We're back from a few weeks off (I went to Florida, Jessica bought a new house and went to a psilocybin retreat — more on that below) with a wide-ranging catch-up that ends up circling one idea: Incentives matter more than intentions. We trace that thread through a proposed data center near Ames, Iowa, through the words AI chatbots keep teaching us to use, and through our own complicated relationships with money, time, and control.

In this episode:

The data center fight in Ames, Iowa (Kimberly's current hometown). Ames is now considering airport-adjacent land for a data center, and we walk through what that actually means at scale, including the energy draw, the water use, the construction-jobs pitch that's more one-time than it sounds, and what a community can realistically do about it.

Incentives over intentions. A phrase from Your Undivided Attention's recent episode on the Center for Humane Technology's seven principles of humane tech becomes the throughline for the whole episode. We talk about tech executives who don't let their own kids use their platforms and, more personally, the unsolicited advice that's well-meant but lands as criticism anyway.

"Claudish" and linguistic capitalism. Kimberly has been tracking word-frequency spikes in a web corpus — quiet, nuanced, connective tissue, and others — that track suspiciously well with the rise of generative AI in everyday writing. We talk through Frédéric Kaplan's 2014 concept of linguistic capitalism and how an SEO-shaped corpus of web writing became the training data now teaching all of us to sound a certain way.

Surveillance capitalism and bread and circuses. We talk about Sarah Wynn-Williams' Careless People and what it reveals about how Meta's own leadership treated their products' addictiveness, plus the older idea of "bread and circuses" — distraction and convenience as tools of social control. If you're unfamiliar with surveillance capitalism, we highly recommend this book by Shoshana Zuboff.

Frugal hedonism (and failing at it). A book recommendation for The Art of Frugal Hedonism by Annie Raser-Rowland and Adam Grubb leads to an honest conversation about the gap between the lifestyle we'd like to want and the one we actually have.

Pit & Peach. Beach trips, a near-drowning rescue, a psilocybin retreat in Georgia, and stepping away from a long-held academic role.

Also mentioned in this episode:

• Ayana Gray, I, Medusa (Kimberly's beach read)

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In this episode, Kimberly Becker and Professor Laura Dumin pull back the curtain on motherhood, higher ed burnout, and AI's effects on teaching. They talk pretty candidly about midcareer life with Laura sharing the reality of juggling three internal grants, release time, her kids' summer camp rush, and student needs and Kimberly tracing her own path out of Moxie, the AI feedback startup she co-founded with Jessica, and into a job completely outside academia after half a year of applications with zero interviews. Together, they discuss rising intolerance for institutional nonsense and why higher ed initiatives often feel like yet another layer of unpaid labor.

Key themes:

• 4–4 teaching loads and the myth of “just add research”
• Being the primary earner: health insurance, risk, and career choices
• Closing an edtech startup and facing a brutal job market
• Midlife in academia: burnout, boundaries, and “less tolerance for everything”
• Why many of us are choosing “good enough” over constant hustle

Suggested links to include:

• LinkedIn profiles for Kimberly and Laura
• Prior WTBAI episode about Moxie

Leave us a comment or a suggestion!

Support the show

Contact us: https://www.womentalkinboutai.com/