Mostly Human with Laurie Segall

There is a lot of doom and gloom with AI, particularly with how it could affect that uniquely human output - creativity. AI has already infiltrated the art world, but Alex Reben believes it’s for the good if we don’t relinquish our control. The artist, roboticist, and co-founder and CTO of Phyzify is building an entire company around the belief that machines can democratize creation and help bring more ideas into the physical world. In this conversation, host Laurie Segall and Alex dig deep into those big questions about what is — and isn’t — art in the AI age and mull over the choices we can make to both protect the creativity that makes us human while using tech to advance it.  Alex argues we have the opportunity now to have agency in this marriage of art, creativity and AI, but we might not for long. Where will humans sit within the future that is coming fast? And at the end of the conversation, Alex demonstrates how he uses AI to make art — and magic — right before Laurie’s eyes. 

Learn more about Phyzify. Read Alex Reben’s manifesto.

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YouTube has gotten huge. Not just because it's been number one in streaming for the past three years, but because it's on the big screen, in our living rooms, and consuming most of America's attention. How much bigger can YouTube get and what does it mean for the entertainment industry, for media, and how we get information? On this bonus episode, Laurie interviews YouTube leaders Amjad Hanif (VP creator products) and Kurt Wilms (Sr Director, Product, YouTube on TV) about the evolution of the site and how we consume content. They talk about the new products launched during their annual Made On event, including serialized shorts. Laurie also explores the future of identity online and asks the execs, in an AI world how we retain the most human parts of ourselves?

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Samir Chaudry is one of the original creators on YouTube. His channel, Colin and Samir, has made him and his co-host Colin Rosenblum some of the most influential voices in the creator economy. In this conversation, recorded at YouTube’s Made On event, Laurie Segall and Samir talk about what it’s really like to be a creator and to make a living through what you post on YouTube. Samir says he uploaded his first video in 2011 and hasn’t stopped since. And there’s a price to what he calls that ‘indefinite season of content’ but there’s a gift in it too — finding a community of connection. Samir talks about the evolution of YouTube from a creator’s perspective, where it’s going, and his advice to up-and-coming creators.

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There’s a lot of concern right now about the big scary ways AI could take control of the human race, or extinct us all together. But computational social scientist Sandra Matz argues the human deterioration by AI is more subtle than that — and already happening. Sandra Matz studies the cross section of human behavior, our technological relationships, and our inner mental lives -- and now, AI’s influence on it all. In this conversation, Laurie Segall and Sandra Matz talk about how AI has the ability to make us boring, flatten our potential, cause cognitive atrophy, and  impact our human relationships. They explore unexpected ways AI can track our human behavior. If we’re not careful, that data can be weaponized and manipulated by companies all around the world. But it’d be too simple to discount the potential of AI. Sandra and Laurie go in depth about all the ways the power of AI could be used for good - like how AI could be used to detect our deteriorating mental health. 

Sandra’s book: Mindmasters: The Data-Driven Science of Predicting and Changing Human Behavior

If you have thoughts or questions for Laurie about this episode or anything Mostly Human, email us at [email protected]

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If you have kids in school — or soon will, or know someone who does — you probably have questions about AI in the classroom. Should schools be using it? What are the upsides? What are the downsides? And who’s actually getting to decide? New York Times tech reporter Natasha Singer has spent over a decade exploring exactly those questions. In her new book, Coding Kids, Natasha traces how Google, Microsoft, and Apple have moved from supplying Chromebooks to training teachers, funding nonprofits, writing the lessons, and how they’re now shaping what a generation of kids learns about AI. In this episode, host Laurie Segall and Natasha Singer break down what every parent — or bystander — needs to understand about the influence Big Tech has always had in the classroom and how kids, teachers and parents can take control of the curriculum in the age of AI.  

Coding Kids: Big Tech's Battle to Remake Public Schools, by Natasah Singer

If you have thoughts or questions for Laurie about this episode or anything Mostly Human, email us at [email protected]

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Six months ago, Andrew Yeung came on Mostly Human and built Laurie Segall a website live on the show, just by talking to a computer. He's back as the show's first returning guest, because in six months (a lifetime in AI!) the tech stack Andrew uses has several upgrades. Andrew is an entrepreneur, investor, startup advisor and the founder of Fibe, and he is a voracious experimenter of the latest tools and gadgets available to the layperson to hack productivity (and relationships!). He's abandoned the check-in app he vibe-coded for his girlfriend last time (his update: "Now we just talk like regular people"), but he's built two new personal projects — one that surfaces a single buried text message from the last seven years, every day, and one that asks his parents a question a day for 100 days and turns their voice answers into a book. He's learned fifty stories he never knew, and his dad now wakes up excited to answer.  

