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

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When you call your bank, your doctor's office, or your financial planner, the voice that greets you may have been deliberately engineered to make you feel safe, calm, and compliant — and you almost certainly can't tell. Research shows people correctly identify synthetic voice only about 55% of the time. That's barely better than a coin flip.

In this co-host deep dive, Kimberly and Jessica pull apart what "voice" actually is (pitch, pace, prosody, timbre, accent) and why those features matter for trust, persuasion, and power. Synthetic voice isn't new, but the technology has crossed a threshold because it now replicates the subtle features that signal warmth, authority, and credibility. That has obvious applications in healthcare and customer service. It also powers grandparent scams, deepfake executive impersonation, and sales pipelines designed to move you from skepticism to compliance before you notice what happened.

In this episode:

• What linguistics actually tells us about why we trust certain voices (and why politicians hire coaches to lower their pitch)
• The FTC's 2024 numbers on imposter scams — $700 million lost by people over 60 in one year, a 362% increase from 2020
• The Hong Kong finance worker who wired ~$25 million USD (HK$200 million) after a deepfake CFO appeared on a Zoom call
• ElevenLabs, Speechify, and the companies building what they call "emotional operating systems" for AI
• Trust vs. persuasion: when shared goals protect you — and when they don't
• Why older adults are the highest-risk population, and why detection tools aren't the solution
• Where regulation actually stands: New York's synthetic performer law (SB 7013), the EU AI Act, and what's still missing
• Practical questions to ask yourself — and the companies you interact with

Mentioned in this episode:

• Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
• Project Hail Mary directed by Drew Goddard, starring Ryan Gosling (film, 2025)
• The Martian by Andy Weir
• "Walk my Walk" by Blanco Brown (the real human artist)
• "Walk my Walk" by Breaking Rust (the AI-generated version)
• Kimberly and Jessica's paper: "Defining and assessing AI literacy for researchers across the research lifecycle" in Frontiers in Education

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In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Julia Stamm, founder and CEO of She Shapes AI, to unpack "The Certainty Trap." The way tech leaders project inevitability about AI, and the way that projection strips the rest of us of our agency. Julia is a sociologist and has held senior roles at the European Commission and the G20.

We talk about why so many AI adoption strategies are measuring the wrong things, why employees are quietly doing more work since AI showed up rather than less, and why women founders keep getting penalized for running for-profit businesses while their male counterparts get celebrated for the same thing. Julia also shares why she believes the most powerful question any of us can ask right now is simply, who benefits from this story being told this way?

Topics Covered

• The certainty trap and Julia's TEDx talk on reclaiming agency in the AI age
• Why the inevitability narrative is marketing, not prophecy
• The for-profit double standard that women founders face
• How AI adoption is breaking the social fabric of organizations
• Why measuring adoption rates and time saved are the wrong metrics
• The magic triangle behind She Shapes AI: female leadership, responsible AI, and social impact
• Real examples of women building AI for impact, including Rhiana Spring's Sophia chatbot for survivors of domestic violence
• Why employees are doing more work, not less, since AI arrived
• The loss of optimism about the future and what it means for how we talk about AI
• Why seeking out alternative narratives matters, and where to find them

Referenced in This Episode

• She Shapes AI
• Julia's TEDx talk: Beyond the Certainty Trap
• She Shapes AI Global Awards 2025/26 finalists
• Rest of World, the nonprofit publication covering technology stories beyond the West
• Empire of AI by Karen Hao
• Cory Doctorow on the TINA framework (there is no alternative)
• Ethan Mollick on the 3% of organizations using AI in the sweet spot
• Julia Stamm on LinkedIn
• Julia Stamm on Substack
• Julia's forthcoming personal website at juliastamm.com

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We keep being told the problem is women's hesitation around AI, that we need to adopt faster, skill up, and get in the game. But what if the hesitation is the rational response? And what if the systems telling us to move faster are the same ones punishing us when we do?

