The Technically Human Podcast

Today I am interviewing Bruce Friedrich, the author of the newly published book "Meat: How the Next Agricultural Revolution Will Transform Humanity's Favorite Food―and Our Future." Bruce Friedrich is the president and founder of the Good Food Institute, one of the leading think tanks working to make the global food system better for the planet, people, and animals. As an international network of organizations, they advance alternative proteins to help meet climate, global health, food security, and biodiversity goals.

Bruce Friedrich serves as GFI’s chief thought leader and relationship-builder, working in close partnership with GFI’s global teams and food system stakeholders around the world. Before founding the Good Food Instiute, he served as Director of Policy for four years at Farm Sanctuary. Prior to that, he worked at PETA for 15 years as Head of Public Campaigns, leading many of the organization's highest-profile and most memorable campaigns.

Bruce has penned op-eds for the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, Nature Food, Wired, and many other publications. He has represented GFI on the Ezra Klein Show, Making Sense (Sam Harris), TED Radio Hour, New Yorker Radio Hour, PBS News Hour, and a variety of other podcasts and TV programs. Bruce’s TED talk has been viewed almost 2.5 million times and translated into 30 languages. Nature featured Bruce’s 2026 book Meat as one of its five “best science picks,” and Publishers Weekly selected Meat as one of the 10 best new releases in science, writing: “This packed account makes food science feel like an urgent and essential undertaking.”

The book has also received praise from Nobel Laureate in economics Michael Kremer, primatologist Jane Goodall, and science fiction master Kim Stanley Robinson, among many others.

Bruce graduated magna cum laude from Georgetown Law and also holds degrees from Johns Hopkins University, the London School of Economics, and Grinnell College.

This episode was produced by Jack Lucas Chang.

My guest for this episode is Professor Aleem Hossain, a writer and director working across science fiction, fantasy, experimental cinema, and television. His feature film After We Leave won Best Feature Film at the Sci-Fi-London film festival and Best Director at the Berlin Sci-Fi festival, and his AI-generated short film, Do Bangladroids Dream of Electric Tagore?, premiered at Fantastic Fest and won Best Narrative Film at the AI Art & Film Awards.

His work is shaped by his own multicultural upbringing—the son of a Muslim immigrant from Bangladesh and a mother from a Roman Catholic family in Connecticut—as well as by his interest in expanding both the kinds of stories we tell and the people who are able to tell them.

He is also an associate professor of digital storytelling at Occidental College, where he teaches filmmaking and screenwriting.

In this conversation, we talk about what generative AI makes possible for independent filmmakers, what it fails to understand about culture and identity, and how the arrival of these tools may change not only how films are made, but who gets to imagine the future.

This episode was produced by Jack Lucas Chang.

Globally, 8 billion people will experience trauma in their lifetime. Ninety-three percent of those in crisis will not receive adequate care. The barriers are familiar: cost, stigma, language, geography, workforce shortages. What is less familiar is someone actually building technology to address all of them at once, starting from survivor experience rather than market opportunity.

Megs Shah is the Founder and CEO of The Parasol Cooperative, a nonprofit that builds trauma-informed AI tools for survivors of domestic violence, human trafficking, and technology-facilitated abuse. Her flagship product, Ruth, is the world's first trauma-informed AI chat — designed by and for survivors and the advocates who support them. In just over a year, Ruth has facilitated more than 679,000 private crisis support interactions across 147 countries in 85 languages, earning a 92% helpfulness rating. It requires no login, no account, and no personal information. Privacy is not a feature; it is the architecture.

In this conversation, Megs and I talk about what it means to build technology under a fundamentally different moral and financial logic — one that centers dignity, safety, and access rather than engagement and data capture. We discuss how lived experience from survivors shapes design decisions that conventional technologists miss, why trauma-informed AI is categorically different from general-purpose AI deployed in sensitive contexts, and what it looks like to measure success when the meaningful metrics are trust, stabilization, and safety rather than clicks. We also talk about the ways technology is already being weaponized against the people Ruth is built to protect — and what it would take to design systems that take patterned harm seriously before it escalates.

This episode was produced by Jack Lucas Chang.

My guest today is Avi Tuschman, founder and CEO of Crickit.ai, an AI tool that live fact-checks social media videos. It’s a visionary technology that analyzes and verifies claims made on videos shared on social media platforms in real time.

Crickit.ai aims to help people make smarter, healthier decisions about what they accept as facts on social media. It arrives at a timely moment, as nearly 4 in 10 young adults get news from influencers, and trust in media hits record lows.  

Avi Tuschman is a Stanford StartX entrepreneur with more than a decade of experience building AI companies at the intersection of risk management and predictive analytics. In the first half of his career, he specialized in international political-risk management, working across private-sector intelligence, multilateral banking, applied, and academic settings. His research and book on the science underlying human political orientation have been featured in mainstream and peer-reviewed media in 25 countries.

