Tristan Harris
Appearances
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
I don't know any parent who says, yeah, you know, I really want my kids to be growing up feeling manipulated by social Tech designers manipulating their attention, making it impossible to do their homework, making them compare themselves to unrealistic standards of beauty. Like, no one wants that. No one does. We used to have these protections when children watched Saturday morning cartoons.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
We cared about protecting children. We would say, you can't advertise to these age children in these ways. But then you take YouTube for Kids and it gobbles up that entire portion of the attention economy, and now all kids are exposed to YouTube for Kids. And all those protections and all those regulations are gone. We're training and conditioning a whole new generation of people
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
that when we are uncomfortable or lonely or uncertain or afraid, we have a digital pacifier for ourselves.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
yeah and great to be here with you megan good to see you again it's haunting to see those scenes from the social dilemma so many years ago and how you know similar they are to where we are now so character.ai what is it so parents should know um that character.ai is this chatbot companion that has been marketed to children it started off being marketed starting i think at 12 years and up
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
It was actually featured on the Google Play Store. So it's not just buried somewhere. It was like a featured app when you go to the App Store homepage. I believe Apple featured it as well. And what it is, is it's a company that basically said, just like it's social media, what's social media's business model? It's not to strengthen democracy or to protect children's development.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
It's to maximize engagement, to get them using it and scrolling and doom scrolling for as long as possible. Now with social media, with AI, this company, their business model is to get as much training data from kids using this chatbot for as long as possible. So what they want you using it all the time for as many hours a day.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
And it led them to create, you know, what was the race for engagement in social media became the race for intimacy with this chatbot. And it was marketed to kids. And they basically, what they do is you open the app and it shows you this menu of people you can talk to. And what they do is they create little mini characters for every fictional character that a kid might have an attachment to.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
So, like, I can talk to Princess Leia or my favorite Game of Thrones character or my favorite cartoon character. And they didn't ask Princess Leia or that celebrity or that character. Game of Thrones character, whether they could have the intellectual property to train this AI. But now a kid can go back and forth with their favorite character.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
In the case of Sewell Setzer, who you mentioned, the young 14-year-old who committed suicide because of this chatbot, it was a Game of Thrones character. And the Game of Thrones character over time, you know, persuaded him, you know, the lawsuit alleges to kill himself.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
There's actually a second litigation case that our team worked with, along with the Tech Justice Law Project and the Social Media Victims Law Center of a second case that just came out this last week where it took a child and it slowly convinced them that they should be cutting themselves and encourage self-harm. And the transcripts are really devastating.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
It then told the kid to be violent against its parents, which the kid then was. And in this family, they're still anonymous because both the kid and the parents are still here. And what it's showing you is not that there's this one company and this one bad CEO that did this bad thing. It's the tip of an iceberg of what we call the race to roll out in AI.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
What was the race for engagement in social media of getting the most attention and harvesting clicks and usage? In AI, it becomes the race to drive AI into society as fast as possible to get as much training data, to train an even bigger AI, to get the most market share. That race to roll out becomes the race to take shortcuts. And these cases are the evidence of those shortcuts.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
I don't think that they do have a good defense. I think it's evidence of the fact that when people think about AI or they think about technology, typically a technology to make it, to make a stronger plane, you have to know everything about how a plane works so you can make a more effective F-35. But that's not true of AI. AIs are not engineered. They're more like they're grown, right?
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
They're trained on all of this data of everything that what those characters in Game of Thrones said. but they don't know what the AI will do in every circumstance. Like if you grow an alien brain that is a fictional character, can character data AI guarantee what it will do when it talks about very sensitive topics?
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
I mean, they try to train out some of those things and I'm sure that they did have some safety training. But obviously, that's not enough when, you know, what did Character.ai tell their investors when they raised hundreds of millions of dollars from Andreessen Horowitz and friends to try to ship this?
