WHAT I BELIEVE
Technology is not neutral. Every algorithm encodes a set of values about who matters, who gets to decide, and who bears the cost when things go wrong. And the people building this stuff are increasingly moved by all the wrong incentives. My work is organized around three questions: Who made the decision? Who profits? Who pays?
I've sat at dinner tables where addiction scientists offered their expertise to app makers looking to hook users. I’ve watched as algorithms determined whether people got food, housing…even handcuffs. I've interviewed the CEOs who compare the devastating global harm their products cause to a bad muffin in a batch.
That gap between how power describes its own effects and what those effects actually cost the rest of us — that's my beat.
CAREER
NOW
• CNN On-Air Contributor
• Founder, The Rip Current
• Stanford d.school Lecturer
• Omidyar Network Reporter-in-Residence Program Lead
2018-2024
• NBC News Technology Correspondent
2022
Author, The Loop: How AI is Creating a World without Choices and How to Fight Back
2016-2020
Host and Co-Writer, Hacking Your Mind (PBS)
2018-2019
Berggruen Fellow, Stanford University Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS)
2013-2017
Technology Correspondent, Al Jazeera
2007-2013
Executive Editor, Editor-in-Chief, Popular Science
I've been a journalist nearly my entire adult life, and have spent more than 20 years covering the billionaires and breakthroughs that determine the course of history — for better and worse.
Between 2018 and 2024 I was a correspondent for NBC News, reporting on science and technology for the TODAY show, Nightly News, MSNBC, and NBC News Now. Before that I spent five years as technology correspondent for Al Jazeera, covering the intersection of innovation, national security, and geopolitics — and finding a new way of telling stories: high-energy, upbeat delivery of dark and difficult topics.
Between 2016 and 2020 I co-wrote and hosted Hacking Your Mind, a landmark four-hour PBS documentary series on behavioral science and the implications of cognitive bias. I recommend it.
I wrote The Loop: How AI Is Creating a World Without Choices and How to Fight Back with support from a year at Stanford’s CASBS program to warn the world of the cognitive and social dangers posed by the arrival of commercial AI. Published in January 2022, it came out nine months before ChatGPT launched.
Today I run The Rip Current, an independent investigative media outlet covering tech accountability, surveillance, and corporate power.
Contact me with story ideas, anonymous tips, and proposals for partnership.
Business inquiry?
Consider contacting
my team.
SPEAKING
Charles Yao
The Lavin Agency
FILM & TELEVISION
Marc Paskin
United Talent Agency
LITERARY
Byrd Leavell
United Talent Agency