56: How to Avoid Distraction with Johann Hari

Max Fisher returns to the show to podmaxx with Jon about the latest Offline-worthy news, including the landmark court case that's put Mark Zuckerberg on trial and internal drama at the AI giants that has the companies feuding with the Department of Defense, Hollywood, and their o ...  Show more

AI company Anthropic has a new, values-oriented “constitution” that they’re feeding their chatbot, Claude. Amanda Askell, the company’s in-house philosopher, joins Offline to talk about what it means to teach ethics to an LLM, whether the AI skews more human or more robot, and ho ...  Show more

Johann Hari is a writer and journalist. He has written for the New York Times, Le Monde, the Guardian, and other newspapers and his TED talks have been viewed over seventy million times. His work has been praised by a broad range of people, from Oprah Winfrey to Noam Chomsky to J ...  Show more

We are living in a time of upgraded technology and downgraded humans. Our collective ability to resist distraction and sustain attention is in decline. Although will power plays a role, this problem is not entirely our fault—it’s the by-product of powerful forces incident to mode ...  Show more

Does it feel impossible to concentrate these days? You're not alone. In this fascinating discussion, the author of Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention - and How to Think Deeply Again ...

Johann Hari is a journalist and author of Lost Connections, a book which changed the way I think about depression and mental health. His new book, Stolen Focus, is about what people can do in order to improve their focus, and about what we can all do to stop our attention being r ...  Show more