Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're

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Today I'm speaking with Tristan Harris. Tristan has been called by the Atlantic

magazine the closest thing that Silicon Valley has to a conscience. He was a design ethicist at Google

and then left the company to start a foundation called Time Well Spent, which is a movement whose

purpose is to align technology with our deepest interests. Tristan was recently profiled on 60 minutes.

That happened last week. He's worked at various companies, Apple, Wikia, Appshur, and Google.

He graduated from Stanford with a degree in computer science,

and have been focused on human computer interaction. We talk a lot about the ethics of human persuasion,

and about what information technology is doing to us and allowing us to do to ourselves.

This is an area which I frankly haven't thought much about, so listening to Tristan was a bit of an

education, but Needless to say, this is an area that is not going away. We are all going to have to

think much more about this in the years ahead. In any case, it was great to talk to Tristan. I have

since discovered that I was mispronouncing his name, Apologies Tristan. Sometimes having a person

merely say his name in your presence proves insufficient, such are the caprices of the human brain,

but however you pronounce his name, Tristan has a lot of wisdom to share, and he's a very nice

guy as well. So meet Tristan Harris.

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