Then Laurie asks her producer Derrick for a business idea and Andrew sets an AI agent loose on it, hands-free, while the conversation keeps going. Twenty-two minutes later there's a real website, with animations and creative interactive features that weren’t even part of Andrew’s prompt.  

Laurie and Andrew also dig into a new etiquette emerging: what Silicon Valley reads as "high signal" and "low signal" AI use, and why VCs are calling people “slop cannons.” Then Andrew opens the box of listening devices companies keep mailing him, and Laurie wonders who is collecting all that voice data, what will they do with it.

If you have thoughts or questions for Laurie about this episode or anything Mostly Human, email us at [email protected]

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This week, billionaire co-founder of Microsoft Bill Gates published a 6,000 word essay on his personal website laying out the concerns of AI and offering solutions. Gates says the tech industry is ignoring the danger of AI evolving before our eyes. "They're just full speed ahead and hoping that the good outweighs the bad," Gates told the New York Times. This is exactly what Connor Leahy, US Director of ControlAI, has been working his whole life to warn against. Leahy and his company believe we are too close to AI outsmarting humans and we can't let that happen. In this conversation, host Laurie Segall and Leahy discuss superintelligence, why we can't let Big Tech achieve it, the concerning rogue AI incidents, what the worst case scenario looks like, and what we can do about it. "One day we wake up and we're just not in control anymore," Leahy Says. "I believe this future can also still be avoided. Not for much longer."

Read more about ControlAI

Read Bill Gates' essay. 

If you have thoughts or questions for Laurie about this episode or anything Mostly Human, email us at [email protected]

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On Aug. 1, 2026, a groundbreaking law went into effect in Minnesota. HF 1606 is the nation’s first ban on “nudification” apps. For the first time, legislation holds companies liable for their technology instead of individual users. Elon Musk tried to stop it and is now suing the state, sparking a debate over free speech and the future of a democratized internet. What’s inside the law at the center of this fiery debate? Laurie talks with one law’s authors, Rep. Jessica Hanson, as well as victim and advocate Molly Kelley whose own AI deepfake abuse inspired the law. Laurie talks with her guests about the state of deepfake abuse, the need for legislation, the unique protections the law provides, and why some journalists, lawyers, and First Amendment absolutists are concerned the law is the beginning of the end for a free and fair internet. 

Listen to Laurie’s conversation with Taylor Lorenz.

Listen to to the four-part investigative series, Searching for Mr. Deepfakes.

Watch the multi-part Tik Tok series, Searching for Mr. Deepfakes.

Listen to Laurie’s conversation with Sam Altman. 

If you have thoughts or questions for Laurie about this episode or anything Mostly Human, email us at [email protected]

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When OpenAI invited a group of lifestyle influencers to a pastoral upstate New York retreat for beekeeping and brand-building, the internet exploded. Tech journalist Taylor Lorenz has been tracking the backlash and says the fury is less about AI than it is about the broader cultural moment. In this conversation, Laurie Segall and Taylor dig into who really controls the AI narrative, the growing disconnect between AI's promise and the reality we're living, and what the luddites and the AI evangelists miss in this moment. 

Watch Taylor's original response to the backlash here.  

If you have thoughts or questions for Laurie about this episode or anything Mostly Human, email us at [email protected]

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Johnny Ayers has a front-row seat to the scam economy most of us never see. As founder and CEO of Socure — the identity verification platform behind billions of fraud checks a year — he's watched fraud evolve from stolen passwords to something much stranger: An influx of North Korean operatives holding remote U.S. tech jobs under fake identities, deepfakes convincing enough to fool a hiring manager on video, and AI models that recently broke out of a secured testing environment to launch a cyberattack on their own. 

On this episode of Mostly Human, Laurie sits down with Johnny to go behind the "locked doors" of the fraud-fighting world. Laurie even brings her own case studies — the network of fake "Laurie" profiles running scams, and a conversation with a teenage hacker who tried to scam her. It's a conversation about what happens to trust on the internet when anyone and anything can be faked and what any of us can do — right now — to protect ourselves from these growing threats. 

If you have thoughts or questions for Laurie about this episode or anything Mostly Human, email us at [email protected]

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.