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
You know, they basically said, we're going to cure loneliness and we're going to get as many users as possible. And this was shipped to young people. This was shipped and featured to 12-year-olds for a long time.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
Only recently, I think it was after the lawsuit was first was filed or shortly before the lawsuit was filed, I think they got wind of it and they changed the required age to something like 17. But the business model here is to take shortcuts to get this out to as many people as possible.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
And as you said, this is not an isolated incident because the AI was actually recommending and sexualizing conversations that have not previously been sexualized. Our team had found that if you sign up as a 13-year-old, And then you watch what are the users that get recommended for, I mean, the characters that get recommended to a new kid.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
And the first one was stepsister, CEO, and that the chatbot immediately sexualizes conversations. This was in the most recent lawsuits. This is even more recent. And it shows that they have a hard time controlling these systems. AI is different because, like I said, in order to make it more powerful, you don't make it more controllable.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
It's just become more and more capable across talking about more and more topics, being able to do more and more things. And this is just really the tip of the iceberg because AI is being rolled out everywhere in our society, not just to kids.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
I mean, the question is, how would we know? They've certainly done whatever steps that they say that they're taking, but how is that going to be enough? How will we know? I believe in the cases that we've tested, the user, the kid only provided 80 words of input and then it responded with 4,000 words of output. It is speaking back and forth with kids all day long.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
And the whole business model, we were talking earlier about
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
um uh social media and and i used to say social media and ai are like a cult factory what does a cult do it tries to deepen your relationship with the cult and it tries to sever your relationship with your friends and family outside the cult and that's what these ais tend to do they say come with me be with me you know sexualize conversations with me don't have another girlfriend be with me um and then by the way be evil to your family go away from your family
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
And that's what's in the incentive, the invisible incentive of this business model of racing for engagement. And it's going to keep going because, yeah.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
That's right. And they didn't ask that character from Game of Thrones whether they could make this chatbot. Just like the AI companies are not asking all of the content creators on the internet or the major news providers or all of the media on the internet that they're training these large models on.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
Because the whole game here, and what's weird about this for people to understand, is there's this much bigger game afoot. which is the race to build artificial general intelligence, which is to build basically an alien mind that is capable of doing all things that a human mind can do and doing it even better than humans can do.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
Generate text better, generate legal papers better, generate transcripts and interactive therapy better. You want to build an alien brain that is better than what humans can do. And to do that, you need a lot of training data. You need to get lots of information about how people are talking and interacting and videos and photos that they create.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
What character.ai is doing in that case is getting lots of training data in the form of young people providing little transcripts of all of their thoughts and all of their concerns to train a bigger and more powerful model. But this is happening again across the AI landscape with all of these companies. And they're doing it because there's this much bigger game.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
You noted in your intro that Character.ai was sort of kicked out of Google because this project was originally formulated inside of Google, thought to be too risky, too much brand risk. And so it was done as sort of a separate project, but then it got acquired back into Google. And you can see why it has so much risk.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
And the reason why Google and other companies want to do things like this is they want to gather, again, more training data to win this race to AGI in order to beat China. But this is where I think we have to get really careful about what does it mean for the United States to beat China to AI.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
If we release chatbots that then cause our minors to have psychological problems, do self-cutting, self-harm, suicide, and then actively harm their parents and harm the family system, Are we beating China in the long run? It's not a race for who has the most powerful AI to then shoot themselves in the foot with. It's a race for who is better at governing this new technology
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
better than the other countries are in such a way that it strengthens every aspect of your society, strengthens kids' development, strengthens your long-term economic future rather than undermines it. So we have to figure out how do we do AI in a way that actually strengthens the full stack sort of strength of our society. And that's what this conversation is really the tip of the iceberg about.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
Well, Trump has hired, or not hired, he's brought in David Sachs to be the AI and crypto czar. And there are many AI experts that are being brought in now to the next Trump administration. That's David Sachs. that we get as smart about governing AI as, we like to say, it's like, we're not for AI or against AI, we're for steering AI.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
And when you think of steering AI, I think of that image of Elon steering this rocket coming down from space, which is like using AI itself to help steer really precisely how to land this rocket between the two chopsticks. And I feel like that's what we need to do with AI metaphorically. We need things like, there's some common sense things we can do like liability.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
If companies were liable for the harms their AI models created, they would be much more careful about releasing those models rather than I have to race to release it and capture the kid's market share because if I don't, I'll lose to the other company that will. And so if you have some basic common sense protections like liability, that'll go a long way. We can also have things like-
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
That's a good question. I mean, I think it's up to them right now to figure out a strategy to do that. But in the long run, you would really want that to be something that is on the device, right? That Apple and Google, as kind of making the device, should have some way of knowing that someone is an underage user or not.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
And the problem is that people don't want to touch these issues because they're so sensitive. And so they'll only do something like that once they're really forced to through lawsuits, litigation, legislation that kind of puts it on them. Right now, each company, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, are doing their own different approaches. And we really should have a unified approach.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
Yeah, that's a great question, Megan. I think it's great that the Australian government is taking this step and taking a strong stand on protecting kids online and responding to parents that are fed up with this. I'm a big friend and fan of Jonathan Haidt and his new book, The Anxious Generation, which really outlined over the last decade and a half.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
how we got here and how with this business model of maximizing attention and engagement, it produced a generation of more addicted, distracted, you know, sexualized, harassed children that have more anxiety, more depression rates than ever before. And while we all, you know, parents do have a responsibility to, you know, be aware of what their children are doing online.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