Tuschman holds a PhD in Anthropological Sciences from Stanford University.

This episode was produced by Jack Lucas Chang.

After a year away writing my book, I'm back with more of the conversations that got me through it — starting with Miranda Bogen, founding Director of the Center for Democracy & Technology's AI Governance Lab and CDT's Chief Technologist.

Miranda has spent her career at the intersection of AI, policy, and civil rights — most recently leading responsible AI strategy at Meta, where she drove company-wide efforts to measure and mitigate bias in AI-powered products. Before that, she was a senior policy analyst at Upturn, where her research on algorithmic discrimination in advertising and hiring helped shape how the industry thinks about AI accountability.

We talk about what it actually takes to govern AI systems responsibly — inside a company and at a policy level — where bias creeps into machine learning, why technical fixes alone aren't enough, and what real, workable AI regulation could look like. Miranda's work has been featured in the Harvard Business Review, NPR, The Atlantic, Wired, and Last Week Tonight, and she brings that same clarity to this conversation.

This episode was co-produced by Jack Lucas Chang. 

In this episode of the show, I speak with Tom Coughlin, the standing President and CEO of IEEE, the world's largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity. We discuss the IEEE's vision of technological innovatinon, what it really means to "benefit humanity" through tech, and how the tech sector can, and should, move toward a values-driven approach to innovation.

Tom Coughlin is an IEEE Life Fellow, past president of IEEE-USA, past director of IEEE Region 6, past chair of the Santa Clara Valley IEEE Section, past chair of the Consultants Network of Silicon Valley and is also active with the Storage Networking Industry Association and Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers. Coughlin is also president of Coughlin Associates, a digital storage analyst and business and technology consultant. He has over 40 years in the data storage industry with engineering and senior management positions at several companies. Coughlin Associates consults, publishes books and market and technology reports (including The Media and Entertainment Storage Report and an Emerging Memory Report) and puts on digital storage-oriented events. He is a regular storage and memory contributor for Forbes.com and media and entertainment organization websites

Today we are bringing you a conversation featuring one technologist who is rethinking and reshaping social media—to build platforms that spark empathy and joy, not division and hate.

Vardon Hamdiu is the co-founder and head of Sparkable, a young nonprofit organization that builds a social media platform aimed at bridging divides.

Growing up immersed in diverse cultures, Vardon has always been a bridge-builder who navigates between worlds. His family history has exposed him to the devastating consequences of communication breakdowns between ethnic communities and the outbreak of war. These experiences have profoundly shaped his understanding of the importance of empathy and social cohesion.

Over the past decade, Vardon has worked on the communications team of a Swiss President, studied to become a teacher, spent an exchange semester in South Africa, and engaged with refugees facing often traumatic circumstances. These experiences made him acutely aware of the enormous disconnect between the information we consume online and the lived realities of many people around the globe. He became deeply passionate about exploring why today’s social media platforms are often dysfunctional and how these powerful systems, which govern our collective attention, could be constructed differently. Driven by this vision, he made the pivotal decision to quit his job, drop out of his studies, and launch Sparkable, aiming to foster a healthier online environment.

In this episode of "Technically Human," I bring you a conversation with one of the great thinkers working at the intersection of ethics and technology, Professor Todd Presner, for an episode about his new book, Ethics of the Algorithm: Digital Humanities and Holocaust Memory. In the conversation, we talk about new direction in Holocaust memory and scholarship, how technologies are enabling new approaches, questions, and interpretations of major historical events, and how digital technologies might help us imagine a new ethics of interpretation of history and memory. 

Dr. Todd Presner is Chair of UCLA’s Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies. Previously, he was the chair of UCLA’s Digital Humanities Program (2011-21), and from 2011-2018, he served as the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Director of the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies. He holds the Michael and Irene Ross Chair in the UCLA Division of the Humanities. His research focuses on European intellectual and cultural history, Holocaust studies, visual culture, and digital humanities. Dr. Presner’s newest book was published with Princeton University Press: Ethics of the Algorithm: Digital Humanities and Holocaust Memory  (Fall 2024). 

In this week's episode of the show, I speak with Daniel Kelley about the culture of online gaming, and the unique set of challenges in the gaming space, related to hate, harassment, and extremism. We talk about the possibilities, and limitations, of regulating that space, and what the landscape of gaming might foretell about the future of increasingly online lives that we live, as more and more of our social interactions take place virtually. We talk about how to make those spaces safer and more inclusive, and whether moderation is the right tack to take in developing that more inclusive future, as well as what other strategies for cultivating such spaces might be possible.

