Actually Useful
Ariel Butters and Josh Stretten-Carlson
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The Sci-Fi to Silicon Valley Pipeline
We chat with author Justin Feinstein about his new novel, Your Behavior Will Be Monitored, about how weird it is to accidentally predict the future, and the role science fiction plays in defining our…
The Promises and Pitfalls of Self-Publishing
We chat with author Kate Crow about the economics and illusions of the self-publishing industry, how Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program has changed both traditional publishing and book culture, and…
AI Video, Slopaganda, and the Making of Meaning
We chat with Jeremy Carrasco (@jeremyfindsai) about the most common uses of AI-generated video, what to make of the US-Iran meme war, and why beloved intellectual property can only be what it is when…
Meta’s Exploitation of Kids Has No Limit
We chat with Meta whistleblower Kelly Stonelake about Meta’s toxic culture being encoded into their products, how much they’re willing to exploit kids for profit at any cost, and what meaningful…
You Might Be an Attention Activist
We chat about “human fracking,” how little we actually know about human attention, and the growing Attention Liberation Movement – a radical idea of agency that you’re probably already practicing! In…
Sports Betting, Predictive Markets, and Financializing Everything
We chat about the explosive rise of sports betting, the underlying tech that makes it especially insidious, and how relentlessly gambling products are marketed to young men. In Falcon Mode, we give…
Your Favorite Bookstore’s Favorite Audiobook App
We chat with Natalie Ponte from Libro.fm about generative AI abolitionism, the cult of early big tech, and why book people are so obsessed with Libro.fm, the audiobook platform that supports…
LinkedIn Wants You Unemployed
We chat with recruitment fraud expert Jay Jones about scam jobs, the grift of hustle posting, and how LinkedIn profits from unemployment. In Falcon Mode, an app Ariel has imagined for over a decade…
AI Collisions, Shadow Ledgers, and Implementing AI That Doesn’t Suck
We chat with AI strategist Allen Martinez about constitutional AI, the cost of multiple AIs conflicting with one another, and how operators tasked with implementing AI can do it without making their…
AI Sexbots, Deepfakes, and the Monetization of Misogyny
We chat about Laura Bates’ incredible (and incredibly depressing) new book, The New Age of Sexism: How AI and Emerging Technologies are Reinventing Misogyny. Between deepfakes and nonconsensual image…
What We’ve Learned So Far
After six months and 12 episodes of Actually Useful, what have we learned? We chat about the worst patterns we saw in tech news this year, the most dangerous lie tech workers tell themselves, and the…
The Homogenization of Tech: Why Products are Visually Boring
We chat with JP Candelier, a front-end developer and graphic designer, about how visually and artistically bland today’s tech has become compared to just a decade ago, why private equity firms seem…
Enshittification Nation
Ariel, AJ, and Producer Josh are finally all together for a very anticipated episode: we’re digging into Cory Doctorow’s new book, Enshittification. We talk about who really owns your shoelaces, how…
Inside Amazon While Things Got Bad and Weird
We chat with Michelle Yang, a former PM at Amazon, about the good, the bad, and the ugly of Amazon product development, and how it felt from the inside as this once-beloved shopping platform…
Make Your Industry Mad!
We chat with Alex Sanfilippo, co-founder of PodMatch, about imbuing products with personality, building tech as an act of community care, and how culture is shaped by products that price-gouge…
Is AI Slop What the People Want?
We chat with Raj Singh, VP of Product at Mozilla, about AI slop, closed discovery loops, the productization of unsociable behavior, and whether or not popularity is the only metric of usefulness that…
Palantir’s Panopticon and the Middle-Earth Military Industrial Complex
Ariel and Producer Josh dive into super spooky surveillance giant Palantir, which powers everything from beverage planning on commercial flights to predictive policing, ICE kidnappings, and literal…
Accept Cookies and Other UX Crimes
We chat with Marcos Moldes, a UX researcher at Monzo, about UX dark patterns, the ethics of freemium, and the peace of working on a product that does what it says it does. In Falcon Mode, we wonder…
The Search Squeeze, Half-Baked AI Agents, and the App That Stops Cholera
We chat with Sal Mohammed, co-founder of LangSync and founder of healthcare app DOGO, about not letting small businesses get left behind in the AI revolution, the stark reality ahead for…
The AI Episode: Empire of AI, Boomers and Doomers, and ChatGPT Therapy
Ariel and Producer Josh discuss Karen Hao’s book Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI, a chronicle of tech’s current AI fervor and everything left in its wake. Along the way,…
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Actually Useful has published 23 episodes since July 2025, covering topics in Technology.
Actually Useful is currently highly active with new episodes every 2 weeks. Average episode length is 51m.
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