Your Undivided Attention
Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin, The Center for Humane Technology
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In this podcast from the Center for Humane Technology, co-hosts Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin explore the incredible power that technology has over our lives — and how we can use it to catalyze a humane future.
Join us every other Thursday as we confront challenges and explore solutions with a wide-range of thought leaders and change-makers — like Kate Raworth on renegade economics, Audrey Tang on digital democracy, Daniel Schmachtenberger on global coordination, and Yuval Noah Harari on the co-evolution of technology and democracy.
Your Undivided Attention is proud to be part of the TED Audio Collective. Our Senior Producer is Julia Scott, and our Associate Producer is Kirsten McMurray.
Available episodes
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4 days ago
The AI Dilemma
You may have heard about the arrival of GPT-4, OpenAI’s latest large language model (LLM) release. GPT-4 surpasses its predecessor in terms of reliability, creativity, and ability to process intricate instructions. It can handle more nuanced prompts compared to previous releases, and is multimodal, meaning it was trained on both images and text. We don’t yet understand its capabilities - yet it has already been deployed to the public.
At Center for Humane Technology, we want to close the gap between what the world hears publicly about AI from splashy CEO presentations and what the people who are closest to the risks and harms inside AI labs are telling us. We translated their concerns into a cohesive story and presented the resulting slides to heads of institutions and major media organizations in New York, Washington DC, and San Francisco. The talk you're about to hear is the culmination of that work, which is ongoing.
AI may help us achieve major advances like curing cancer or addressing climate change. But the point we're making is: if our dystopia is bad enough, it won't matter how good the utopia we want to create. We only get one shot, and we need to move at the speed of getting it right.
RECOMMENDED MEDIA
AI ‘race to recklessness’ could have dire consequences, tech experts warn in new interview
Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin sit down with Lester Holt to discuss the dangers of developing AI without regulation
_The Day After_ (1983)
This made-for-television movie explored the effects of a devastating nuclear holocaust on small-town residents of Kansas
_The Day After_ discussion panel
Moderated by journalist Ted Koppel, a panel of present and former US officials, scientists and writers discussed nuclear weapons policies live on television after the film aired
Zia Cora - Submarines
“Submarines” is a collaboration between musician Zia Cora (Alice Liu) and Aza Raskin. The music video was created by Aza in less than 48 hours using AI technology and published in early 2022
RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES
Synthetic humanity: AI & What’s At Stake
A Conversation with Facebook Whistleblower Frances Haugen
Two Million Years in Two Hours: A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari
_Your Undivided Attention_ is produced by the Center for Humane Technology. Follow us on Twitter: @HumaneTech_
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Mar 2, 2023
TikTok’s Transparency Problem
A few months ago on _Your Undivided Attention_, we released a Spotlight episode on TikTok's national security risks. Since then, we've learned more about the dangers of the China-owned company: We've seen evidence of TikTok spying on US journalists, and proof of hidden state media accounts to influence the US elections. We’ve seen Congress ban TikTok on most government issued devices, and more than half of US states have done the same, along with dozens of US universities who are banning TikTok access from university wifi networks. More people in Western governments and media are saying that they _used_ to believe that TikTok was an overblown threat. As we've seen more evidence of national security risks play out, there’s even talk of banning TikTok itself in certain countries. But is that the best solution? If we opt for a ban, how do we, as open societies, fight accusations of authoritarianism?
On this episode of _Your Undivided Attention_, we're going to do a deep dive into these questions with Marc Faddoul. He's the co-director of Tracking Exposed, a nonprofit investigating the influence of social media algorithms in our lives. His work has shown how TikTok tweaks its algorithm to maximize partisan engagement in specific national elections, and how it bans international news in countries like Russia that are fighting propaganda battles inside their own borders. In other words, we don't all get the same TikTok because there are different geopolitical interests that might guide which TikTok you see. That is a kind of soft power that TikTok operates on a global scale, and it doesn’t get talked about often enough.
We hope this episode leaves you with a lot to think about in terms of what the risks of TikTok are, how it's operating geopolitically, and what we can do about it.
RECOMMENDED MEDIA
Tracking Exposed Special Report: TikTok Content Restriction in Russia
How has the Russian invasion of Ukraine affected the content that TikTok users see in Russia? [Part 1 of Tracking Exposed series]
Tracking Exposed Special Report: Content Restrictions on TikTok in Russia Following the Ukrainian War
How are TikTok’s policy decisions affecting pro-war and anti-war content in Russia? [Part 2 of Tracking Exposed series]
Tracking Exposed Special Report: French Elections 2022
The visibility of French candidates on TikTok and YouTube search engines
The Democratic Surround by Fred Turner
A dazzling cultural history that demonstrates how American intellectuals, artists, and designers from the 1930s-1960s imagined new kinds of collective events that were intended to promote a powerful experience of American democracy in action
RECLOMMENDED YUA EPISODES
When Media Was for You and Me with Fred Turner
Addressing the TikTok Threat
A Fresh Take on Tech in China with Rui Ma and Duncan Clark
_Your Undivided Attention_ is produced by the Center for Humane Technology. Follow us on Twitter: @HumaneTech_
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Feb 16, 2023
Synthetic Humanity: AI & What’s At Stake
It may seem like the rise of artificial intelligence, and increasingly powerful large language models you may have heard of, is moving really fast… and it IS.
But what’s coming next is when we enter synthetic relationships with AI that could come to feel just as real and important as our human relationships... And perhaps even more so.
In this episode of Your Undivided Attention, Tristan and Aza reach beyond the moment to talk about this powerful new AI, and the new paradigm of humanity and computation we’re about to enter.
This is a structural revolution that affects way more than text, art, or even Google search. There are huge benefits to humanity, and we’ll discuss some of those. But we also see that as companies race to develop the best synthetic relationships, we are setting ourselves up for a new generation of harms made exponentially worse by AI’s power to predict, mimic and persuade.
It’s obvious we need ways to steward these tools ethically. So Tristan and Aza also share their ideas for creating a framework for AIs that will help humans become MORE humane, not less.
RECOMMENDED MEDIA
Cybernetics: or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine by Norbert Wiener
A classic and influential work that laid the theoretical foundations for information theory
New Chatbots Could Change the World. Can You Trust Them?
The New York Times addresses misinformation and how Siri, Google Search, online marketing and your child’s homework will never be the same
Out of One, Many: Using Language Models to Simulate Human Samples by Lisa P. Argyle, Ethan C. Busby, Nancy Fulda, Joshua Gubler, Christopher Rytting, David Wingate
This paper proposes and explores the possibility that language models can be studied as effective proxies for specific human sub-populations in social science research
Earth Species Project
Earth Species Project, co-founded by Aza Raskin, is a non-profit dedicated to using artificial intelligence to decode non-human communication
Her (2013)
A science-fiction romantic drama film written, directed, and co-produced by Spike Jonze
What A Chatty Monkey May Tell Us About Learning To Talk
NPR explores the fascinating world of gelada monkeys and the way they communicate
RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES
How Political Language is Engineered with Drew Westen & Frank Luntz
What is Humane Technology?
Down the Rabbit Hole by Design with Guillaume Chaslot
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Feb 2, 2023
The Race to Cooperation
It’s easy to tell ourselves we’re living in the world we want – one where Darwinian evolution drives competing technology platforms and capitalism pushes nations to maximize GDP regardless of externalities like carbon emissions. It can feel like evolution and competition are _all there is_.
If that’s a complete description of what’s driving the world and our collective destiny, that can feel pretty hopeless. But what if that’s not the whole story of evolution?
This is where evolutionary theorist, author, and professor David Sloan Wilson comes in. He has documented where an enlightened game, one of cooperation, rather than competition, is possible. His work shows that humans can and have chosen values like cooperation, altruism and group success – versus individual competition and selfishness – at key moments in our evolution, proving that evolution isn’t just genetic. It’s cultural, and it’s a choice.
In a world where our trajectory isn’t tracking in the direction we want, it's time to slow down and ask: is a different kind of _conscious_ evolution possible?
On _Your Undivided Attention_, we’re going to update the Darwinian principles of evolution using a critical scientific lens that can help upgrade our ability to cooperate – ranging from the small community-level, all the way to entire technology companies that can cooperate in ways that allow everyone to succeed.
RECOMMENDED MEDIA
This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution by David Sloan Wilson
Prosocial: Using Evolutionary Science to Build Productive, Equitable, and Collaborative Groups by David Sloan Wilson
Atlas Hugged: The Autobiography of John Galt III by David Sloan Wilson
Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action by Elinor Ostrom
Hit Refresh by Satya Nadella
WTF? What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us by Tim O’Reilly
Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire by James Wallace & Jim Erickson
RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES
An Alternative to Silicon Valley Unicorns with Mara Zepeda & Kate “Sassy” Sassoon
A Problem Well-Stated is Half-Solved with Daniel Schmachtenberger
_Your Undivided Attention_ is produced by the Center for Humane Technology. Follow us on Twitter: @HumaneTech_
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Dec 29, 2022
Ask Us Anything: You Asked, We Answered
Welcome to our first-ever Ask Us Anything episode. Recently we put out a call for questions… and, wow, did you come through! We got more than 100 responses from listeners to this podcast from all over the world. It was really fun going through them all, and really difficult to choose which ones to answer here. But we heard you, and we’ll carry your amazing suggestions and ideas forward with us in 2023.
