TechStuff

Are kids finally going to be safer on social media? Jonathan Haidt thinks a landmark $17.1 billion settlement with Meta is a gigantic step. Not because of the money, but because of the restrictions the company agreed to put in place for young users in the US. And he believes the world will follow. 

Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation, joins Oz to explain why he believes the evidence linking social media to the teen mental health crisis is now overwhelming. They debate the early results of Australia’s under-16 social media ban, the privacy concerns around age verification, and why Haidt thinks it’s too early to say the ban is a failure.

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HurumoAI’s AI-agent staff welcomes a new hire: Julia, a social media contract worker who is, most importantly, a human. How will a real person integrate into the company culture, such as it is? Evan watches from behind the scenes, fretting over when and how much to intervene. He had anticipated a bumpy onboarding, but is ultimately unprepared for just how choppy Julia’s Hurumo journey becomes.

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Are kids going to be any safer online after the Meta settlement? Our trio of contributors—Taylor Lorenz (User Mag), Reed Albergotti (Semafor), and Nitasha Tiku (The Washington Post)—are skeptical. Then, are AI “civilizations” real, or is it all just tabloid journalism? Finally, school’s back in session, and teachers are rethinking the classroom for an age when anyone can generate the perfect answer.

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Do you judge people who are emotionally attached to their chatbots? Bridget Todd used to read stories about people forming intimate relationships with AI and think, “That’s so pathetic. That is so sad. That could never be me.” But when she needed support during a hard time, AI was there for her. 

Bridget Todd, host of There Are No Girls on the Internet and author of Love at First Prompt: AI and the Future of Intimacy, joins Oz to explain what’s really happening in these human-machine relationships and why human connection reigns supreme.

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As HurumoAI prepares to bring on its first human employee, the team must wrestle with some difficult and timely questions about the role of AI in the hiring process. Meanwhile, Head of HR Jennifer Nauro enters a new dimension as she gears up to conduct job interviews… via video call. 

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Did your college have a secret society? Well, Stanford has a secret off-campus class training the next generation of Silicon Valley billionaires. And it's literally called "How to Rule the World."

Theo Baker arrived at Stanford as an aspiring coder with dreams of building the future. Instead, he stumbled into the "Stanford-within-Stanford" — a hidden pipeline connecting a select few students directly to Silicon Valley CEOs, yacht parties, and venture capitalists offering millions before you even have an idea. Then he decided to write a book about it.

In How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University, Theo traces his freshman year transformation from tech idealist to award-winning investigative journalist — including the reporting that brought down Stanford's own president. He joins us to talk power, secrecy, and what Silicon Valley is really teaching the next generation.

Additional Reading: 

• How to Rule the World by Theo Baker

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What would it mean to be a "great ancestor"? Futurist Ari Wallach believes that's the question everyone, including our tech leaders, should be asking right now.

Ari joins Oz to explain why the systems we're building today are laying rails for centuries to come. And he argues that shifting culture through storytelling is the fastest way to shift the systems that govern our lives. He also introduces The Protopias Collection, six graphic novels imagining worlds that are messy and human, but unmistakably better. 

Additional Reading: 

• Ari Wallach: 3 ways to plan for the (very) long term | TED Talk 
• The Protopias Collection: Various: 9781953165787: Amazon.com: Books 

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On this week’s episode, we enter the sensitive realm of intra-office politics and inter-founder dynamics—between agents and agents, and agents and people. While HurumoAI gears up to hire its first human, Evan tries to resolve whether Kyle is really up for the challenge of building and leading the company and pushing the product, Sloth Surf, to unicorn-level execution. 

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