Tristan Harris

Thanks, everybody, for listening.

We'll have Tristan Harris on the show on Wednesday to talk about AI risk.

Thank you, Ranjan.

Thanks to all of you.

That's why I'm opposing this kind of populism that you're championing here.

Everyone thinks that they're going to be the savior, whether it's Jacob Coxon, Romney and Polsky, Tristan Harris, Dari Amadei.

Every single person right now thinks that their modus operandi, their raison d'etre is the way that we're going to get.

Sam Asman

And I think that it's useful for all of us to think about that, both in terms of our impact on ourselves and on each other, which I don't think is really talked about that much, is the impact of producing content then that takes other people's attention and the impact that that has on their lives.

I remember that Tristan Harris had an article, oh God, it must have been back in like 2017, but he was talking about witnessing the decision at Google about whether or not to enable push notifications by default on Gmail.

And he wrote something and said something that was like, you know, in that moment of decision of turning them on by default, there were billions of dinner conversations that were going to be interrupted.

And he was encouraging the engineers to think about that.

But none of this is impossible.

At a social media level, if Tristan Harris is right, China may not have invented it, but they have put in guardrails that makes it a whole lot safer for all of the people than the current predatory model we have where the American companies can do whatever the heck they like as long as they continue to make obscene amounts of money for their founders.

I am not suggesting that China is some paragon of virtue, but they did look... at the complete car crash that social media is making of our culture and decide to do something different.

And we could learn from that.

I mean, I think that's a fascinating question.

I saw that one podcast with Tristan Harris on the Diary of a CEO, where he, I don't know if you guys saw that one, but he was sort of, you know, like imagine how much better the world would be if we had these controls in place.

But I don't know, like I'm, and this is sort of like a hard thing to think through.

Like if I think about my own child, like what is the best lesson? It's experiencing the thing, right? Like that's the thing that actually gets you to learn really deeply what has happened so that you can correct for the mistakes and optimize for the things that does well, right? And so putting too many controls ahead of time could prevent us from really learning the lesson of what we've learned with like addictive social media algorithms, which is that, hey, being in front of a screen for you is really bad.