In this episode of For Humanity, John sits down with Philip Trippenbach, Strategy Director at the Seismic Foundation, a team of veteran advertising, PR, and communications professionals who have turned their expertise toward one of the most urgent challenges of our time: getting the public to actually care about AI risk.Philip brings a decade in journalism at the CBC and BBC, and another decade in strategic communications for global brands. Now he's applying all of it to the AI safety movement, and what he has to say should change the way the movement thinks about messaging.The central question: why has one of the most important issues in human history failed to break through... and what would it actually take to fix that?
Together, they explore:
* Why the AI safety world has historically rejected advertising, marketing, and PR — and why that's a problem
* Audience segmentation: why you can't say the same thing to everyone
* What Google Trends data reveals about how public interest in AI risk is actually shifting
* The surprising finding: AI extinction searches are being eclipsed by AI jobs, AI and children, and AI suicide
* Why "this isn't fair" may be a more powerful message than "we're all going to die"
* The case for creating friction across many AI harms as a path to slowing things down
* How public demand drives policy — and what $400K/day in tech lobbying means for the movement
* Why Seismic exists: raising the salience of AI risk through targeted, professional communications
* What it looks like to run a real, orchestrated public awareness campaign on AI
If you've ever felt like the AI safety movement is brilliant at research and terrible at talking to regular people than this episode is required viewing.
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