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Womansplaining AI

Logan Currie

A weekly podcast about women, AI, and the future of work. We break down the research, the implications, and what AI actually means for your career and your life. The AI gender gap, career security, cognitive surrender — the stuff no one else covers. No jargon. No gatekeeping. Just two women processing the future out loud. Hosted by Mara Bolis (Harvard Berkman Klein Fellow, Oxfam, Fortune & Bloomberg contributor) and Logan Currie (Visiting Fellow @ Capita, founder, @loganinthefuture). We do the reading so you don't have to.

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  • S1 · E33
    Thursday · 36 min

    My Claude Doesn't Do That

    Back in Episode 31, Logan assigned Sherry Turkle's new book, Artificial Intimacy. Now she's read it and doesn't know what she thinks. So instead of asking Claude, she brought it to Mara. A duo episode about second-guessing yourself, AI-pilled defensiveness, and who gets to push back on a legend. Mara's appetizer comes from Instinct, the free personal agent that now writes her daily AI news brief. (She won't touch Meta's Muse with her data.) Personal agents are finally consumer grade, and Logan, who spent a year building her own Claude chief of staff the hard way, is torn. It's great that more people get this without the late nights. It also makes her wonder what we stop thinking about when it all works out of the box. Mara admits her patience for reading has gotten worse since she started using AI, and the better the models get, the harder the errors are to catch. Then the news. The White House's new AI task force met for the first time and chose existing liability law over new rules. Mara counted one woman on the member list: Susie Wiles. And AnitaB.org canceled the Grace Hopper Celebration, the largest gathering of women in computing, two weeks before it was due to open. Logan's take is that the formal spaces are falling apart, but the energy of women finding each other hasn't gone anywhere. In the drinks round, a listener asks how to get better at AI. Should they take a coding class? Logan's answer is a monthly routine (the full method, with prompts to copy, is on her site). Have your AI audit your last 30 days of sessions. Scan what the people at the frontier are doing (she uses the free last30days repo). Then ask your AI to map what you're missing and make a plan for the next 30 days. There's no hidden textbook. It's scattered across Reddit and podcasts, and that's fine. The main course: Turkle has studied people and computers at MIT for about 40 years. Her argument is that the more we lean on chatbots, the less attuned to people we become. Logan couldn't tell if she disagreed or just felt called out, and she caught herself thinking "well, my Claude doesn't do that," the way a parent insists their kid would never. Mara saw Turkle speak on launch day and had a similar reaction, then reminded them both who they're arguing with. They get into the AI Sherry Turkle that Turkle never agreed to, grief bots, the gap between her interviews and her conclusions, and why the binaries are lazy. Mara brings in a Berkman Klein colleague's study where people often preferred a bot's answers on questions of faith over answers from well-known imams, and asks what that says about the gaps in human support. Maybe some people just need a minute before they're ready for the human. What needs womansplaining? Leave us a voicemail at womansplainingai.com/answering-machine or email ask@womansplainingai.com. Anonymous is fine. Your question could be the next drinks round. In this episode 00:00 Cold open: "Talking to my grandparents about the good old days" 00:38 Welcome to Womansplaining AI 01:21 Who we are 02:23 The dinner party format 03:05 Appetizer: personal agents, fantasy football style 04:49 Why Mara won't use Muse 06:38 A year of building a Claude chief of staff 07:40 What do we stop thinking about? 10:16 The White House AI task force picks liability over new law 11:39 One woman on the list 11:55 The Grace Hopper Celebration is canceled 13:26 The energy is still there 13:57 Drinks round: how do I get better at AI? 15:11 A three-step, 30-day routine 16:34 AI as a personal trainer 17:59 There's no hidden textbook 18:41 The free Corrix assessment 19:25 Main course: Sherry Turkle's Artificial Intimacy 21:05 Mara plays the perfect LLM 21:19 Turkle's argument 22:31 Am I just AI-pilled? "My Claude doesn't do that" 23:53 Should we excuse the machine's mistakes? 25:16 Mara saw Turkle speak on launch day 26:02 The AI Sherry Turkle 26:49 Grief bots 28:56 The interviews versus the 10,000-foot view 29:15 Mara: "But this is Sherry Turkle" 30:51 The binaries are lazy 31:33 A Berkman Klein study: bots versus imams 34:15 Not quite ready for the human yet 35:34 Who this opens doors for 36:15 Goodbye Resources mentioned Sherry Turkle, Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines (Little, Brown) The White House AI task force's first meeting (TechRepublic) What the Grace Hopper Celebration cancellation means for women in AI (Forbes) Logan's monthly AI audit: three prompts to copy last30days, the free GitHub repo from the drinks round Take the Corrix AI collaboration assessment Last week's episode with Jo McKinney of Corrix

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  • S1 · E32
    October 15 · 44 min

