Our 2024 Predictions + Jenny Slate Answers Your Hard Questions!

Google's Next Top Model + Will the Cybertruck Crash? + This Week in A.I.: Like the Cybertruck, this podcast is also bulletproof. by Hard Fork

57 min listen

We Tried the Apple Vision Pro + Can Congress Protect Kids Online? + Cruise’s Crash: Introducing DJ TaskRabbit. by Hard Fork

74 min listen

Matter of Opinion: Paul Krugman on Inflation, ‘Bad Vibes’ and 2024: We’ll be back on Friday with a new episode. In the meantime, we wanted to share one of our favorite recent episodes from our sister podcast, “Matter of Opinion.” Why does the economy look so good to economists but feel so bad to voters? The Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman joins the hosts on “Matter of Opinion” to discuss why inflation, interest rates and wages aren’t in line with voters’ perception of the economy. Then, they debate with Paul how big of an influence the economy will be on the 2024 presidential election, and which of the two presumed candidates, Joe Biden and Donald Trump, it could benefit. Plus, Ross Douthat’s lessons on aging, through Michael Caine impressions. Mentioned: “Believing Is Seeing,” from Paul Krugman’s newsletter “The Age of Diminished Expectations,” by Paul Krugman “The Trip” scene: “This Is How Michael Caine Speaks” by The Ezra Klein Show

36 min listen

RANGE: Why Generalists Succeed in a Specialists’ World by The Next Big Idea

48 min listen

Justice Dept. Sues Apple + Smartphones and Children with Jonathan Haidt + Reddit’s IPO: “We’ll see you in court.” by Hard Fork

90 min listen

‘The Strongest Democratic Party That Any of Us Have Ever Seen’: If you’re a Democrat, how worried should you be right now? It’s strangely hard to answer that question. On the one hand, polls suggest Democrats should be very worried. President Biden looks weaker than he did as a candidate in 2020, and in matchups with Donald Trump, the election looks like a coin flip. On the other hand, Democrats staved off an expected red wave in the 2022 midterm elections. Biden has a strong record to run on, and Trump has a lot more baggage than he did in 2020. So, in an effort to put all those pieces together, I had two conversations with two people who have polar opposite perspectives — starting with a more optimistic take for Democrats. Simon Rosenberg is a longtime Democratic political strategist, the author of the newsletter Hopium Chronicles and one of the few people who correctly predicted the Democrats’ strong performance in 2022. He argues that the Democratic Party is in a better position by The Ezra Klein Show

69 min listen

Birthrates Are Plummeting Worldwide. Why?: For a long time, the story about the world’s population was that it was growing too quickly. There were going to be too many humans, not enough resources, and that spelled disaster. But now the script has flipped. Fertility rates have declined dramatically, from about five children per woman 60 years ago to just over two today. About two-thirds of us now live in a country or area where fertility rates are below replacement level. And that has set off a new round of alarm, especially in certain quarters on the right and in Silicon Valley, that we’re headed toward demographic catastrophe. But when I look at these numbers, I just find it strange. Why, as societies get richer, do their fertility rates plummet? Money makes life easier. We can give our kids better lives than our ancestors could have imagined. We don’t expect to bear the grief of burying a child. For a long time, a big, boisterous family has been associated with a joyful, fulfilled by The Ezra Klein Show

61 min listen

Google DeepMind C.E.O. Demis Hassabis on the Path From Chatbots to A.G.I.: The mind behind DeepMind. by Hard Fork

57 min listen

#94 — The Future of Intelligence: A Conversation with Max Tegmark by Making Sense with Sam Harris

37 min listen

Google’s Epic Loss + Silicon Valley’s Curious New Subculture + How 2023 Changed the Internet: Looks like Google is on the naughty list this year. by Hard Fork

73 min listen

Here’s How an Open Democratic Convention Would Work: Last week on the show, I argued that the Democrats should pick their nominee at the Democratic National Convention in August. It’s an idea that sounds novel but is really old-fashioned. This is how most presidential nominees have been picked in American history. All the machinery to do it is still there; we just stopped using it. But Democrats may need a Plan B this year. And the first step is recognizing they have one. Elaine Kamarck literally wrote the book on how we choose presidential candidates. It’s called “Primary Politics: Everything You Need to Know About How America Nominates Its Presidential Candidates.” She’s a senior fellow in governance studies and the founding director of the Center for Effective Public Management at the Brookings Institution. But her background here isn’t just theory. It’s practice. She has worked on four presidential campaigns and 10 nominating conventions for both Democrats and Republicans. She’s by The Ezra Klein Show

63 min listen

Episode 1: Black Holes by Journey Across the Universe

21 min listen

A Republican Pollster on Trump’s Undimmed Appeal: The fact that Donald Trump is the front-runner for the G.O.P. nomination in 2024 has created a chasm in our politics. In the past, Democrats and Republicans at least understood why members of the other party liked their chosen candidates. Most conservatives weren’t confused why liberals liked Barack Obama, and vice versa for George W. Bush. But for a lot of Democrats, it feels impossible to imagine why anyone would cast a vote for Trump. And as a result, the two parties don’t just feel hostile toward each other; they feel increasingly unknowable. Kristen Soltis Anderson is a veteran Republican pollster, a founding partner of the opinion research firm Echelon Insights and a CNN contributor. She spends her days trying to understand the thinking of Republican voters, including hosting focus groups for New York Times Opinion. So I wanted to get her insights on why Republicans like Trump so much — even after his 2020 electoral loss, the Jan by The Ezra Klein Show

48 min listen

Theorem Provers: Fake news attempts to lead readers/listeners/viewers to conclusions that are not descriptions of reality. They do this most often by presenting false premises, but sometimes by presenting flawed logic. An argument is only sound and valid if the... by Data Skeptic

