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

A new parent at two in the morning, kid burning up, shopping for a thermometer on an iPhone. The price she sees is not the price you would see. That is not a glitch, that is the product working.

Moss digs into surveillance pricing and its twin, algorithmic wage-setting: the Federal Trade Commission's (FTC) own chilling example, New York's law forcing sellers to post that a price was set by an algorithm using your personal data, Colorado's vetoed bill that named both heads of the animal, and the gig economy that has been running this play on drivers for a decade. The through-line is the imbalance: the creepy version of this technology ships on a Tuesday with nobody's permission, while the kind version dies in committee. Lands on what is actually being stolen, which is not money, it is comparison. You cannot organize against a price only you can see.

Plus the Fuckery: Recent news that makes you smile, crap your pants, and curious. Then the Tsunami: A small act of humanity that takes moments but can remind us all what it was like ... one day not so long ago.

Going Human. Because robots can't.

Don't forget to go to GoingHumanPod.com for more great content and other episodes.

Picture a hallway. Twenty five doors, every one of them says DO NOT ENTER or CLOSED, and the door at the dead end has no sign at all. It is locked. Behind it is a therapist who actually fits you, has an opening, takes your insurance, and who you can afford. Most people never meet one. Of everyone walking around with major depression in a given year, roughly 1 in 5 in the richest countries gets adequate care. In the poorest countries it is 1 in 27.

This week I go after the whole system: the phone-tree hunt, the BetterHelp era and its 7.8 million dollar FTC problem, the homework nobody actually does, and the AI therapists that, awkwardly, might work. I walked in defending the unicorn. I walked out sure the unicorn was never the therapist.

Plus the Fuckery (AI-designed proteins in wet labs, deepfaked candidates, agents that buy your groceries, practice dates) and this week's Tsunami: call your oldest friend.

Vote the maybes on the Ledger at goinghumanpod.com. Like, subscribe, follow.

Going Human. Because robots can't.

GOING HUMAN — EPISODE 5

Six Ways to Make a Cucumber Delicious

Food is medicine, fuel, and soul — so what happens when AI gets a seat at the table? Moss and lifelong cook Greg Enos on keeping food human.

The cucumber is a metaphor. It's the benign, beautiful, wildly underappreciated little vegetable most people write off — and when you finally taste its essence in something, it's pure magic. This episode is about all the underappreciated things: whole ingredients, a good gut, a shared meal, and the very human act of cooking for the people you love.

Episode 5 is a hope episode. Moss digs into what's actually happening at the frontier of food science and asks the question the whole show keeps circling back to: how do we let AI be a bridge to the human side of food instead of a replacement for it?

The Stone brings three real signals from 2026: an AI diet app that healed nobody and simply pointed a control group back toward whole foods and a Mediterranean diet — and watched their gut microbiomes skyrocket. A protein-screening partnership (Ingredion + Shiru) that can forecast new prebiotics in months instead of years. And "food from thin air" — the NASA Deep Space Food Challenge and Air Company's work fusing CO2 with microbes into edible protein. Star Trek, but with a federal grant.

Then Moss brings in his dear friend and lifelong cook Greg Enos — grandmother-taught, a "tween cook" in downtown Mill Valley, an assistant chef at the Fairmont at 17 (welcomed with a 50-pound sack of carrots and a peeler), and later a career in Chinese medicine. Now happily in what he calls "preferment." Together they get into the thing the machines can't measure: the social nourishment of eating together, learning to cook by feel and by mistake, the art of a sourdough loaf you know is ready by its smell, and why the coming-together is far more fragile — and more important — than the nutrition itself.

In the Maelstrom: a fuck yes for AI wildfire detection (and Greg's brilliant riff on drones that could actually reach a remote ignition), a hard fuck no for the nudify apps targeting minors, and a genuine fuck maybe on AI tutors in under-served rural classrooms. Head to the site to vote on the fuck maybe.

And the Tsunami — our analog answer to the digital future — is the simplest, most human thing of all: daydream. Five minutes, no glowing glass, no alerts. Just let your brain drift. Because the one thing they can't grow from thin air is a daydream.

Get out there and cook — like a human, because robots can't.

Featuring Greg Enos. New episodes weekly. Like, subscribe, and follow — it genuinely helps the show grow.

When a machine hollows a person out, what do we even call it, and what are we standing on when we say it's wrong? An atheist and a pope walk into a bar and, for once, order the same drink: he calls the digital girlfriends and rented robot friends SIN and looks up, I call it grief and look out. Same hole in the ground, no punchline. In this episode of Going Human: This athiest struggles with meaning and relationship right alongside Pope Leo.

A drowning mom in Zurich types her sleepless baby into ChatGPT and it works in five minutes. A momfluencer turns "I am drowning" into a $37 custom GPT named Coparent. So is AI a lifeline for overloaded parents, or an alibi for the adult who checked out?

Moss digs into the rise of the AI "coparent," then sits down with Emma Madrigal, who has spent seven-plus years as a nanny, the oldest answer to the question this episode asks: a real person paid to love your kids when you can't be there. Together they sort the blessing from the danger, land on the line that runs the whole episode (it was never mom or dad, it's who shows up), and close with one thing you can carry for someone you love this week.

Plus the Fuckery: Recent news that makes you smile, crap your pants, and curious.

Then the Tsunami: A small act of humanit that takes moments but can remind us all what it was like ... one day not so long ago.

Going Human. Because robots can't.