Your Undivided Attention

Democracy in action has looked the same for generations. What would an upgrade look like - not just for democracy, but for all the different places that democratic decision-making happens? On this episode of Your Undivided Attention, we’re joined by political economist and social technologist Divya Siddarth, one of the world's leading experts in collective intelligence.

A few episodes back, we presented Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin’s talk The AI Dilemma. The talk resonated - over 1.6 million people have viewed it on YouTube as of this episode’s release date. However, now that so many people have watched or listened to the talk, we’ve found that there are some AI myths getting in the way of making progress. On this episode of Your Undivided Attention, we debunk five of those misconceptions.

Despite our serious concerns about the pace of deployment of artificial intelligence, there are use cases for the technology that can help us better understand ourselves and the world around us. Your Undivided Attention co-host Aza Raskin is also co-founder of Earth Species Project, a nonprofit dedicated to using AI to decode non-human communication. In this episode, Aza presents the machine learning breakthroughs that will soon make talking to animals a possibility - and the ethical implications that come with it.

When it comes to AI, what kind of regulations might we need to address this rapidly developing new class of technologies? What makes regulating AI and runaway tech in general different from regulating airplanes, pharmaceuticals, or food? Answers to these questions are playing out in real time. Our guest Marietje Schaake, a former EU Parliamentarian, argues that if we wait for more AI harms to emerge before proper regulations are put in place, it may be too late… and she traces the path forward for effective governance, both in the U.S. and elsewhere.

In our previous episode, we shared a presentation Tristan and Aza recently delivered to a group of influential technologists about the race happening in AI. In that talk, they introduced the Three Rules of Humane Technology. In this Spotlight episode, we’re taking a moment to explore these three rules more deeply in order to clarify what it means to be a responsible technologist in the age of AI.

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.

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. More people in Western governments and media are saying that they used to believe that TikTok was an overblown threat. As we've seen mounting evidence of national security risks play out, there’s even talk of banning TikTok completely. 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 on these questions with Marc Faddoul, the co-director of the nonprofit Tracking Exposed who studies TikTok’s algorithm.

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 the risks and possibilities of this powerful new AI, and the new paradigm of humanity and computation we’re about to enter. It’s obvious we need ways to steward these tools ethically. So they also share their ideas for creating a framework for AIs that will help humans become MORE humane, not less.

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. But what if that’s not the whole story of evolution? On Your Undivided Attention, we speak with evolutionary theorist, author, and professor David Sloan Wilson about his work documenting where an enlightened game – one of cooperation rather than competition – is possible.

Welcome to our first-ever Ask Us Anything episode. We thought it’d be fun at the end of the year to engage our community of listeners by answering your questions. When we created this podcast, 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 and enhances our well-being. Thank you to everyone who submitted questions and comments for us. We’ll carry your amazing suggestions and ideas forward with us in 2023.

When you look at the world, it can feel like we're in a precarious moment in our ability to relate to one another and cooperate. That's why we’re talking to Rick Doblin, the founder and executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS – a non-profit focused on educating and researching the benefits of using psychedelic therapy to address PTSD and promote humane ways of relating worldwide. Both MAPS and Center for Humane Technology want to understand what helps minds heal and be free. 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. We invite you to keep an open mind about a different kind of humane technology as you listen to this episode.

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. 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.

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.

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. 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.

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. In what ways does our government not represent us — and do we not represent ourselves? How might we revive the relationship between the will of the people and the actions of our government? Join us.

The next frontier of the internet is: the metaverse. How might we learn from our experience with social media, in order to design a humane metaverse? This week on Your Undivided Attention, we talk with two pioneers who are thinking critically about the development of the metaverse — Dr. Courtney Cogburn and Professor Jeremy Bailenson.

We often think our ideological differences are far greater than they actually are. Which means: we’re 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.

TikTok is now the most popular app for teens in the United States, and is influenced by China — our main geopolitical rival. 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.