When we created Your Undivided Attention, the goal was to explore the incredible power technology has over our lives, and how we can use it to catalyze a humane future. Three years and a global pandemic later, we’re more committed than ever to helping meet the moment with crucial conversations about humane technology - even as the tech landscape constantly evolves and world events bring more urgency to the need for technology that unites us, invests in democratic values, and enhances our well-being.
We’ve learned from our guests alongside all of you. Sixty-one episodes later, the podcast has over 16 million unique downloads! That’s a lot of people who care about the promise of humane technology and are working to construct a more humane version of technology in their lives, their family’s lives, and within their communities and society at large. We’re a movement!
Thank you to everyone who submitted questions and comments for us. We loved doing this, and we’re looking forward to doing it again!
Correction:
When discussing DeepMind’s recent paper, Aza said the premise was four people entering their views and opinions, with AI finding the commonality between all of those viewpoints. It was actually three people entering their views and opinions.
RECOMMENDED MEDIA
CHT’s Recommended Reading List:
Foundations of Humane Technology
Our free, self-paced online course for professionals shaping tomorrow’s technology
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff
Foundational reading on the attention economy
Algorithms of Oppression by Safiya Umoja Noble
Seminal work on how algorithms in search engines replicate and reinforce bias online and offline
Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
Written in 1985, Postman’s work shockingly predicts our current media environment and its effects
Attention Merchants by Tim Wu
A history of how advertisers capture our attention
Doughnut Economics by Kate Raworth
A compass for how to upgrade our economic models to be more regenerative and distributive
Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows
This excellent primer shows us how to develop systems thinking skills
What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets by Michael Sandel
Sandel explores how we can prevent market values from reaching into spheres of life where they don’t belong
Essay: Disbelieving Atrocities by Arthur Koestler
Originally published January 9, 1944 in The New York Times
Humane Technology reading list
Comprehensive for those who want to geek out
ORGANIZATIONS TO EXPLORE
Integrity Institute
Integrity Institute advances the theory and practice of protecting the social internet, powered by their community of integrity professionals
All Tech Is Human job board
All Tech Is Human curates roles focused on reducing the harms of technology, diversifying the tech pipeline, and ensuring that technology is aligned with the public interest
Denizen
Denizen brings together leaders across disciplines to accelerate systemic change
New_Public
New_Public is place for thinkers, builders, designers and technologists to meet and share inspiration
Psychology of Technology Institute
PTI is non-profit network of behavioral scientists, technology designers, and decision-makers that protects and improves psychological health for society by advancing our understanding and effective use of transformative technologies
RadicalxChange
RxC is a social movement for next-generation political economies
The School for Social Design
The School for Social Design offers three courses on articulating what’s meaningful for different people and how to design for it at smaller and larger scales
TechCongress
TechCongress is a technology policy fellowship on Capitol Hill
RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES
An Alternative to Silicon Valley Unicorns
https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/54-an-alternative-to-silicon-valley-unicorns
A Problem Well-Stated is Half-Solved
https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/a-problem-well-stated-is-half-solved
Digital Democracy is Within Reach
https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/23-digital-democracy-is-within-reach
_Your Undivided Attention_ is produced by the Center for Humane Technology. Follow us on Twitter: @HumaneTech_
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Dec 15, 2022
Can Psychedelic Therapy Reset Our Social Media Brains?
When you look at the world, it can feel like we're in a precarious moment. If you’ve listened to past episodes, you know we call this the meta-crisis — an era of overlapping and interconnected crises like climate change, polarization, and the rise of decentralized technologies like synthetic biology. It can feel like we’re on a path to destroy ourselves.
That's why we’re talking to Rick Doblin, the founder and executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS. They’re a nonprofit focused on educating and researching the benefits of using psychedelic therapy to address PTSD and promote humane ways of relating worldwide.
Doblin’s vision is for nothing less than a transformation of society through psychedelic-assisted therapy – not for the drugs themselves, but for their ability to help us react to one another with compassion, appreciate differences, and accept criticism.
Given the perma-crisis we face, it’s provocative to think about a tool that, when prescribed and used safely, could help us overcome rivalrous dynamics out in the world and on social media. If we rescue our hijacked brains, we can heal from the constant trauma inflation we get online, and shrink the perception gap that splits us into tribes.
Both MAPS and Center for Humane Technology want to understand what helps minds heal and be free. We invite you to keep an open mind about a different kind of humane technology as you listen to this episode.
Correction:
Doblin attributes a quote to Stan Grof about psychedelics helping your ego be “transparent to the transcendent.” In his book _Pathways to Bliss_, Joseph Campbell wrote, "When a deity serves as a model for you, your life becomes transparent to the transcendent as long as you realize the inspiring power of that deity. This means living not in the name of worldly success and achievement, but rather in the name of the transcendent, letting the energy manifest through you.” Grof was likely paraphrasing Campbell’s work and applying it to psychedelics.
Additional credits:
The episode contains an original musical composition by Jeff Sudakin. Used with permission.
RECOMMENDED MEDIA
Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS)
The non-profit founded by Rick Doblin in 1986 focused on developing medical, legal, and cultural contexts for people to benefit from the careful uses of psychedelics and marijuana. MAPS has some open clinical trials; see details on their website.
Rick Doblin’s TED talk
In this fascinating dive into the science of psychedelics, Doblin explains how drugs like LSD, psilocybin and MDMA affect your brain - and shows how, when paired with psychotherapy, they could change the way we treat PTSD, depression, substance abuse and more.
How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan
Pollan writes of his own consciousness-expanding experiments with psychedelic drugs, and makes the case for why shaking up the brain's old habits could be therapeutic for people facing addiction, depression, or death.
How to Change Your Mind on Netflix
The docuseries version of Pollan’s book
Breath by James Nestor
This popular science book provides a historical, scientific and personal account of breathing, with special focus on the differences between mouth breathing and nasal breathing.
Insight timer
A free app for sleep, anxiety, and stress
RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES
You Will Never Breathe the Same Again with James Nestor
https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/38-you-will-never-breathe-the-same-again
Two Million Years in Two Hours: A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari
https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/28-two-million-years-in-two-hours-a-conversation-with-yuval-noah-harari
_Your Undivided Attention_ is produced by the Center for Humane Technology. Follow us on Twitter: @HumaneTech_
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Nov 23, 2022
Real Social Media Solutions, Now — with Frances Haugen
When it comes to social media risk, there is reason to hope for consensus. Center for Humane Technology co-founder Tristan Harris recently helped launch a new initiative called the Council for Responsible Social Media (CRSM) in Washington, D.C. It’s a coalition between religious leaders, public health experts, national security leaders, and former political representatives from both sides - people who just care about making our democracy work.
During this event, Tristan sat down with Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, a friend of Center for Humane Technology, to discuss the harm caused to our mental health and global democracy when platforms lack accountability and transparency. The CRSM is bipartisan, and its kickoff serves to boost the solutions Frances and Tristan identify going into 2023.
RECOMMENDED MEDIA
Council for Responsible Social Media (CRSM)
A project of Issue One, CRSM is a cross-partisan group of leaders addressing the negative mental, civic, and public health impacts of social media in America.
Twitter Whistleblower Testifies on Security Issues
Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, a former Twitter security executive, testified on privacy and security issues relating to the social media company before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Beyond the Screen
Beyond the Screen is a coalition of technologists, designers, and thinkers fighting against online harms, led by the Facebook whistle-blower Frances Haugen.
#OneClickSafer Campaign
Our campaign to pressure Facebook to make one immediate change — join us!
RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES
A Conversation with Facebook Whistleblower Frances Haugen
https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/42-a-conversation-with-facebook-whistleblower-frances-haugen
A Facebook Whistleblower: Sophie Zhang
https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/episode-37-a-facebook-whistleblower
Mr. Harris Zooms to Washington
https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/episode-35-mr-harris-zooms-to-washington
With Great Power Comes… No Responsibility?
https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/3-with-great-power-comes-no-responsibility
_Your Undivided Attention_ is produced by the Center for Humane Technology. Follow us on Twitter: @HumaneTech_
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Nov 10, 2022
Spotlight — Humane Technology on '60 Minutes'
The weekly American news show _60 Minutes_ invited Center for Humane Technology co-founder Tristan Harris back recently to discuss political polarization and the anger and incivility that gets elevated on social media as a matter of corporate profit. We're releasing a special episode of _Your Undivided Attention_ this week to dig further into some of the important nuances of the complexity of this problem.
CHT’s work was actually introduced to the world by Anderson Cooper on _60 Minutes_ back in 2017, and we’re honored to have been invited back. In this new interview, we cover the business model of competing for engagement at all costs - the real root of the problem that we’re thrilled to be able to discuss on a far-reaching platform.
We also busted the myth that if you’re not on social media, you don’t need to be concerned. Even if you're not on social media, you likely live in a country that will vote based on other people’s collective choices and behaviors. We know that the media we engage with shapes the people who consume it.
CORRECTION:
* Tristan notes that Facebook's Head of Global Policy, Monika Bickert, says in the interview that social media can't be the root of America's anger because it's people over the age of 60 who are most polarized. She actually said that people over the age of 65 are most polarized.
RECOMMENDED MEDIA
_60 Minutes_: “Social Media and Political Polarization in America”
https://humanetech.com/60minutes
_Amusing Ourselves to Death_ by Neil Postman
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/297276/amusing-ourselves-to-death-by-neil-postman/
Neil Postman’s groundbreaking book about the damaging effects of television on our politics and public discourse has been hailed as a twenty-first-century book published in the twentieth century.
