James Williams is the author of “Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy,” and cofounder of the ‘Time Well Spent’ campaign, a project that aims to steer technology design toward having greater respect for users’ attention, goals, and values. Previously, James worked for over ten years at Google, where he received the Founder’s Award, the company’s highest honor. He is also a frequent speaker, consultant for companies and governments, and commentator on...

Here in 2020, we’re all confronting the challenges of technology more intensely than ever. Digital capitalism is working very hard to use our psychology and social environment against us - to hijack our attention and redirect it towards whatever they’re pushing. And it’s been working. These challenges are so new, it hasn’t been clear what the best solutions are. That’s why I created Navigate - a brand new digital well-being membership to provide you with the ongoing support you need to thrive...

Jen Duffin’s nom commercial is the imagination-stirring Nova Mercury, derived from her youngest daughter of the same name whose birth precipitated the maternity leave during which Jen launched her entrepreneurial venture. Creating a home business was the perfect pivot for Duffin, whose fibromyalgia made a traditional 9-to-5 job unsustainable. Today, Nova Mercury is thriving, due in large part to Duffin’s social media positioning- with over 90,000 Instagram followers and over 3500 sales and a...

The author of the globally best-selling “Essentialism” and the upcoming “Effortless” joins the JOMO(cast) to proudly announce that JOMO and the philosophy of essentialism are natural companions. He’s spoken at multinational brands, top-tier universities, and organizations around the world to share the simple, powerful message that individuals, teams, and societies function at their absolute best when they make the conscious and mindful decision every day to make room only for what matters...

"I always try and say to myself ‘Don't’ let your anxiety and your fears of rejection and people not liking your work stop you from doing something." Growing up as the first of four daughters — gender equality and leadership came naturally to British-import Ony Anukem. By day, she is the Advocacy Manager at the International Confederation of Midwives — but she also wears another hat as the Show Host of the Twenty5 Podcast, a bi-weekly interview podcast that she started to guide young women...

Jay Vidyarthi was one of the creators of Muse, a headband utilizing biofeedback to guide and train meditation that introduced thousands of beginners to an accessible world of mindfulness practice. He’s also had a hand in the development and strategic launch of more than a dozen other apps and event platforms connecting consumers around the world to mindfulness technologies and communities. As an important companion to this impressive CV, though, Jay is also on the board of America Offline, a...

Nir Eyal writes, consults, and teaches about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business. Nir previously taught as a Lecturer in Marketing at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford. Nir co-founded and sold two tech companies since 2003 and was dubbed by The M.I.T. Technology Review as, "The Prophet of Habit-Forming Technology."

Jillian Richardson created The Joy List when she moved to New York City to connect herself to the events and gatherings around the city that would give her the best chance to forge meaningful human connections and “find her people.” Since then, she’s made it her business to create “facilitated human connection”- intentional gatherings carefully curated and designed to foster friendship.

For 14 years, Lindsay Coulter was the Suzuki Foundation’s “Queen of Green,” the creator of newsletters and blog posts for the Foundation under that name with a readership of tens of thousands. Through her unique blend of spirituality, evidence-based science, and practical action, Lindsay has helped educate a generation on the immediate, impactful ways they can come to terms with their feelings, fears, and goals for the environment and how to effect positive change at every scale. Lindsay...

Born in Germany in 1937, technology philosopher Albert Borgmann has seen technological transitions and upheavals unknown to many listening to this podcast. Throughout his long life, he’s studied and written about the impact of technological advancement on every aspect of the societies that have evolved around him, especially the often-unseen second-order effects of tech that ostensibly improves life, such as the reduced need and incentive for families to spend time close together in a home...

Pamela Pavliscak specializes in emotionally intelligent design and emotion-sensing artificial intelligence. Her research has been featured on CBC's Spark, Salon, and Quartz. Her book, Emotionally Intelligent Design, focuses on how to design a future that has as much EQ as it does IQ. Pamela is a TEDx speaker and has spoken at SxSW , Web Summit, Google Creative Labs. She teaches at the Pratt Institute School of Information in NYC and serves on an international committee to develop IEEE...

Rachel Macy Stafford is the author of “Hands Free Life,” “Hands Free Mama,” “Only Love Today,” and the new “Live Love Now,” all books sharing Rachel’s powerful message of how learning self-love is the inflection point for nearly every part of how we live our lives that brings us closer to or farther from joy. In this episode, Rachel discusses some of the most important points from “Live Love Now” and her research with children of all ages to discover how parents can heal and care for...

Kunal Gupta is the founder of Polar, a digital advertising agency that develops Social Display technology for hundreds of brands, generating millions of ads every year. He’s also on the board of CAMH, Canada’s Center for Addiction and Mental Health, where he advocates for public health policy rooted in ‘mindtech,’ a technology-enabled model for compassionate and effective mental health care. He writes the blog By Kunal, where he shares reflections on leadership, mindfulness, technology, and...

