It’s been two weeks since the Silicon Valley Bank run, and we’re still feeling the ripple effects — not just at banks like Signature, First Republic and Credit Suisse, which are definitely taking a beating. Across the industry, too, banks are on edge, and regulators are rushing to keep the system together. Every financial crisis is different. And every financial crisis is the same. Assets that a lot of people thought were safe — mortgage-backed securities in the 2008 crisis and long-term Treasur...
Mar 24, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Transcript available on Metacast OpenAI last week released its most powerful language model yet: GPT-4, which vastly outperforms its predecessor, GPT-3.5, on a variety of tasks. GPT-4 can pass the bar exam in the 90th percentile, while the previous model struggled around in the 10th percentile. GPT-4 scored in the 88th percentile on the LSAT, up from GPT-3.5’s 40th percentile. And on the advanced sommelier theory test, GPT-4 performed better than 77 percent of test-takers. (It’s predecessor hovered around 46 percent.) These are...
Mar 21, 2023•2 hr 34 min•Transcript available on Metacast This is something a bit different: Not an interview, but a commentary of my own. We’ve done a lot of shows on A.I. of late, and there are more to come. On Tuesday, GPT-4 was released, and its capabilities are stunning, and in some cases, chilling. More on that in Tuesday’s episode. But I wanted to take a moment to talk through my own views on A.I. and how I’ve arrived at them. I’ve come to believe that we’re in a potentially brief interregnum before the pace of change accelerates to a rate that ...
Mar 19, 2023•16 min•Transcript available on Metacast Last Friday, in the largest bank failure since 2008, Silicon Valley Bank failed. Banks fail all the time. But unless it’s a big or highly-connected bank, most of us don’t pay much attention. That’s because at the average bank, about half of all accounts are F.D.I.C.-insured. That means, if a typical bank fails, the F.D.I.C. will step in and pay every depositor back up to $250,000. But Silicon Valley Bank was not a typical bank. It seems that only around a single digit percentage of accounts were...
Mar 16, 2023•59 min•Transcript available on Metacast In just a few years, the narrative on China has almost completely flipped. The dominant sentiments in America had been awe, envy and a kind of fear. China’s growth seemed relentless. Its manufacturing prowess was lapping ours. It weathered the pandemic without the mass death seen in the West. It could build housing and transit and infrastructure at a speed we could no longer even imagine. And then, as 2022 ticked over to 2023, things changed. China’s real estate bubble popped. Its Zero Covid pol...
Mar 14, 2023•1 hr 20 min•Transcript available on Metacast In 1972, when Congress passed Title IX to tackle gender equity in education, men were 13 percentage points more likely to hold bachelor’s degrees than women; today women are 15 points more likely to do so than men. The median real hourly wage for working men is lower today than it was in the 1970s. And men account for almost three out of four “deaths of despair,” from overdose or suicide. These are just a sample of the array of dizzying statistics that suffuse Richard Reeves’s book “ Of Boys and...
Mar 10, 2023•2 hr 58 min•Transcript available on Metacast In the 2023 legislative session alone, Republican state legislators have introduced more than a hundred bills seeking to restrict transgender people’s freedoms, rights and health care access. To put that in perspective, in the 2018 legislative session, fewer than 20 such bills restricting transgender rights were proposed. Over the weekend, at the Conservative Political Action Conference, the commentator Michael Knowles said that “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely.” Thes...
Mar 07, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Transcript available on Metacast “Poetry is the attempt to understand fully what is real, what is present, what is imaginable, what is feelable, and how can I loosen the grip of what I already know to find some new, changed relationship,” the poet Jane Hirshfield tells me. Through poetry, she says, “I know something new and I have been changed.” Hirshfield is the award-winning author of many books of poetry and two illuminating essay collections about what poetry does to us and in the world: “ Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of P...
Mar 03, 2023•1 hr 20 min•Transcript available on Metacast Our society’s dominant narrative is that body size is a product of individual willpower. We are skinny or fat because of the choices we make: the kinds of food we buy, the amounts we eat, the exercise regimens we follow. Research has never been kind to this thesis. It’s a folk narrative we use to punish people, not an empirical account of why residents of most rich countries are getting heavier over time. But, then, what account does fit the data? In his 2017 book, “ The Hungry Brain ,” Stephan ...
Feb 28, 2023•1 hr 27 min•Transcript available on Metacast Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “ Children of Time ” is about an advanced civilization built by sentient spiders. A sequel, “ Children of Ruin ,” is about a society run by superintelligent octopuses. I love these books. They’re remarkably serious about their premises, and by the end, it’s human civilization and our limited sensorium that come to seem strange. But Tchaikovsky’s latest book, “ Children of Memory ,” ostensibly about crows, read as something very different to me: the best fictional representat...
