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 Senior Producer is Julia Scott, and our Associate Producer is Kirsten McMurray.

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Spotlight: How Zombie Value...

06.08.2023

Zombies are the perfect metaphor to explain something Tristan and Aza have been thinking about lately that they call 'zombie values.' In this Spotlight episode, we talk through some examples of how zombie values limit our thinking around tech harms. ...

Your Undivided Attention episodes:

06.08.2023 Spotlight: How Zombie Values Infect Society Zombies are the perfect metaphor to explain something Tristan and Aza have been thinking about lately that they call 'zombie values.' In this Spotlight episode, we talk through some examples of how zombie values limit our thinking around tech harms. ...
06.02.2023 Feed Drop: AI Doomsday with Kara Swisher Kara Swisher challenges Tristan Harris on the so-called ‘AI Doomsday’ in a wide-ranging discussion. If you enjoy their conversation and want to hear more of Kara’s interviews with folks like Sam Altman, Reid Hoffman and others, you can find episodes ...
05.25.2023 The Tech We Need for 21st Century Democracy with Divya Siddarth 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 ...
05.11.2023 Spotlight: AI Myths and Misconceptions 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 ...
05.04.2023 Talking With Animals… Using AI 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 ...
04.21.2023 Can We Govern AI? 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 ...
04.06.2023 Spotlight: The Three Rules of Humane Tech 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, ...
03.24.2023 The AI Dilemma 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 ...
03.02.2023 TikTok’s Transparency Problem 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 ...
02.16.2023 Synthetic Humanity: AI & What’s At Stake 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 ...
02.02.2023 The Race to Cooperation 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 ...
12.29.2022 Ask Us Anything: You Asked, We Answered 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 ...
12.15.2022 Can Psychedelic Therapy Reset Our Social Media Brains? 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 ...
11.23.2022 Real Social Media Solutions, Now — with Frances Haugen 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 ...
11.10.2022 Spotlight — Humane Technology on '60 Minutes' 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 ...
10.27.2022 Spotlight — Elon, Twitter and the Gladiator Arena 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 ...
10.20.2022 They Don’t Represent Us — with Larry Lessig 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 ...
10.06.2022 Stepping Into the Metaverse — with Dr. Courtney Cogburn and Prof. Jeremy Bailenson 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 ...
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 Spotlight — 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 Spotlight — How might a long-term stock market transform tech? 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 Spotlight — 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 Spotlight — 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 Spotlight — 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 Spotlight — 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 Spotlight — 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 ...

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