Freedom Matters

This week, we welcome Susie Alegre, a leading human rights barrister in the internationally renowned Doughty Street Chambers. She has been a legal pioneer in digital human rights, in particular the impact of artificial intelligence on the human rights of freedom of thought and opinion.

Her book, Freedom to Think, charts the history and importance of our most basic human right: freedom of thought. From Galileo to Nudge Theory to Alexa, Susie explores how the powerful have always sought to get inside our heads, influence how we think and shape what we buy. Providing a bold new framework to understand how our agency is being gradually undermined, Freedom to Think is a groundbreaking and vital charter for taking back our humanity and safeguarding our reason in the technological age.

In this fascinating episode we discuss:

This episode is part of our mini-series on 'Self' where we explore how our technology impacts some of the most important aspects of being human. Over the coming weeks we will speak with Krista Tippett, creator of On Being, Susie Alegre, human rights lawyer and author of Freedom to Think, Jillian Horton MD, physician and author of We are All Perfectly Fine, Casey Swartz, author of Attention, A Love Story, L M Sarcasas, renown commentator on technology & society, and Sharath Jeevan OBE, motivation expert and author of Intrinsic. Our goal: to help all our listeners to think more critically about the role of technology in our lives, and how it shapes who we are.

To find out more about Susie: https://susiealegre.com/

Purchase Freedom to Think in the US

Purchase Freedom to Think in the UK

Susie talks about Magic Sauce: https://applymagicsauce.com/demo

And also Privacy International's Twitter Bot: https://twitter.com/privacyint/status/1148506707150200833

Host and Producer: Georgie Powell https://www.sentientdigitalconsulting.com/

Music and audio production: Toccare https://spoti.fi/3bN4eqO

This week we welcome Krista Tippett. Krista is a Peabody Award-winning broadcaster, a National Humanities Medalist, a New York Times bestselling author and the creator and host of On Being, a world renown podcast which sets out to explore the immensity of our human lives.

In this extended episode, we discuss the importance of questions - how asking the right questions and accepting that there may never be an answer, can help us to know ourselves better, whilst enabling society to grow. We discuss the role of technology in our rush for answers, media’s role in the portrayal of society and just how Krista, through her career in exploring humanity has come to understand herself.

Krista grew up in a small town in Oklahoma, attended Brown University, and became a journalist and diplomat in Cold War Berlin. She then lived in Spain and England before seeking a Master of Divinity at Yale University in the mid-1990s.

Emerging from that, she saw a black hole where intelligent public conversation about the religious, spiritual, and moral aspects of human life might be and came to launch On Being, a weekly NPR show, to fill this hole.

In 2014, the year after she took On Being into independent production, President Obama awarded Krista the National Humanities Medal for “thoughtfully delving into the mysteries of human existence.” On Being with Krista Tippett airs on more than 400 public radio stations across the U.S. and is distributed by WNYC Studios. The podcast has been played/downloaded more than 350 million times.

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This is the first episode in our new mini-series on 'Self', where we explore how our technology impacts some of the most important aspects of being human. Over the coming weeks we will speak with Krista Tippett, creator on On Being, Susie Alegre, human rights lawyer and author of Freedom to Think, Jillian Horton MD, doctor and author of We are All Perfectly Fine, Casey Swartz, author of Attention, A Love Story, LM Sacasas, renowned commentator on technology & society, and Sharath Jeevan OBE, motivation expert, and author of Intrinsic. 

Our goal: to help all our listeners to think more critically about the role of technology in our lives, and how it shapes who we are.

Learn more about Krista and the On Being Project: https://onbeing.org/

Listen to the On Being show and podcast: https://onbeing.org/series/podcast/

Host and Producer: Georgie Powell https://www.sentientdigitalconsulting.com/

Music and audio production: Toccare https://spoti.fi/3bN4eqO

This week, we wrap up our series on the the future of work with Founder and CEO of Freedom, Fred Stutzman. Freedom is developing the essential toolset for the future of focused work. In a distraction-first world, we believe that the ability to reliably and consistently do focused, deep work is a differentiating skillset.

In this episode we reflect on Fred's own thoughts on the future of work, how the Freedom team is organized to embrace asynchronous, remote working, and some of his favourite insights from our most recent series. We cover:

Fred is a seasoned GTM executive and serial entrepreneur, having taken multiple consumer technology companies from the idea/R&D phase to market. His core strengths include technology development, remote team formation and management, and using research-driven strategies to identify market needs. Fred has conducted research at both UNC-Chapel Hill and Carnegie Mellon University. He holds a Ph.D. in Information Science (HCI), and degrees in Survey Research and Economics from UNC-Chapel Hill. Additionally, he completed postdoctoral work in Behavioral Economics at CMU.

