AI For Good.
A podcast conversation with Josh Tyrangiel.
Josh Tyrangiel is a writer for The Atlantic. He was previously the editor of Bloomberg Businessweek and chief content officer for Bloomberg Media. A twelve-time Emmy and Peabody Award–winning producer, he created Vice News Tonight on HBO and has produced numerous feature-length documentaries for HBO, Netflix, and Apple TV.
Shortly after David Shipley took over as the editor of the editorial/opinion pages of The Washington Post, he hired Josh to “cover” artificial intelligence. Out of that assignment came the makings of his just-released book, ‘AI For Good: How Real People are Using Artificial Intelligence to Fix Things That Matter’.
Given the intense interest in AI and the disturbing implications of its development and use, it seemed like a good idea to talk to someone who’s been thinking about it, reporting on it and writing about it from “ground level” for the past three years.
So I called Josh.
(The News Items Podcast with Josh Tyrangiel. Recorded 26 May 2026. Produced by Dale Eisinger. ~50 minutes in length)
You can find this podcast, and previous News Items podcasts, on most of the major platforms, including Apple, Amazon and Spotify.
A bit more detail. The Simon & Schuster publisher’s page describes the book as follows:
AI is often framed as a force of radical transformation, either catapulting us into a utopian future or dragging us toward existential ruin. But this book tells a different story. It’s not about high-profile tech CEOs who want to use AI to “break shit,” but about a bunch of smart pragmatists using AI to make the world better.
Josh Tyrangiel’s journey into AI began with a late-night YouTube video featuring General Gustave Perna, the retired four-star general who orchestrated the distribution of Covid vaccines during Operation Warp Speed. Perna’s success—and the end of the pandemic—depended on AI’s practical ability to synthesize and standardize vast amounts of logistical data. AI wasn’t the hero of the story—it was the tool that helped real people get things done.
This book follows those people, who make up a kind of AI counterculture. It explores AI’s quiet revolution in government services, medicine, education, and human connection—places where it’s being used to amplify human judgment rather than replace it. It tells the stories of teachers, doctors, and bureaucrats who often stumbled into AI as a means to solve specific, tangible problems, often with no prior software expertise.
While the loudest voices in AI debate doomsday scenarios and trillion-dollar market opportunities, this book focuses on those working in the messy, incremental, but deeply impactful space of AI practice. However, there is one big caveat—success is not guaranteed. Change is hard. Institutions move slowly. But even in failure there are lessons for everyone who’s interested in using AI—carefully, thoughtfully—to build a better world today.