Technoskeptic Podcast Mo Lotman, Art Keller, Elizabeth Brunner

Tim Kasser spent over two decades studying the relationship between materialism and well-being and penned the highly cited book, The High Price of Materialism. Mo Lotman interviewed Kasser while he was still a professor at Knox College-Knox has since been promoted to Professor Emeritus and retired.
Professor Kasser and Mo discuss what types of values coincide with healthy relationships to ourselves and the environment. It is impossible to hear this podcast without thinking, “Do I really want to tether myself to a ‘delivery system’ that injects unhealthy values into every area of life?” Kasser also asks a crucial question about what is and is very deliberately not covered by the advertising-fueled media.



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Catherine Steiner-Adair is a clinical and developmental psychologist whose empathic 2013 book The Big Disconnect was one of the first big warning signs about tech’s effect on growing children.
Mo Lotman speaks with Steiner-Adair about the invisible costs of tech-how it can impair the brain development of children, and may also hinder bonding between child and parent. Many concerned parents look at their kids and think, “What is tech doing to them?”
Steiner-Adair thinks it’s also worth asking, “What is tech doing to our family?”


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Courtesy MIT
Mo Lotman interviewed Tomaso Poggio, Director of MIT’s Center for Minds, Brains, and Machines. Poggio explained the basics of how AI models work, why we’re still a long way from the dystopian fears of robot overlords, but also that the threat to jobs is real.
(Editor’s Note: This podcast was originally recorded at an interesting moment in AI development: after machine learning and neural networks had started to make impressive gains, but before the appearance of Large Language Models like Chat GPT. Without giving any interview spoilers, it is fascinating with hindsight to hear what predictions of Professor Poggio’s were undermined by the unanticipated explosion of LLM AI.)


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In mid-2017, Mo Lotmon spoke to journalist and media critic Bill Powers. Powers authored a bestselling book, Hamlet’s BlackBerry, about stepping away from tech. Powers was one of the first to publicly and loudly speak about the need to get away from “screens” and move to have “screen Sabbaths.”
At the time he spoke to Mo Lotman, Powers was at MIT’s Media Lab trying to increase the quality of social media. Powers is now at the Max-Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.
(Editors Note: In listening to this a few times in preparing to re-release it in 2024, it is hard to ignore that Powers’ 2017 optimism about the ability of social media to be moved in a positive direction did not pan out. He noted that in working at the MIT media lab, the technologists, i.e. the people who ran Twitter, were humanized to him. Once he got to know them, he realized they saw the problems their tools had created.
But did they, really?
Seven years later, the only changes at Twitter (now X) and Facebook (now Meta) are purely cosmetic. Yes, there have been some changes to content moderation algorithms-but those algorithms are still optimized to deliver toxic yet addictive sludge. Very probably, social media can’t be less disruptive to society and mental health, as long as social media’s business model is to harvest attention to sell ads and collect user info to sell to data brokers.)


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Danielle Allen is James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University and Director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation at the Kennedy School's Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation.* She spoke with Mo Lotman about Eudaimonia aka “the good life.” They explore the emphasis in American education on STEM (science, technology, engineering, math), and the social costs of not teaching social studies and history. Regardless of your politics, Allen’s diagnosis that we have inadequate education in civics and history is something most Americans will agree on as we head into 2024’s turbulent election season.

*At the time this interview was recorded, Allen was the director of the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard. She is now assembling research for the Democracy Renovation project for Our Common Purpose, a commission for the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.


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Mo Lotman speaks with psychiatrist, professor, and author David Greenfield, founder of the Center for Internet and Technology Addiction. Dr. Greenfield was one of the first medical professionals to recognize and study the addictive qualities of the Internet. Twenty-five years later his societal diagnosis has gone from outlier to mainstream. He explains what we know, what it means, and what can be done.
This podcast was originally recorded pre-COVID, but the topics covered dovetail nicely with the work on how technology hacks our dopamine reward system of Dr. Anna Lembke. Her book, Dopamine Nation, is a great follow-on to this interview with Dr. Greenfield. Many of you will have seen Lembke in the documentary “The Social Dilemma” discussing the addictive nature of social media.


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