Your Undivided Attention

By Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin, The Center for Humane Technology

Society & Culture Technology Tech News Philosophy

What's Your Undivided Attention about?

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 Executive Producer is Stephanie Lepp, and our Senior Producer is Julia Scott.

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Fighting With Mirages of Ea...

09.22.2022

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 ...

Your Undivided Attention episodes:

09.22.2022 Fighting With Mirages of Each Other — with Adam Mastroianni 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 ...
09.08.2022 Bonus – Addressing the TikTok Threat 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 ...
08.25.2022 Bonus — How might a long-term stock market transform tech? (ZigZag episode) 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 ...
08.04.2022 The Invisible Cyber-War 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.
06.30.2022 An Alternative to Silicon Valley Unicorns 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 ...
06.16.2022 Bonus — Conversations With People Who Hate Me with Dylan Marron 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 ...
06.02.2022 How Political Language Is Engineered — with Drew Westen and Frank Luntz 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? ...
05.19.2022 Transcending the Internet Hate Game — with Dylan Marron 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 ...
05.05.2022 How To Free Our Minds — with Cult Deprogramming Expert Dr. Steven Hassan 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.
04.26.2022 Bonus – 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 ...
04.21.2022 What Is Civil War in the Digital Age? — with Barbara F. Walter 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, ...
04.07.2022 Bonus – What Is Humane Technology? 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 ...
03.24.2022 Digital Democracy is Within Reach with Audrey Tang (Rerun) [This episode originally aired on July 23rd, 2020.] Audrey Tang, Taiwan's Digital Minister, helps us 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 ...
03.10.2022 The Dark Side Of Decentralization — with Audrey Kurth Cronin 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 ...
02.24.2022 The Invisible Influence of Language — with Lera Boroditsky 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 ...
02.10.2022 How Science Fiction Can Shape Our Reality — with Kim Stanley Robinson 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.
02.03.2022 Here’s Our Plan And We Don’t Know — with Tristan Harris, Aza Raskin and Stephanie Lepp 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?
01.13.2022 Is World War III Already Here? — with Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster 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 ...
12.10.2021 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 ...
11.11.2021 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 ...
10.18.2021 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 — ...
10.06.2021 Bonus — 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 ...
09.30.2021 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 ...
09.21.2021 Bonus — 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 ...
09.03.2021 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 ...
08.12.2021 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 ...
07.23.2021 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 ...
07.09.2021 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 ...
06.25.2021 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 ...
06.25.2021 [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 ...
05.10.2021 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 ...
04.29.2021 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 ...
04.22.2021 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 ...
04.15.2021 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 ...
04.08.2021 Bonus — 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, ...
04.01.2021 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. ...
03.18.2021 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 ...
03.04.2021 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 ...
02.11.2021 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, ...
01.15.2021 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 ...
12.23.2020 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 ...
10.27.2020 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 ...
10.06.2020 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 ...
09.09.2020 Bonus — 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 ...
09.02.2020 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 ...
08.06.2020 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 ...
07.23.2020 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 ...
07.10.2020 Bonus — Beyond the Boycott #StopHateforProfit is an important first step, but we need to go much further.
07.08.2020 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 ...
06.22.2020 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 ...

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