If you saw the documentary The Social Dilemma on Netflix, then you heard a lot from Tristan Harris.

He used to work in Big Tech, and now he's on a crusade to tell us all about the dangers of social media and what we can do to protect ourselves.

This is a bit of optimism.

Hey Tristan, thanks for joining me.

You've already had an incredibly intense year.

Can we start with your experience with the California wildfires?

Yeah, I had been based in San Francisco, and then when the pandemic hit, I actually moved into my family home that I grew up in up in Santa Rosa, which is in Sonoma County.

Two weeks after The Social Dilemma came out, a huge wildfire came through Calistoga and Sonoma County, and basically overnight, incinerated everything that I know and grew up with.

We had to evacuate. We had 30 minutes to leave.

It's crazy to go through something like that.

Working up the next day and get a text message from your neighbor saying, it's gone to other houses in the neighborhood, also burned many were spared.

We were one of the unlucky ones, but as is true in existentialism, the meaningfulness of something is what happens afterwards and the meaning you continue to make.

I think I'm trying to turn it into the sweetest thing that's ever happened by rebuilding a better life and living situation afterwards.

It's been a crazy year.

Did you have a chance to mourn? And what about your family? I mean, this was the house you grew up in.

So this was the house that I grew up in with my mother. And actually, strange fact, the house burned down exactly two years after her passing, which is it's this very strange twist of a fate.

I don't think I really mourned until November after getting through a huge amount of the press and media tour.

I think there was a big, a big release of kind of just recognizing what had happened.

Yeah, it's been a crazy journey.

Well, talking about the social dilemma, you know, that was one of those shows on Netflix that had everybody talking.

And really, for the first time, made people realize the danger and feel fear for the way that social media is in our lives and more importantly,

the way the companies manipulate our lives.

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