Birju: The signature of your teaching, as I've heard it, is that this misaligned technology is not so much about bad people causing it, but more about misaligned systems. And of course, you've got this Buddhist background, but now you're holding that context as you sit across from executives and legislators and people who are leveraged in this system. How does your perspective inform you as you step into these places now?

Randima: Yeah, I think I didn't know a lot about systems thinking and systems as a whole when we began this work. I didn't even fully understand the downstream effects of social media. I was like, oh yeah, it's definitely bad for attention. Bad for kids, there were some parts that I understood.

And I was certainly seeing it more on the attentional lens. I did not really see the downstream, the polarization impact on democracy. I was, no, really, Tristan? And I think he'll tell you that I did not see that.

Over time, that's become so obvious. Now everyone gets it, right? That it's so obvious. You start to think more in terms of a systems view.

And systems, the big connection is systems is about interdependence and conditions. And from a Buddhist perspective, one of the fundamental things is that everything is conditioned, right? All the things, they arise because certain conditions come together, they stick around while those conditions sustain, and then when the conditions change, they pass away, right? They kind of come and they go.

And this happens at very high frequency in your experience, but also at different frequencies in the world. And so you start to see that these systems are very connected. There's all this flow of conditions and ideas that create the systems, and then the systems govern the stuff that's in the systems, like the technologies that we build. And so all of that, now over time, I've certainly come to see the integration of the two sides much more clearly than in the beginning.

Because I've had to learn all these things in the course of our work. But we have these things called the principles of humane technology, and they connect very closely. So things like thinking systems don't just optimize narrowly, or protecting the systems that we all depend on. So, for example, how do we know what's true or not?

Or how do we have an electorate that's not super divided? Once those things are broken, it's really hard to do good in the world. Or understanding that technology is never neutral. That there's always stuff that you bake into the product.

And now, as the products become more and more active, right? AI and social media are very active. They're not passive tools. They actively guide you to do things.

So they're extra not neutral. Things are not neutral, but they are very not neutral. Things like that, right? Or why are you building technology?

Are you clear on what the actual good in the world you want to accomplish? What is that? And to answer that well, you have to understand the human condition, to some extent, right? What causes suffering?

Why? What are you trying to solve, right? And a lot of times, we just don't talk about those things. You find some narrow thing that you're good at.

Scale it to a million, 100 million users, and it, yay, right?