The Technically Human Podcast

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Who Owns the Open Web? Data Infrastructure, AI, and the Politics of Access Aug 07, 2026

Show notes

Today I’m speaking with Dana Mazia, General Manager of the Bright Initiative by Bright Data, which provides nonprofits, academic institutions, and public bodies with pro bono access to public web data and expertise.

Dana is a lawyer, social entrepreneur, and World Economic Forum Global Shaper with more than 14 years of experience across technology, data, and social impact.

Bright Data is a web-data platform that provides the infrastructure organizations use to collect, process, and analyze publicly available information from across the internet. The Bright Initiative is its public-interest program, making that technology and expertise available to organizations working in academic research, public policy, transparency, and social impact.

Conversations about artificial intelligence typically focus on models: what they can do, what they produce, and whether their outputs are accurate or safe. But behind every model is a less visible infrastructure—the systems through which information is collected, organized, and made usable.

That raises important questions about who can access public web data, what “public” really means, and whether an open internet benefits everyone equally or primarily its most powerful actors. These questions become even more urgent as AI systems move from learning from the web to actively operating within it.

Dana and I discuss the politics of data infrastructure, the ethics of web scraping, the risk of information monopolies, and the legal and ethical questions that arise when information from the public web is collected and operationalized at scale. Ultimately, we ask who should have access to this infrastructure—and who will have the power to shape the AI ecosystem built upon it.

Meat, Technology, and the Future of Food: Bruce Friedrich and the Next Agriculural Revolution Jul 31, 2026

Show notes

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.

Do Filmmakers Dream of Electric Cinema? AI, Authorship, and the Future of Film with Aleem Hossain Jul 24, 2026

Show notes

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.

Ruthless About Safety Jul 17, 2026

Show notes

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.

Fact checking fake news -- with Avi Tuschman Jul 10, 2026

Show notes

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.

Building the Guardrails for AI — with Miranda Bogen Jul 03, 2026

Show notes

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.

High Tech Society: IEEE's vision for ethical technological advancement Nov 01, 2024

Show notes

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

Debugging Division: The Architecture of Bridge-Building Social Media Oct 25, 2024

Show notes

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.

The Algorithm as Witness: Reimagining Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age Oct 18, 2024

Show notes

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).

Game On, Hate Off: Navigating the Virtual Frontier Oct 11, 2024

Show notes

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.

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