Social media companies are stuck in classic multipolar traps. They must 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. One experiment in enabling companies to transcend multipolar traps is the Long Term Stock Exchange — a U.S. national securities exchange serving companies and investors who share a long-term vision. This week on Your Undivided Attention, we’re airing ZigZag’s conversation with Long Term Stock Exchange founder, Eric Ries.

What happens when our most critical infrastructure can be deactivated and controlled simply through bugs in its software? Cyber-security expert Nicole Perlroth guides us in an exploration of the global cyber arms race.

What’s the alternative to the Silicon Valley unicorn? What might it look like to design an ownership and governance model that incentivizes humane technology? This week on Your Undivided Attention, we're talking with Mara Zepeda and Kate “Sassy” Sassoon of Zebras Unite.

A few weeks ago, we aired an episode with Dylan Marron — creator and host of the podcast, Conversations With People Who Hate Me. This week on Your Undivided Attention, you’re getting a full episode of Conversations With People Who Hate Me.

Democracy depends on our ability to choose our political views. But when the language we use to talk about political issues is designed to influence our beliefs, 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 and Frank Luntz.

The social media game must be radically transformed. And, we can also decide to step out of the game, and do something different. Our guest on this week’s Your Undivided Attention is a master at doing just that. Dylan Marron has been called by Jason Sudeikis "a modern Mr. Rogers for the digital age."

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.

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, 3 days prior to an official announcement that revealed Elon Musk and Twitter reached a purchase agreement for $44 Billion.

What are the generator functions for civil war in the digital age, and how do we prevent them? This week on Your Undivided Attention, we're joined by Barbara F. Walter — ​​one of the world's leading experts on civil wars, political violence, and terrorism, and the author of How Civil Wars Start: And How To Stop Them.

How do we develop the wisdom we need to responsibly steward exponential technology? This week on Your Undivided Attention, we're introducing one way the Center for Humane Technology is attempting to close the wisdom gap — our new, free, online course, Foundations of Humane Technology.

Audrey Tang, Taiwan's Digital Minister, helps us imagine a world where every country has a digital minister and technologically-enabled legislative bodies.

These days, there's enthusiastic talk about the possibilities of decentralized technologies, like cryptocurrencies and 3D printing. But decentralization is cast in a different light when we're talking about decentralized weaponry. This week on Your Undivided Attention, security expert Audrey Kurth Cronin guides us in an exploration of decentralized weaponry throughout history, how social media is a new decentralized weapon, and how to wisely navigate these threats.

One of the oldest psycho-technologies we have is language. How do the words we use influence the way we think? Further, how can we inoculate ourselves from their undue influence — and consciously design language that helps us meet our most complex challenges? This week on Your Undivided Attention, we're grateful to have cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky.

Science fiction can prepare us for the impending future, and empower us to shape it. Join us for a conversation with one of the greatest living science-fiction writers — Kim Stanley Robinson.

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?

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. Here to shed some light on what might be considered WWIII is General H. R. McMaster, who served as the 26th National Security Advisor of the United States.

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. This week on Your Undivided Attention, Rui Ma and Duncan Clark join us for a surprising conversation about technology in China.

How do you make a film that impacts more than 100 million people in 190 countries in 30 languages? On the heels of The Social Dilemma‘s 1-year anniversary, we’re going behind the curtain on the film — with Director Jeff Orlowski-Yang and Producer Larissa Rhodes.

We are now in social media's Big Tobacco moment. And that’s largely thanks to the courage of Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen.

In seven years of working on the problems of runaway technology, we’ve never experienced a week like this!

What helps you make meaning in challenging times?

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.

What is the goal of our digital information environment? Is it simply to inform us, or also to empower us to act?

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. 

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.

In September 2020, data scientist and Facebook employee Sophie Zhang posted a 7,900-word memo to the company's internal site, describing the anguish and guilt she experienced in attempting to rein in fake activity on the platform.

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?

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?