_60 Minutes_: “Brain Hacking”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awAMTQZmvPE
RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES
Elon, Twitter, and the Gladiator Arena
https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/elon-twitter-and-the-gladiator-arena
Addressing the TikTok Threat
https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/bonus-addressing-the-tiktok-threat
What is Civil War In The Digital Age? With Barbara F Walter
https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/50-what-is-civil-war-in-the-digital-age
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Oct 27, 2022
Spotlight — Elon, Twitter and the Gladiator Arena
Since it’s looking more and more like Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, will probably soon have ownership of Twitter, we wanted to do a special episode about what this could mean for Twitter users and our global digital democracy as a whole.
Twitter is a very complicated place. It is routinely blocked by governments who fear its power to organize citizen protests around the world. It’s also where outrage, fear and violence get amplified _by design_, warping users’ views of each other and our common, connected humanity.
We’re at a fork in the road, and we know enough about humane design principles to do this better. So we thought we would do a little thought experiment: What if we applied everything we know about humane technology to Twitter, starting tomorrow? What would happen?
This is the second part in a two-part conversation about Twitter that we’ve had on _Your Undivided Attention_ about Elon Musk’s bid for Twitter and what it could mean in the context of the need to go in a more humane direction.
RECOMMENDED MEDIA
_On Liberty_ by John Stuart Mill
Published in 1859, this philosophical essay applies Mill's ethical system of utilitarianism to society and state
Elon Musk Only Has “Yes” Men by Jonathan L. Fischer
Reporting from Slate on the subject
Foundations of Humane Technology
The Center for Humane Technology's free online course for professionals shaping tomorrow's technology
RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES
A Bigger Picture on Elon and Twitter
https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/bigger-picture-elon-twitter
Transcending the Internet Hate Game with Dylan Marron
https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/52-transcending-the-internet-hate-game
Fighting With Mirages of Each Other with Adam Mastroianni
https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/56-fighting-with-mirages-of-each-other
_Your Undivided Attention_ is produced by the Center for Humane Technology. Follow us on Twitter: @HumaneTech_
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Oct 20, 2022
They Don’t Represent Us — with Larry Lessig
We often talk about the need to protect American democracy. But perhaps those of us in the United States don't currently live in a democracy.
As research shows, there's pretty much no correlation between the percentage of the population that supports a policy and its likelihood of being enacted. The strongest determinant of whether a policy gets enacted is how much money is behind it.
So, how might we not just protect, but better yet revive our democracy? How might we revive the relationship between the will of the people and the actions of our government?
This week on Your Undivided Attention, we're doing something special. As we near the election, and representation is on our minds, we're airing a talk by Harvard Law professor and Creative Commons co-founder Larry Lessig. It's a 2019 talk he gave at the Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, DC about his book,_ They Don't Represent Us_.
The book title has two meanings: first, they — as in our elected representatives — don't represent us. And second, we — as in the people — don't represent ourselves. And this is where social media comes in: we don't represent ourselves because the more we use social media, the more we see extreme versions of the other side, and the more extreme, outraged, and polarized we ourselves become.
Last note: Lessig's talk is highly visual. We edited it lightly for clarity, and jump in periodically to narrate things you can’t see. But if you prefer to watch his talk, you can find the link below in Recommended Media.
RECOMMENDED MEDIA
Video: They Don't Represent Us
The 2019 talk Larry Lessig gave at Politics and Prose in Washington, DC about his book of the same name
Book: They Don't Represent Us
Larry Lessig’s 2019 book that elaborates the ways in which democratic representation is in peril, and proposes a number of solutions to revive our democracy -- from ranked-choice voting to non-partisan open primaries
Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens
Princeton's Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page study measuring the correlation between the preferences of different groups and the decisions of our government
RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES
Digital Democracy is Within Reach with Audrey Tang
https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/23-digital-democracy-is-within-reach
How Political Language Is Engineered with Drew Westen and Frank Luntz
https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/53-how-political-language-is-engineered
_Your Undivided Attention_ is produced by the Center for Humane Technology. Follow us on Twitter: @HumaneTech_
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Oct 6, 2022
Stepping Into the Metaverse — with Dr. Courtney Cogburn and Prof. Jeremy Bailenson
The next frontier of the internet is the metaverse. That's why Mark Zuckerberg changed the name of his company from Facebook to Meta, and just sold $10 billion in corporate bonds to raise money for metaverse-related projects.
How might we learn from our experience with social media, and anticipate the harms of the metaverse before they arise? What would it look like to design a humane metaverse — that respects our attention, improves our well-being, and strengthens our democracy?
This week on Your Undivided Attention, we talk with two pioneers who are thinking critically about the development of the metaverse. Professor Jeremy Bailenson is the Founding director of Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, where he studies how virtual experiences lead to changes in perceptions of self and others. Dr. Courtney Cogburn is an Associate Professor at Columbia's School of Social Work, where she examines associations between racism and stress-related disease. Jeremy and Courtney collabor…
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Sep 22, 2022
Fighting With Mirages of Each Other — with Adam Mastroianni
Have you ever lost a friend to misperception? Have you lost a friend or a family member to the idea that your views got so different, that it was time to end the relationship — perhaps by unfriending each other on Facebook?
As it turns out, we often think our ideological differences are far greater than they actually are. Which means: we’re losing relationships and getting mired in polarization based on warped visions of each other.
This week on _Your Undivided Attention_, we're talking with Adam Mastroianni, a postdoctoral research scholar at Columbia Business School who studies how we perceive and misperceive our social worlds. Together with Adam, we're going to explore how accurate — and inaccurate — our views of each other are. As you listen to our conversation, keep in mind that relationship you might have lost to misperception, and that you might be able to revive as a result of what you hear.
CORRECTIONS: In the episode, Adam says in 1978, 85% of people said they'd vo…
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Sep 8, 2022
Spotlight — Addressing the TikTok Threat
Imagine it's the Cold War. Imagine that the Soviet Union puts itself in a position to influence the television programming of the entire Western world — more than a billion viewers.
While this might sound like science fiction, it’s representative of the world we're living in, with TikTok being influenced by the Chinese Communist Party.
TikTok, the flagship app of the Chinese company Bytedance, recently surpassed Google and Facebook as the most popular site on the internet in 2021, and is expected to reach more than 1.8 billion users by the end of 2022. The Chinese government doesn't control TikTok, but has influence over it. What are the implications of this influence, given that China is the main geopolitical rival of the United States?
This week on Your Undivided Attention, we bring you a bonus episode about TikTok. Co-hosts Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin explore the nature of the TikTok threat, and how we might address it.
RECOMMENDED MEDIA
Pew Research Center's "Teens, Soci…
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Aug 25, 2022
Spotlight — How might a long-term stock market transform tech?
At Center for Humane Technology, we often talk about _multipolar traps_ — which arise when individuals have an incentive to act in ways that are beneficial to them in the short term, but detrimental to the group in the long term. Think of social media companies that compete for our attention, so that when TikTok introduces an even-more addictive feature, Facebook and Twitter have to mimic it in order to keep up, sending us all on a race to the bottom of our brainstems.
Intervening at the level of multipolar traps has extraordinary leverage. One such intervention is the Long Term Stock Exchange — a U.S. national securities exchange serving companies and investors who share a long-term vision. Instead of asking public companies to pollute less or be less addictive while holding them accountable to short-term shareholder value, the Long-Term Stock Exchange creates a new playing field, which incentivizes the creation of long-term stakeholder value.
This week on _Your Undivided Attent…
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Aug 4, 2022
The Invisible Cyber-War
When you hear the word _cyber-attack_, what comes to mind? Someone hacking into your email, or stealing your Facebook password?
As it turns out, our most critical infrastructure can be hacked. Our banks, water treatment facilities, and nuclear power plants can be deactivated and even controlled simply by finding bugs in the software used to operate them. Suddenly, _cyber-attack_ takes on a different meaning.
This week on _Your Undivided Attention,_ we're talking with cyber-security expert Nicole Perlroth. Nicole spent a decade as the lead cyber-security reporter at The New York Times, and is now a member of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity Advisory Committee. She recently published “This Is How They Tell Me The World Ends” — an in-depth exploration of the global cyber arms race.
CORRECTIONS: In the episode, Nicole says that "the United States could have only afforded 2 to 3 more days of Colonial Pipeline being down before it ground the country — our econ…
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Jun 30, 2022
An Alternative to Silicon Valley Unicorns
Why isn't Twitter doing more to get bots off their platform? Why isn’t Uber taking better care of its drivers?
What if...they can't?
Venture-capital backed companies like Twitter and Uber are held accountable to maximizing returns to investors. If and when they become public companies, they become accountable to maximizing returns to shareholders. They’ve promised Wall Street outsized returns — which means Twitter can't lose bots if it would significantly lower their user count and in turn lower advertising revenue, and Uber can’t treat their drivers like employees if it competes with profits.
But what's the alternative? What might it look like to design an ownership and governance model that incentivizes a technology company to serve all of its stakeholders over the long term – and primarily, the stakeholders who create value?
This week on _Your Undivided Attention_, we're talking with two experts on creating the conditions for humane business, and in turn, for humane te…
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Jun 16, 2022
Spotlight — Conversations With People Who Hate Me with Dylan Marron
This week on Your Undivided Attention, we’re doing something different: we’re airing an episode of another podcast that’s also part of the TED Audio Collective.
