Hey everyone, this is Tristan Harris.

And this is Azaraskan. Welcome to the annual Ask Us Anything podcast. Tristan, I'm really excited to do this episode because this year, first year we've done videos. We've got to see huge numbers of listeners.

And actually, you were just out, yeah, getting to interact.

Yeah.

Well, first of all, this is one of my favorite episodes to do of the year because we get to really feel the fact that there are millions of listeners out there who have listened and followed along to this journey of, you know, both the problems of technology and how we get to a more humane future.

I actually am just in New York right now. I gave the Alfred Korsipski Memorial Lecture.

This is in the lineage of like Neil Postman, Marshall McLuhan, Gregory Bateson, Buckminster Fuller,

Lara Borditsky, a past podcast guest, all the people who are kind of the the map is not the territory, folks, communication, media, ecology, folks. And I actually met several professors, many people in the audience who listen actively to this podcast. They use it in their training materials with students. And it's always really great to hear from you because, you know, we're speaking to avoid sometimes.

We don't really know who's paying attention. So thanks for sending in so many amazing questions.

There's a lot to dive into and we're excited to answer them.

Yeah. Just to say the phenomenology of doing a podcast is sort of weird because we speak at her computer screens.

And then we only much later get to hear what the impacts were, and so getting to hear from you directly is such a treat.

We should do a podcast sometime on what reinventing podcasting would look like if it was actually

humane and had human connection at the center.

Right.

But that's another topic.

Probably would look like more live events, which I really hope we get to do. Me too. Giza, do you want to move this conversation to a Google Doc and maybe just do the rest of this through commenting back and forth with the blinking cursor? Would that feel good? Oh, that sounds awesome. Can I be passive aggressive? And can you tell? All right, so let's get into our first questions.

Hello. My name is Aerylund, and I'm a student from California. I've been trying to wrap my head around the incentives that technology companies are facing. Any explanation for why they keep on rolling their products just out and out and out, despite the really horrific and preventable impacts that we've seen come from AI systems. I was wondering if you could elaborate on any other cultures at play,

any other structures that play that are just contributing to this major boom, profit has always

seemed like a little too simple of an explanation for everything. Thank you, and I really appreciate your work.

Thanks, Erlin, for this question.

I really love that you ask this because it's actually one of our pet peeves

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