I’m not even going to try to pretend I don’t have a bit of a girl-crush on Shoshana Berger. She’s a former WIRED editor turned editorial leader for companies like Notion and Ideo. She’s super smart and chic. And she’s the cofounder, with Nina Willdorf, of the Aged Intelligence Society, a buzzy events startup that hosts invite-only dinner parties where women “solve midlife problems using frontier tools.”
Berger and Willdorf having a refreshingly practical take on AI. “This is the most formative technology of our generation, and it’s here,” Willdorf says. “If you choose to sit it out, you are doing yourself a disservice.”
That thesis resonates. Their events have been oversubscribed since day one. The second dinner party they hosted was covered by The New York Times. Hundreds of women reached out asking to attend future events. Their Substack, where they share tools and tips, quickly got over 1,000 subscribers, including a New Yorker writer and a small-town mayor. Women outside the Bay Area are now hosting their own Aged Intelligence meetups.
They also practice what they preach, especially as they juggle kids entering college, their own aging parents, and their increasingly in-demand business. “The midlife cognitive and emotional labor is so heavy and so intense that we need an assistant,” Berger says. “Actually, we need the National Guard, but AI will help in the interim.”
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Zoë Schiffer: How did the Aged Intelligence Society start?
Shoshana Berger: Nina and I are both recovering magazine editors. We ended up at a friend's birthday party, and we were both obsessing over Claude, our new French lover. All the other women had glazed eyes while we were talking; they just weren’t part of the conversation. At some point I said, “Nina, I think this might be a business, because all these women need to be doing what we're doing.”
Nina Willdorf: We were super nervous before the first event …
Berger: We needed to take beta blockers and ashwagandha because we were like, wait, we're inviting all of these baller women, these really smart, incredibly accomplished women, and we’re not AI experts. But we have been doing what we usually did as reporters, which is test the tools in a way many women did not seem to be doing.
There's a million reasons for women to bow out of the conversation, and we were like, “no, no, no, you cannot bow out of this conversation if you are going to be relevant in the work world. You need to be fluent.”
Willdorf: We are not like pom-pom advocates for everything about this, but we feel committed to this idea that being involved is really important.
How do you set up expectations around the event for attendees?
Berger: There are rules of engagement for every party. One is we have an ideological parking lot. So if you want to talk about how AI is going to ruin everything, this is not the best space to do that. There are lots of ways in which we are also terrified about AI and find it can be quite menacing, especially for creatives like us, but that's not what we're here to do. We're here to gain fluency, test things out, and reduce our administrative load.
Willdorf: And eat some really good cheese and drink some wine.
Berger: We have everyone bring a laptop and a midlife problem. We call it a midlife quandary. We spend 15 minutes doing what we call library time. We all bring our laptops out, and you work on your problem. And Nina and I kind of walk around the room sherpa-ing people through the experience: “You might want to try this tool, try this LLM instead. Your prompt is feeling a little weak. You're not getting the answer that you like. Let's work on that and iterate.”
Willdorf: Sometimes people are like, “You know what? I don't really want AI to write for me.” And we're like, “Oh no, no, we don't either. Let us show you a couple other things you can think about.”
You’ve had a wait list for these parties since you started. How do you decide who gets to attend?
Willdorf: We have really found that the optimal number is between like eight and 12. When it gets bigger than that, it's a little bit chaotic. Our best events have been ones where there is a magical mix, and you have somebody that works in nonprofit next to somebody who works in design next to somebody who is home with the kids next to a CEO next to someone who works in philanthropy.
Most people, in my experience, cannot immediately identify a software-shaped problem in their life. How do you help people see an issue that AI could actually help with?
Berger: So much of what we're trying to do is show the pragmatic ways in which it's helping with midlife overload. We're often labeled the sandwich generation. We hate that term because it just sounds like we're the tasteless tomato in between two slabs of bread. But the real part of that is that we are dealing with parents who increasingly need help and kids who maybe are launching, maybe not.
One woman came to an event with a mother who was dealing with an Alzheimer's diagnosis, and she wanted to know whether her mother was qualified for long-term care because she had an insurance plan. Well, the insurance carrier sent her a 300-page packet. Who is going to read through that? This is how insurance companies keep you from using your insurance policy. So of course, she fed it to AI. And the AI came back saying, yes, your mother is absolutely qualified for care, and would you like me to write a letter to the insurance company to argue your case?
When I first started out as a consultant, I, in a typical female way, completely lowballed my consulting fee. I fed my proposal to Claude and said, “What's wrong with this? Make this bulletproof.” And it came back and said, “You're not charging enough for this scope of work.” And I was like, “Well, what should I charge?” And it said, “Start by doubling your rate.” I took a deep breath, and I did it. The client did not blink.
I feel that a lot of people don’t want to get near AI because they see slop and get the ick. But you’re talking about something different—using AI for economically valuable tasks.
Berger: The economic value piece is really important, because women have long suffered from being stuck at home as domestic laborers, because we weren't seen as economically valuable in the marketplace, right? So the idea behind Aged Intelligence Society is that if anyone needs to optimize their time, it's women.
In some ways, AI is the new washing machine or the new laundry or whatever it is. It's giving women many, many hours of the day back by offering them automation.
The reason we narrowed the aperture to people 40-plus is that we feel like the product-market fit for women who are over 40 is so spot on. One, because we have very discerning taste after many decades of honing it. We know how to ask really sharp questions. We have very strong bullshit meters, so we're not going to take just the first answer. We're going to keep probing and pushing.
And so we feel like in some ways this tool was built for people who have a certain level of intelligence and accrued experience. It's not really built for young people. It's not built for people who have not already gone through the failure and the friction of life and learned for themselves what makes for a good question.
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Source: Wired