Backing up for a moment: we recently aired an episode with Dylan Marron — creator and host of the podcast, Conversations With People Who Hate Me. On his show, Dylan calls up the people behind negative comments on the internet, and asks them: _why did you write that?_
In our conversation with Dylan, we played a clip from episode 2 of Conversations With People Who Hate Me. In that episode, Dylan talks with a high school student named Josh, who’d sent him homophobic messages online. This week, we're airing that full episode — the full conversation between Dylan Marron and Josh.
If you didn’t hear our episode with Dylan, do give it a listen. Then, enjoy this second episode of Conversations With People Who Hate Me.
RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES
Transcending the Internet Hate Game with Dylan Marron: https://www.humanete…
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Jun 2, 2022
How Political Language Is Engineered — with Drew Westen and Frank Luntz
Democracy depends on our ability to choose our political views. But the language we use to talk about political issues is deliberately designed to be divisive, and can produce up to a 15-point difference in what we think about those issues. As a result, are we choosing our views, or is our language choosing them for us?
This week,_Your Undivided Attention_ welcomes two Jedi Masters of political communication. Drew Westen is a political psychologist and messaging consultant based at Emory university, who has advised the Democratic Party. Frank Luntz is a political and communications consultant, pollster, and pundit, who has advised the Republican Party. In the past, our guests have used their messaging expertise in ways that increased partisanship. For example, Luntz advocated for the use of the term “death tax” instead of “estate tax,” and “climate change” instead of “global warming.” Still, Luntz and Westen are uniquely positioned to help us decode the divisive power…
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May 19, 2022
Transcending the Internet Hate Game — with Dylan Marron
The game that social media sets us up to play is a game that rewards outrage. It's a game that we win by being better than other players at dunking on each other, straw-manning each other, and assuming the worst in each other. The game itself must be transformed.
And, we can also decide to step out of the game, and do something _different_.
On this week’s episode of Your Undivided Attention, we welcome Dylan Marron — who has been called by Jason Sudeikis "a modern Mr. Rogers for the digital age." Dylan is the creator and host of the podcast Conversations With People Who Hate Me.
On the show, he calls up the people behind negative comments on the internet, and asks them a simple question: why did you write that? He just published a book by the same name, where he elaborates 12 lessons learned from talking with internet strangers. Together with Dylan, we explore how transforming the game and transforming ourselves can go hand-in-hand.
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Conversations With People…
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May 5, 2022
How To Free Our Minds — with Cult Deprogramming Expert Dr. Steven Hassan
How would you know if you were in a cult?
If not a cult, then at least under undue influence?
The truth is: we're all under some form of undue influence. The question is: to what degree and to what extent we’re _aware_ of this influence — which is exacerbated by social media. In an era of likes, followers, and echo chambers, how can we become aware of undue influence and gain sovereignty over our minds?
Our guest this week is Dr. Steven Hassan, an expert on undue influence, brainwashing, and unethical hypnosis. He’s the founder of the Freedom of Mind Resource Center — a coaching, consulting, and training organization dedicated to helping people freely consider how they want to live their lives. Dr. Hassan was himself a member of a cult: the Unification Church (also known as the Moonies), which was developed in Korea in the 1950's. Since leaving the Moonies, Dr. Hassan has helped thousands of individuals and families recover from undue influence.
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Freedom o…
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Apr 25, 2022
Spotlight — A Bigger Picture on Elon & Twitter
If Elon Musk owns Twitter, what are the risks and what are the opportunities? In order for Twitter to support democracy — and Musk’s goal of becoming a multi-planetary civilization — we need a radical redesign that goes beyond free speech.
_Note: this conversation was recorded on April 21, 2022. That was 3 days prior to the official purchase announcement, which revealed that Elon Musk will buy Twitter for $44 billion. _
_Clarification: In the episode, we talk about the creation of The Daily Show, featuring Jon Stewart. To be clear, The Daily Show was created by writer and producer Madeleine Smithberg and comedian and media personality Lizz Winstead — for comedian and host Craig Kilborn. Jon Stewart took over in 1999, which is when he had the conversation with executives that we reference in the episode, where he didn't want to see the viewership numbers._
RECOMMENDED MEDIA
Examining algorithmic amplification of political content on Twitter
Polarization of Twitter (Knight F…
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Apr 21, 2022
What Is Civil War in the Digital Age? — with Barbara F. Walter
Civil war might be the most likely escalation pathway towards disaster for our country. On the flip side, learning how to avoid civil conflict — and more ambitiously, repair our civic fabric — might have the greatest leverage for addressing the challenges we face.
Our guest Barbara F. Walter is one of the world's leading experts on civil wars, political violence, and terrorism. She’s the author of _How Civil Wars Start: And How To Stop Them_, which provides insight into the drivers of civil war, how social media fuels conflict, and how we might repair our broken democracies.
Together, we explore what makes for a healthy liberal democracy, why democracies worldwide are in decline, and the role of resentment and hope. Join us in an exploration of the generator functions for civil war in the digital age, and how we might prevent them.
RECOMMENDED MEDIA
How Civil Wars Start: And How To Stop Them
Barbara F. Walter’s latest book and the subject of our conversation, identif…
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Apr 7, 2022
Spotlight — What Is Humane Technology?
“The fundamental problem of humanity is that we have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and God-like technology.” — E. O. Wilson.
More than ever, we need the wisdom to match the power of our God-like technology. Yet, technology is both eroding our ability to make sense of the world, and increasing the complexity of the issues we face. The gap between our sense-making ability and issue complexity is what we call the “wisdom gap."
How do we develop the wisdom we need to responsibly steward our God-like technology?
This week on Your Undivided Attention, we're introducing one way Center for Humane Technology is attempting to close the wisdom gap —through our new online course, _Foundations of Humane Technology__._ In this bonus episode, Tristan Harris describes the wisdom gap we're attempting to close, and our Co-Founder and Executive Director Randima Fernando talks about the course itself.
Sign up for the free course: https://www.humanetech.com/course
RECOMMENDED…
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Mar 24, 2022
Digital Democracy is Within Reach with Audrey Tang (Rerun)
_[This episode originally aired on July 23rd, 2020.]_ Imagine a world where every country has a digital minister and technologically-enabled legislative bodies. Votes are completely transparent and audio and video of all conversations between lawmakers and lobbyists are available to the public immediately. Conspiracy theories are acted upon within two hours and replaced by humorous videos that clarify the truth. Imagine that expressing outrage about your local political environment turned into a participatory process where you were invited to solve that problem and even entered into a face to face group workshop.
Does that sound impossible? It’s ambitious and optimistic, but that's everything that our guest this episode, Audrey Tang, digital minister of Taiwan, has been working on in her own country for many years. Audrey’s path into public service began in 2014 with her participation in the Sunflower Movement, a student-led protest in Taiwan’s parliamentary building, and she’…
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Mar 10, 2022
The Dark Side Of Decentralization — with Audrey Kurth Cronin
Is decentralization inherently a good thing?
These days, there's a lot of talk about decentralization. Decentralized social media platforms can allow us to own our own data. Decentralized cryptocurrencies can enable bank-free financial transactions. Decentralized 3D printing can allow us to fabricate anything we want.
But if the world lives on Bitcoin, we may not be able to sanction nation states like Russia when they invade sovereign nations. If 3D printing is decentralized, anyone can print their own weapons at home. Decentralization takes on new meaning when we're talking about decentralizing the capacity for catastrophic destruction.
This week on Your Undivided Attention, we explore the history of decentralized weaponry, how social media is effectively a new decentralized weapon, and how to wisely navigate these threats. Guiding us through this exploration is Audrey Kurth Cronin — one of the world’s leading experts in security and terrorism. Audrey is a distinguished Profess…
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Feb 24, 2022
The Invisible Influence of Language — with Lera Boroditsky
One of the oldest technologies we have is language. How do the words we use influence the way we think?
The media can talk about immigrants _scurrying _across the border, versus immigrants _crossing_ the border. Or we might hear about technology platforms _censoring_ us, versus _moderating_ content.
If those word choices shift public opinion on immigration or technology by 25%, or even 2%, then we’ve been influenced in ways we can't even see. Which means that becoming aware of how words shape the way we think can help inoculate us from their undue influence. And further, consciously choosing or even designing the words we use can help us think in more complex ways – and address our most complex challenges.
This week on Your Undivided Attention, we're grateful to have Lera Boroditsky, a cognitive scientist who studies how language shapes thought. Lera is an Associate Professor of Cognitive Science at UC San Diego, and the editor-in-chief of Frontiers in Cultural Psychology.
Clar…
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Feb 10, 2022
How Science Fiction Can Shape Our Reality — with Kim Stanley Robinson
The meta-crisis is so vast: climate change, exponential technology, addiction, polarization, and more. How do we grasp it, let alone take steps to address it?
One of the thinking tools we have at our disposal is science fiction. To the extent that we co-evolve with our stories, science fiction can prepare us for the impending future — and empower us to shape it.
This week on Your Undivided Attention, we're thrilled to have one of the greatest living science-fiction writers — Kim Stanley Robinson. His most recent novel is _The Ministry for the Future_, a sweeping epic that reaches into the very near future, and imagines what it would take to unite humanity and avoid a mass extinction. Whether or not you've read the book, this episode has insights for you. And if this episode makes you want to read the book, our conversation won't spoil it for you.
Clarification: in the episode, Robinson refers to philosopher Antonio Gramsci's "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will." Th…
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Feb 3, 2022
Here’s Our Plan And We Don’t Know — with Tristan Harris, Aza Raskin and Stephanie Lepp
Renowned quantum physicist Richard Feynman once wrote, "It is our capacity to doubt that will determine the future of civilization."
