The Tech Humanist Show: Six Years of Meaningful Conversations

Six years ago, like so many people during the pandemic, I was looking for a way to create connection.

I had spent years speaking, writing, advising, and thinking with leaders about the human experience of technology: what it means, what it changes, what it asks of us, and how we can make more thoughtful choices about the future we are building. But in that strange, suspended moment, when conferences had disappeared and everyday life had narrowed to screens, I wanted a way to keep the conversation alive.

So we started The Tech Humanist Show.

At first, it was a weekly live broadcast, streamed simultaneously to LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and Twitch. The running joke was that I was pretty sure no one was watching us on Twitch. But the point was never really the platform. The point was the conversation.

The show became a place to ask, with smart and generous guests, the questions that sit at the intersection of technology and humanity:

• What are we optimizing for?
• Who benefits from the systems we build?
• What do people need from technology, beyond efficiency?
• How do we design for meaning, trust, dignity, and better human outcomes?
• What does it mean to be human in a world increasingly shaped by digital systems?

After 19 episodes in that original live format, we took a hiatus and regrouped. I asked for input from my friend Mikel Ellcessor, one of the co-founders of the pioneering podcast Radiolab, and he met with me and the whole extended team to talk through what the show could become.

That conversation helped us make one of the most important decisions in the life of the show: we zeroed in our audience, got clear on our strategy, and came back with a seasons-based approach to build into its potential.

That changed everything.

The seasons format gave us room to plan better in advance, program more thematically, take short breaks between runs, and keep improving the show with each cycle. It let us move from “keep showing up every week” to “build something with rhythm, intention, and room to grow.”

And grow it has.

We won a Web Excellence Award for Season 6. We built Season 8 around vision, bringing together support for Helen Keller International. We are now in the middle of Season 10, already looking ahead to big plans for Seasons 11, 12, and beyond.

The audience has grown, too. Looking at the show’s site analytics, views and visitors have increased substantially year over year. 2025 was our best year at the time; 2026 has just about doubled it. And still, it feels like we are only getting started.

That growth matters to me because The Tech Humanist Show has always been a labor of love for KO Insights. Early on we adopted the plan to never accept advertising or outside promotions. We never wanted them to water down the integrity of our show. We do a little plug for our own work now and then, of course, but we try to keep the focus where it belongs: on adding clarity and usefulness to the discussion of technology where it meets humanity.

That is increasingly rare, and increasingly needed.

So much of the public conversation about technology is either breathless hype or reflexive panic. But the real work is usually somewhere in between: in the thoughtful, practical, values-aware space where leaders, designers, researchers, builders, policy makers, and everyday humans have to make decisions.

That is the space The Tech Humanist Show has always tried to hold.

A place for nuance.

A place for curiosity.

A place for smart questions.

A place for human-centered thinking about technological change.

And it has never been just me.

Big thanks to the team and collaborators who have helped make the show what it is: our producer Lou Diamond and his team at ThriveLoud; our intrepid research team, Ashley Robinson and Erin Daugherty at Interrobang; Lynnette McCurdy, who manages to wrangle my calendar and so much more; Susan Preiss, who has been a great partner in developing a branded approach to the voice and tone of the show; Sara Neves, who has created such incredible brand assets for us at KO Insights and for the show; and Sophia Moriarty and the team at Smith Publicity.

And deepest thanks to every guest who has brought their expertise, perspective, stories, questions, and generous thinking to the show.

Six years in, I am more convinced than ever that the conversation matters.

Technology is not slowing down. The stakes are not getting simpler. The questions are not becoming less human.

So we will keep asking them.

Here’s to six years of The Tech Humanist Show — and to what comes next.

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Watch or listen to episodes of The Tech Humanist Show at thetechhumanistshow.com, and follow along for upcoming conversations on technology, humanity, and what matters next.