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.

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 co-runs the Jacquin Hypnosis Academy. He uses his practice to help his clients change their behavior and improve their lives.

[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.

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.

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.

Shamil Idriss, CEO of the organization Search for Common Ground, shares the lessons of peacebuilding from his work in Niger, the Balkans, and Rwanda. 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.

Camille François, Chief Information Officer at the cybersecurity company Graphika and an affiliate of the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, and other 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.

It’s no revelation that Americans aren’t getting along. But Braver Angels is working to address this problem. The organization brings Americans together to bridge the partisan divide, offering tools and running workshops that convince Republicans and Democrats to meet but not necessarily in the middle.

Kate Raworth, the “renegade economist” and creator of Doughnut Economics, explores how we can transform the world by changing the models for how we value it. Check out our conversation.

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, before exploring nearly unimaginable possibilities for where we might go from here.

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.

Jonathan Haidt, NYU social psychologist, has spent the last few years trying to figure out why we are in the midst of a teen mental health crisis. He believes social media is to blame.

Zahed Amanullah, counter-terrorism expert at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, explains how the very tools that extremists use to broadcast messages of hate can also be used to stop them in their tracks.

A new documentary, The Social Dilemma comes out on Netflix today, September 9, 2020.

Julie Owono, Executive Director of Internet Without Borders, discusses Facebook’s “2Africa” subsea cable project and the risks of tech companies leading us into an age of “digital colonialism.”

Fred Turner, a professor of communications at Stanford University, discusses how media can make us feel more reflective, more patient, and more tolerant.

Audrey Tang, Taiwan's Digital Minister, helps us imagine a world where every country has a digital minister and technologically-enabled legislative bodies.

The #StopHateforProfit campaign is an important first step.

Travis View studies the cryptic appeal and cult-like dynamics of QAnon and what happens as Q followers leave their screens behind, arm themselves, and take their extremism into the real world.

Fadi Quran and his team at Avaaz 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.

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.

Jack Kornfield and Trudy Goodman 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.

Christiana Figueres, one of the main architects of the Paris Agreement, is intimately familiar with the high stakes of climate change negotiation. We explore how a shift in Silicon Valley’s vision could lead 3 billion people to take action.

Renée DiResta traces conspiracy theories back to their source, showing how disinformation spreads in the age of COVID-19.

Tim Wu, Columbia law professor, 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.

Anthony Leiserowitz, Director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, talks us through his approach to shifting public opinion on climate change.

Claire Wardle, co-founder and executive director of First Draft, studies the gray zones of information warfare, where bad actors mix facts with falsehoods, news with gossip, and sincerity with satire.

Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin take us behind the scenes of Center for Humane Technology's January 8th testimony to the Energy and Commerce Committee on disinformation in the digital age.

Rachel Botsman, Trust Fellow at Oxford University, guides us through a global trust crisis—speaking directly to technology leaders about fostering communities and creating products the public is willing to put faith in.

Tony 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.

Brittany Kaiser, a former Cambridge Analytica insider, witnessed a two-day presentation at the company that shocked her and her co-workers.

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.

Johann Hari, author of Chasing the Scream, traveled some 30,000 miles in search of an answer to what causes addiction and depression.

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.

Renée DiResta, disinformation expert, Mozilla fellow, and co-author of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Russia investigation, 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.

Renée DiResta, disinformation expert, explains how social media platforms’ algorithms and business models allow foreign agents to game the system, and what these messages reveal to us about ourselves.

Guillaume Chaslot, AI expert, helped write YouTube’s recommendation engine and reveals how those priorities spin up outrage, conspiracy theories and extremism.

Yaёl Eisenstat, a former CIA officer and a former advisor at the White House, shares what she learned advising technology companies in the U.S., and her perspective on government's role in regulating tech.

Natasha Dow Schüll, cultural anthropologist and author of Addiction by Design, tells us what gamblers are really after a lot of the time—it’s not money.

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.