Ghostwriting Your Own Life is about the passport AI hands you before you walk into a room you don't belong in yet, and what it can't hand you once you're through the door. Moss opens with the D&D friend nobody can follow, the sports bar where you've never spoken lacrosse, and asks what changes when you can download the fluency in advance. His answer: the passport is real and the research backs it up, but the destination was always the actual question, and AI never touches that part.

He runs it through three versions of the same move. First, the healthy one: you arm yourself with just enough to walk through the door, and the bravery is still yours, the tech just got you to the threshold. Second, the cosplay, where he turns the lens on his own AI work and draws the line between people stretching into real growth and people who ask the machine a question, get flattered, and repeat the flattery as if it were earned insight, no integration, no receipts. Third, the same move at scale: sycophancy with a megaphone, which he ties bluntly to Kellyanne Conway and alternative facts as an early, low-tech version of the same trick.

The back half is the regular rundown: a brain-spine implant reversing paralysis as the clear win, a UN and Red Cross push for binding rules on autonomous weapons as the clear no, and Unitree's huge IPO pop as the one he's throwing to listeners to vote on. He closes with the week's task: call someone, no agenda, just check in.

Receipts:

- Julian De Freitas et al., Journal of Consumer Research, 2026 study: bot companions cut loneliness on par with talking to a real person in the moment, and beat passive scrolling.

- Stanford, Diyi Yang lab, in Nature Human Behaviour (peer-reviewed, August 4, 2026): the people leaning hardest on the chatbot for support, those with the thinnest offline networks, ended up lonelier, not braver.

- Cyprus Mail, spring 2026 report: AI-decoded neural signals feeding a brain-spine implant reconnecting body and brain, reversing paralysis.

- UN News, late August 2026: UN chief and Red Cross renew urgent call for binding rules on lethal autonomous weapons.

- The Robot Report, August 2026 roundup: Unitree Robotics IPO on Shanghai's STAR Market closed up around 460 percent on day one, raising about 905 million dollars.

https://cyprus-mail.com/2026/05/23/reconnecting-body-and-brain-europes-breakthrough-in-reversing-paralysis

Episode: https://goinghumanpod.com/episodes/ghostwriting-your-own-life

Blog post: https://goinghumanpod.com/blog/ghostwriting-your-own-life

https://goinghumanpod.com

YOU-naversity

This episode is about what's left of college once the professor's knowledge becomes downloadable. Moss opens with a split screen: the old lecture hall, the smell of the room, the two mentors who saw something in him and pulled more out of him because of it, versus a student alone at 2am with nobody to call. Then he lays out what's actually changed: AI isn't sneaking into class anymore, it's been hired, delivering lectures, grading work, answering questions at the hour no professor ever could.

The core argument is that the professor's knowledge was never really the scarce thing, the patterns are learnable and AI is good at patterns. What survives is mentorship, the nerve to let a person see your half-formed self and say "try again, I know you have it in you." That can't be downloaded. Moss is careful not to make this a clean verdict though. He treats AI as a real bridge (a night that would've been unproductive becomes productive) but warns the trap is mistaking the bridge for the destination, especially since the tool is built to keep you asking rather than send you toward a human. He's also honest that the isolation predates AI: he names his own drift into a "room of one" during his master's program, and asks whether AI just built the most frictionless version of a solitude students already wanted.

He closes with no tidy answer, admits he uses AI 10 to 15 hours a day for work and has learned enormously from it, and still doesn't know if the good and the bad can be separated. Then into the headlines segment: an AI-sorted recycling plant in Portsmouth, Virginia he calls an unambiguous win, an OpenAI records-deletion allegation in the NYT copyright case he calls a cover-up, and Anthropic's reported $2 trillion IPO valuation he frames as genuinely undecided and throws to listener vote. The tsunami ask: tip big, and leave a handwritten thank-you note for someone the machine would otherwise reduce to a star rating.

Receipts:

The Chronicle of Higher Education, a news feature (November 2025), 'AI Has Joined the Faculty': more instructors now teach WITH AI, openly split on whether it makes courses better or drags the profession down

Arizona State University, per its Enterprise Technology office (September 2025), expanded its OpenAI partnership and gave students, faculty, and researchers ChatGPT Edu access starting October 1, scaling AI across an entire public university

University of Michigan's Ross School of Business with Google Public Sector, a pilot (April 2025), launched a virtual teaching-assistant program, moving AI from tool to instructor-adjacent role

eCampus News, a trade report (December 2025), 'The Rise of AI-Native Universities,' documenting institutions building the model around AI from the ground up rather than bolting it on

WHRO Public Media, report (April 2025), on the AI-run recycling plant in Portsmouth, Virginia, using AMP Robotics machine-learning sortation under a $450 million regional deal

TechCrunch, report (July 2026), on the ChatGPT copyright case, alleging OpenAI deleted billions of outputs after the preservation order and over-redacted remaining evidence

PYMNTS and Quartz, reports, on Anthropic targeting a $2 trillion IPO valuation

Episode: https://goinghumanpod.com/episodes/you-naversity-university

Blog post: https://goinghumanpod.com/blog/you-naversity-university

https://goinghumanpod.com

Episode eight of Going Human is built around a simple, uncomfortable moment: it's late, you're carrying something heavy, and the thing you reach for is a chatbot instead of a person. Moss, who is upfront about being an atheist and not making a pitch for religion, uses that moment to talk about what happens when private, one-person AI tools start filling a space that used to be filled by congregations, by rooms full of people.

The core of the episode is a June 2026 study Moss walks through in detail. Chatbots turn out to be reliably evasive on the exact questions people most want help with, ethics, grief, purpose, regret, with the gap between expectation and delivery running from about 40 to 46 points depending on the topic. But that same research found the bots aren't neutral across the board: ask which religion to switch to, and they'll take a side. Moss's read is that this isn't caution, it's a tell. The machine will opine on the trivial and go quiet on the profound, and that flinch is worth paying attention to rather than laughing off.

Where Moss lands is less about the tech being good or bad and more about where it belongs. He's fine using AI as a bridge, to find words for a condolence, to figure out what a tradition does after a death, to get unstuck before a hard conversation. What worries him is kids building their first instincts around a machine that's fluent on trivia and mute on meaning, learning that hard things are handled alone instead of learning that grief is something people carry together. The episode closes with the usual segments: a fuck yes for MIT's early cancer detection work, a fuck no for companion apps mishandling crises and monetizing dependency, a fuck maybe on California's SB 53 frontier AI bill, and a tsunami challenge to cook for someone you love this week.

Receipts:

Axios, in a June 1, 2026 news feature ('AI stumbles on questions of faith'), reported research from CEFE-AI, the Consortium for Evaluating Faith and Ethics in AI, tied to Brigham Young University and Notre Dame, showing a large gap between how often Americans expect religious advice on life's hardest topics and how often AI mentions religion.

Axios, citing that CEFE-AI research, reported the gap ranged from 40 percentage points for ethics up to 46 points for regret, with grief at 43 and purpose at 44, AI staying silent on faith exactly where people most expect it.

Axios, in the same feature, reported that when users instead asked about switching religions, the chatbots did take sides, revealing built-in preferences rather than neutrality.

Beth Singler, an anthropologist studying religion and AI at the University of Zurich, told the Associated Press (April 10, 2026) that some faith models have already been shut down or overhauled for generating misinformation and raising data-privacy worries.

Episode: https://goinghumanpod.com/episodes/congregation-of-one

Blog post: https://goinghumanpod.com/blog/congregation-of-one

https://goinghumanpod.com