Hi, I'm Alex Goldman, and this is Hyperfixed. And this week we have a very special guest episode from a podcast called Smart Girl Dumb Questions, which is hosted by Naima Raza. And Naima is here with me right now. Hi, Naima. Thank you so much for having me. I'm a huge fan of Hyperfix. Welcome.

My God, I feel like I'm hijacking your feed. What's going on? I love it, honestly. I love

using the opportunity to introduce people to shows that I'm a fan of and my audience may not have

heard of or listen to. So I want to do that right now. I'm curious if you could just describe for

our audience what Smart Girl Dumb Questions is about.

So Smart Girl Dumb Questions is really a show where I ask the questions I think a lot of us have about topics. And the idea is that, like, the dumbest thing you can be is a know-it-all. So I came from traditional media. I was at the New York Times. I used to produce a woman named Karras Wisher for a long time. I used to co-host a show alongside Ben Smith at Semaphore.

And I thought, there's so many questions that I have that sometimes I wouldn't feel comfortable to ask out loud. A big example of this would be in the pandemic when I was going to get my vaccine. I actually did pull over to the side of the road and think, MRNA sounds a lot like DNA. Well, this affect my ability to have kids. Now, I had produced a New York Times interview with the couple that created

the bio-antec vaccine, but I still had that question. I still thought about it as a woman of childbearing

age. And, like, I think we have created an ecosystem where it's sometimes hard to ask questions

out loud. And so, no, this is not an anti-vax podcast. Don't get excited out there. But it is something

where like nothing's off limits. And I want to ask the questions we all have and just be like,

in a world of hot takes, I think the hottest thing you can be is curious. I love that,

first of all, because I am a huge fan of asking incredibly dumb questions because often

they end up giving you incredibly surprising and much more layered

answers than you'd expect. Yeah. And I think people are excited to answer them because, like,

I interviewed Jeffrey Hinton, who's the godfather of AI who helped create, like, the kind of

understanding of the neural networks won a Nobel Prize for it. And I asked him, how many people

who are interviewing you actually understand how AI works? And he was like, not many. And I said, well, how many ask you? And he says in his very English accent, very few, you know. So it's like, I think it's like that idea that we're all pretending to understand things because we have this thing in our pocket that has all the answers in the world. And so instead instead of having a fight at a dinner party, we're just like chatting with Chat Chit and getting our answers. Or now, Claude, because everyone's canceling Chatchipt, but yeah, hope they're not a sponsor. They're not. Don't worry. Whoever you're going to disparage in this intro, I assure you, they're not a sponsor. It's interesting that you say that because I,

you know, I was a tech journalist for 12 years and I understand conceptually how AI works,

but it's still like, is very elusive because it's actually really complex. So people are like,

oh, well, you put it in, a computer has all the information in the world and it gives you an

answer. It's a lot more complex than that.

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