Let's assume we don't want to be doing this interview in five years from a bunker.

Let's avoid that, Kara.

Let's avoid that.

It's on. Hi, everyone from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network.

This is on with Caroushisher, and I'm Carous Swisher.

My guest today is Tristan Harris, a technology ethicist and co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology.

He's a former entrepreneur and Google employee who now studies how the tech industry's platforms have become extractive and controlling.

He was featured in the 2020 Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma, which showed how

social media has manipulated our psychology and behavior through addictive algorithms.

Now he's in a new film from director Daniel Roar called The AI Doc, or How I Became an Apocalypse. I think I got that

right, which explores the promises and existential threats of AI, topics Tristan has written and spoken

about extensively. When he was last on in May of 2023, we talked about why he felt the AI

arms race needed to slow down.

Three years later, that hasn't happened, and AI has become integrated into nearly every aspect of society.

I have been talking to Tristan for many, many years.

We did an original interview back in 2017.

I think I was one of the first people to focus on what he was saying because he had come out of the tech industry and he had such insights into the sort of casino mentality that was inside these companies in terms of

keeping people's attention and not letting it go. And he was spot on even though people were not

paying attention to him or they dismissed him as someone who wasn't successful at tech

and various insults that they did. But he was spot on right and I find him to be very smart.

And in fact, he was one of the first people to do a session for people in Congress about AI

long ago, again, where a lot of people were decrying what he was saying and he was 100% right.

...