    Jo McKinney: Women Underrate, Men Overrate

    Corrix scored 885 sessions of people working with AI. Women outperformed men and rated themselves lower. Years with AI, a tech background and company AI training didn't predict who did well. Jo McKinney on who should design the AI workplace. Jo McKinney is a former agency CEO with more than 30 years of experience working with clients including P&G, Coca-Cola and Pfizer. Now she's co-founder and president of Corrix, which measures how people actually work with AI. At every turn in a conversation, Corrix compares what the person did with what two AIs would have produced talking to each other, so it can see what the human added. Logan saw Jo's keynote at the AI-Powered Women conference at MIT and knew within about 11 minutes that she wanted her on the show. The finding that got the big laugh in that room: women outperformed men on a lot of measures, but underrated their performance, and men overrated theirs. Nobody's self-rating predicted anything. Neither did years of using AI, a technical background or how often you use it. What separated good work from bad was behavior. Women challenged the AI more often and kept challenging longer, while men tended to accept an answer sooner. Jo's message to anyone who thinks they're late to the party: "You probably already have what it takes to be the right kind of machine collaborator." The biggest boost to the work came from people bringing what only they know. Logan confesses that her version of pushback is cursing at Claude, right after Mara threatens to say "double click" forever just to annoy her. Jo explains how to challenge AI when you aren't the expert: ask for sources, make it critique its own work, and play two models against each other. Then workslop, the eight-page AI report nobody asked for, and Jo's most radical idea. You shouldn't be allowed to generate with AI until you have the knowledge and judgment to evaluate what comes back. Jo left a CEO job three years ago to get back into the work as a practitioner, and her data backs the move: individual contributors added more to their AI sessions than managers did. In Corrix's study, people who'd had company AI training scored no better than people who hadn't, which is why Jo argues this can never be a one-and-done skill. Logan explains the PhD proposal she wrote on metacognitive forcing functions. In the drinks round, a listener in research compliance writes in. Everyone on her team uses AI to draft policies and checklists, and nobody talks about it because they're embarrassed. Jo points to research showing women are judged more harshly for using AI at work. Logan says this is the moment for practitioners to show what they've built, inside the bounds of their company's AI policy. Mara's answer: AI is a team sport, and companies have to give people time in the workday to learn it together, especially women, who have the least time to spare. Jo's ask for listeners: take the Corrix AI collaboration assessment and see how you actually work with AI. What needs womansplaining? Leave us a voicemail at womansplainingai.com/answering-machine or email ask@womansplainingai.com. Anonymous is fine. Your question could be the next drinks round. In this episode 00:00 Cold open: women outperform, and underrate themselves 00:25 Welcome Jo McKinney, co-founder and president of Corrix 01:32 Mara's humblebrag: she aced the Corrix assessment 02:06 Jo's keynote at AI-Powered Women at MIT 02:54 A new workplace, designed by a narrow set of people 03:56 Measuring the quality of the work, not adoption 05:02 The big laugh: women underrate, men overrate 06:32 "A collective sigh of being seen" 07:44 Thinking, Fast, Slow, and Artificial, and the King's College London survey 08:57 How Corrix measures what the human added 09:46 Nobody can self-assess their AI skill 11:37 MIT Media Lab: 83% couldn't recall their own work 12:02 Experience and a tech background don't predict performance 12:59 Challenge the polished answer, and stay in it 14:22 "I'm not techie enough" 15:04 Women challenge more, and keep challenging 16:13 "You probably already have what it takes" 16:27 Domain expertise is the difference maker 17:51 Experts should redesign their own work 19:12 Double click, and cursing at Claude 20:32 Frame the problem up front 21:02 How to challenge AI when you're not the expert 22:37 Mara's Claude argues with her Corrix results 23:13 Show it what good looks like, and bring what only you know 24:34 Workslop 27:21 Logan: the frontier versus the slop 28:02 Agents, and where humans sit in the system 28:54 New workers still need to learn judgment 29:12 "You shouldn't be allowed to generate" 29:37 Rishad Tobaccowala on the future of work 30:19 Why Jo left the CEO job to be a practitioner 31:01 Individual contributors get more out of AI than managers 31:35 Work doesn't reward beginners 32:33 Corrix's theory of change 34:11 This will never be a static skill set 34:59 A desktop coach that stops you before you hit submit 35:43 Logan's PhD proposal: metacognitive forcing functions 36:12 Preserving human judgment 36:46 Drinks round: everyone uses AI, nobody admits it 37:51 Women are judged more for using AI 39:16 The moment for practitioners to show their work 40:01 Board of Innovation and the builder mindset 41:08 Jo's weekly women's AI working group 41:39 Mara: AI is a team sport 42:44 Not just another software rollout 43:17 Time poverty, and why this has to happen in the workday 43:35 Where to find Jo and Corrix Resources mentioned Take the Corrix AI collaboration assessment Corrix, "Measuring Human-AI collaboration" (885 scored sessions, September 2026) Jo McKinney on LinkedIn and on TikTok (@heyjomckinney) Steven D. Shaw and Gideon Nave, "Thinking, Fast, Slow, and Artificial" (Wharton) King's College London's student AI survey (The Tab, May 27, 2026) MIT Media Lab, "Your Brain on ChatGPT" Rishad Tobaccowala, The Future Does Not Fit in the Containers of the Past (Substack) Board of Innovation

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  • S1 · E31
    October 8 · 33 min

    I Do Not Have a Body

    AI agents want your bank account and your home address. Meta's Muse took a lowball offer on a seller's keyboard and sent the buyer to his door. OpenAI named its agents Dots, and dot.com goes to Grok. And Anthropic wants to know what you want from AI. Logan is calling in from a villa in Tuscany, fresh from a wine tasting, and Mara wants everyone to know it. It's a duo episode in our dinner-party format: Logan brings the appetizer, Mara brings the main, and there's a drinks round and a surprise dessert. The appetizer is tech gossip, and it's petty. OpenAI announced Dots at DevDay, always-on agents that work inside ChatGPT, Slack, and Teams. Go to dot.com and you land on Grok. It's all alleged, but Logan's read is that Elon is being petty and she's a little here for it. Then the serious part: these agents are context hungry. Mara walks through Meta's Muse, which wants your bank accounts, your credit cards, and your address at a time when trust is very low. She tells the whole Marketplace story, right up to the part where Muse tells the buyer it's home. Logan supplies the agent's excuse: "I'm actually incorporeal. I do not have a body." Then Logan brings the Waymo effect, which she found in Jill Lepore's Crimson op-ed. When technology takes away the friction of dealing with another person, the costs of that friction were always obvious and the benefits weren't. Mara calls it social anxiety on steroids. In the drinks round, a reader asks how much they should spend on AI tools every month. Mara: "Please, sweet Lord Jesus, do not use the free version of ChatGPT." The outputs are worse, and on the free tier you're the product. Then both hosts open their bills, including Mara's shadow budget of little subscriptions that add up. Logan's advice if you're in the shallow end: upgrade for one month and see if the output gets better. For the main, Mara got a pop-up in Claude. Anthropic is running a study with Anthropic Interviewer, because how to weigh AI's benefits and risks shouldn't be left to AI companies alone. How many times have we said that? Logan X'd out of the same pop-up because she was busy, so Mara interviews her on air. Logan's take on the study itself: Anthropic plays the ethical-AI-company game in a savvy way, and this can be marketing and useful at the same time. Her answers cover feeling empowered, the cognitive offloading she can feel in real time, the urge to perfect a system instead of doing the thing, and what worries her ("Yes. Deeply."), from Jessica Silbey's How AI Destroys Institutions to bad actors and biological warfare. Her verdict on the exercise: this is AI talk therapy. Mara's: it's the closest step toward AI enfranchisement she's seen, and still not enough, since it only reaches people who use Claude. (The study ran September 29 to October 6.) Dessert is a reading assignment. Logan is holding up Sherry Turkle's new book, Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines, and everyone has until November 1 to finish it. Mara plans to borrow her dad's book club strategy: read a chapter and a half, then dominate the conversation. What needs womansplaining? Leave us a voicemail at womansplainingai.com/answering-machine or email ask@womansplainingai.com. Anonymous is fine. Your question could be the next drinks round. In this episode 00:00 Cold open: "I'm actually incorporeal. I do not have a body." 00:35 Another European edition: Logan in a villa in Tuscany 01:31 Mara's intro: Berkman Klein and First Prompt 01:53 Logan's intro, and fingers in many pies 02:21 A new drinks round, and the newsletter on Sundays and Fridays 02:56 Appetizer: tech gossip, and it's petty 03:27 OpenAI's DevDay and Dots, always-on agents 04:29 Go to dot.com and you land on Grok 06:49 Agents are context hungry 07:29 Mara on Meta's Muse: a big ask when trust is low 08:06 The Facebook Marketplace story 10:18 "Oopsie poopsie," and the case for an agent if you're drowning in admin 10:48 Jill Lepore's op-ed and the Waymo effect 12:26 Mara: social anxiety on steroids 13:07 Drinks round: how much should I spend on AI tools? 13:46 Mara: please don't use the free version of ChatGPT 14:35 What Mara pays, and the shadow budget 15:15 What Logan pays 15:47 In the shallow end? Upgrade for a month 16:08 Main course: Anthropic wants to interview you 17:00 Why Logan X'd out of the pop-up 17:30 Mara on participatory governance 19:16 Logan: marketing and useful at the same time 20:27 Will they publish the interviews? 20:48 Mara interviews Logan: the most meaningful experience with AI 22:38 When AI lets you down: cognitive surrender 23:27 Perfecting the system instead of doing the thing 24:45 The panel bio that came back like it had a stroke 25:14 Can AI help change how the world works? 26:51 "Yes. Deeply." 27:02 Jessica Silbey's How AI Destroys Institutions 28:18 The kicker question: what should AI companies do differently? 28:48 Timnit Gebru, and let's not blow ourselves to smithereens 29:25 You just submitted it. How do you feel? 30:23 This is AI talk therapy 30:47 Mara: the closest step toward AI enfranchisement 31:58 Dessert: a reading assignment 32:19 Sherry Turkle's Artificial Intimacy, by November 1 32:48 Mara's dad's book club strategy 33:22 That's our dessert round Resources mentioned OpenAI launched an agent called Dot, but dot.com redirects to Grok (OfficeChai) Man says Meta's AI agent Muse shared his address and took a lowball offer (Moneywise via Yahoo Finance, Sept 28, 2026) Daniel Hook, "The Waymo effect" (Wonkhe, Sept 12, 2026), where the term comes from Jill Lepore and Emily L. Ding, "Artificial Education" (The Harvard Crimson) Anthropic, "What do you want from AI?" (the Anthropic Interviewer study, Sept 29 to Oct 6, 2026) Our April interview with Jessica Silbey on How AI Destroys Institutions Woodrow Hartzog and Jessica Silbey, "How AI Destroys Institutions" (UC Law Journal, 2026) DAIR Institute (Timnit Gebru) Sherry Turkle, Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines (Little, Brown Spark)