 

Daniel Kelley is the Director of Strategy and Operations of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) Center for Technology and Society (CTS). CTS works through research and advocacy to fight for justice and fair treatment for all in digital social spaces from social media to online games and beyond. For the last five years, Daniel has been the lead author of the first nationally representative survey of hate, harassment, and positive social experiences in online games. He is also the co-author of the Disruption and Harms in Online Games Framework, a resource to define harms in online multiplayer games together with members of the game industry coalition the Fair Play Alliance. He also leads CTS’ tech accountability research efforts, such as its Antisemitism and Holocaust Denial Report Card, which looks at ways to create research-grounded advocacy products to inform the public about the nature of hate and harassment online and to hold tech companies accountable.

Hi Technically Human listeners! Welcome back to another episode of the show. Today I'm sitting down with Alva Noë. We talk about his new book, The Entanglement, and the relationship between technology, philosophy, and art.

In The Entanglement, Professor Noë explores the inseparability of life, art, and philosophy, arguing that we have greatly underestimated what this entangled reality means for understanding human nature. Neither biology, cognitive science, nor AI can tell a complete story of us, and we can no more pin ourselves down than we can fix or settle on the meaning of an artwork. Even more, art and philosophy are the means to set ourselves free, at least to some degree, from convention, habit, technology, culture, and even biology.

Dr. Alva Noë is a philosopher of mind whose research and teaching focus is perception and consciousness, and the philosophy of art. He is the author of Action in Perception (MIT, 2004); Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2009); Varieties of Presence (Harvard, 2012); Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 2015), Infinite Baseball: Notes from a Philosopher at the Ballpark (Oxford, 2019) and, most recently, Learning to Look: Dispatches from the Art World (Oxford 2021).  He holds a Bachelor of the Arts degree from Columbia University; a Bachelors of Philosophy. from University of Oxford;  and a Ph.D. from Harvard University. He teaches in the philosophy department of UC Berkeley.

In this episode of the show, I speak with Dr. Thomas Mullaney about his new book, The Chinese Computer. In the book, Dr. Mullaney outlines the history and evolution of Chinese language computing technology, and explores how the technology of the QWERTY keyboard changed this history of computing. We talk about how the structure of language has shaped the history of digital technologies, and Dr. Mullaney explains how China and the non-Western world—because of the “hypographic” technologies they had to invent in order to join the personal computing revolution— helps us understand the relationship between the human mind and the technologies it creates.

Thomas S. Mullaney is Professor of History and Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures, by courtesy, at Stanford University. He is also the Kluge Chair in Technology and Society at the Library of Congress, and a Guggenheim Fellow. 

He is the author or lead editor of 7 books, including The Chinese Typewriter (winner of the Fairbank prize), Your Computer is on Fire, Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China, and The Chinese Computer—the first comprehensive history of Chinese-language computing. 

His writings have appeared in the Journal of Asian Studies, Technology & Culture, Aeon, Foreign Affairs, and Foreign Policy, and his work has been featured in the LA Times, The Atlantic, the BBC, and in invited lectures at Google, Microsoft, Adobe, and more. He holds a PhD from Columbia University.

Hi Technically Human Listeners!

After a long summer break we are back with a brand season and brand new episodes of the show! To kick off the season, we are bringing you an episode that I’m calling “agree to disagree,” with two guests, Robert D. Atkinson and David Moschella, who join me to argue that the critiques of tech circulating in our environment are full of “myths and scapegoats.” That’s the title of their new book, “Technology Fears and Scapegoats: 40 Myths About Privacy, Jobs, AI, and Today’s Innovation Economy,” published this year by Pallgrave McMillan. The book argues that our era of tech critique, and the impetus for regulation that many critics advocate for and recommend, is misguided, and that our era is one of general pessimism toward AI, in which our society largely overlooks the benefits of this technology. In their words, quote, “These attitudes both reduce the enthusiasm for innovation and the efforts by government needed to spur it.”

Well, as the title of the episode suggests, agree to disagree, both on the facts and the merits of the argument! A key component of this show is my commitment to talking to people with whom I disagree, and foregrounding civil discourse with people whose ideas differ from my own. My hope is that you, the listeners, can weigh out their arguments against my own and see where you land. As always, if you have thoughts about the show, please get in touch!

Robert D. Atkinson is the founder and president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF). He is an internationally recognized scholar and a widely published author whom The New Republic has named one of the “three most important thinkers about innovation,” Washingtonian Magazine has called a “tech titan,” Government Technology Magazine has judged to be one of the 25 top “doers, dreamers and drivers of information technology,” and the Wharton Business School has given the “Wharton Infosys Business Transformation Award.”

