Brené and Barrett reflect on the "Living Beyond Human Scale" Podcast Series

What It Covers

Brené Brown and Barrett Guillen reflect on their eight-episode series examining how social media, AI, and rapid technological change exceed human neurobiological capacity, featuring experts on digital intimacy, moral outrage algorithms, and algorithmic justice.

Key Questions Answered

• •Artificial Intimacy: Social media creates connection illusions through follower counts rather than genuine relationships. Attention functions as an undervalued form of love, yet platforms engineer artificial intimacy that cannot sustain real needs like finding someone to feed your cat despite thousands of followers.
• •Algorithmic Moral Outrage: Social media platforms amplify extreme moral outrage because engagement algorithms prioritize inflammatory content to serve advertisements. Research on hundreds of thousands of posts reveals users perform more outrage than they genuinely feel, seeking belonging through common enemy intimacy rather than authentic connection.
• •AI Alignment Problem: Deploying AI systems in vulnerable sectors like policing, prisons, and healthcare without diverse teams risks scaling existing injustices. Building ethical AI requires ethicists, social workers, humanists, and people with lived experience at the table alongside engineers to align technology with democratic values.
• •Generation Transition Skills: Navigating technological super cycles spanning AI, wearables, and biotechnology demands neuroplasticity and nervous system regulation over coding knowledge. Leaders must develop emotional regulation capacity and embodied awareness to manage the velocity of change without becoming disembodied from human-scale experience.