The Most Interesting People I Know

I'm really excited to come out of hiatus to share this conversation with you. You may have noticed people are talking a lot about AI, and I've started focusing my journalism on the topic. I recently published a 9,000 word cover story in Jacobin’s winter issue called “Can Humanity Survive AI,” and was fortunate to talk to over three dozen people coming at AI and its possible risks from basically ev...

Carl Robichaud is the first person I go to on the topic of nuclear weapons. He has been working as a grantmaker and analyst of nuclear weapons policy for close to two decades. He co-leads nuclear security grantmaking at Longview Philanthropy, where I used to work as a media consultant. Prior to Longview, Carl led nuclear grantmaking for the Carnegie Corporation of New York. We recently saw Oppenhe...

[This episode was recorded before the FTX collapse. It contains some discussion of Sam Bankman-Fried. Habiba has asked me to pass on that, to say the least, she no longer endorses what she says about Sam as an example of someone doing good. I've also linked in the show notes to her  twitter thread with her thoughts on FTX.] This episode is a long time in the making. We’re going deep on the interse...

Rutger Bregman is the bestselling author of Utopia for Realists and Humankind: a Hopeful History . He has been profiled in the New York Times and interviewed on the Daily Show. Rupert Murdoch has been spotted reading his book, and Tucker Carlson called him a “fucking moron.”  I first came across Rutger years ago when a friend was reading Utopia for Realists. The book, which argues for UBI, open bo...

Alexander Zaitchik is a freelance journalist and author with work in The New Republic, The Nation, The Guardian, and elsewhere. Zaitchik has written two books, one about Glenn Beck and another exploring Trump’s America. He’s working on a third, out in January 2022, called Owning the Sun: A People’s History of Monopoly Medicine, from Aspirin to Covid-19.  This episode is about one of the most impor...

Tobias Leenaert is the author of How to Create a Vegan World: a Pragmatic Approach , which has been translated into five languages. He is the cofounder of ProVeg International , which aims to reduce the consumption of animal products by 50% by 2040. Tobias also writes the Vegan Strategist blog , where he shares strategies for convincing people to reduce their animal product consumption.    We disc...

Conor Oberst is one of the most prolific singer-songwriters of the last twenty years. Best known for his work with Bright Eyes , Oberst has also collaborated with Flea , Jim James , Alt-J , and Phoebe Bridgers . His most recent song, “ Miracle of Life ”, featuring Bridgers, raised money for Planned Parenthood and opposed Trump’s nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court.  Oberst sat for...

David Shor is a data scientist and the former head of political data science for Civis Analytics, a Democratic think tank. In 2012, he developed the Obama campaign’s in-house election forecasting system, which accurately predicted the outcome to within a point in every state. David was the subject of some controversy this summer when he was fired following his tweeting of an academic paper . The p...

Trevor Beaulieu is the host of the podcast Champagne Sharks, a “podcast about race, politics, and pop culture, through the lenses of humor and psychology.” The show has released over 300 episodes on a huge range of topics, from Afro-pessimism and social justice, to Marvel movies and Tumblr. I’ve only scratched the surface of the show, but have really enjoyed the episodes I’ve listened to so far. C...

Ross Barkan is an award-winning journalist and former political candidate. Ross ran for state senate in Brooklyn in 2018 (where he was endorsed by AOC). He is back to full-time journalism, with a column in the Guardian and frequent contributions to the Nation and Gothamist. He also has work in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, New York Magazine, and the Columbia Journalism R...

Charlie Bresler is the Executive Director of the Life You Can Save , a nonprofit founded by Peter Singer that inspires and empowers people to take action in the fight against extreme poverty.  Charlie was previously the president of the Men’s Warehouse and a professor of clinical psychology. Later in the episode, we dig into Charlie’s path from psychology, to men’s fashion, to fighting global pove...

Edgar Villanueva is a globally-recognized expert on social justice philanthropy. He serves as Chair of the Board of Directors of Native Americans in Philanthropy. Edgar currently serves as Senior Vice President at the Schott Foundation for Public Education where he oversees grant investment and capacity building for education justice campaigns across the United States. He is also the award-winning...