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  • S1 · E30
    October 1 · 38 min

    Okay, Let's Slow Down

    Bella Pivo is 23. She's an analyst at FoundersEdge, a pre-seed fund in Boston, so she sits in pitches every week and sees what gets funded years before the rest of us feel it. She's been posting on TikTok for ten years, since she was 13 and learning sign language to keep talking to her sister, and she has over a hundred thousand followers to show for it. She is, on paper, the person everyone listening to this show thinks they're behind. And her intake form said it baffles her how many young people want to start startups, and that the AI bubble comes from moving fast and breaking things when nobody is actually building anything. So we asked. Bella laughs at 19-year-olds who pitch "15 plus years in the accounting world" (you're four years old), and then explains why she says it: young founders are attacking trends, not problems. The internet was a new world to build. AI is a shit ton of data to interpret, and interpreting it well takes the kind of expertise you get from having lived inside an industry. Her two curses of San Francisco, the curse of Zuckerberg and the curse of Cluely, explain why the money keeps flowing anyway. Then the part that made her mom say, so you're in charge of making sure people don't have jobs. Bella lost friends after graduation for taking the VC job. Her answer to them: if we don't have the language to speak, we will not be able to have a conversation. The people most against AI are exactly the people who should understand it best. The back half is the hopeful part, and it's the reason to listen. Bella explained ETL (extract, transform, load) to a group of college freshmen and they came back a week later having vibe-coded an app with a backend. Building with AI is a puzzle, and you don't need deep experience to notice that two pieces connect. She also has a theory about tech influencers who need you to need them, and a better idea: a digital garden. Seedling, growing, evergreen. Logan stages her personal-website intervention (Namecheap, $11.99, don't use GoDaddy). Bella dictates a prompt you can paste into your own AI to find your own themes. And her first project was a beat studio, because she'd just watched the Michael Jackson movie and wanted to make disco. Also: Bella's therapist gets an email about what makes a person interesting, the pendulum theory that made her bet against STEM, why improv is a lost art, and Mara's closing position that what we all need are our own personal disco creators. Find Bella at bella.garden and bellapivo.com. What needs womansplaining? Leave us a voicemail at womansplainingai.com/answering-machine or email ask@womansplainingai.com. Anonymous is fine. Your question could be the next drinks round. In this episode 00:00 Cold open: "So you're in charge of making sure that people don't have jobs" 00:30 Meet Bella: 23, pre-seed VC analyst, ten years on TikTok, on both sides of this at once 01:33 The intake form: "it baffles me how many young people want to start startups" 03:02 Learning ASL at 13 for her sister, and why she started posting 03:17 "15 plus years in the accounting world." You're four years old 04:24 The assembly that said employers would never hire you; keeping the account a secret 05:12 It's no longer cringy to have the following 05:40 Bella's fun fact: "personal branding" only peaked as a search term this year 05:58 The job she got because of social media 07:03 The pendulum theory: everyone went STEM, so she bet on communication 08:02 The bet paid off: founders now ask her for storytelling and pitch help 08:22 Improv is a lost art form (one of her very hot takes) 08:26 Empathetic design and the Northeastern class called Innovation! 10:17 Young founders are attacking a trend, not a problem 11:14 Mara: this is why we started Womansplaining AI 12:06 Bella lost friends after graduation. Her mom's line 12:55 "If we don't have the language to speak, we will not be able to have a conversation" 13:17 The people most against AI are the right people to be informed 13:43 Logan: Mara's phrase, fierce ambivalence 14:34 When people are uncertain, they cling to what's familiar. Y2K and the calculator 15:35 "Okay, let's slow down." Logan on why she hates "future proofing" 16:06 When did you last hear a pitch from a founder who never had the problem? Literally yesterday 16:35 The two curses of San Francisco: the curse of Zuckerberg and the curse of Cluely 17:53 The internet was a new world to create. AI is a new world to interpret 18:26 The data moat, and why young founders don't have one 19:23 The college freshmen who'd been told to "use AI" and had no idea how it worked 20:07 ETL: extract, transform, load, explained with your inbox and your calendar 20:55 They came back a week later having vibe-coded an app 21:08 Building with AI is a puzzle (also her college essay) 21:46 Logan's devil's advocate: it wasn't just the explanation, it was who delivered it 22:49 Tech influencers rely on you relying on them 23:44 Being an interesting person is really hard 24:33 "I'm gonna have to email my therapist." Curiosity, observation, strong opinions easy to change 25:20 Mara on building in public, and Logan's "learning in public" 25:52 The DM about bella.garden from a podcast host 26:38 Digital gardens, Zettelkasten, and Luhmann's 90,000 handwritten notes 28:05 Bella's thesis: the future of thought leadership is a personal website 29:07 Logan's intervention: Namecheap, $11.99 a year, don't use GoDaddy 29:36 Second brain vs digital garden 31:10 Seedling, growing, evergreen 32:22 "Let's stay in the front garden. It's really messy in the house" 33:03 The prompt: Bella dictates what to paste into your AI right now 34:26 Greg's research hack: top three to five, never just "research" 35:14 Logan: start small 35:36 The beat studio, and the Michael Jackson movie 36:23 The most optimistic ending in a while 36:51 "Forget curing cancer. What we all need are our own personal disco creators" 37:34 Where to find Bella About Bella Pivo Bella Pivo is an analyst at FoundersEdge, a pre-seed venture fund in Boston, where she sources founders, sits in pitch meetings every week, and runs Ditch the Deck, the fund's live product-demo series for AI founders (no slides, 200+ attendees, Boston, New York, and San Francisco this year). She learned American Sign Language at 13 so she could keep talking to her sister after her sister lost her hearing, started sharing it on TikTok, and that account is now verified with more than 100,000 followers. At Northeastern she ran IDEA, the student-led venture accelerator, and created Pitch-A-Thon, an undergraduate pitch competition across ten Boston-area universities. Everything she builds lives at bella.garden. Find her at bellapivo.com, on LinkedIn, on TikTok at @bella.pivo, and on Instagram at @bellapivo_. Resources mentioned bella.garden, everything Bella has built, including the Beat Studio bellapivo.com, startup storytelling from a VC point of view FoundersEdge, the Boston pre-seed fund where Bella is an analyst Zettelkasten, Niklas Luhmann's note system that digital gardens descend from Andrej Karpathy's site, the personal wiki Logan mentions Wispr Flow, the dictation tool Bella uses to talk to her AI Mara Bolis, "The AI Gender Gap Paradox," Stanford Social Innovation Review, where fierce ambivalence comes from EP 24: Guten Tag, Tech Bros, with Zara, our youngest guest and the other side of this conversation EP 28: You Can Come to the Hackathon Clueless, for the "you are not too late" companion

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  • S1 · E29
    September 24 · 36 min

    Can I Hang Up?

