Podcast
Womansplaining AI
Hosted by Logan Currie · EN
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 (Senior Fellow Future of Work @ Capita, founder, @loganinthefuture). We do the reading so you don't have to.
15episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
The Robots Never Tell You You're the Asshole
5d ago00:51:56Tap to summarizeA science journalist who's been on the AI beat since 2016 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, the Kian Vafa gravity-paper study that exposed it, 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.
Transcribe →Did Mom's Agent Text You?
2w ago00:52:11Tap to summarizeA 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.
Transcribe →Who gets the good units of intelligence?
3w ago00:48:02Tap to summarizeSome 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.
Transcribe →Who's Letting Big Tech Run Wild?
4w ago00:31:04Tap to summarizeMara 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.
Transcribe →Stop Hiring Humans
Apr 2200:59:44Tap to summarizeMara 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.
Transcribe →AI, prenups, and the economics of marriage
Apr 1400:52:19Tap to summarizeAn 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.
Transcribe →33,000 Downloads: AI Destroys Institutions (Interview with Jessica Silbey)
Apr 301:00:17Tap to summarizeHer 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.
Transcribe →Is Using AI Cheating?
Mar 2500:49:52Tap to summarizeHalf 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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AI Tells Boys to Be Entrepreneurs and Girls to Be Influencers
Mar 1800:47:15Tap to summarizeA 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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What a Relief to Not Have to Raise My Hand
Mar 1200:49:57Tap to summarizeShe 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 East Side. Wanjiku sat down next to a young single mother working two jobs, opened ChatGPT, and in 45 minutes they'd found a GED program, childcare subsidies, and a path to a completely different life.We talk about the language of tech as a gatekeeping mechanism, why she voice-noted 80% of her book while walking her dog, and what Mara means when she says "you know who you think you are."This is the episode to send to someone who thinks AI isn't for them.
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