safe to eat

We chat about: -AIs trading crypto + the broader role of crypto/CBDCs -the impact of AI on real interest rates (Cowen’s Third Law) -the replenishing of low-hanging fruit Tyler Cowen is a professor of economics at George Mason University and Director of the Mercatus Center. He needs little introduction given his widespread online footprint. Tyler writes regularly on his blog Marginal Revolution , h...

Growing up in Georgia, Clarence Thomas wanted to make his mark. His goal was to become his hometown’s first Black Catholic priest. But in the 1960s, he abandoned that dream. Instead, he embraced campus activism and the teachings of Malcolm X. Season 8 of Slow Burn is produced by Joel Anderson, Sophie Summergrad, Sam Kim, and Sofie Kodner. Josh Levin is the editorial director of Slow Burn. Derek Jo...

Happy National Train Day, everyone – for those of you who missed it: that was May 13th this year. A year ago, we started down this path with Train Set: Track One, which gave way to Track Two …and now, here we are for the final part of our train-fecta. Slip coaches, the worlds shortest trains, private cars, torpedoes, and of course, Thomas.

When Kevin Kelly turned 68 years old, he began writing down notes and thoughts about all the lessons he’d learned in his life and the ones he wished he’d learned earlier. While those notes were originally intended for his young adult children, they eventually became the book Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier, which was released in May 2023. On this episode of the Knowled...

Players, pundits and fans complain bitterly that referees are getting worse each season – but is that fair?

Kevin is the founding executive editor of Wired magazine, a writer and a photographer. When he was young he dropped out of college and travelled to Taiwan, which he describes as a live changing experience. Kevin is passionate about owning his time, the importance of goofing off and staying optimistic about the development of technology.

Robin Hanson is an associate professor of economics at George Mason. He is known for a number of his works including Prediction Markets and Futarchy, writings on the possibility of alien life with both the Great Filter and Grabby Aliens, his book The Elephant In The Brain about our social programming, as well as extensive work and thought in the field of artificial intelligence including a very pr...

(0:00) Preview (1:17) Sponsor (4:00) Anton breaks down the advantages of vector databases (4:45) How embeddings have created an AI-native way to represent data (11:50) Anton identifies the watershed moment and step changes in AI (12:55) Open AI’s pricing (18:50) How chroma works (33:04) Stable Attribution and systematic bias (36:48) How latent diffusion models work (51:26) How AI is like the early...

'Productivity is a trap. Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved work-life balance. The real problem isn’t our limited time. The real problem—or so I hope to convince you—is that we’ve unwittingly inherited, and feel pressured to live by, a troublesome set of ideas about how to use our limited time, all of which are pretty much guaranteed to make things worse.' That's how Oliver Burkem...

We are raiding the Audio Long Read archives to bring you some classic pieces from years past, with new introductions from the authors. This week, from 2019: Three decades ago, Olof Palme was assassinated on Stockholm’s busiest street. The killer has never been found. Could the discovery of new evidence finally close the case?

Introducing Lost Debate's newest weekly podcast, Sweat the Technique! In our very first episode, Ravi sits down with co-host Doug Lemov, K-12 expert and author of the international bestseller Teach Like a Champion. They discuss how lessons from teaching and running schools can be used toward success in any field

Reshared: Thought the comparison between MA programs (lots of debt, no income) and unpaid or poorly paid internships (no debt, maybe no income) was really on the nose. There are a lot of really predatory MA programs out there (esp in the humanities!) and it seems like the halo effect of university brands allows for behavior that would get shut down in any other context. Matt is joined by Vox's Lib...

Just for fun, a guy and his friends record a Christmas song in his Living room. More than three years later, he walks into a grocery store and hears that song playing. Alex investigates.

Matt is joined by reporter Spencer Ackerman, author of the new book Reign of Terror. Ackerman explains the ways in which America’s approach to domestic white terrorism differs from its approach to international threats. They discuss the treatment of Timothy McVeigh after the Oklahoma City bombing, and the way in which it primed the political and cultural response to 9/11 and the War on Terror. Ack...

Susan Athey, The Economics of Technology Professor at Stanford's Graduate Business School, talks with host Auren Hoffman. Susan serves as the Founding Director at Stanford's Golub Capital Social Impact Lab, using technology and social science to improve the effectiveness of social sector organizations, and is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Athey was the first Chi...

In this episode of the a16z Podcast, we take a deep dive into the world of drug development—specifically 'undruggable drugs': a category of protein, protein family or even piece of RNA that’s so difficult to target that many researchers don’t even want to touch it. Jay Bradner, President of the Novartis Institute for BioMedical Research, shares with a16z General Partners Jorge Conde and Vijay Pand...

Paul and Rich have a follow up discussion about Marc Andreessen’s newest article and ask the important question: How can we connect and empower people to create crucial tools for society when the industry has become so transactional? Are we able to create necessary social momentum when there’s no money involved? Paul puts out a plea for Postlight to create a software development kit for education...

Kevin Kelly is a writer and a founding executive editor of. He is the author of, and.“I always try to write about the future—and it became harder and harder because things would catch up so fast. If you read now, I’ve heard that people say, ‘well, this is obvious.’ I have to tell you, it was dismissed as entirely pie-in-the-sky, wild-eyed craziness twenty-five years ago.

Friction is introspection: This week on Track Changes Paul and Rich sit down with UX designer Cliff Kuang and co-founder of Dalberg Design Robert Fabricant to talk about their new book User Friendly. We discuss the history of the concept and how it’s become something that we demand yet often take for granted. We also chat about the greater paradigm shift that led to the popularity of user experien...

Jane, Dara, and Matt discuss the possibility of 'human challenge trials' to speed vaccine development. Resources: 'How Anthony Fauci Became America’s Doctor' by Michael Specter, The New Yorker 'What Each Side of the COVID-19 Debate Should Understand About the Other' by Brian Doherty, Reason 'Special Report: Peruvian coca farmers to Paris pushers, coronavirus upends global narcotics trade' by Gabri...

On this episode of's Arbiters of Truth series on disinformation, Kate Klonick and Quinta Jurecic spoke with Charlie Warzel, an opinion writer at large at the New York Times. He’s written about the internet, disinformation, privacy and platform governance—and recently he’s been focusing on how these collide with COVID-19 and the uncertainty and anxiety of living through a pandemic. They talked abou...

When will social distancing end? When will life return to “normal”? And what will it take to get there? Scott Gottlieb is a physician and public health expert who served as Donald Trump’s first FDA commissioner, where he was the rare Trump appointee to win plaudits from both the left and the right. Now he’s a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute where he’s emerged as a leading voic...