Previously, he co-founded ClaimID, a distributed social identity provider, served as Director of Technology for Ibiblio.org/Metalab, where he managed large, distributed technical projects. In his spare time, Fred is a competitive masters racer on the bike.

You can find out more about Fred here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fstutzman/

Host and Producer: Georgie Powell https://www.sentientdigitalconsulting.com/

Music and audio production: Toccare https://spoti.fi/3bN4eqO

Jeremy Redleaf is an Emmy Award winning artist, entrepreneur, and co-founder of Caveday, the world's most focused community. Their research-backed method is used by workers and companies in over 40 countries to do better work in less time with fewer distractions.

In this episode we dive into philosophical and practical advice on how setting the right conditions for flow is essential - and how working 'in a cave' with other people can achieve many of the things we need. We discuss:

Jeremy speaks and writes about the future of work for sites including Fast Company and Thrive Global. As a facilitator, he helps founders, teams, and companies improve their relationship to work.

You can find more about Jeremy at: https://www.caveday.org/

Freedom Premium Users can register for a free Cave through our Perks page: https://freedom.to/perks

This episode is part of our mini-series on the Future of Work. Listen to episodes with Chase Warrington, Alex Pang, Rebecca Seal, Shamsi Iqbal and Charlie Warzel to hear more.

Host and Producer: Georgie Powell https://www.sentientdigitalconsulting.com/

Music and audio production: Toccare https://spoti.fi/3bN4eqO

This week we are in conversation with Charlie Warzel. Charlie writes the newsletter, Galaxy Brain for The Atlantic, where he is a Contributing Writer. Before that he was a writer-at-large for the New York Times Opinion page, and a senior technology writer at BuzzFeed News.

Most recently, he has co-authored Out of Office - with his partner Anne Helen Peterson. The book combines groundbreaking reporting and the couple’s own experiences after they made the decision to leave their desk jobs in New York City for Montana. They describe how workers and employers across America, and around the world, are finding new ways of working that make people happier and more productive, and make companies more profitable.

Today we'll be discussing:

You can order the book, Out of Office, here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/673782/out-of-office-by-charlie-warzel-and-anne-helen-petersen/

This episode is part of our mini-series on the Future of Work. Listen to episodes with Chase Warrington, Alex Pang, Rebecca Seal and Shamsi Iqbal to hear more.

Host and Producer: Georgie Powell https://www.sentientdigitalconsulting.com/

Music and audio production: Toccare https://spoti.fi/3bN4eqO

This week we welcome Rebecca Seal. Rebecca is an author, journalist and occasional TV presenter. Her book, SOLO: How To Work Alone (And Not Lose Your Mind) was mostly written in 2019, before the pandemic, but became a bestseller when it was published in 2020. It has now been translated into multiple languages and is available worldwide.

In this episode we dive into philosophical and practical advice on how to work 'solo'. We cover:

Rebecca is the host of the Solo Collective podcast, a series of conversations about how to cope with solitary working. She is also an award-winning food and drink writer, and has written 10 cookbooks, most recently LEON Happy Guts, a cookbook about good gut health. She lives in London with her husband, a photographer, and her two daughters.

You can find more about Rebecca at: https://www.rebeccaseal.co.uk/

Tune in for the 3rd season of the Solo Collective Podcast (from mid-March): https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-solo-collective/id1555707166

Or read her articles for the Guardian at: https://www.theguardian.com/profile/rebeccaseal

In this episode she mentions work by Ashley Whillans, Annie Auerbach and Bruce Daisley.

This episode is part of our mini-series on the Future of Work. Listen to episodes with Chase Warrington, Alex Pang and Shamsi Iqbal to hear more.

Host and Producer: Georgie Powell https://www.sentientdigitalconsulting.com/

Music and audio production: Toccare https://spoti.fi/3bN4eqO

This week we welcome Dr. Shamsi Iqbal. A Principal Researcher in the Modern Work Transformation Org in Microsoft, Shamsi is on the frontline of research, investigating productivity, attention and the future of work.

Most recently her work has focused on redefining productivity in the new future of work, introducing novel ways of being productive through leveraging micromoments, and balancing productivity and well-being in interaction design to empower individuals and help organizations thrive.

In this episode we explore the future of work with Shamsi, through the eyes of a productivity research. We discuss:

Shamsi's research has been covered in the New York Times, MIT Tech Review among others, and also featured in the King 5 News (NBC affiliate in the Seattle area). Shamsi has served on many organizing and program committees for Human-Computer Interaction conferences, is currently serving as an ACM TOCHI Associate Editor, was a guest Editor for IEEE Pervasive Special Issue on Future of Work and was the General Co-chair for UIST 2020. She is one of the co-authors of the document Microsoft released on the Future of Remote Work in 2021. 

