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

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.

LINKS
Positive Technology Institute: https://www.positivetechinstitute.org/
The Pledge: https://www.positivetechinstitute.org/pledge
Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez: https://carolinecriadoperez.com/book/invisible-women/
Stanford Ethics Toolkit: https://ethicsinsociety.stanford.edu/tech-ethics/ethics-toolkit
How AI Destroys Institutions (Silbey & Hartzog): https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5146&context=faculty_scholarship

The AI Con: https://thecon.ai/

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.