Your Undivided Attention

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 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. “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.

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.