Aza Raskin

And if you see the world that way as a collection of disconnected problems, then you're never going to solve any of them because different people can be working in different areas.

The diagnosis is wrong.

It's like playing the world's hardest game of whack-a-mole.

Instead, you need to get to the root of the problem and if you can name the root correctly, then you address that one thing and it addresses all the other things.

And so we're going to start by taking you to our very first episode all the way back in 2019 with our very first guest, Natasha Daushol, who is a cultural anthropologist who conducted years of research in Las Vegas casinos.

Does that sound familiar?

Well, it should because that's exactly how pretty much every app on your smartphone is designed.

Not necessarily to maximize for wellness or well-being or thriving, but for time on site.

It's interesting because that means for a whole range of technologies, from slot machines to iPhones to AI chatbots, the tech is all different, but somehow that core principle, this sort of broken ideology behind them, they're all the same.

So in this episode, Randy and I are going to walk through CHD's principles of humane technology, seven in total.

And for each one, we're going to bring in some real-world examples from the podcast and be able to illustrate it and talk about why it matters.

approach solving technologies problems through a complex systems lens.

And that's sort of an abstract thing to say.

But really, this is about that there's a problem in the way that we solve problems.

So Randy,

And this is really where most of the harmful aspects of today's technology comes from.

And we can go back to our fourth episode to get a good example of this.

We talked to Guillaume Chasleau, a former software engineer at YouTube, about what happened after YouTube decided to optimize for just one single metric, which was engagement.

Guillaume observed a subtle but unmistakable tilt in the recommendations.

It seemed to favor extreme content.