Akash Mehta is a writer and organizer from New York. He is a member of the New York City Democratic Socialists of America and helped organize UChicago for Bernie. Akash recently wrote a great article for Jacobin called Even in a Pandemic, Andrew Cuomo Is Not Your Friend . Governor Cuomo has received a lot of good press for his handling of the coronavirus crisis in New York, but his past and presen...

CONTENT WARNING: This episode includes descriptions of racially-motivated violence.  Zach Roberts is a photo and video journalist whose work has been published on the cover of the New York Daily News, The Observer, The Guardian and on the inside of the New York Times, TheNation.com, Al Jazeera, Washington Post, Buzzfeed and Newsweek, among others.   For the past 10 years, Zach's been on the trail...

Malaika Jabali is an attorney, activist, and writer based in New York. She is a contributing writer to Essence Magazine and a frequent contributor to the Guardian. Her work also appears in Current Affairs, Jacobin, the Intercept and elsewhere. Malaika is my first returning guest, and I was very happy to have her back. Since we last spoke, she has written extensively about the 2020 candidates and d...

Meagan Day is a staff writer at Jacobin magazine. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Vox, Mother Jones, The Week, The Baffler, In These Times, n+1, and elsewhere. Her nonfiction book Maximum Sunlight was excerpted in the Best American Nonrequired Reading 2017. She has co-authored a book with Micah Uetricht called Bigger than Bernie: How We Go from the Sanders Campaign...

Ben Burgis is a philosopher and logician who lectures at Rutgers University. He has a segment on the Michael Brooks Show called the Debunk and writes a weekly column for Jacobin magazine. We spend most of the show talking about his book Give Them an Argument: Logic for the Left , which challenges the left to take logic more seriously.  Ben’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/benburgis?lang=en And Patre...

Marcus Davis is the co-founder and lead researcher at Rethink Priorities , a nonprofit conducting foundational research on neglected causes within the Effective Altruism movement. Marcus also co-founded Charity Entrepreneurship and Charity Science Health. Rethink Priorities has put out a lot of impactful research on topics like nuclear war, invertebrate sentience, and ballot initiatives, in additi...

Rob Scott is the Executive Director of the Cornell Prison Education Program (CPEP) , which he has led since 2013. Under his leadership CPEP has expanded operations from one to four prisons and now serves over 200 incarcerated students. Rob also helped form state and national coalitions for higher education in prisons. In 2016, he was recognized as one of 10 White House “Champions of Change” for hi...

Andrés Gómez Emilsson is the Director of Research at the Qualia Research Institute (QRI) . QRI aims to systematize the study of consciousness, to do to consciousness what chemistry did for alchemy. He holds a master’s degree in computational psychology and an undergraduate degree in symbolic systems from Stanford University, where he co-founded the Stanford Transhumanist Association.  This is a pr...

Matt Stoller is a fellow at the Open Markets Institute and the author of Goliath: the 100 Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy  (out now!). He was previously a Senior Policy Advisor and Budget Analyst to the Senate Budget Committee and worked in Congress on financial services policy, including Dodd-Frank, the Federal Reserve, and the foreclosure crisis. Matt has written for the New York T...

Leah Garcés is the president of Mercy for Animals , one of the world’s largest effective animal advocacy organizations. She was previously the executive director of Compassion in World Farming USA . Today we discuss her new book Grilled: Turning Adversaries into Allies to Change the Chicken Industry . Leah tells the remarkable story of how she teamed up with farmers to expose the world to the horr...

Lyta Gold is the Amusements and Managing Editor of Current Affairs magazine. She is also the co-editor of the Current Affairs Big Book of Amusements, a full-color collection of some of the wonderful amusements that have appeared in the pages of Current Affairs, in addition to some brand new ones. The Current Affairs print edition is chock full of beautifully-illustrated activities, quizzes, lists,...

Eric Levitz is a political analyst and Associate Editor at New York Magazine, where he writes an alarming number of “ good takes ” on a huge range of topics. I think Eric’s columns are the rare combination of well-written and well-argued. I don’t know of any political columnists who are more empirically grounded. I feel substantially better-informed having read him.  We cover:  The danger of moder...

Lewis Bollard leads the Open Philanthropy Project’s strategy for farm animal welfare . He directs roughly $30M in grants annually to nonprofits working to reduce suffering of farmed animals around the world. By virtue of his position, Lewis has deep insight into the state of the farmed animal welfare movement, which we get into in some detail. Unfortunately, there are some audio issues with this e...