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 · 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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April 22 · 59 min
Stop Hiring Humans
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 aristocracy" (18 households, $1.8 trillion), the quiet relocation of power from DC to SF, and why public.ai might be the actual infrastructure answer. Logan closes on the hakawati analogy: find one small problem, and go build the solution yourself.
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#11
April 14 · 52 min
AI, prenups, and the economics of marriage
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 personal website this weekend. *Editor's note: Logan did not, in fact, recall the gender demographic split in China accurately. It's 51.2% male to 48.8% female. She was close-ish.
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April 3 · 1 hr
33,000 Downloads: AI Destroys Institutions (Interview with Jessica Silbey)
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 abstinence should be the new dry January. Plus: the Constitution is a poem, friction is the feature, and Mara reads Yeats.
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#8
March 25 · 49 min
Is Using AI Cheating?
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 predict flash floods and actually save lives, and we both announce our fellowships. Leave us a voicemail at womansplainingai.com.
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March 18 · 47 min
AI Tells Boys to Be Entrepreneurs and Girls to Be Influencers
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 instead of defaulting to stereotypes. C9SD569gir0pAcvaaUPH
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