Journalist Laurie Segall interviews OpenAI CEO Sam Altman for her new podcast, Mostly Human.

Mostly Human with Laurie Segall

AI is at a point now where it can write emails, help someone build a business, and even compress a decade of scientific discovery into a single year. At the same time, that kind of norm-upending leap forward is also resetting the boundaries of human judgment and creativity — a fact which gave former CNN technology correspondent Laurie Segall the idea for her new media venture.

She decided to launch her creator-led enterprise Mostly Human after coming to the conclusion that this moment requires, for one thing, a different kind of storytelling. Her focus, for example, isn’t just on what AI can do, but what it’s doing to us. In short: Mostly Human, which includes an iHeartMedia podcast of the same name, is designed to probe the human consequences of technology.

Beyond the podcast, it’s also envisioned as a broader production hub — to include the development of original podcasts and programming, collaborating with creators on new projects, and eventually expanding into short-form video and more.

One of the podcast’s first interviews is a conversation between Segall and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (available below), drawing on a relationship between the pair that dates back to his earliest days as a founder. The conversation — Altman’s first since OpenAI’s decision to pull back access to its video model Sora — touches on everything from the shutdown of Sora to tensions involving the Pentagon and rival AI firm Anthropic.

The interview also engages Altman in a way that the media almost never does, getting him to not only open up about the chatbot he’s built but what it will mean, say, for his own children.

“I saw a window to expand what I’ve been doing for the last 16 years,” Segall told me, underscoring the “the deeply human implications of technology through nuanced storytelling.”

That’s the sort of thing, she continues, “that will come to life in everything the company does, starting with our Mostly Human weekly podcast.”

In addition to Altman, upcoming guests will include Center for Humane Technology founder Tristan Harris, as well as Neil Parikh, the Ash CEO and Casper co-founder who will introduce his AI chatbot built for mental health.

The name Mostly Human doubles as a kind of a statement of purpose, as does a particular piece of art featured on the Mostly Human website by digital artist and filmmaker Yuge Zhou. It’s a scene of people going about their lives in Central Park on what looks like an ordinary day; if you look closer, though, technology is missing from the scene.

“At its best,” Segall says, “technology should be additive to the human experience. But these days, we’re so intertwined with technology that it’s a part of us. We’re mostly human, and the stakes are high.”

This sort of project arguably tracks with something that Segall herself told me years ago, about how someone once described her as the human equivalent of an ellipsis. Which sounds a little strange at first, until you zero in on how that specific punctuation mark speaks to the idea that something more is coming, or that a particular thought is still unresolved.

Kind of like the way a journalist connects the spaces between the overt and the unsaid. The very thing that Segall has done throughout her career, from CNN to her earlier venture Dot Dot Dot Media, and now to Mostly Human — where the goal, again, is to keep pushing past the obvious version of the story to figure out what comes next. Or to at least get closer to doing so.

“I don’t exactly fit into a box,” Segall told me, adding that’s why she wanted to build her own. “At the end of the day, I want to advocate for tech that works for us, not against us.

“I love innovation. I got into tech in 2010 when it felt a bit punk rock. There were a bunch of entrepreneurs building a future because the present seems dated. Tech is far from punk rock these days … I have a 1-year-old son, and I want to leave him with a world a bit better off. But we have to fight for that world. And I can’t help but think the tech angle to that mission is one of the most important angles I could cover as a parent.”