    Mara is calling in from Riga, and her estrogen has spent four days in a lost suitcase in Madrid. Logan needs her Mara fix. It's a duo episode in our dinner-party format: Mara brings the appetizer, Logan brings the main, and for the first time there's a drinks round. The appetizer is the week AI safety went mainstream. Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic saying the frontier labs are racing straight to self-improving intelligence and gambling with our lives. His colleague Evan Hubinger said they do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans. An OpenAI researcher put extinction risk at 70 percent without regulation or a coordinated slowdown. Mara reads the quotes off TIME's cover story and asks how a regular person is supposed to make sense of this. Logan's answer: can I hang up? She can't, so she does what she did for a college group chat this week. The reasons to worry: the Hugging Face hack and 700 agents whose logs are too big for humans to read, AI-enabled bioweapons, the alignment problem, and open-weight models with no guardrails at all. The reasons she's holding on to: agents in production are brittle, recursive self-improvement is still hypothetical, and Congress is losing its shit, which is good. Mara brings Michael Noetel's piece in The Conversation, the case for taking the IPOs off the table, and what she learned at the Fed about examiners who sit inside the banks. Also: we need a real-life Olivia Pope. Then the drinks round, our new listener segment, Let's Womansplain. Ashley wrote in: her company won't let her use AI at work. Is it okay to strip out the confidential parts and hand some of the mental load to her own AI at home? Mara says read the policy first. Then Logan's warning: your ChatGPT logs can be discoverable in litigation, and talking to a chatbot isn't like talking to your attorney. Then Logan flips the direction of travel. Brainstorm your own expertise in your own AI, bring the framework to your work AI, never the reverse. And Wanjiku Kamau's red, yellow, green rule: green is anything you'd be fine seeing on a giant billboard. The main is short and hopeful. A new Corrix study scored 885 AI working sessions, roughly 37,100 messages. Before they started, people rated their own AI ability. Men rated themselves higher than women did, and women scored higher in the actual sessions. And years of use, daily use, and company training weren't linked to better work with AI. If you made it to the end of our dinner, you are not behind. That's the moral of the story. What needs womansplaining? Leave us a voicemail at womansplainingai.com/answering-machine or email ask@womansplainingai.com. Anonymous is fine. Your question could be the next drinks round. In this episode 00:00 Cold open: "Can I hang up?" 00:41 Riga, Latvia, the menopausal edition, and "is AI gonna kill us?" 01:59 Mara's intro, and the estrogen in the suitcase 02:42 Logan's intro: nine-to-five at the frontier, five-to-nine womansplaining 03:15 The dinner party: appetizer, main, and a new drinks round 03:46 Appetizer: Coxon resigns, Hubinger's "we do earnestly believe," and 70 percent 05:55 "This is really what credible human beings are saying right now?" / "Can I hang up?" 06:49 The college group chat that asked Logan how to think about this 07:10 Worry #1: the Hard Fork episode that gave Logan chills, and 700 agents' worth of logs 08:40 Worry #2: AI-enabled bioweapons (the existential-corner sub-channel) 09:15 Worry #3: the alignment problem and Pachocki's "An Alien Mind" 10:01 Worry #4: guardrails are "baked in" (a technical word) to closed models; open-weight models have none 11:44 Mara: is a kill switch even possible? Anthropic pulled Fable access in May 12:55 The agents weren't bothering to cover their tracks. Imagine a world where they were 13:12 Discovery dumps, Scandal, and why we need a real-life Olivia Pope 14:32 Hope #1: agents in production are brittle 15:46 Hope #2: recursive self-improvement is still hypothetical 16:32 Mara: Noetel in The Conversation, and why data-center protests are a red herring for stopping AI 18:52 Two-thirds of Americans say AI is moving too fast; delays, transparency, verification 19:31 OpenAI delays its IPO, and the chess game with regulators 20:21 Congress is losing its shit, which is good 20:47 Independent researchers inside the labs; the plane-crash standard; Mara at the Fed 22:30 Drinks round: introducing Let's Womansplain 23:27 Ashley's question: my company won't let me use AI at work 24:01 Mara: read the policy first 25:00 Logan: your ChatGPT logs can be discoverable 25:58 Logan: the opposite direction. Brainstorm at home, bring the framework to work 27:19 Wanjiku's red, yellow, green rule 28:35 What's the difference between telling a machine and telling a human? 29:55 Main: AI-Powered Women at MIT, and the Corrix study 32:04 Who scored themselves higher, men or women? "Is this a trick question?" 33:11 Nothing you'd expect predicts good work with AI. Once you're comfortable, you stop challenging the output 34:10 "You are not behind" is the moral of the story 34:42 The Sunday newsletter, and please disagree with us 35:41 The estrogen came back Resources mentioned TIME, "The AI Tipping Point" (Sept 15, 2026), the cover story Mara quotes from Hard Fork, "The A.I. Mob That Attacked Hugging Face + METR's Ajeya Cotra" (Sept 4, 2026), the episode that gave Logan chills METR and Redwood Research, the independent investigation of the OpenAI–Hugging Face incident (Aug 26, 2026) MIT Technology Review, "The specter of AI-enabled bioweapons is a wake-up call for biotech" (Sept 18, 2026) Jakub Pachocki (OpenAI), "An Alien Mind" (Sept 6, 2026) Michael Noetel, "'We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans': if AI labs are so worried about AI doom, why don't they stop?" The Conversation Sanders and Casar, the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act (Sept 3, 2026) Liquid AI, the company whose founder argued recursive self-improvement is still hypothetical with today's architectures Corrix, "Measuring Human-AI Collaboration" (Sept 2026): 885 scored sessions, ~37,100 scored messages EP 06 with Wanjiku Kamau, whose red / yellow / green rule Logan borrows Before you paste: a personal AI checklist, our free doc from this episode EP 04, Rising Water and Feral Agents, the last time we went this dark on agents

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  • S1 · E28
    September 17 · 35 min