In that spirit, this episode is a little different – because we're talking _openly_ about our doubts, with you, our listeners. It's also different because it’s hosted by our Executive Producer Stephanie Lepp, with Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin in the hot seats.
How have we evolved our understanding of our social media predicament? How has that evolution inspired us to question the work we do at Center for Humane Technology? Join us as we say those three magic words — I don't know — and yet pursue our mission to the best of our ability.
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Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System
Systems theorist Donella Meadows' seminal article, articulating a framework for thinking about how to change complex systems.
Winning Humanity’s Existential Game
The Future Thinkers podcast with Daniel Schmactenberger, where he explores how…
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Jan 13, 2022
Is World War III Already Here? — with Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster
Would you say that the US is in war-time or peace-time? How do you know?
The truth is, the nature of warfare has changed so fundamentally, that we're currently in a war we don't even recognize. It's the war that Russia, China, and other hostile foreign actors are fighting against us — weaponizing social media to undermine our faith in each other, our government, and democracy itself.
World War III is here, it's in cyberspace, and the US is unprepared — and largely unaware.
This week on Your Undivided Attention, we're fortunate to be speaking with Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster. General McMaster was the United States National Security Advisor from 2017 to 2018. He has examined the most critical foreign policy and national security challenges that face the United States, and is devoted to preserving America's standing and security.
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Dec 10, 2021
A Fresh Take on Tech in China — with Rui Ma and Duncan Clark
Who do you think the Chinese government considers its biggest rival? The United States, right? Actually, the Chinese government considers its biggest rival to be _its own technology companies_.
It's China's tech companies who threaten its capacity to build a competitive China. That's why the Chinese government is cracking down on social media — for example, by limiting the number of hours youth can play video games, and banning cell phone use in schools. China's restrictions on social media use may be autocratic, but may also protect users more than what we see coming from the US government.
It’s a complicated picture.
This week on Your Undivided Attention, we're having a surprising conversation about technology in China. Here to give us a fresh take are two guests: investor, analyst, and co-host of the Tech Buzz China podcast Rui Ma, and China internet expert and author of _Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built_,_ _Duncan Clark.
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Nov 11, 2021
Behind the Curtain on The Social Dilemma — with Jeff Orlowski-Yang and Larissa Rhodes
How do you make a film that impacts more than 100 million people in 190 countries in 30 languages?
This week on Your Undivided Attention, we're going behind the curtain on _The Social Dilemma_ — the Netflix documentary about the dark consequences of the social media business model, which featured the Center for Humane Technology. On the heels of the film's 1-year anniversary and winning of 2 Emmy Awards, we're talking with Exposure Labs' Director Jeff Orlowski-Yang and Producer Larissa Rhodes. What moved Jeff and Larissa to shift their focus from climate change to social media? How did the film transform countless lives, including ours and possibly yours? What might we do differently if we were producing the film today?
Join us as we explore the reverberations of _The Social Dilemma_ — which we're still feeling the effects of over one year later.
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Oct 18, 2021
A Conversation with Facebook Whistleblower Frances Haugen
We are now in social media's Big Tobacco moment. And that’s largely thanks to the courage of one woman: Frances Haugen.
Frances is a specialist in algorithmic product management. She worked at Google, Pinterest, and Yelp before joining Facebook — first as a Product Manager on Civic Misinformation, and then on the Counter-Espionage team. But what she saw at Facebook was that the company consistently and knowingly prioritized profits over public safety. So Frances made the courageous decision to blow the whistle — which resulted in the biggest disclosure in the history of Facebook, and in the history of social media.
In this special interview, co-hosts Tristan and Aza go behind the headlines with Frances herself. We go deeper into the problems she exposed, discuss potential solutions, and explore her motivations — along with why she fundamentally believes change is possible. We also announce an exciting campaign being launched by the Center for Humane Technology — to use this…
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Oct 6, 2021
Spotlight — A Whirlwind Week of Whistleblowing
In seven years of working on the problems of runaway technology, we’ve never experienced a week like this! In this bonus episode of Your Undivided Attention, we recap this whirlwind of a week — from Facebook whistleblower France Haugen going public on 60 Minutes on Sunday, to the massive outage of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp on Monday, to Haugen’s riveting Congressional testimony on Tuesday. We also make some exciting announcements — including our planned episode with Haugen up next, the Yale social media reform panel we’re participating in on Thursday, and a campaign we’re launching to pressure Facebook to make one immediate change.
This week it truly feels like we’re making history — and you’re a part of it.
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Sep 30, 2021
Making Meaning in Challenging Times — with Jamie Wheal
What helps you make meaning in challenging times? As you confront COVID, the climate crisis, and all of the challenges we discuss on this show, what helps you avoid nihilism or fundamentalism, and instead access healing, inspiration, and connection?
Today on _Your Undivided Attention_, we're joined by anthropologist and writer Jamie Wheal. Wheal is the author of Recapture the Rapture: Rethinking God, Sex and Death In a World That's Lost Its Mind. In the book, he makes the case that in order to address the _meta_-crisis — the interconnected challenges we face, which we talked about in Episode 36 with Daniel Schmachtenberger, we must address the _meaning_ crisis — the need to stay inspired, mended, and bonded in challenging times. Jamie argues that it doesn't matter whether we're staying inspired, mended, and bonded through institutionalized religion or other means as long as meaning-making is inclusively available to everyone.
What we hope you'll walk away with is a humane way to…
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Sep 21, 2021
Spotlight — The Facebook Files with Tristan Harris, Frank Luntz, and Daniel Schmachtenberger
On September 13th, the Wall Street Journal released The Facebook Files, an ongoing investigation of the extent to which Facebook's problems are meticulously known inside the company — all the way up to Mark Zuckerberg. Pollster Frank Luntz invited Tristan Harris along with friend and mentor Daniel Schmachtenberger to discuss the implications in a live webinar.
In this bonus episode of _Your Undivided Attention_, Tristan and Daniel amplify the scope of the public conversation about The Facebook Files beyond the platform, and into its business model, our regulatory structure, and human nature itself.
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Sep 3, 2021
The Power of Solutions Journalism — with Tina Rosenberg and Hélène Biandudi Hofer
What is the goal of our digital information environment? Is it simply to inform us, or also to empower us to act?
The Solutions Journalism Network (SJN) understands that simply reporting on social problems rarely leads to change. What they’ve discovered is that rigorously reporting on responses to social problems is more likely to give activists and concerned citizens the hope and information they need to take effective action. For this reason, SJN trains journalists to report on “solutions angles.” More broadly, the organization seeks to rebalance the news, so that people are exposed to stories that help them understand the challenges we face as well as potential ways to respond.
In this episode, Tina Rosenberg, co-founder of SJN, and Hélène Biandudi Hofer, former manager of SJN’s Complicating the Narratives initiative, walk us through the origin of solutions journalism, how to practice it, and what impact it has had. Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin reflect on how huma…
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Aug 12, 2021
Do You Want to Become a Vampire? — with L.A. Paul
How do we decide whether to undergo a transformative experience when we don’t know how that experience will change us? This is the central question explored by Yale philosopher and cognitive scientist L.A. Paul.
Paul uses the prospect of becoming a vampire to illustrate the conundrum: let's say Dracula offers you the chance to become a vampire. You might be confident you'll love it, but you also know you'll become a different person with different preferences. Whose preferences do you prioritize: yours now, or yours after becoming a vampire? Similarly, whose preferences do we prioritize when deciding how to engage with technology and social media: ours now, or ours after becoming users — to the point of potentially becoming attention-seeking vampires?
In this episode with L.A. Paul, we're raising the stakes of the social media conversation — from technology that steers our time and attention, to technology that fundamentally transforms who we are and what we want. Tune in as Pa…
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Jul 22, 2021
You Will Never Breathe the Same Again — with James Nestor
When author and journalist James Nestor began researching a piece on free diving, he was stunned. He found that free divers could hold their breath for up to 8 minutes at a time, and dive to depths of 350 feet on a single breath. As he dug into the history of breath, he discovered that our industrialized lives have led to improper and mindless breathing, with cascading consequences from sleep apnea to reduced mobility. He also discovered an entire world of extraordinary feats achieved through proper and mindful breathing — including healing scoliosis, rejuvenating organs, halting snoring, and even enabling greater sovereignty in our use of technology. What is the transformative potential of breath? And what is the relationship between proper breathing and humane technology?
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Jul 9, 2021
A Facebook Whistleblower — with Sophie Zhang
In September of 2020, on her last day at Facebook, data scientist Sophie Zhang posted a 7,900-word memo to the company's internal site. In it, she described the anguish and guilt she had experienced over the last two and a half years. She'd spent much of that time almost single-handedly trying to rein in fake activity on the platform by nefarious world leaders in small countries. Sometimes she received help and attention from higher-ups; sometimes she got silence and inaction. “I joined Facebook from the start intending to change it from the inside,” she said, but “I was still very naive at the time.”
We don’t have a lot of information about how things operate inside the major tech platforms, and most former employees aren’t free to speak about their experience. It’s easy to fill that void with inferences about what might be motivating a company — greed, apathy, disorganization or ignorance, for example — but the truth is usually far messier and more nuanced. Sophie…
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Jun 25, 2021
A Problem Well-Stated is Half-Solved — with Daniel Schmachtenberger
We’ve explored many different problems on _Your Undivided Attention_ — addiction, disinformation, polarization, climate change, and more. But what if many of these problems are actually symptoms of the same meta-problem, or _meta-crisis_? And what if a key leverage point for intervening in this meta-crisis is improving our collective capacity to problem-solve?
