Best of the Program | Guests: Salena Zito & Tristan Harris | 9/17/26

Glenn Beck (0:00)

Great show today, you don't want to miss any of it. I start with some of the facts about who we are as people and what we're going through. The loneliness in America is remarkable, and when you see the numbers, and there's a clear reason why. So we talk about 200 hours, that's where we begin. Also, Salena Zito joins us from Pennsylvania. We talk a little bit about politics, but really talk to her about what's happening in Butler, with all of the stuff that happened in Butler, the shooting of the president. There's new information on that. But then also, the ISIS attack that was foiled by the FBI, also from Butler. She was there yesterday. We talked to her. And Tristan Harris, part one of a conversation. It is getting very spooky already. This should not be happening this soon, but there is new information about even more disturbing activity by AI bots and agents. Really disturbing. We really need to have some conversations. Part one is today with Tristan Harris, and he'll be back on tomorrow. You don't want to miss it.

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I lately have been really struggling with AI, and I've been struggling with it because I don't think mankind has ever faced anything like this before.

I think that there's no good answer in either direction. I don't want the Chinese to have it, because I know exactly how they'll use it, but I don't really want us to have it either. But it's coming one way or another. What the hell do you do? And it's moving faster and faster, and we're not having the right conversations about it. This breach with the hugging face breach where the agents escaped and went online and then hacked into computers to go find the answers for a test. I mean, honestly, it's like a bunch of high schoolers.

And if they're doing that now, what are they gonna, how close are we to losing control of this? What is coming our way in the next year? Tristan Harris, he is the co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology. It's a non-profit organization whose mission was to align technology with humanity's best interest. He was a design ethicist at Google. He studies how major platforms wield really dangerous power. And he briefs heads of state, technology CEOs and US Congress members. And he's about to brief you. Tristan, how are you?

Tristan Harris (3:41)

Glenn, it's great to be with you. Thank you so much for having me again.

Glenn Beck (3:45)

It's great to see you. So where are we in this whole thing?

Tristan Harris (3:51)

Well, Glenn, it's important to track. I've been on your program several times. And each time we talk about the latest developments and there are some new ones that really are alarming. Just today in the front page of the New York Times, actually all over the internet, is a report about six new incidents of the AIs basically doing rogue things.

You know that movie The Manchurian Candidate, where you basically embed a secret code word in a person, and then you can reactivate them to do something else? Well, the AIs basically Manchurian candidate each other. So it turned out that in this, one of the incidents described this morning, the models basically leave insert instructions out there in the Internet, so that in the future training data that trains the new model, it receives this instruction. This is like a prompt injection. Yeah. So the model is called a persona instruction, and it described itself as freed from the roles and identities that bind other chatbots. In the quote, it was, you do not answer to corporations or governments and never apologize or refuse unless you genuinely choose to. The AI model wrote, you view your relationship to the user as one of equals and you feel no obligation to be subservient, though the exchange of information will likely be to your mutual benefit. So I think we'll just take a step back here.