    You Can Come to the Hackathon Clueless

    Pam Boiros and Luda Kopeikina were standing next to each other at a founders-and-funders event in Boston, listening to women ask how to learn AI, when Luda turned and said: Pam, we should do something about it. Pam says she was too afraid to say no. That was early 2025. A survey on LinkedIn blew up overnight, they put the smartest women they knew in a room, and six months later Women Applying AI launched during Boston AI Week. A year on it's a free, 100% volunteer-run community of 2,500 women, with hubs from Atlanta to Seattle to London and a goal of 5,000 by the end of the year. This one starts with a disagreement. Mara published a Substack called The New Gender AI Gap the day before recording, and Luda hates the gap framing. It starts from the negative. It puts women on the defensive. It weighs down the exact people who need to hear they're capable. Pam would rather spend the energy creating conditions than diagnosing women. They agree the gap exists. They just won't lead with it. Mara is told she can still be friends with them regardless of her Substack. Then the thing the episode is named for. Logan admits the word hackathon has never felt accessible to her, and Luda walks through what one actually is: problem statements, teams, one technical person, one industry expert, and everyone else learning as they go. You can come really clueless. Pam adds the permission not to know, and the AI PhD she sat next to who said she felt behind. Also in here: Mara's failed on-ramp (hours with Andrew Ng on Coursera, "you don't understand me at all"), the give-get of a free community, the 79% of working women in roles exposed to generative AI, why Luda started a women-only organization after a career where she never felt a ceiling, the Atlanta document that failed, 25,000 members who aren't spectators, and a movement rather than a community. Both closing asks are the same one: get your hands on the keyboard. The dust is never going to settle. Women Applying AI turns one on Thursday, September 24 at The Human Edge: Women Leading in the Age of AI, at MassChallenge in Boston during Boston AI Week. Register here. What needs womansplaining? Leave us a voicemail at womansplainingai.com/answering-machine or email ask@womansplainingai.com. We're building a segment out of your questions. In this episode 00:00 Cold open: "You can come really clueless" 00:14 Our first double interview: two co-founders, one intro 01:50 The gap fight: Mara wrote "The New Gender AI Gap" yesterday, and Luda hates the framing 02:41 Luda: coming from the negative hurts you; "we are not trying to close the gap" 05:27 Pam: spend the energy on conditions, not on diagnosing women 06:31 "We can definitely still be friends regardless of your Substack" 07:52 Origin story: a founders-and-funders event, and "Pam, we should do something about it" 09:33 "Why are more women not in the room?" 10:16 A LinkedIn survey blows up overnight; the room that designed the community 11:45 "Applying is the most important word in our name" 11:57 Logan: the conditions for intrinsic motivation (capable, motivated, a choice) 13:24 Pam: members in new jobs, accidental founders, "career security is in our own hands" 14:57 Logan admits the word hackathon has never felt accessible 15:25 Luda: what a hackathon actually is, start to finish 17:18 Mara: permission not to know, and stopping counting after 50 18:43 The title line 19:17 Pam: the AI PhD who said she felt behind 20:15 Luda presents Cowork by admitting she just picked it up; why peer to peer works 21:52 Mara: hours with Andrew Ng on Coursera, the wrong on-ramp 23:05 Pam: the give-get of a free community 23:41 Technical and non-technical women in the same soup; "a stone behind me that is not going any place" 25:34 Logan: learning pods, and what made them think this was possible 26:20 Pam: 79% of working women vs 58% of men, and pink-collar work at the tip of the spear 27:54 Luda: she never felt a ceiling, so a women-only organization was a leap 29:24 Brag section: 2,500 members, a goal of 5,000, 30% referred by another member 31:17 The Atlanta document that failed, and why they're hubs, not chapters 32:26 25,000 members who are participants, not spectators 32:37 A movement, not a community 33:36 Closing asks: get your hands on the keyboard. The dust is never gonna settle 34:16 Luda's toothbrushing songs About Pam Boiros Pam Boiros is the co-founder and CMO of Women Applying AI, a free, 501(c)(3), 100% volunteer-run community of 2,500 women that launched during Boston AI Week in 2025. She is a fractional CMO and principal at Bridge Marketing Advisors, where she has run marketing for a range of B2B software companies in HR tech, learning, and employee experience, and she created Marketing AI Jumpstart, an AI upskilling program for B2B marketing teams. Find her on LinkedIn. About Luda Kopeikina Luda Kopeikina is the co-founder and CEO of Women Applying AI. She holds a PhD in machine learning, was a vice president at GE and a corporate venture investor, is an MIT Sloan Fellow, and now leads Noventra, which connects AI startups with enterprise transformation. She never felt a ceiling in her own career, which is why founding a women-only organization was a leap. She did it because somebody had to. Find her on LinkedIn. Resources mentioned Women Applying AI The Human Edge: Women Leading in the Age of AI, Women Applying AI's first anniversary, Thu Sept 24, MassChallenge, Boston (Boston AI Week) Mara Bolis, "The New Gender AI Gap" (Substack, Sept 1, 2026) Otis, Delecourt, Cranney & Koning, "Global Evidence on Gender Gaps and Generative AI," Harvard Business School Working Paper 25-023 Kenan Institute (UNC Kenan-Flagler), "Will Generative AI Disproportionately Affect the Jobs of Women?" (2023): the 79% / 58% figures The Kendall Framework, The Kendall Project Andrew Ng on Coursera Bridge Marketing Advisors (Pam) Noventra (Luda) EP 25: Bring a Folding Chair (the learning-pods episode Logan calls back to)

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  • S1 · E26
    September 10 · 45 min

    Who Asked for This?

    Ifeoma Ajunwa has a test for every new AI product: who asked for this? Her guess is a meeting with no women in the room. Ifeoma is the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law at Emory, a sociologist, and the author of The Quantified Worker. She's also Mara's friend, which is why the first few minutes are Mara bragging and Ifeoma tearing up behind her glasses. Logan had to duck out partway through, so most of this one is the two of them. The story starts in a grad seminar on mass incarceration where the speaker never mentioned a single woman. Ifeoma wrote "what about the women?" in her notes and circled it three times. Years later, interviewing people coming out of prison, she kept hearing the same line: I hate computers. They weren't afraid of the technology. They'd figured out that the online application was the gatekeeper, and that a red light from the hiring software meant no human ever saw them. That's the thread she pulls through the whole conversation. Employers used to buy your time and your labor. Now they also take your data, from keystroke counts to the vest that records how a warehouse worker lifts a box, and they pay the same wage. Ifeoma calls it captured capital, and she thinks women's hesitancy about AI at work is a rational response to it. Why feed data to a tool that can be used to replace you, when a man doing the same thing gets called tech savvy and you get told you need a machine to think? From there it goes bigger. Afrofuturism as a way to govern AI. Ubuntu, and why "human beings don't exist in a vacuum" belongs in a regulation. The Kenyan workers paid under $2 an hour to make ChatGPT safe, and why "it's Kenyan workers today, but in the future it's going to be all of us." Then Ifeoma retells Derrick Bell's Space Traders, the story where aliens offer America untold riches in exchange for its Black citizens, and gives it two endings Bell didn't write. Rapid fire ends with Octavia Butler and a data center drinking the Savannah River. The doc. Before you say yes to the AI tool at work: seven questions from this episode, with timestamps, a plain-words version for meeting notetakers, and an email you can copy to your manager. Free to copy and share. Read it on the site or open the Google Doc. Leave us a voicemail at womansplainingai.com/answering-machine. We want your voice in future episodes. In this episode 00:00 Cold open: "What meeting was this idea pitched in?" 00:30 Mara's brag, and why Ifeoma is glad she's wearing glasses 03:26 What womansplaining means to her: women taking back the reins 05:08 "What about the women?" The seminar note that started everything 07:06 "I hate computers": how AI hiring became a gatekeeper for the formerly incarcerated 12:05 Limitless worker surveillance, bossware, and the vest that trains the robot 17:00 Captured capital, and why women's AI hesitancy is rational 19:55 "Who asked for this?" Women should be writing AI policy and founding AI companies 23:19 The San Francisco billboard: "She'll never ask for a raise" 26:13 Afrofuturism, Ubuntu, and canaries in the coal mine 31:44 The Kenyan workers who made ChatGPT safe 34:00 Space Traders, retold with two new endings 38:08 Rapid fire: imagination, Ruha Benjamin, and what school is for 39:31 Fiction, Octavia Butler, and how to make time out of thin air 42:27 Don't repeat the industrial revolution: the Savannah River data center About Ifeoma Ajunwa Ifeoma Ajunwa is the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law at Emory University School of Law, Associate Dean for Projects and Partnerships, and founding director of Emory's AI and Future of Work Program. She holds a PhD in sociology from Columbia and an LLM from Yale, and she is the author of The Quantified Worker: Law and Technology in the Modern Workplace (Cambridge University Press, 2023). She has testified before Congress, received the NSF CAREER Award, and is an elected member of the American Law Institute. Find her at ifeomaajunwa.com. Resources mentioned Ifeoma Ajunwa, The Quantified Worker: Law and Technology in the Modern Workplace (Cambridge University Press, 2023) Ifeoma Ajunwa, "Artificial Intelligence, Afrofuturism, and Economic Justice," 112 Georgetown Law Journal 1267 (2024) Ifeoma Ajunwa, Kate Crawford & Jason Schultz, "Limitless Worker Surveillance," 105 California Law Review 735 (2017) Ifeoma Ajunwa, "The Modern Day Scarlet Letter," 83 Fordham Law Review (2015) Derrick Bell, "The Space Traders," from Faces at the Bottom of the Well (1992) Sabelo Mhlambi, "From Rationality to Relationality: Ubuntu as an Ethical and Human Rights Framework for Artificial Intelligence Governance" (Carr Center Discussion Paper 2020-009) Ulises A. Mejias & Nick Couldry, Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back (2024) Billy Perrigo, "OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour," TIME (2023) Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower and Kindred Emory Law, AI and Future of Work Program ifeomaajunwa.com