Shamsi received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2008 and received a Bachelor's in Computer Science and Engineering from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology in 2001.

Find Shamsi's work at:

The New Future of Work - Microsoft Research [https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/] - a wealth of information on remote and hybrid work based on research conducted by Microsoft researchers on topics such as personal productivity and wellbeing, hybrid meetings, thriving organizations and so on.

Shamsi Iqbal at Microsoft Research -  [https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/people/shamsi/]

Or read:

The Rise of the Triple Peak Day [https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/triple-peak-day]

The Ways We Disconnect [https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/ways-we-disconnect-work-life-balance]

How to Focus in the Always-on Economy [https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/always-on-economy-focus]

This episode is part of our mini-series on the Future of Work. Listen to episodes with Chase Warrington, Alex Pang and forthcoming with Rebecca Seal to hear more. 

Host and Producer: Georgie Powell https://www.sentientdigitalconsulting.com/

Music and audio production: Toccare https://spoti.fi/3bN4eqO

This week we welcome Alex Pang, advocate of the 4-day workweek. Alex has spent two decades studying people, technology, and the worlds they make. A Silicon Valley-based futurist and consultant, he is also the best-selling author of Shorter: Work better, smarter and shorter - here's how, Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less, and The Distraction Addiction.

A growing number of businesses are shortening their working week to address problems with low productivity, poor mental health, and unequal working opportunities. Workers are still paid the same salary for a four-day week and the results are revolutionary. In this episode we explore this movement with Alex, and discuss:

Alex, runs a consultancy company, strategy.rest, where he has worked with governments and Fortune 500 companies; spoken at venues ranging from CIA headquarters to Shakespeare's Globe Theatre to the Googleplex; and held academic positions at Stanford and Oxford universities.

You can find Alex: 

At his business, Strategy.Rest: https://www.strategy.rest/?page_id=8650

On LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/askpang/

Or @askpang on Twitter and Instagram

This episode is part of our new mini-series on the Future of Work. Listen to episodes with Chase Warrington and forthcoming with Rebecca Seal and Shamsi Iqbal to hear more.

Host and Producer: Georgie Powell https://www.sentientdigitalconsulting.com/

Music and audio production: Toccare https://spoti.fi/3bN4eqO

This week, we welcome Chase Warrington. Chase is the Head of Remote at Doist, a pioneer of distributed work that specializes in productivity software. He is responsible for developing and executing Doist’s remote work strategy, co-located events and advocating for the future of work on behalf of the company.

He has worked remotely for over 12 years, as one of Doist’s 100 employees in 35 countries. He is a regular contributor, instructor, and consultant to many of the leading remote work organizations and publications, as well as the host of his own podcast, About Abroad.

Today we discuss:

Chase is currently based in Spain and is fluent in English and conversational in Spanish. When not nerding out about remote work, he loves traveling in his campervan, spending time in the mountains, and taking his husky pup on a jog from time to time.

For more from Chase: [email protected]

dcwarrington

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chase-warrington 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dcwarrington

Chase's podcast, About Abroad: https://aboutabroad.com/

Host and Producer: Georgie Powell https://www.sentientdigitalconsulting.com/

Music and audio production: Toccare https://spoti.fi/3bN4eqO

This week, we are sharing with you an episode from the JOMO(cast) podcast. In this abridged version we hear host Christina Crook discuss with Albert Borgmann his concept of Good Burdens.

Born in Germany in 1937, technology philosopher Albert Borgmann has seen technological transitions and upheavals unknown to many. Throughout his long life, he’s studied and written about the impact of technological advancement on every aspect of society. Within this context, Dr. Borgmann joins Christina on the JOMO(cast) to discuss the cost-benefit analysis of technology’s ability to lift our burdens, and why good burdens are vital to preserve if we want to live intentionally and with joy.

Hear Christina and Albert discuss:

Listen to the original conversation: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/24-the-joy-of-good-burdens-with-albert-borgmann/id1467390472?i=1000487173726

Listen to more episodes of Jomo(cast): https://www.christinacrook.com/jomocast

Learn more about Christina Crook & JOMO: https://www.christinacrook.com/

Order Christina's new book, Good Burdens, based on this concept: https://www.christinacrook.com/goodburdens

Read books by Albert:

Follow @experiencejomo on Instagram, Facebook + Twitter

Host and Producer: Georgie Powell https://www.sentientdigitalconsulting.com/

Music and audio production: Toccare https://spoti.fi/3bN4eqO