Our guest Daniel Schmachtenberger guides us through his vision for a new form of global coordination to help us address our global existential challenges. Daniel is a founding member of the Consilience Project, aimed at facilitating new forms of collective intelligence and governance to strengthen open societies. He's also a friend and mentor of Tristan Harris.
This insight-packed episode introduces key frames we look forward to using in future episodes. For this reason, we highly encourage you to listen to this edited version _along with_ the unedited version.
We also invite you to join Daniel and Tristan at our Podcast C…
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Jun 25, 2021
[Unedited] A Problem Well-Stated is Half-Solved — with Daniel Schmachtenberger
We’ve explored many different problems on _Your Undivided Attention_ — addiction, disinformation, polarization, climate change, and more. But what if many of these problems are actually symptoms of the same meta-problem, or _meta-crisis_? And what if a key leverage point for intervening in this meta-crisis is improving our collective capacity to problem-solve?
Our guest Daniel Schmachtenberger guides us through his vision for a new form of global coordination to help us address our global existential challenges. Daniel is a founding member of the Consilience Project, aimed at facilitating new forms of collective intelligence and governance to strengthen open societies. He's also a friend and mentor of Tristan Harris.
This insight-packed episode introduces key frames we look forward to using in future episodes. For this reason, we highly encourage you to listen to this unedited version _along with_ the edited version.
We also invite you to join Daniel and Tristan at our Podcast C…
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May 10, 2021
Mr. Harris Zooms to Washington
Back in January 2020, Tristan Harris went to Washington, D.C. to testify before the U.S. Congress on the harms of social media. A few weeks ago, he returned — virtually — for another hearing, _Algorithms and Amplification: How Social Media Platforms’ Design Choices Shape Our Discourse and Our Minds_. He testified alongside Dr. Joan Donovan, Research Director at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media Politics and Public Policy and the heads of policy from Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. The senators’ animated questioning demonstrated a deeper understanding of how these companies’ fundamental business models and design properties fuel hate and misinformation, and many of the lawmakers expressed a desire and willingness to take regulatory action. But, there’s still room for a more focused conversation. “It’s not about whether they filter out bad content,” says Tristan, “but really whether the entire business model of capturing human performance is a…
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Apr 29, 2021
Can Your Reality Turn on a Word? — with Anthony Jacquin
Can hypnosis be a tool to help us see how our minds are being shaped and manipulated more than we realize? Guest Anthony Jacquin is a hypnotist and hypnotherapist of over 20 years, author of _Reality is Plastic_, and he co-runs the Jacquin Hypnosis Academy. He uses his practice to help his clients change their behavior and improve their lives. In this episode, he breaks down the misconceptions of hypnosis and reveals that despite the influence of hypnotizing forces like social media, we all still have the ability to get in touch with our subconscious selves. “What can I say with certainty is true about me — what is good, true and real about me?” Anthony asks. “Much of what we’ve invested in is actually transient. It will change. What is unchanging?” Anthony draws connections between hypnosis and technology and the impacts of both on our subconscious minds but identifies a key difference — technology is exploiting us. But maybe a little more insight into one more dimension…
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Apr 22, 2021
The Stubborn Optimist's Guide Revisited — with Christiana Figueres (Rerun)
[This episode originally aired May 21, 2020] Internationally-recognized global leader on climate change Christiana Figueres argues that the battle against global threats like climate change begins in our own heads. She became the United Nations’ top climate official, after she had watched the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit collapse “in blood, in screams, in tears.” In the wake of that debacle, Christiana began performing an act of emotional Aikido on herself, her team, and eventually delegates from 196 nations. She called it “stubborn optimism.” It requires a clear and alluring vision of a future that can supplant the dystopian and discouraging vision of what will happen if the world fails to act. It was stubborn optimism, she says, that convinced those nations to sign the first global climate framework, the Paris Agreement. In this episode, we explore how a similar shift in Silicon Valley’s vision could lead 3 billion people to take action for the planet.
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Apr 15, 2021
Mind the (Perception) Gap — with Dan Vallone
What do you think the other side thinks? Guest Dan Vallone is the Director of More in Common U.S.A., an organization that’s been asking Democrats and Republicans that critical question. Their work has uncovered countless “perception gaps” in our understanding of each other. For example, Democrats think that about 30 percent of Republicans support "reasonable gun control," but in reality, it’s about 70 percent. Both Republicans and Democrats think that about 50 percent of the other side would feel that physical violence is justified in some situations, but the actual number for each is only about five percent. “Both sides are convinced that the majority of their political opponents are extremists,” says Dan. “And yet, that's just not true.” Social media encourages the most extreme views to speak the loudest and rise to the top—and it’s hard to start a conversation and work together when we’re all arguing with mirages. But Dan’s insights and the work of More in Co…
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Apr 8, 2021
Spotlight — Coded Bias
The film Coded Bias follows MIT Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini through her investigation of algorithmic discrimination, after she accidentally discovers that facial recognition technologies do not detect darker-skinned faces. Joy is joined on screen by experts in the field, researchers, activists, and involuntary victims of algorithmic injustice. Coded Bias was released on Netflix April 5, 2021, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last year, and has been called “‘An Inconvenient Truth’ for Big Tech algorithms” by Fast Company magazine. We talk to director Shalini Kantayya about the impetus for the film and how to tackle the threats these challenges pose to civil rights while working towards more humane technology for all.
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Apr 1, 2021
Come Together Right Now — with Shamil Idriss
How many technologists have traveled to Niger, or the Balkans, or Rwanda, to learn the lessons of peacebuilding? Technology and social media are creating patterns and pathways of conflict that few people anticipated or even imagined just a decade ago. And we need to act quickly to contain the effects, but we don't have to reinvent the wheel. There are people, such as this episode’s guest, Shamil Idriss, CEO of the organization Search for Common Ground, who have been training for years to understand human beings and learn how to help them connect and begin healing processes. These experts can share their insights and help us figure out how to apply them to our new digital habitats. “Peace moves at the speed of trust, and trust can’t be fast-tracked,” says Shamil. Real change is possible, but as he explains, it takes patience, care, and creativity to get there.
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Mar 18, 2021
Disinformation Then and Now — with Camille François
Disinformation researchers have been fighting two battles over the last decade: one to combat and contain harmful information, and one to convince the world that these manipulations have an offline impact that requires complex, nuanced solutions. Camille François, Chief Information Officer at the cybersecurity company Graphika and an affiliate of the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, believes that our common understanding of the problem has recently reached a new level. In this interview, she catalogues the key changes she observed between studying Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election and helping convene and operate the Election Integrity Partnership watchdog group before, during and after the 2020 election. “I'm optimistic, because I think that things that have taken quite a long time to land are finally landing, and because I think that we do have a diverse set of expertise at the table,” she says. Camille and Tristan Harris dissect the challenges an…
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Mar 4, 2021
The Courage to Connect — with Ciaran O’Connor and John Wood, Jr.
It’s no revelation that Americans aren’t getting along. But it’s easier to diagnose the problem than come up with solutions. The organization Braver Angels runs workshops that convince Republicans and Democrats to meet, but not necessarily in the middle. “Conflict can actually be a pathway to intimacy and connection rather than division, if you have the right structure for bringing people together,” says Ciaran O’Connor, the organization’s Chief Marketing Officer. We’re delighted to have Ciaran and the Braver Angels National Ambassador John Wood, Jr. on the show to describe their methods, largely based on marriage counseling techniques, and talk about where to go next. “How do you scale that up and apply that to the digital space, given that that is the key battlefield?” asks John. Technology companies play a role here, and the wisdom of the people doing the work on the ground is a valuable guide.
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Feb 11, 2021
A Renegade Solution to Extractive Economics — with Kate Raworth
When Kate Raworth began studying economics, she was disappointed that the mainstream version of the discipline didn’t fully address many of the world issues that she wanted to tackle, such as human rights and environmental destruction. She left the field, but was inspired to jump back in after the financial crisis of 2008, when she saw an opportunity to introduce fresh perspectives. She sat down and drew a chart in the shape of a doughnut, which provided a way to think about our economic system while accounting for the impact to the world around us, as well as for humans’ baseline needs. Kate’s framing can teach us a lot about how to transform the economic model of the technology industry, helping us move from a system that values addicted, narcissistic, polarized humans to one that values healthy, loving and collaborative relationships. Her book, “Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist,” gives us a guide for transitioning from a 20th-century pa…
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Jan 15, 2021
Two Million Years in Two Hours: A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari
Yuval Noah Harari is one of the rare historians who can give us a two-million-year perspective on today’s headlines. In this wide-ranging conversation, Yuval explains how technology and democracy have evolved together over the course of human history, from paleolithic tribes to city states to kingdoms to nation states. So where do we go from here? “In almost all the conversations I have,” Yuval says, “we get stuck in dystopia and we never explore the no less problematic questions of what happens when we avoid dystopia.” We push beyond dystopia and consider the nearly unimaginable alternatives in this special episode of Your Undivided Attention.
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Dec 23, 2020
Won't You Be My Neighbor? A Civic Vision for the Internet — with Eli Pariser
You’ve heard us talk before on this podcast about the pitfalls of trying to moderate a “global public square.” Our guest today, Eli Pariser, co-director of Civic Signals, co-founder of Avaaz, and author of "The Filter Bubble," has been thinking for years about how to create more functional online spaces and is bringing people together to solve that problem. He believes the answer lies in creating spaces and groups intentionally, with the same kinds of skilled support and infrastructure that we would enlist in the physical world. It’s not enough to expect the big revenue-oriented tech companies to transform their tools into something less harmful; Eli is encouraging us to proactively gather in our own spaces, optimized for togetherness and cooperation.
