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12 – Trust Falls with Rachel Botsman

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.

January 14, 2020

11 – The Cure for Hate. Guest: Tony McAleer

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.

December 19, 2019

10 – Rock the Voter. Guest: Brittany Kaiser

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

December 5, 2019

9 – 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.

November 4, 2019

8 – The Opposite of Addiction. Guest: Johann Hari

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

October 22, 2019

7 – Pardon the Interruptions. Guest: Gloria Mark

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.

August 14, 2019

6 – From Russia with Likes (Part 2). Guest: Renée DiResta

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.

August 1, 2019

5 – From Russia with Likes (Part 1). Guest: Renée DiResta

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.

July 24, 2019

4 – Down the Rabbit Hole by Design. Guest: Guillaume Chaslot

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

July 10, 2019

3 – With Great Power Comes… No Responsibility? Guest: Yaёl Eisenstat

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.

June 25, 2019

2 – Should’ve Stayed in Vegas. Guest: Natasha Dow Schüll

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.

June 19, 2019

1 – What Happened in Vegas. Guest: 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.

June 10, 2019