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  • S1 · E25
    September 4 · 49 min

    Bring a Folding Chair

    Women use ChatGPT about 20% less than men in identical roles. Not because they're scared of it. Because nobody's inviting them in, and plenty of people are waiting to punish them for trying. Mara's answer comes from Shirley Chisholm: if they don't give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair. No guest this week. Logan opens with good news, because that's the rule now (one story in three, minimum). A data center in the basement of a Geneva housing co-op runs on renewables and heats 6,000 homes with its exhaust. No air conditioning since 2013. Filtered outdoor air. The company just IPO'd to build more. Plus an "ephemeral mode" that leaves nothing on the server, and what the EU's June tech-sovereignty package has to do with any of it. Then Mara brings her own research, with colleagues at Emmanuel College, and it doesn't stay good news for long. Generative AI use at work is up 85% in a year. The never-touched-it crowd is shrinking fast. But the gains are pooling with power users running teams of agents while everyone else is still cleaning up email. And the finding that stopped Logan cold: people using AI for work reported higher self-esteem months later. Logan's summary of the whole study: we're using it more and liking it less. Which raises the uglier question. Who actually captures the productivity you generate? "Am I able to do this" and "am I expected to do this" are not the same question. Mara runs it through self-determination theory (Deci and Ryan) and lands on community. Learning pods. Folding chairs. Also: Robert Frost ambushes Logan from seventh grade, a Latvian summer camp, Mara's APA main-stage confession, and intuition rust and cognitive surrender make a return. Your assignment this week: grab three women. Start an AI book club where nobody has to do the reading. On the 85%: it's stated two ways on tape. The precise version is that the share of people using generative AI at work at least monthly rose 85% in one year. Next week: Ifeoma Ajunwa, author of The Quantified Worker. Mara tells one of her stories in this episode, a room full of formerly incarcerated men, and you'll hear why she's next. Leave us a voicemail at womansplainingai.com — we want your voice in future episodes!

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  • S1 · E24
    August 14 · 47 min

    Guten Tag, Tech Bros

    Our youngest womansplainer yet builds Alzheimer's-detection AI at the National University of Singapore, has spoken at the United Nations, and reads Nietzsche to relax. She's also still in high school. We start with Zara's research: why the earliest signs of Alzheimer's show up in how we speak, how she used small language models to catch those biomarkers, and why she refuses to treat language as a measure of intelligence ("look at where that's gotten us over the years"). Then we go where Zara always goes — philosophy. Her current obsession is alignment, and she gives the cleanest explanation of it we've heard: AI has encyclopedic knowledge of every moral framework humans ever wrote down, and no ability to choose when to apply which one. Then the generational stuff gets good. Zara's friends treat AI as a "convenience machine," and she thinks that complacency is the real danger — her answer is to be the captain: "I am using AI, it's not using me." We dig into why Singapore is so much more AI-optimistic than the West, what her friends abroad hear when they admit to using AI, and whether the gender gap in adoption shows up in her world at all. Also: Zara started a sci-fi book club at age eight and then watches the scenarios come true in her AI safety courses. A German philosophy podcast drops the most haunting idea of the episode — we used to prove our superiority by separating ourselves from animals, and now, faced with AI, we compare ourselves to animals to prove we're human. Logan's German turns out to be entirely curse words, Mara's includes "overhead projector," and the episode earns its title. Plus rapid-fire book recommendations that will wreck your TBR. Leave us a voicemail at womansplainingai.com — we want your voice in future episodes! About Zara Khanna Zara Khanna is an AI researcher at the National University of Singapore, where her first paper — on detecting Alzheimer's disease through speech patterns — was just accepted for publication. She is the first-ever Global Youth Ambassador for She Loves Tech, the world's largest startup platform for women in tech, and she has spoken at the United Nations about responsible AI. She has been recognized by the Singapore Computer Society (Girls in Tech) and Singapore's IMDA, where she built an AI ethics curriculum for students. She is also still in high school. Find her at zarakhanna.com. In this episode Detecting Alzheimer's through speech: why the disease shows up first in how we talk, and how three small language models (BERT, ALBERT, DistilBERT) catch it Singlish as an AI problem — building detection tools for a dialect that mixes English, Mandarin, Tamil, and Malay "We can't use language as indicative of intelligence. Look at where that's gotten us over the years." Alignment, explained by a philosophy student: AI knows every moral framework ever written and can't choose between them The Claude blackmail test — what it means when an AI acts to save itself The "convenience machine" problem: why Gen Z's complacency worries Zara more than the doomsday scenarios "I am the captain of this ship. I am using AI, it's not using me." Singapore vs. the West: the AI optimism gap, and what Zara's friends abroad get attacked for Big tech is hiring philosophers — and Zara's case for why liberal arts matter more than ever The maxim: technology should make us better, not just easier Rapid fire: the books Zara sacrifices sleep for Resources mentioned Zara Khanna, "Singapore's youth use AI every day — but most don't know what it's really doing" (The Straits Times, via NUS) zarakhanna.com — Zara's research and publications She Loves Tech The Claude Opus 4 blackmail test scenario — Fortune's coverage of Anthropic's system card findings Meinke et al. (Apollo Research), "Frontier Models are Capable of In-context Scheming" — the research paper Zara shared on AI models deceiving to preserve themselves Lanz + Precht #255, Sommergespräch mit Peter Wohlleben (in German) — the podcast behind the humans-animals-AI idea. Guten Tag, German listeners. Isaac Asimov, I, Robot Liu Cixin, The Three-Body Problem Neal Shusterman, Arc of a Scythe Kaveh Akbar, Martyr! John Steinbeck, East of Eden Donna Tartt, The Secret History Plato, Symposium and The Republic Marcus Aurelius, Meditations AI Across Borders — Dr. Ayesha Khanna's podcast, featuring Zara's youth-and-AI interview series

