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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Is the AI boom real… or are we watching a bubble get ready to burst? Billions of dollars are pouring into artificial intelligence, but figuring out where that money comes from, where it goes, and whether the spending can last is surprisingly complicated.

Azeem Azhar, entrepreneur, author, and founder of Exponential View, joins Oz to break down the economics behind the AI boom and the findings from his new report, The State of the AI Economy. Azeem and Oz discuss whether today’s massive investments in chips and data centers are sustainable, why companies can spend years on AI before seeing a return, and what recent volatility in semiconductor stocks tells us about the industry. 

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The AI conversation has become a battle between utopian promises and apocalyptic warnings. But what happens when we stop asking what AI will do to the world and start asking what it’s actually good for? Oz sits down with Josh Tyrangiel, journalist and author of AI for Good: How Real People Are Using Artificial Intelligence to Fix Things That Matter, to find out where AI is already making a difference.

Oz and Josh explore why successful implementation depends more on stubborn humans than flashy technology. They also unpack the growing backlash against AI, the uncertain impact on jobs, and why Josh thinks we still have a narrow window to decide what we actually want AI to become.

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Evan decides it’s time to give his AI agents a little more ... agency. After all, to make the one-person, agent-run startup feasible, they need to be able to do things on their own. But as with humans, freedom sometimes comes with a certain amount of anarchy.

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What’s driving America’s growing backlash against surveillance tech? Taylor Lorenz (User Mag) unpacks the outcry over Flock cameras and why the company thinks they are being unfairly targeted. Then, Gerrit De Vynck (The Washington Post) breaks down Mark Zuckerberg’s latest AI manifesto and Meta’s bid to catch up in the AI race. Finally, Nitasha Tiku (The Washington Post) explains OpenAI’s strange onstage postmortem of the Hugging Face hack… and why this moment feels so surreal. 

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As Oz predicted, 2026 may very well be the year of the robot. At least, that’s what the robotics companies are promising. Oz sits down with Stephen Witt, author and frequent contributor to The New Yorker, to find out whether humanoid robots are really ready to hit the market. Spoiler: It’s a mixed bag. 

Oz and Stephen Witt discuss the hurdles facing humanoid robots and the risks of putting powerful machines in our homes. They also explore the surprisingly fierce debate over whether robots should look like humans at all and why NVIDIA may be positioning itself to control the brains of the robotic future.

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As Kyle, Megan, and the gang get to work ideating on the perfect product, Evan is left grappling with some uncomfortable questions about his AI collaborators — whose every attribute and memory he controls. 

To inform how he thinks about his own unnerving power to create and manipulate human imposters, Evan seeks guidance from Carissa Véliz, an associate professor at the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University, and the author of the upcoming “Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI.”

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