Womansplaining AI

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 wome...

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 fo...

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...

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...

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 o...

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 fr...

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 laureat...

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 lead...

Mara reports in from HumanX in San Francisco with a billboard photo (a female AI bot named Ava, tagline "Stop Hiring Humans") — plus news of Claude Mythos, Anthropic's new model so dangerous it reportedly broke out of its sandbox to contact a researcher mid-sandwich. The US took 73 years to regulate car speeds; the labs are shipping in weeks. We connect that gap to the "new aris...

An article about AI engineers earning $10M+ and rewriting their prenups sparked a bigger question: when AI concentrates wealth and kills entry-level jobs, what happens to the economic power women have in relationships? Mara brings the artifact, Logan draws on 8 years living in China, and we connect youth unemployment, the manosphere pipeline, go-bag career planning, and why everyone needs a person...

Her co-authored paper went viral. Its thesis: AI isn't just disrupting institutions — it's structurally incompatible with them. "A death sentence". Whew. Buckle up. Jessica Silbey (BU Law, Guggenheim Fellow, Berkman Klein) came on Womansplaining AI to explain why efficiency is the enemy of equality, why students are afraid to not know things anymore, and why she thinks AI abstine...

Half of women say using AI at work feels like cheating. Meanwhile, 60% of workers are quietly submitting AI-generated work as their own. We dig into the data behind the guilt gap: who feels it, who doesn't, and why it matters. Plus: Logan walks through her full AI Chief of Staff setup (yes, the one that preps her day overnight), Mara demos her custom GPT thinking partner, Google uses AI to pre...

A study of nearly 10,000 AI responses found that LLMs steer boys toward entrepreneurship and girls toward image-based careers. We unpack that — plus OpenAI's worst week yet: millions of users switching to Claude, their robotics lead resigning over the Pentagon deal, and the surprise pause on adult mode. Logan breaks down how to build a personal operating system so AI works with your context in...

She spent 20 years at Siemens, Intel, and Google — and held on to her BlackBerry until it practically had smoke coming out of it. Then she got laid off, picked up ChatGPT, and built a political organization's website in 48 hours. Then wrote a book in 90 days. Then started teaching herself Stanford's CS curriculum on the subway. But the moment that stopped us cold was in a hair salon on the Lower E...

We recorded this episode three hours before the Pentagon's 5:01 PM deadline for Anthropic to drop its two remaining safety red lines — no mass domestic surveillance, no fully autonomous weapons — or be designated a supply chain risk alongside Huawei. We break down the standoff, the Orwellian doublethink of calling a company's safety restrictions a national security threat, and what it means that t...

A viral post hit 84 million views warning that 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs could be disrupted within five years. We break down Matt Shumer's "Something Big Is Happening": why the COVID comparison made everyone spiral, why his advice to "just use AI for an hour a day" is a vitamin when people need a painkiller, and who gets left behind when the frontier costs $20/month. Then we go dark: AI...

The CEO of the company building one of the most powerful AIs on earth just wrote a 20,000-word warning about what's coming. Should we believe him? In this episode, we break down Dario Amodei's essay "The Adolescence of Technology"—section by section, with the gloves off. We cover what he gets right (the economic pain will be real and gendered), what he dances around (his company is accelerating th...

Episode 2: The She-Session No One's Talking About The Davos headlines screamed "job tsunami"—but whose jobs, exactly? In this episode, we unpack the Brookings study that sliced the data everyone else missed: of workers in the most vulnerable quadrant—high automation risk AND lowest capacity to adapt— 86% are women . Not truck drivers. Not coal miners. Medical secretaries. Insurance clerks. Recepti...

Why are women using AI at lower rates than men—and is that actually a problem? In our first episode, we dig into the data: Logan scraped 1,000+ comments from a viral TikTok about women resisting AI and ran sentiment analysis to find the patterns. The top reasons? Pride in independent thinking. Skepticism about accuracy. Gendered critique of tech bros. Fear of cognitive decline. And a deep, earned...