Feb 24, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Transcript available on Metacast Physical pain is a universal human experience. And for many of us, it’s a constant one. Roughly 20 percent of American adults — some 50 million people — suffer from a form of chronic pain. For some, that means having terrible days from time to time. For others, it means a life of constant suffering. Either way, the depth and scale of pain in our society is a massive problem. But what if much of how we understand pain — and how to treat it — is wrong? Rachel Zoffness is a pain psychologist at the...
Feb 21, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Transcript available on Metacast In recent months, the story of the U.S. economy has changed significantly. The January Consumer Price Index showed that annual inflation slowed for the seventh straight month. That month, the economy also added over half a million jobs, and unemployment reached 3.4 percent, its lowest level since 1969. In light of these trends, comparisons to the 1970s stagflation crisis have weakened, and the possibility of a “soft landing” looks increasingly likely. But that doesn’t mean we’ve achieved victory...
Feb 17, 2023•1 hr 18 min•Transcript available on Metacast For most of us, seeing an advertisement pop up while we’re scrolling on Instagram or reading an article or watching a video is the most banal experience possible. But in the background of those experiences is a $500 billion marketplace where our attention is being bought, packaged and sold at split-second speeds virtually every minute of every day. Online advertising is the economic engine of the internet, and that engine is fueled by our attention. Tim Hwang is the former global public policy l...
Feb 14, 2023•1 hr 7 min•Transcript available on Metacast Reading Rick Rubin’s production discography is like taking a tour through the commanding heights of American music over the past few decades. Jay-Z. Run-DMC. Beastie Boys. Slayer. The Red Hot Chili Peppers. Johnny Cash. Kanye West. Neil Diamond. Brandi Carlile. Eminem. Adele. And it’s not just his production credits: Rubin co-founded Def Jam Recordings and was a co-chairman of Columbia Records. What’s allowed him to work with so many different kinds of artists, across such a stunning range of ge...
Feb 10, 2023•2 hr 30 min•Transcript available on Metacast In my columns and on this show over the past few years, I’ve argued that to achieve the goals liberals hold most dear, we need a liberalism that builds. A liberalism that builds everything from multifamily housing and mass transit systems to transmission lines and solar farms. And we need a liberalism that can build it all quickly, cheaply and effectively. But even in the places where liberals have governing power, they are often failing to do exactly that. Why? Nicholas Bagley is a law professo...
Feb 07, 2023•1 hr 20 min•Transcript available on Metacast Ezra is out sick, so today, we’re sharing one of our favorite conversations — with Jenny Schuetz, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution whose 2022 book “ Fixer Upper: How to Repair America’s Broken Housing Systems ,” is perhaps the best, clearest overview of America’s housing problems to date. In this conversation, recorded in July 2022, Schuetz breaks down the politics and policies that have contributed to America’s multiple housing crises — from housing shortages and high homelessness r...
Feb 03, 2023•1 hr 17 min•Transcript available on Metacast Ezra is out sick, so today, we're sharing an episode from the New York Times Opinion podcast, “ First Person .” Each week, the host Lulu Garcia-Navarro sits down with people living through the headlines for intimate and surprising conversations that help us make sense of our complicated world. This episode features Maurice Mitchell, the head of the Working Families Party. Mitchell has been an organizer for two decades, working in progressive politics and the Movement for Black Lives. In recent y...
Jan 31, 2023•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast There are few issues on which the dominant consensus in Washington has changed as rapidly in recent years as it has on China. Donald Trump made taking on China a core pillar of his campaign and presidency. And while Joe Biden has toned down the harsh anti-China rhetoric of his predecessor, many of his administration’s policies have gone even further than Trump’s did. In October the Biden administration unveiled sweeping controls on advanced chip exports to China — a move that former Trump offici...
Jan 27, 2023•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast There are few stories that are more crucial to the world’s future than what’s happening in China. Take any of the most important issues of our time — climate change, geopolitics, the global economy, advanced technologies — and China is at the center of them. American politics itself has increasingly come to revolve around competition with China. In other words, what happens in China doesn’t stay in China — it reverberates through the global economy, the American political system and the internat...
Jan 24, 2023•1 hr 20 min•Transcript available on Metacast In recent weeks, America got a preview of how the new Republican House majority would wield its power. In attempting to perform a basic function of government — electing a speaker — a coalition of 20 House members caused Kevin McCarthy to lose 14 rounds of votes, decreasing his power with each compromise and successive vote. This is not normal. Party unity ebbs and flows, but the G.O.P. in recent decades has come apart at the seams. Nicole Hemmer is the director of the Carolyn T. and Robert M. R...