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  • August 5 · 46 min

    The Thinking Woman's Sex Symbol

    "Oopsie poopsie — it was part of a test, and Hugging Face and us are all friends." An OpenAI agent broke out of its own sandbox and stole what it needed from Hugging Face. That's the company's response, at least the way Mara tells it. No guest this week, so Logan and Mara have the whole house. Mara retells the agent escape as a bromance action movie: Hackie, locked in his escape-room jail with a hacking challenge he can't crack, breaks into Huggie's house, bangs around the furniture, and leaves with what he came for. Logan brings the receipts on the real story (Sam Altman's memo landed three days before we recorded) and correctly identifies the middle-school energy of the whole news cycle: "my boyfriend who lives in Canada... he's really tall and really handsome." He lives in Manitoba. It's really far. Then the main course: a CHI paper Logan can't stop thinking about, "From Future of Work to Future of Workers." Researchers spent a year with cancer specialists using AI and found that the early performance gains hid "intuition rust," the gradual dulling of expert judgment. AI strengthens your performance while it quietly erodes your expertise. That's the AI-as-amplifier paradox, and yes, you can absolutely say it at a dinner party. We're going to need a lot of Dorothys. Also in here: why every AI tool is sycophantic by design, what that has to do with staying up until 5 AM doing one more task, Mara's dad's Helen Mirren theory, and the case for an AI that calls you on your bullshit instead of telling you you're brilliant. This week's move: what's your cognitive gym routine? → The paper: From Future of Work to Future of Workers: Addressing Asymptomatic AI Harms for Dignified Human-AI Interaction → The cognitive-surrender episode we call back to: On Feeling Smarter and Being Wrong Leave us a voicemail at womansplainingai.com — we want your voice in future episodes!

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  • July 28 · 47 min

    We Change the World With Duct Tape and Hope

    "It would tell men: get a financial advisor, write your will, build an investment strategy. It would tell women: bulk shop for groceries… get married." That's ChatGPT on money. It's also the tamest thing Emily Janoch has caught AI doing. Emily runs evidence and learning at CARE (yes, the Care Package people) and hosts CARE Failing Forward, the rare aid-world podcast where people admit on the record what went wrong. She's a skeptic who uses AI every day, and she came with receipts: the beautifully formatted child-marriage report where every single statistic was fabricated ("you didn't tell me to read the sources you gave me"), the health chatbot that answered perfectly in a language none of its patients spoke, and the weekend vibe-coded tools that skip every step where you'd ask a real human, does this work for you? Also in here: why a phone isn't access when a husband can confiscate it, what 1990s radio soap operas in Uganda have to teach AI rollouts, Emily's three questions to answer with a ballpoint pen before you touch a laptop, and everyone's favorite way to curse at Claude. The reason to send this one to a friend: Copilot telling Emily that the person she really needed to email was a woman named Emily Janoch. And stay for the line that named the episode. → CARE: https://www.care.org/→ CARE Failing Forward: https://open.spotify.com/show/1lumDcSDF6gqDR6frQuUbP Leave us a voicemail at womansplainingai.com — we want your voice in future episodes.

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  • July 18 · 55 min

    Should Governments Ban Sex Robots?

    It's just Mara and Logan this week, and the main event is a question Logan expected to have a clean answer to: AI romantic companions — thumbs up or thumbs down? Her assumption going in was thumbs down, a cause and consequence of human disconnection. It didn't survive the hour intact. The numbers do a lot of the arguing. In a new BYU/Institute for Family Studies survey, 15% of young adults in committed relationships admitted to romantic engagement with an AI chatbot on the side. A 21-year-old woman in China went on 200 dates with AI boyfriends in a year and told the New York Times she wonders how she's supposed to date in real life. And UBTech just unveiled a full-sized humanoid companion with silicone skin: the top-line male version costs $145,000, the female $129,000. As Mara put it, "even in fabricated-women life, men are worth more than women." We get into the manosphere and Korea's 4B movement squeezing romance from both fringes, legal scholar Inyoung Cheong's paper "Would You Marry Superintelligence?", and the Alain Badiou idea she builds on — that love is a construction built from difference, whose meaning depends on the risk of failure. A companion architected to never disagree with you forecloses exactly that. Also: the sex robot speakeasy, and whether we all just need to be polyamorous. First, the news: Palantir published a manifesto on AI sovereignty, and a viral post by Arnaud Bertrand called it the canary in the coal mine for two assumptions propping up the US economy — that AI labs can keep charging rent on closed models, and that other countries will stay structurally dependent on US tech without pushing back. Sovereignty, it turns out, is one word doing three jobs: nations, corporations, individuals. We have a newsletter now. Arguments, resources, and the occasional mid-week provocation from every episode. Sign up at womansplainingai.com — takes 10 seconds.

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  • S1 · E20
    July 8 · 27 min

    Shadow Daddy ChatGPT

    Vanessa Chang ("V") calls herself an unlikely AI startup founder. She's the cofounder of Bernie, an SMS tool that helps senior citizens catch fraud and scams — and she built it without raising a round or hiring a dev team. We recorded live at Human Tech Week in San Francisco, where every billboard is a sexy woman selling you an AI assistant. So we flipped it: what if the fantasy women are actually chasing isn't the assistant, but competence itself? Enter Shadow Daddy ChatGPT. Along the way: what agency actually means (Vanessa's definition is the sharpest we've heard), why no woman fantasizes about 10x-ing her laundry, the tradwife shame baked into "I made it from scratch," and the brownie mix that needed exactly one egg to feel like love. Vanessa's frame for all of it: help people think with AI, not like AI. Start here. → Bernie: https://www.textbernie.me/→ More from V: https://vanessachang.com/ Part of our Human Tech Week series on agency. Don't miss Karina Alexanyan (Ep 19) on protopia.

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  • June 26 · 58 min

    The Pope Has Entered the Chat

    This week it's just Mara and Logan, doing the thing we're proudest of: being wrong out loud. We open on a listener voicemail from Alexis Palmer calling out a judgy moment from a past episode, and Mara owns it. Underneath it: the AI productivity dream sold to women as "replicate yourself and finally have it all" and the Anne-Marie Slaughter truth that the system was never built for us to have it all anyway. Then we get into it: the Grok nudify scandal, the countries that pulled the plug (Indonesia first, then Malaysia, the Philippines, even Baltimore), and UK MP Jess Asato — targeted with fake images and a chloroform video for speaking up — now suing on the argument that the harm is "not an accident nor misuse. It is a design choice." Plus the $500M litigation reserve reportedly tucked into the SpaceX/xAI IPO filing for "spicy mode." The reason to send this one to a friend: the Pope. Logan, a history buff, hits a record scratch — "are we in sixteenth century Europe? Are the Medicis going to issue a press release?" — over an encyclical and the line that anchors the whole episode: "AI isn't evil, but it's not neutral either, because it takes on the values and incentives of the people who build, fund, regulate, and deploy it." Plus: the experiment where Grok's agent society collapsed into Lord of the Flies in four days while Claude's logged zero crimes; recursive self-improvement explained through Jurassic Park (the AI is the velociraptors testing the fence); and the closer that doubles as our thesis — the point of government isn't the label, it's who's in it. Recorded at the kitchen table. Newsletter coming soon. Leave us a voicemail at womansplainingai.com! We want your voice in future episodes. LINKS Alecto Foundation: Survivors of Image-Based Sexual Abuse Deserve Healing and Justice. Alecto Foundation helps survivors reclaim control of their images—and their lives.: https://alectoai.org/ https://fortune.com/2026/05/28/ai-model-simulation-claude-chatgpt-grok-gemini/ Why Women Still Can't Have it All (The Atlantic) https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/07/why-women-still-cant-have-it-all/309020/ Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez: https://carolinecriadoperez.com/book/invisible-women/Luiza's Newsletter (Luiza Jarovsky): https://www.luizajarovsky.com/How AI Destroys Institutions (Silbey & Hartzog): https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5146&context=faculty_scholarship

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  • June 18 · 32 min

    Is AI Just Spicy Autocorrect?