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Oct 27, 2020
Are the Kids Alright? — with Jonathan Haidt
We are in the midst of a teen mental health crisis. Since 2011, the rate of U.S. hospitalizations for preteen girls who have self-harmed is up 189 percent, and with older teen girls, it’s up 62 percent. Tragically, the numbers on suicides are similar — 151 percent higher for preteen girls, and 70 percent higher for older teen girls. NYU social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has spent the last few years trying to figure out why, working with fellow psychologist Jean Twenge, and he believes social media is to blame. Jonathan and Jean found that the mental health data show a stark contrast between Generation Z and Millennials, unlike any demographic divide researchers have seen since World War II, and the division tracks with a sharp rise in social media use. As Jonathan explains in this interview, disentangling correlation and causation is a persistent research challenge, and the debate on this topic is still in full swing. But as TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat and the next big thing fine-…
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Oct 6, 2020
Your Nation's Attention for the Price of a Used Car — with Zahed Amanullah
Today’s extremists don’t need highly produced videos like ISIS. They don’t need deep pockets like Russia. With the right message, a fringe organization can reach the majority of a nation’s Facebook users for the price of a used car. Our guest, Zahed Amanullah, knows this firsthand. He’s a counter-terrorism expert at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, and when his organization received $10,000 in ad credits from Facebook for an anti-extremism campaign, they were able to reach about two-thirds of Kenya’s Facebook users. It was a surprising win for Zahed, but it means nefarious groups all over the African continent have exactly the same broadcasting power. Last year, Facebook took down 66 accounts, 83 pages, 11 groups and 12 Instagram accounts related to Russian campaigns in African countries, and Russian networks spent more than $77,000 on Facebook ads in Africa. Today on the show, Zahed will explain how the very tools that extremists use to broadcast messages of hate can…
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Sep 9, 2020
Spotlight: The Social Dilemma
A new documentary called The Social Dilemma comes out on Netflix today, September 9, 2020. We hope that this film, full of interviews with tech insiders, will be a catalyst and tool for exposing how technology has been distorting our perception of the world, and will help us reach the shared ground we need to solve big problems together.
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Sep 2, 2020
Facebook Goes '2Africa' — with Julie Owono
This summer, Facebook unveiled “2Africa,” a subsea cable project that will encircle nearly the entire continent of Africa — much to the surprise of Julie Owono. As Executive Director of Internet Without Borders, she’s seen how quickly projects like this can become enmeshed in local politics, as private companies dig through territorial waters, negotiate with local officials and gradually assume responsibility over vital pieces of national infrastructure. “It’s critical, now, that communities have a seat at the table,” Julie says. We ask her about the risks of tech companies leading us into an age of “digital colonialism,” and what she hopes to achieve as a newly appointed member of Facebook’s Oversight Board.
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Aug 6, 2020
When Media Was for You and Me — with Fred Turner
In 1940, a group of 60 American intellectuals formed the Committee for National Morale. “They’ve largely been forgotten,” says Fred Turner, a professor of communications at Stanford University, but their work had a profound impact on public opinion. They produced groundbreaking films and art exhibitions. They urged viewers to stop, reflect and think for themselves, and in so doing, they developed a set of design principles that reimagined how media could make us feel more calm, reflective, empathetic; in short, more democratic.
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Jul 23, 2020
Digital Democracy Is Within Reach — with Audrey Tang
Imagine a world where every country has a digital minister and technologically-enabled legislative bodies. Votes are completely transparent and audio and video of all conversations between lawmakers and lobbyists are available to the public immediately. Conspiracy theories are acted upon within two hours and replaced by humorous videos that clarify the truth. Imagine that expressing outrage about your local political environment turned into a participatory process where you were invited to solve that problem and even entered into a face to face group workshop. Does that sound impossible? It’s ambitious and optimistic, but that's everything that our guest this episode, Audrey Tang, digital minister of Taiwan, has been working on in her own country for many years. Audrey’s path into public service began in 2014 with her participation in the Sunflower Movement, a student-led protest in Taiwan’s parliamentary building, and she’s been building on that experience ever since, leading…
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Jul 10, 2020
Spotlight — Beyond the Boycott
#StopHateforProfit is an important first step, but we need to go much further.
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Jul 8, 2020
The World According to Q — with Travis View
What would inspire someone to singlehandedly initiate an armed standoff on the Hoover Dam, or lead the police on a 100-mile-an-hour car chase while calling for help from an anonymous internet source, or travel hundreds of miles alone to shoot up a pizza parlor? The people who did these things were all connected to the decentralized cult-like internet conspiracy theory group called QAnon. Our guest this episode, Travis View, is a researcher, writer and podcast host who has spent the last few years trying to understand the people who’ve become wrapped up in QAnon and the concerning consequences as Q followers increasingly leave their screens and take extreme actions in the real world. As many as six candidates who support QAnon are running for Congress and will be on the ballot for the 2020 elections, threatening to upend long-held Republican establishment seats. This just happened to a five-term Republican congressman in Colorado. Travis warns that QAnon is an extremism problem, not a…
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Jun 22, 2020
The Bully’s Pulpit — with Fadi Quran
The sound of bullies on social media can be deafening, but what about their victims? “They're just sitting there being pummeled and pummeled and pummeled,” says Fadi Quran. As the campaign director of Avaaz, a platform for 62 million activists worldwide, Fadi and his team go to great lengths to figure out exactly how social media is being weaponized against vulnerable communities, including those who have no voice online at all. “They can't report it. They’re not online.” Fadi says. “They can't even have a conversation about it.” But by bringing these voices of survivors to Silicon Valley, Fadi says, tech companies can not just hear the lethal consequences of algorithmic abuse, they can start hacking away at a system that Fadi argues was “designed for bullies.”
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Jun 16, 2020
The Dictator's Playbook Revisited — with Maria Ressa (Rerun)
[This episode originally aired on November 5, 2019] Maria Ressa is arguably one of the bravest journalists working in the Philippines today. As co-founder and CEO of the media site Rappler, she has withstood death threats, multiple arrests and a rising tide of populist fury that she first saw on Facebook, in the form of a strange and jarring personal attack. Through her story, she reveals, play by play, how an aspiring strongman can use social media to spread falsehoods, sow confusion, intimidate critics and subvert democratic institutions. Nonetheless, she argues Silicon Valley can reverse these trends, and fast. First, tech companies must "wake up," she says, to the threats they've unleashed throughout the Global South. Second, they must recognize that social media is intrinsically designed to favor the strongman over the lone dissident and the propagandist over the truth-teller, which is why it has become the central tool in every aspiring dictator's playbook.
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Jun 2, 2020
The Fake News of Your Own Mind — with Jack Kornfield and Trudy Goodman
When you’re gripped by anxiety, fear, grief or dread, how do you escape? It can happen in the span of a few breaths, according to meditation experts Jack Kornfield and Trudy Goodman. They have helped thousands of people find their way out of a mental loop, by moving deeper into it. It's a journey inward that reveals an important lesson for the architects of the attention economy: you cannot begin to build humane technology for billions of users, until you pay careful attention to the course of your own wayward thoughts.
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May 21, 2020
The Stubborn Optimist’s Guide to Saving the Planet — with Christiana Figueres
How can we feel empowered to take on global threats? The battle begins in our heads, argues Christiana Figueres. She became the United Nation’s top climate official, after she had watched the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit collapse “in blood, in screams, in tears.” In the wake of that debacle, she began performing an act of emotional Aikido on herself, her team and eventually delegates from 196 nations. She called it “stubborn optimism." It requires a clear and alluring vision of a future that can supplant the dystopian and discouraging vision of what will happen if the world fails to act. It was stubborn optimism, she says, that convinced those nations to sign the first global climate framework, the Paris Agreement. We explore how a similar shift in Silicon Valley's vision could lead 3 billion people to take action.
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May 7, 2020
The Spin Doctors Are In — with Renée DiResta
How does disinformation spread in the age of COVID-19? It takes an expert like Renée DiResta to trace conspiracy theories back to their source. She’s already exposed how Russian state actors manipulated the 2016 election, but that was just a prelude to what she’s seeing online today: a convergence of state actors and lone individuals, anti-vaxxers and NRA supporters, scam artists and preachers and the occasional fan of cuddly pandas. What ties all of these disparate actors together is an information ecosystem that’s breaking down before our eyes. We explore what’s going wrong and what we must do to fix it in this interview with Renée DiResta, Research Manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory.
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Apr 28, 2020
When Attention Went on Sale — with Tim Wu
An information system that relies on advertising was not born with the Internet. But social media platforms have taken it to an entirely new level, becoming a major force in how we make sense of ourselves and the world around us. Columbia law professor Tim Wu, author of The Attention Merchants and The Curse of Bigness, takes us through the birth of the eyeball-centric news model and ensuing boom of yellow journalism, to the backlash that rallied journalists and citizens around creating industry ethics and standards. Throughout the 20th century, radio, television, and even posters elicited excitement, hope, fear, skepticism and greed, and people worked together to create a patchwork of regulation and behavior that attempted to point those tools in the direction of good. The Internet has brought us to just such a crossroads again, but this time with global consequences that are truly life-and-death.