19 min listen

A Looming TikTok Ban + A Royal Photoshop Mystery + Your Car is Snitching: Maybe go ahead and download your favorite TikToks. by Hard Fork

76 min listen

CONFLICT: How to Have More Productive Disagreements by The Next Big Idea

44 min listen

Why we can’t just blame capitalism for everything: Exploring the big divide on the American left by The Gray Area with Sean Illing

49 min listen

What Relationships Would You Want, if You Believed They Were Possible?: Around 40 percent of people who marry eventually get a divorce. Almost half of children are born to unmarried women. The number of close friends Americans report having has been on a steep decline since the 1990s, especially among men. Millions of us are growing old alone. We are living out a radical experiment in how we live, love, parent and age — and for many, it’s failing. That’s partial context, I think, for the recent burst of interest and media coverage of polyamory. People want more love in their lives, and opening their relationships is one way to find it. A poll from last year found that one-third of Americans believe their ideal relationship would involve something other than strict monogamy. But polyamory, for all its possibilities, isn’t right for many, and it doesn’t have that much to say about parenting or aging or friendship. As radical as it may sound, it’s not nearly radical enough. It’s not jus by The Ezra Klein Show

59 min listen

Mercury by Journey Across the Universe

14 min listen

Diving into Simulation Theory: This week we take a VERY deep dive into simulation theory (yesss, yes, we know it's scientifically categorized as a hypothesis) what some of the greatest minds around us have to say about it, and just maybe convince our guest that we are living in a simulation. SOURCES; Built-In Article- https://builtin.com/hardware/simulation-theory The Why Files- https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=6&v=4wMhXxZ1zNM Nick Bostrom- https://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.pdf Vox- https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/4/10/18275618/simulation-hypothesis-matrix-rizwan-virk Scientific American- https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-we-live-in-a-simulation-chances-are-about-50-50/ Space.com https://www.space.com/universe-simulation-hypothesis-problems PBS- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-MNSLsjjdo by Always the Last to Know

109 min listen

Steven Johnson wants to know how enlightenment happens: It’s official, the TED Interview has a new host! In Chris’s last episode as head of the show, he interviews his successor, bestselling science and technology author Steven Johnson. by The TED Interview

55 min listen

Three Sentences That Could Change the World — and Your Life: Today’s show is built around three simple sentences: “Future people count. There could be a lot of them. And we can make their lives better.” Those sentences form the foundation of an ethical framework known as “longtermism.” They might sound obvious, but to take them seriously is a truly radical endeavor — one with the power to change the world and even your life. That second sentence is where things start to get wild. It’s possible that there could be tens of trillions of future people, that future people could outnumber current people by a ratio of something like a million to one. And if that’s the case, then suddenly most of the things we spend most of our time arguing about shrink in importance compared with the things that will affect humanity’s long-term future. William MacAskill is a professor of philosophy at Oxford University, the director of the Forethought Foundation for Global Priorities Research and the author by The Ezra Klein Show

69 min listen

The Sunday Debate: Hydrogen, the green ‘silver bullet’ or a lot of hype? by Intelligence Squared

64 min listen

A Lot Has Happened in A.I. Let’s Catch Up.: Thursday marked the one-year anniversary of the release of ChatGPT. A lot has happened since. OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, recently dominated headlines again after the nonprofit board of directors fired C.E.O. Sam Altman, only for him to return several days later. But that drama isn’t actually the most important thing going on in the A.I. world, which hasn’t slowed down over the past year, even as people are still discovering ChatGPT for the first time and reckoning with all of its implications. Tech journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton are hosts of the weekly podcast “Hard Fork.” Roose is my colleague at The Times, where he writes a tech column called “The Shift.” Newton is the founder and editor of Platformer, a newsletter about the intersection of technology and democracy. They’ve been closely tracking developments in the field since well before ChatGPT launched. I invited them on the show to catch up on the state of A.I. We discu by The Ezra Klein Show

70 min listen

A.I. Could Solve Some of Humanity’s Hardest Problems. It Already Has.: Since the release of ChatGPT, huge amounts of attention and funding have been directed toward chatbots. These A.I. systems are trained on copious amounts of human-generated data and designed to predict the next word in a given sentence. They are hilarious and eerie and at times dangerous. But what if, instead of building A.I. systems that mimic humans, we built those systems to solve some of the most vexing problems facing humanity? In 2020, Google DeepMind unveiled AlphaFold, an A.I. system that uses deep learning to solve one of the most important challenges in all of biology: the so-called protein-folding problem. The ability to predict the shape of proteins is essential for addressing numerous scientific challenges, from vaccine and drug development to curing genetic diseases. But in the 50-plus years since the protein-folding problem had been discovered, scientists had made frustratingly little progress. Ent by The Ezra Klein Show

88 min listen

The Rest of the Story, 2023 by Planet Money

26 min listen

The Science of Coincidence: Brian Cox and Robin Ince explore the science of coincidence and being lucky. by The Infinite Monkey Cage

43 min listen

The Indicators of this year and next by Planet Money

16 min listen

Cosmic Queries - Cosmic Cauldron (Re-release): What would Isaac Newton think of today’s science? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comedian Chuck Nice answer a cosmic cauldron of Cosmic Queries. From dark matter, to what aliens look like, the size of the universe, we answer a multiverse of questions. by StarTalk Radio

46 min listen

Rebuilding Higher Education for the 21st Century | Brian Keating & James Altucher: Rebuilding Higher Education for the 21st Century | Brian Keating & James Altucher by Into the Impossible With Brian Keating

92 min listen

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Our 2024 Predictions + Jenny Slate Answers Your Hard Questions!

Our 2024 Predictions + Jenny Slate Answers Your Hard Questions!

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