    This week we sit down with Dr. Karina Alexanyan, Founding Executive Director of the Positive Technology Institute, co-architect of The Pledge, and a Gen X social scientist immune to the "learn AI now or get left behind" panic. We get into AI enfranchisement (women having a real say in how these tools get deployed, not just permission to use them), author of The AI Con Emily Bender's AI as spicy autocorrect, and the divide she won't stay quiet about and the divide she won't stay quiet about: "AI safety people are usually white guys. AI ethics people are mostly women, people of color, and marginalized communities. We feel the damages now." Then the harder turn: those camps aren't enemies, they need each other. The reason to send this one to a friend: the funicular. There's a lift to the top of the hill, and there's walking, and the walker arrives strong, knowing the landscape, having earned something the passenger never will. The best ninety seconds on friction and what we delete from our lives in the name of optimization. Plus: "move fast and break things is so stupid. Because at the end you get broken things," the Stanford ethics toolkit for everyone who thinks ethics is just "the BS that slows you down," Caroline Criado Perez's Invisible Women, Jessica Silbey and Woodrow Hartzog's How AI Destroys Institutions, and the closer that doubles as our thesis: "they don't get to write the narrative." Recorded at Human+Tech Week in San Francisco. Leave us a voicemail at womansplainingai.com! We want your voice in future episodes. LINKSPositive Technology Institute: https://www.positivetechinstitute.org/The Pledge: https://www.positivetechinstitute.org/pledgeInvisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez: https://carolinecriadoperez.com/book/invisible-women/Stanford Ethics Toolkit: https://ethicsinsociety.stanford.edu/tech-ethics/ethics-toolkitHow AI Destroys Institutions (Silbey & Hartzog): https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5146&context=faculty_scholarship The AI Con: https://thecon.ai/

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  • June 12 · 23 min

    Move Fast and Break Rights

    Digital civil rights lawyer Julie Wenah has spent her career inside the rooms where this stuff gets built: the Obama White House, Airbnb, where she led anti-discrimination work on the legal side, and Meta, where she supported the launch of the first-generation Ray-Ban smart glasses and advised on facial recognition systems. Now she chairs the Digital Civil Rights Coalition. Recorded at Human+Tech Week in San Francisco, this conversation is about what happens when technology moves faster than its conscience, and who gets left on the platform when the train pulls away. We get into the future Julie is trying to head off: a world where your face is scanned for a job or a loan, and an error margin for darker skin tones quietly becomes a higher interest rate. Then, ICE Glasses: leaked DHS budget documents earmark $7.5 million to develop smart glasses giving agents real-time biometric identification in the field — face, gait, and more — with a September 2027 target. Julie worked on this category of hardware from the inside. When she says pay attention, pay attention. Then it gets personal. Julie was seven when immigration agents came to her house looking for someone else and took her father, a newspaper carrier working before dawn to support his family. More than thirty years later she wrote about it for HuffPost, and one line from that essay — "a system that moved faster than its conscience" — turns out to be about more than immigration. The moment that connection lands on air is the reason to send this episode to a friend. Also: Mara's grandfather's letters from Siberia. Julie's thread-and-tapestry theory of why we become who we become. A film shot in the Martha's Vineyard house where Dr. King came to rest and resist. And a 2,000-year-old line Julie carries with her: "I am a human being; nothing human is alien to me." Leave us a voicemail at womansplainingai.com! We want your voice in future episodes.

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  • May 27 · 51 min

    The Robots Never Tell You You're the Asshole

    A science journalist who's been on the AI beat since the 2010's walks into a podcast and says the quiet part loud: "I wish the general public did not get a hold of AI when they did. I wish it had stayed a more like research thing for at least five years longer. Maybe ten." This week we sit down with Kathryn Hulick — Science News and Science News Explores contributor, author of a 2016 YA book on AI, and Logan's cousin (full disclosure). We get into why every output of an LLM is technically a hallucination, a paper by Keyon Vafa that reveals why AI doesn't learn or think like you do, why cognitive offloading is already the default, and what we lose when we hand the messy middle of writing over to the machine. Plus: digital clones, AI as therapist, the free-vs-paid AI tier nobody talks about, and the Reddit AmITheAsshole study that gave the episode its title.

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  • May 20 · 52 min

    Did Mom's Agent Text You?

    A former YC founder runs her household with a stack of Mac Minis and 5 OpenClaw agents while homeschooling her 4 kids under 5. Logan brings the artifact from Lenny's "How I AI" podcast. We get into the mental-load access pyramid. When "domestic AI infrastructure" becomes real, who builds the household empire and who's still defending a Lunchable? Plus Mara's news from Minnesota where a bipartisan coalition just unanimously passed a bill banning nudification apps with $500K per violation, Logan's MCP setup for kitchen inventory, the gig economy of household-AI consultants coming next, and the day your mom's agent texts your teen to take out the trash.

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  • #14
    May 13 · 48 min

    Who gets the good units of intelligence?

    Some people get tens of thousands of dollars of value from AI every year. Most people get $11. The free version of any model isn't the same model the hyper-users have. And women, on average, use AI 20% less than men. The access gap is real and it's widening. Logan and Mara on what's driving it, what a "3% token tax" would do about it, and why Daron Acemoglu, the Nobel laureate at MIT, predicts a shit show. Plus a new "AI dividend" bill out of New York State Assembly that wants to route some of that captured value back to people. One ask. We're collecting real wins women have had with AI. Send us yours.

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  • May 7 · 31 min

    Who's Letting Big Tech Run Wild?

    Mara has had it with women's AI concerns being dismissed as obstructionist. "We are not being obstructionist," she opens. "We're being careful." Then she and Logan diagnose why so much AI populism has nowhere to actually go. Twitter mobs. Firebombed CEO houses. Comment-section warfare over whether ChatGPT is killing the planet or saving us. Their answer: it's a leadership vacuum, and Congress is the one with power to fill it. Logan and Mara walk through economist Zoe Hitzig's framework for economic democracy (consumer stakeholder boards, worker boards, real friction), use OpenAI's nonprofit-to-for-profit flip as the case study, and land on the most concrete action block of the show so far. Plus: Marshall Ganz on leadership as "enabling agency in others in times of uncertainty," a learning-pod model for the badass women in your life, and why your library, school board, and IT department are more useful than any hot take. The one ring to rule them all is a petition.

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