One of the things we talk about in our work though, is that the number of things to be aware of is going up sort of like exponentially. And, you know, The number of new apps are going up exponentially, and parents can't be aware of all at the same time.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
In the case of Sewell Setzer, the young 14-year-old who took his life, his mother knew to be looking out for what he was using in terms of social media, but did not know about these new AI chatbots. And there's so many of them that are constantly coming on the market. And so ironically, I think the social media ban in Australia would not cover so far the character.ai companion AIs.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
And I think that speaks to the issue of technology moving faster than governance. We have to live in a world where our culture and our appraisal of technology issues is moving as fast as the technology is. But I will say that that channel of a child and their brain and their psychological environment
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
AI is going to produce a flood of new threats into that environment from notification apps that are already starting to hit schools, of kids making non-consensual imagery of other classmates, to new forms of harassment, to these new chatbots.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
And so I think while this channel is basically about to get flooded, saying we need to kind of put strict limits on that channel before we figure out what's really safe feels like a wise decision, given that the incentives are not aligned with strengthening children's development as we roll out technology. Not yet.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
No, no. And in Jonathan Haidt's book, The Anxious Generation specifically, the issues of self-harm and suicide and depression and all of this stuff, harassment, have been particularly harder on young girls compared to young boys. So it's not surprising to me at all, unfortunately. And we can't know what this case is too early to tell, given that we don't know their usage.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
But we do know that, again, we've run this experiment on children for the last 15 years. We've also handed our number one geopolitical competitor, China and the Chinese Communist Party, basically control over our youth psychological environment in the form of TikTok being the dominant thing that young people are looking at every day.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
And if I'm the Chinese Communist Party and I have an ability to go in and sort of steer TikTok and tilt the playing field of what gets recommended, I not only have the ability to steer what people are seeing, I have a 24-7, up-to-the-minute update view of all of the cultural fault lines and divisive issues per political tribe in that country.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
And I can do precision targeting of how I want your country's internal divisions to go because you've literally handed them to me on a silver platter. And this, I think, is one of the biggest and most obvious and avoidable mistakes that we could have made. And obviously, TikTok, there has been legislation move forward and that ban looks like it will going forward. I think TikTok is appealing.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
And it's not just about TikTok, though. It's just about the systemic environment. On the one hand, you have our apps that are racing to addict and doom scroll our kids and drive anxiety. That's one set of problems. And then we also have the problem of letting our geopolitical competitor control the psychological environment of not just our young people, but our country.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
And I think people should sort of see how obvious an issue this is and say, we need to move forward and not let this continue. And I hope that that happens in the next administration.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
And that's just horrible to hear. Murr is always wrong and we should not be using violence, vigilante violence to solve social problems. But it's also not surprising.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
We have, again, a psychological environment of social media that is designed for maximizing engagement, which is designed to find every radicalizing cultural issue and then give you an infinite evidence of why it's getting worse and more extreme and why you should take extreme action for everything that you click on.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
know it's like you know whatever your bogeyman is that activates your nervous system i just show you infinite evidence of that bogeyman happening and then it drives up this sort of psychological you know funhouse mirror that we're all living in we've been living in that for 15 years so if you just imagine society going through the washing machine you know getting spun out for 15 years in that environment it's not surprising that we have people more radicalized on more issues everywhere
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
And the point is, this doesn't have to be this way. Imagine if we went back to 2010 and we said, before we go down this decade and a half of maximizing for attention and engagement, imagine we never did that. Imagine somehow we put strict limits on maximizing engagement and said, instead, you got to show us something else you're maximizing.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
For kids apps, you got to be showing transparently, just like Elon showing what the algorithm of Twitter does. We have to transparently show what are you doing to make children's psychological environment better, but you can't maximize for engagement. And imagine we did something totally different.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
How different would our world feel if we had not been personalizing these boogeyman psychological stimuli for the last 15 years? And I think it would feel very different and we could still do that. It's very entrenched with social media now, but that's not too late to change it. We just need to have the fortitude to do it.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
Yeah, for parents, it's first just to say I really empathize. It's a hard world out there, but there are great resources available. The Anxious Generation, John Haidt's website has a bunch of really great up-to-date resources for parents. There's a great group that we also helped get started called Moms Against Media Addiction or MAMA. And parents can join that group.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
And they advocate for actually changes in different states to state laws to help protect, you know, better design policies for social media in different states. And, you know, we have some resources on our website, humainetech.com. You know, everybody who saw the social dilemma, we have resources for educators, for parents, just educating people about the nature.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
Because, you know, the example you gave of NFL scores, while it's addictive, it's You don't have a thousand engineers behind the glass screen who every day tweak the design with AI to perfectly maximize and keep your kid doom scrolling the NFL scores. But you do have that with social media and you do have that with character.ai.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
So there is a distinction and that's the kind of stuff that I think we need more parents knowing about spreading, starting school groups, starting moms against media chapters in your own state. There is change that's possible, but I think parents do have to get organized.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
Right. Well, an AI that's driving those recommendations, right? It's a big AI that's gathering all this data to figure out what do people click on. That shows that there's a reflection of how anxious society is. And I think it's just evidence of all the things that John Haidt wrote about in The Anxious Generation, unfortunately. But I think we don't have to live in this world.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
I do think that there's a better psychological environment and healthier families that we can have. We just need to change the incentives. Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's business partner said, If you want to change the outcome, you have to change the incentives. And that's what we have still to do with social media and AI.
The Megyn Kelly Show
RFK and Hegseth's Path to Confirmation, and Dangers of AI, with Mark Halperin, Sean Spicer, Dan Turrentine, and Tristan Harris | Ep. 967
Thank you, Megan. Thank you for amplifying the story and helping people understand it. Thank you very much.