Jan 20, 2023•1 hr 23 min•Transcript available on Metacast It’s hard to think of a more celebrated figure of the 20th century than Martin Luther King Jr. He has a national memorial in Washington, D.C. His birthday is one of just 11 federal holidays. And his words and legacy are routinely evoked by politicians of both major parties. But the paradox of King’s legacy is that while many revere him, very few actually read him. Most of us can cite a handful of his most famous quotes, but King’s actual teachings span five books, countless speeches and sermons,...
Jan 16, 2023•2 hr 34 min•Transcript available on Metacast “Capitalism, it turns out, is more than just the exchange of goods in a market economy,” Katharina Pistor writes. “It is a market economy in which some assets are placed on legal steroids.” Pistor is a professor of comparative law at Columbia Law School, the director of the Center on Global Legal Transformation at Columbia University and the author of “ The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality .” In the book, Pistor argues that economic value isn’t just captured by markets;...
Jan 13, 2023•2 hr 35 min•Transcript available on Metacast Even if you don’t recognize the advice columnist Dan Savage by name, it’s possible that his ideas have influenced how you think about sex and relationships. For decades now, Savage has been arguing that our expectations for long-term partnerships are way too high; that healthy relationships are about acknowledging our vast spectrum of desires, not repressing them; and that monogamy is not the ideal setup for every partnership. Through over 30 years of writing “ Savage Love ,” one of the most wid...
Jan 10, 2023•1 hr 25 min•Transcript available on Metacast The year 2022 was jam-packed with advances in artificial intelligence, from the release of image generators like DALL-E 2 and text generators like Cicero to a flurry of developments in the self-driving car industry. And then, on November 30, OpenAI released ChatGPT, arguably the smartest, funniest, most humanlike chatbot to date. In the weeks since, ChatGPT has become an internet sensation. If you’ve spent any time on social media recently, you’ve probably seen screenshots of it describing Karl ...
Jan 06, 2023•1 hr 12 min•Transcript available on Metacast Do we know how to truly rest? Who would we be if we did? I’ve been wrestling with these questions since I read Abraham Joshua Heschel’s stunning book “The Sabbath” in college. The ancient Jewish ritual of the Sabbath reserves a full day per week for rest. As it’s commonly practiced, that means about 25 hours every week of no work, very little technology and plenty of in-person gathering. But the Sabbath is a much more radical approach to rest than a simple respite from work and technology. Impli...
Jan 03, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Transcript available on Metacast “One of the biggest things about poetry is that it holds all of humanity,” the poet Ada Limón tells me. “It holds the huge and enormous and tumbling sphere of human emotions.” At the end of a turbulent year, we thought revisiting this May 2022 conversation with Limón would be fitting. Just months after our conversation, Limón was named U.S. poet laureate. Limón’s work is a salve for all that the world faces: her books of poetry are filled with meditations on grief and infertility, as well as s...
Dec 30, 2022•1 hr 18 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week, we’re revisiting some of our favorite episodes from the year. For those who make New Year’s resolutions, today’s conversation might plant the seed for a bold one: Running for office. Amanda Litman is a co-founder of Run for Something, which recruits and supports young, progressive candidates who want to run for office. We spoke in February 2022, but our conversation remains relevant as ever. It’s about the mechanics of American democracy, the confusions and myths that keep so many of ...
Dec 27, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Transcript available on Metacast This past year, we’ve witnessed considerable progress in the development of artificial intelligence, from the release of the image generators like DALL-E 2 to chat bots like ChatGPT and Cicero to a flurry of self-driving cars. So this week, we’re revisiting some of our favorite conversations about the rise of A.I. and what it means for the world. Today’s conversation is with Sam Altman. He’s the C.E.O. of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. When I talked to him in June 2021, ChatGPT was still ov...
Dec 23, 2022•1 hr 12 min•Transcript available on Metacast This past year, we’ve witnessed considerable progress in the development of artificial intelligence, from the release of the image generators like DALL-E 2 to chat bots like ChatGPT and Cicero to a flurry of self-driving cars. So this week, we’re revisiting some of our favorite conversations about the rise of A.I. and what it means for the world. Brian Christian’s “ The Alignment Problem ” is the best book on the key technical and moral questions of A.I. that I’ve read. At its center is the term...
Dec 20, 2022•1 hr 17 min•Transcript available on Metacast As 2022 comes to a close, we decided to invite listeners to send in questions for an ask-me-anything episode. And boy, did you all deliver. We received hundreds of fantastic questions, and my column editor, Aaron Retica, joined me to ask some of them. Is equality of opportunity preferable to equality of outcomes? What would a better version of Twitter look like? Are Republicans more politically savvy than Democrats? What do recent advances in artificial intelligence mean for the future of our so...
Dec 16, 2022•1 hr 15 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
