#469 — Escaping an Anti-Human Future
Making Sense with Sam Harris
Waking Up with Sam Harris
4.6 • 29.7K Ratings
🗓️ 10 April 2026
⏱️ 109 minutes
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Summary
Sam Harris speaks with Tristan Harris about the dangers of AI and the race to build it. They discuss the new documentary The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, the lessons of The Social Dilemma, the arms race dynamics between AI labs, the "intelligence curse" and its implications for human political power, the psychology of tech CEOs indifferent to extinction risk, the possibilities of US-China coordination on AI safety, and other topics.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm here with Tristan Harris. |
| 0:21.6 | Tristan, it's great to see you again. |
| 0:24.6 | Sam, it's great to be back with you. |
| 0:25.6 | So you've been busy, you've been busy worrying about social media for years, and you |
| 0:30.6 | created this, in part, created this documentary, the social dilemma, which it seems half of humanity saw. |
| 0:36.6 | Yeah. We still have a problem with social media, I'll point out, but you, as much as anyone, |
| 0:42.5 | alerted us to the nature of the problem and are continuing on that front. But now you |
| 0:46.2 | have added to your portfolio concerns about AI, and there's this new documentary, the AI, |
| 0:52.3 | which I just saw, which is very super watchable and entertaining |
| 0:57.0 | in its own way, but also very worrying. |
| 1:01.3 | And we'll talk about the reasons to be worried here and maybe some of the reasons to be |
| 1:05.6 | optimistic or at least cognizant of the upside should things go well. But there's a lot to fear on the front of |
| 1:14.6 | things not going well. So let's just take it from the top. When did you start worrying about AI? |
| 1:20.6 | Yeah. Well, first, it's just good to be back with you, Sam, because you really, in a way, |
| 1:24.8 | helped launch my ability to speak on these topics with the 60 |
| 1:28.4 | minutes interview that I did in 2017. And then I remember recording in that same hotel, |
| 1:33.8 | our first podcast, which actually really got a lot of attention back in the day about persuasive |
| 1:37.5 | technology. Yeah, yeah. And in a way about the baby AI that was social media that was just |
| 1:42.5 | pointed at your kid's brain trying to figure out |
| 1:44.4 | which photo, video, or tweet to put in front of your nervous system. And as we know that that little |
| 1:49.1 | baby AI was enough to create the most anxious and depressed generation in our lifetimes, |
| 1:54.0 | was enough to break down shared reality, polarized political parties, much further, |
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