Hey everyone, welcome to your undivided attention. I'm Tristan Harris.

In 1957, two events turned up the heat on the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union in a major way.

The first was the launch of Sputnik, which showed the world that the Soviets were far ahead

in the space race. The second was the release of a government report called the Gaither report

that warned of a, quote, missile gap between the two superpowers. And according to the report,

the USSR had massively expanded their nuclear arsenal and America needed to do the same

in order to ensure

mutual destruction. JFK made the missile gap a central theme in the 1960 election, and after he

won, he dramatically accelerated the build-up of American nuclear weapons, starting what we now

think of as the nuclear arms race. But today, we know that the Gaither report was wrong.

Historical counting from Soviet documents and early satellite imagery

showed that the USSR was actually far behind the U.S. in nuclear capability.

Rather than the hundreds of ICBMs that the report claimed that they had,

the Russians at the time only had four.

The point of the story isn't that the U.S. shouldn't have taken the USSR seriously as an adversary.

The point was, before we open a Pandora's box with the potential for global catastrophe,

we need to have the maximum clarity and situational awareness and not be led astray

by false narratives or misperceptions.

And if we had had that clarity in the 1960s, we might have been able to do more to avoid

the nuclear arms race and seek diplomacy and disarmament instead of racing.

Well, today, we're on the brink of a potentially new catastrophic arms race

between the United States and China on AI. And China had their own kind of Sputnik moment when

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