“You have to earn the trust of people to share with you what it’s like to be them out in the world.”   Jumana Abu-Ghazaleh is the Founder and President of Pivot for Humanity. This comes after a diverse and winding career in advertising, marketing, digital design, and entrepreneurship, which Jumana decided to synthesize into a mission focused on bringing ethical reform to the tech industry through professionalization: creating a body of shared community standards and oversight, just as...

Dr. Ellen Langer, a social psychology professor at Harvard University, is widely considered the “mother of mindfulness”, researching the topic since the 70’s.  She’s the author of the book that arguably introduced the concept of mindfulness to the public consciousness, Mindfulness, now in its 25th-anniversary edition. In this episode Dr. Langer shares what mindfulness really is, how we can get there, and how it can help us get through this and every moment with more joy.

David Heinemeier Hansson is a leading mind in the tech world inspiring the world to reconsider it’s working relationship with, well, work. As the creator of the popular Ruby on Rails web development framework, co-founder & CTO at Basecamp -- a saner way to manage projects and communicate company-wide -- and bestselling author, along with Basecamp co-founder Jason Fried, of It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work, Rework (which is also the name of the Basecamp podcast) + Remote, a book...

Damian Bradfield, Chief Creative Officer at WeTransfer and Author of the Trust Manifesto, on what we need to reclaim to create a better Internet for all.    We’re at a very unusual moment in modern history, where a roughly equal number of generations alive today have either a lived experience of near-total personal privacy, and with it, great consumer power over the way they were marketed to- or a lived experience of nearly every experience, action, and statement being collected, analyzed,...

Canadian researcher Kate Tilleczek, Canada Research Chair on Youth, Education & Global Good, addresses the impact of online education on child development, during COVID-19 and beyond. Because of the COVID-19 epidemic, millions more children than ever are learning at home- and online. But the transition to increasingly digital and online environments for youth education was happening, and as usual, it happened with little pause to consider how much digital is a good thing, and how the...

Christina Crook on how Covid-19 has helped us leave the FOMO-fuelled Age of You behind.  Welcome to the Age of Us. In this episode, we explore the many ways the COVID-19 crisis can teach us about ourselves- and joy. Just as we’ve had to give up expectations for normalcy when this began, we will have the privilege of deciding what to take with us back into ‘normal life’ and what to leave behind.   What are you discovering matters to you a lot more than you thought it did?  What do you...

This episode has been a long time coming… but at the same time, I feel it’s happened exactly when it should.  As we stand at the dawn of 2020, voices are being raised heralding the next decade as “the era of JOMO,” a decade of reassessing and renegotiating the excesses of social media, hyperconnection, and hustle of the past ten years. What was very recently regarded as fringe, unrealistic, or even ignorant criticism of the harm that a completely unconsidered shotgun wedding to technology...

Folk Rebellion founder Jess Davis and I reconnected after she emerged from a year-long hermitage away from the impossible pace of her work building a ‘hustle-free movement.’ A stress-induced heart condition, which caused her to collapse in an airport between speaking engagements, was telling her that enough was enough. Jess’ Folk Rebellion is an expression of the very problems that her hustle-induced illness caused: that the way we relate to technology right now is not serving us at all.    ...

Letters are intimate and a delight to receive.   Thanks to their miraculous homing instincts, pigeons have a long and honourable track record delivering letters. The ancient Greeks sent them out to broadcast the names of victorious athletes at the original Olympic Games. And Julius Caesar employed pigeon post during his conquest of Gaul. In recent centuries, of course – ever since 1660, when King Charles II established the Post Office – the poor old pigeon’s been somewhat edged out.    My...

Ingrid Fetell Lee is the author of Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness, and the site The Aesthetics of Joy, where she shares amazing actionable tips and essays about how we can find joy absolutely everywhere around us. She’s also been a speaker on TED Talks and brings more than a decade of experience in design and branding to showing audiences how to make life more beautiful and joyful.    In this episode, we discuss: - How we can (and...

Christina Malecka is the founder of Digital Mindfulness Retreats. She hails from Seattle, a city that she has seen transform dramatically over her lifetime with the arrival of Amazon and the massive influx of the technorati. She has a psychotherapy practice rooted in her experience as a community environmental activist, which she characterizes as a “macro to micro shift to social change.” Christina has observed her clients evolve through the tech revolution, struggling with the anxiety, FOMO,...

Cristian Villamarin and Alanna Harvey are the creative minds behind Flipd, the app that demonstrates how digital well-being and productivity are naturally compatible- and how JOMO is not about turning your back on tech, but changing your relationship to it to one that’s intentional, healthy, and positive.   Flipd is a productivity package that includes social interaction, education, and tools that don’t just help users stop wasting their time on unintentional phone use, but also reinforce,...