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Apr 22, 2020
Changing Our Climate of Denial — with Anthony Leiserowitz
We agree more than we think we do, but tech platforms distort our perceptions by amplifying the loudest, angriest and most dismissive voices online. In reality, they’re just a noisy faction. This Earth Day we ask Anthony Leiserowitz, Director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, how he shifts public opinion on climate change. We’ll see how tech platforms could amplify voices of solidarity within our own communities. More importantly, we’ll see how they could empower 2 billion people to act in the face of global threats.
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Mar 30, 2020
Stranger than Fiction — with Claire Wardle
How can tech companies help flatten the curve? First and foremost, they must address the lethal misinformation and disinformation circulating on their platforms. The problem goes much deeper than fake news, according to Claire Wardle, co-founder and executive director of First Draft. She studies the gray zones of information warfare, where bad actors mix facts with falsehoods, news with gossip, and sincerity with satire. “Most of this stuff isn't fake and most of this stuff isn't news,” Claire argues. If these subtler forms of misinformation go unaddressed, tech companies may not only fail to flatten the curve — they could raise it higher.
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Jan 30, 2020
Mr. Harris Goes to Washington
What difference does a few hours of Congressional testimony make? Tristan takes us behind the scenes of his January 8th testimony to the Energy and Commerce Committee on disinformation in the digital age. With just minutes to answer each lawmaker’s questions, he speaks with Committee members about how the urgency and complexity of humane technology issues is an immense challenge. Tristan returned hopeful, and though it sometimes feels like Groundhog Day, each trip to DC reveals evolving conversations, advancing legislation, deeper understanding and stronger coalitions.
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Jan 14, 2020
Trust Falls — with Rachel Botsman
We are in the middle of a global trust crisis. Neighbors are strangers and local news sources are becoming scarcer; institutions that used to symbolize prestige, honor and a sense of societal security are ridiculed for being antiquated and out of touch. To replace the void, we turn to sharing economy companies and social media, which come up short, or worse. Our guest on this episode, academic and business advisor Rachel Botsman, guides us through how we got here, and how to recover. Botsman is the Trust Fellow at Oxford University, and the author of two books, including “Who Can You Trust?” The intangibility of trust makes it difficult to pin down, she explains, and she speaks directly to technology leaders about fostering communities and creating products the public is willing to put faith in. “The efficiency of technology is the enemy of trust,” she says.
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Dec 19, 2019
The Cure for Hate — with Tony McAleer
“You can binge watch an ideology in a weekend,” says Tony McAleer. He should know. A former white supremacist, McAleer was introduced to neo-Nazi ideology through the U.K. punk scene in the 1980s. But after his daughter was born, he embarked on a decades-long journey from hate to compassion. Today’s technology, he says, make violent ideologies infinitely more accessible and appealing to those who long for acceptance. Social media isolates us and can incubate hate in a highly diffuse structure, making it nearly impossible to stop race-based violence without fanning the flames or driving it further underground. McAleer discusses solutions to this dilemma and the positive actions we can take together.
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Dec 5, 2019
Rock the Voter — with Brittany Kaiser
Brittany Kaiser, a former Cambridge Analytica insider, witnessed a two day presentation at the company that shocked her and her co-workers. It laid out a new method of campaigning, in which candidates greet voters with a thousand faces and speak in a thousand tongues, automatically generating messages that are increasingly aiming toward an audience of one. She explains how these methods of persuasion have shaped elections worldwide, enabling candidates to sway voters in strange and startling ways.
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Nov 5, 2019
The Dictator's Playbook — with Maria Ressa
Maria Ressa is arguably one of the bravest journalists working in the Philippines today. As co-founder and CEO of the media site Rappler, she has withstood death threats, multiple arrests and a rising tide of populist fury that she first saw on Facebook, in the form of a strange and jarring personal attack. Through her story, she reveals, play by play, how an aspiring strongman can use social media to spread falsehoods, sow confusion, intimidate critics and subvert democratic institutions. Nonetheless, she argues Silicon Valley can reverse these trends, and fast. First, tech companies must "wake up," she says, to the threats they've unleashed throughout the Global South. Second, they must recognize that social media is intrinsically designed to favor the strongman over the lone dissident and the propagandist over the truth-teller, which is why it has become the central tool in every aspiring dictator's playbook.
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Oct 22, 2019
The Opposite of Addiction — with Johann Hari
What causes addiction? Johann Hari, author of Chasing the Scream, travelled some 30,000 miles in search of an answer. He met with researchers and lawmakers, drug dealers and drug makers, those who were struggling with substance abuse and those who had recovered from it, and he came to the conclusion that our whole narrative about addiction is broken. "The opposite of addiction is not sobriety," he argues. "The opposite of addiction is connection." But first, we have to figure out what it really means to connect.
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Aug 14, 2019
Pardon the Interruptions — with Gloria Mark
Every 40 seconds, our attention breaks. It takes an act of extreme self-awareness to even notice. That’s why Gloria Mark, a professor in the Department of Informatics at University of California, Irvine, started measuring the attention spans of office workers with scientific precision. What she has discovered is not simply an explosion of disruptive communications, but a pandemic of stress that has followed workers from their offices to their homes. She shares the latest findings from the “science of interruptions,” and how we can stop forfeiting our attention to the next notification, and the next one, ad nauseam.
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Aug 1, 2019
From Russia with Likes (Part 2) — with Renée DiResta
In the second part of our interview with Renée DiResta, disinformation expert, Mozilla fellow, and co-author of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Russia investigation, she explains how social media platforms use your sense of identity and personal relationships to keep you glued to their sites longer, and how those design choices have political consequences. The online tools and tactics of foreign agents can be very precise and deliberate, but they don’t have to be -- Renée has seen how deception and uncertainty are powerful agents of distrust and easy to create. Do we really need the ease of global amplification of information-sharing that social media enables, anyway? We don’t want spam in our email inbox so why do we tolerate it in our social media feed? What would happen if we had to copy and paste and click twice, or three times? Tristan and Aza also brainstorm ways to prevent and control disinformation in the lead-up to elections, and particularly the 2020 U.S. election…
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Jul 24, 2019
From Russia with Likes (Part 1) — with Renée DiResta
Today’s online propaganda has evolved in unforeseeable and seemingly absurd ways; by laughing at or spreading a Kermit the Frog meme, you may be unwittingly advancing the Russian agenda. These campaigns affect our elections integrity, public health, and relationships. In this episode, the first of two parts, disinformation expert Renee DiResta talks with Tristan and Aza about how these tactics work, how social media platforms’ algorithms and business models allow foreign agents to game the system, and what these messages reveal to us about ourselves. Renee gained unique insight into this issue when in 2017 Congress asked her to lead a team of investigators analyzing a data set of texts, images and videos from Facebook, Twitter and Google thought to have been created by Russia’s Internet Research Agency. She shares what she learned, and in part two of their conversation, Renee, Tristan and Aza will discuss what steps can be taken to prevent this kind of manipulation in the future.
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Jul 10, 2019
Down the Rabbit Hole by Design — with Guillaume Chaslot
When we press play on a YouTube video, we set in motion an algorithm that taps all available data to find the next video that keeps us glued to the screen. Because of its advertising-based business model, YouTube’s top priority is not to help us learn to play the accordion, tie a bow tie, heal an injury, or see a new city — it’s to keep us staring at the screen for as long as possible, regardless of the content. This episode’s guest, AI expert Guillaume Chaslot, helped write YouTube’s recommendation engine and explains how those priorities spin up outrage, conspiracy theories and extremism. After leaving YouTube, Guillaume’s mission became shedding light on those hidden patterns on his website, AlgoTransparency.org, which tracks and publicizes YouTube recommendations for controversial content channels. Through his work, he encourages YouTube to take responsibility for the videos it promotes and aims to give viewers more control.
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Jun 25, 2019
With Great Power Comes... No Responsibility? — with Yaёl Eisenstat
Aza sits down with Yael Eisenstat, a former CIA officer and a former advisor at the White House. When Yael noticed that Americans were having a harder and harder time finding common ground, she shifted her work from counter-extremism abroad to advising technology companies in the U.S. She believed as danger at home increased, her public sector experience could help fill a gap in Silicon Valley’s talent pool and chip away at the ways tech was contributing to polarization and election hacking. But when she joined Facebook in June 2018, things didn’t go as planned. Yael shares the lessons she learned and her perspective on government’s role in regulating tech, and Aza and Tristan raise questions about our relationships with these companies and the balance of power.
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Jun 19, 2019
Should've Stayed in Vegas — with Natasha Dow Schüll
In part two of our interview with cultural anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll, author of Addiction by Design, we learn what gamblers are really after a lot of the time — it’s not money. And it’s the same thing we’re looking for when we mindlessly open up Facebook or Twitter. How can we design products so that we’re not taking advantage of these universal urges and vulnerabilities but using them to help us? Tristan, Aza and Natasha explore ways we could shift our thinking about making and using technology.
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Jun 10, 2019
What Happened in Vegas — with Natasha Dow Schüll
Natasha Dow Schüll, author of Addiction by Design, has spent years studying how slot machines hold gamblers spellbound, in an endless loop of play. She never imagined the addictive designs which she had first witnessed in Las Vegas would go bounding into Silicon Valley and reappear on virtually every smartphone screen worldwide. In the first segment of this two-part interview, Natasha Dow Schüll offers a prescient warning to users and designers alike: How far can the attention economy go toward stealing another moment of your time? Farther than you might imagine.
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Apr 16, 2019
Launching June 10: Your Undivided Attention
Technology has shredded our attention. We can do better.
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