We continue our radically candid conversation series with Deborah Spar, current senior associate dean of Harvard Business School Online, and former president of Barnard College.

She's the author of Work, Mate, Mary, Love, How Machines Shape Our Human Destiny.

Deb, welcome to the show. It's so great to have you here.

It is such a pleasure to be here.

So I'm going to start with a terrible thing to ask a writer, and I feel your pain when I ask you this question.

But tell me about your book.

I always, when somebody asked me that,

I always want to answer, just go read the damn book. But I would love for our readers to hear

who haven't read your book, to be inspired to do so. Well, thank you. And I do hope that they will,

they will go out and read it. But I'll give you kind of the overview. I mean, it's a really big book. It starts in the year 8,000 BC and goes all the way up to the present and into the future, which is kind of crazy if you think about it. But what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to sort of tell this long arc of history story about all the ways in which technology has shaped and will continue to shape

our most personal and intimate lives. I'm trying to bring two worlds together, the worlds of

technology and the worlds of gender. So usually when people think about technology, at the risk of

making generalizations here, but technology is kind of masculine and it's big and

it's bulky and it's very tangible. And most of the work on technology tends to be written by

men, not all, but most of it. There's this other whole world of literature that's about

gender and sexuality and romance and babies and love. And that literature is overwhelmingly

written by and for women. And because I've sort of lived in both of these worlds in weird ways,

I wanted to bring those literatures together and make the argument, which I passionately believe

is true, that if technology shapes the way we form our families and have love and have sex and

fall in love, then we need to be thinking about it and to some extent worrying about it,

because we want to watch technology's arc and its trajectory rather than just sort of waking up

one morning and say, huh, this is how we've been changed. Yes, absolutely. Let me draw an even closer

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