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.”