A sought-after speaker and valued adviser to policymakers around the world, Atkinson’s books include Technology Fears and Scapegoats: 40 Myths about Privacy, Jobs, AI, and Today’s Innovation Economy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024); Big is Beautiful: Debunking the Mythology of Small Business (MIT Press, 2018); Innovation Economics: The Race for Global Advantage (Yale, 2012); Supply-Side Follies: Why Conservative Economics Fails, Liberal Economics Falters, and Innovation Economics is the Answer (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006); and The Past And Future Of America’s Economy: Long Waves Of Innovation That Power Cycles Of Growth (Edward Elgar, 2005).

President Clinton appointed Atkinson to the Commission on Workers, Communities, and Economic Change in the New Economy; the Bush administration appointed him chair of the congressionally created National Surface Transportation Infrastructure Financing Commission; the Obama administration appointed him to the National Innovation and Competitiveness Strategy Advisory Board; as co-chair of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s China-U.S. Innovation Policy Experts Group; to the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship; and the Trump administration appointed him to the G7 Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence. The Biden administration appointed him as a member of the U.S. State Department’s Advisory Committee on International Communications and Information, and a member of the Export-Import Bank of the United States' Council on China Competition.

Atkinson holds a Ph.D. in city and regional planning from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hil.

David Moschella is a nonresident senior fellow at ITIF. Previously, he was a research fellow at Leading Edge Forum (LEF), where he explored the global business impact of digital technologies, with a particular focus on disruptive business models, industry restructuring and machine intelligence. For more than a decade before LEF, David was in charge of worldwide research for IDC, the largest market analysis firm in the information technology industry, responsible for the company’s global technology industry forecasts and insights.

A well-known international speaker, writer, and thought leader, David’s books include Technology Fears and Scapegoats: 40 Myths about Privacy, Jobs, AI, and Today’s Innovation Economy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), Seeing Digital—A Visual Guide to the Industries, Organizations, and Careers of the 2020s (DXC Technology, 2018), Customer-Driven IT (Harvard Business School Press, 2003), and Waves of Power (Amacom, 1997). He has lectured and consulted on digital trends and strategies in more than 30 countries, working with leading customers and suppliers alike.

Today I’m speaking with Projjal Ghatak, CEO & Co-Founder At Onloop, about the ethics of teamwork, collaboration, and providing constructive feedback.

Projjal founded OnLoop in 2020 to create a category called Collaborative Team Development (CTD) to fundamentally reinvent how hybrid teams are assessed and developed,  after over a decade of frustration with clunky, traditional enterprise performance management and learning processes and tools that were either hated or ignored by his teams at companies like Uber and Accenture where he spent many years.

Prior to founding OnLoop, Projjal spent three and a half years at Uber in a variety of roles including leading Strategy & Operations for Business Development globally, leading Strategy & Planning for the APAC rides business, and GM of the Philippines rides business. Besides Uber, he also spent some time raising debt and equity from New York hedge funds for an industrial conglomerate (Essar), in strategy consulting in South East Asia (Accenture), and in early-stage companies in Latin America (BlueKite, El Market) prior to that. He holds an MBA from Stanford University.

In this episode of the show, I speak with Sarah Fairweather about what it is like to be an ethics worker. We talk about how ethical work can sync up with business practices, how to develop a culture of ethics in industry, and Sarah talks me through what it is like to practice ethics as a day job.

Sarah Fairweather is the Senior Program Manager of Ethics at WellSaid Labs, shaping Responsible AI for synthetic voice technology and designing policies for WellSaid Labs’ ethical AI deployment. She leads the effort at WellSaid to ensure that every team in the organization is equipped with the tools and skills they need to make ethics-informed designs and decisions in support of responsible innovation. Before WellSaid Labs, she was the Director of Professional Learning at Code.org where she designed equity-focused K-12 professional development experiences and co-led the company’s first Equity Working Group.

In this episode of the show, I sit down with author Mike Trigg about his new novel, Burner. Mike Trigg is an author, a novelist, a tech executive, a tech founder, and an investor in dozens of technology start-up companies for over twenty-five years. His first novel, Bit Flip, was released in August 2022 to critical acclaim, lauded by the San Francisco Chronicle as a “twisty, acerbic corporate thriller.” His work has been featured in Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus, and Literary Hub. He has been a contributor to TechCrunch, Entrepreneur, and Fast Company, and frequently posts on his author site, www.miketrigg.com.

 

Burner is a mind-bending thriller that dives headfirst into our modern online zeitgeist of social media disinformation, toxic internet subcultures, and the human need for belonging, purpose, and love in an age of distorted electronic personas. The story confronts the loss of the American dream and the societal factors behind it, including wealth inequality, lack of opportunity, and cultural prejudices. At the same time, it is a tragic love story, asking the question of whether real human connection is inherently incompatible with our addiction to online esteem.