This week, Kimberly and Jessica talk with Nikki Meller, founder and CEO of CreduEd and DocuCred AI, a member of the Tech Council of Australia, and the founder of Women in AI Australia. Nikki brings a rare combination of on-the-ground organizing and firsthand experience as a female tech founder who has navigated investment rounds, built a development team, and made it to pitch week in San Francisco — all from a nursing background.

The conversation centers on a problem that's structural, not individual: organizations hand employees an AI platform with no governance, no training plan, and no reassurance about job security, then interpret the resulting hesitation — which falls disproportionately on women — as a capability gap. Nikki makes the case that this hesitation is actually a form of due diligence, and that the "competence penalty" documented in recent research (AI-assisted work rated as less competent, with the penalty larger for women) reframes the whole "women are behind on AI" narrative as a trap rather than a failing.

Topics covered:

• What the Harvard Business Review's coverage of the "competence penalty" research actually shows — and why it reframes women's AI hesitation as rational risk assessment
• How organizational culture creates the AI gender gap before policy ever enters the picture
• Australia's National AI Strategy: what it gets right, where it mentions women (spoiler: mostly in the context of abuse and safety risk, not leadership or capability), and what that omission signals
• The data aggregation problem: why lumping women, First Nations people, people with disability, and remote communities into a single "disadvantaged group" makes the research almost useless
• Why "the leaky pipeline" is the wrong frame — and what better language would look like
• What governments and organizations would actually have to do for "innovation is inclusive" to become more than a tagline

Guest:

Nikki Meller is the founder and CEO of CreduEd and DocuCred, a member of the Tech Council of Australia, and the founder of Women in AI Australia. You can find her and the organization at womeninai.org.au and on LinkedIn.

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In this episode, Jessica teaches Kimberly quantum computing — and we mean that literally. Starting from classical bits and working through superposition, Schrödinger's cat, the observer effect, and Google's Willow chip, Jessica builds a surprisingly intuitive explanation of what quantum computers actually do and why they matter for the future of AI.

But the episode starts somewhere else, with the phone call Jessica made after we stopped recording, questioning whether she should have tried to explain something she isn't formally trained in. That moment opens a bigger conversation about why women hesitate to speak publicly in technical spaces — not because they lack knowledge, but because the social penalties for being visibly uncertain are higher.

We cover:

• How classical computers work (bits, binary, the basics)
• What makes quantum computers fundamentally different (superposition, qubits, the observer effect)
• Schrödinger's cat — what it actually means and why a physicist would argue the cat is both dead and alive
• The double-slit experiment and why watching something changes what it is
• How Google's Willow chip did in five minutes what would take a classical computer longer than the age of the universe — and why you should read that headline carefully
• Why quantum computers are kept colder than outer space
• The three possible futures for quantum computing and what each would mean for everyday life
• The connection to AI — why quantum could speed up model training and what that actually looks like
• Who controls access to this technology, and why that question sounds familiar
• The research on why women adopt new technologies more slowly — and what it has to do with self-silencing, impostor syndrome, and gendered penalties for public uncertainty

Links

Women, voice, and silence

• bell hooks — National Women’s History Museum:
  bell hooks
  
  
• bell hooks and feminism — Equal Rights Advocates:
  10 rules: following bell hooks’ instructions for our movement
  
  
• Dana Crowley Jack — Harvard University Press:
  Silencing the Self
  
  
• Self-silencing summary — TIME:
  Self-Silencing Is Making Women Sick
  
  

Tech adoption and impostor feelings

• Women and AI adoption gap — LeanIn.org:
  Women and AI: The Gender Gap in AI Adoption and Usage
  
  
• Women avoiding AI — Harvard Business School:
  Women Are Avoiding AI. Will Their Careers Suffer?
  
  
• Women in tech and imposter syndrome — IT Pro:
  Imposter syndrome is pushing women out of tech
  
  

Quantum computing basics

• Quantum computing intro — QCS Hub:
  Introduction to quantum computing
  
  
• Schrödinger’s cat — Yale News:
  Doubling down on Schrödinger’s cat
  
  

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