The Mixtape with Scott

scott cunningham
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The Mixtape with Scott is a podcast in which economist and professor, Scott Cunningham, interviews economists, scientists and authors about their lives and careers, as well as the some of their work. He tries to travel back in time with his guests to listen and hear their stories before then talking with them about topics they care about now. causalinf.substack.com

  1. 2 DAYS AGO

    Episode 9: Mystery Solved!

    This week's episode of "The Odd Couple" is just Caitlin and Hannah as I had to go to Georgetown to talk about Claude Code at a faculty retreat. But before we get going with a description, Hannah mentioned at the start during the ice breaker about the opening theme song to the podcast, and for those that don't recognize the lyrics, that's Mac Miller's "Small Worlds" sung by my two nephews. So what is this episode about? One of the themes I have been emphasizing in my talks on AI Agents and my substack is that AI Agents have caused a separation between the historic bundling of the production of research and the verification of the results. Since AI Agents are now able to produce so many aspects of the research project autonomously -- that is without much direction from the human researcher -- one of the new tasks of the researcher is to verify them. If you remember from a few weeks ago, Claude Code had nearly instantly worked up the county-level marriage data into a county panel of marriage rates and marriage counts by year. We brought Hannah Sayre, a recent college graduate and current economic consultant, into the project to help us work through the latter task of "human verification". Had Claude done it correctly? How do we verify that it is correct? And if it is not correct, why was it not correct, and how generalizable is that inaccuracy? Hannah was our eyes and ears, our boots on the ground, as she independently investigated the same question, the same task we gave Claude, to on the back end up help us determine whether Claude had indeed found the same irregularities in the original marriage dataset, and if so, what autonomous decisions had he made. And so in this episode, Hannah walks us through it, and she and Caitlin discuss both those findings, as well as begin the work of conceptualizing the process of verification in a world of AI Agents. While not definitive, this is a chance for others to hear more specifically about this. I at least anticipate that all of us will have to wrestle with verification going forward in ways we were not expecting, and maybe even are not prepared for, at least not universally, and definitely not necessarily if in fact AI Agents shrink the size of the project team members due to automation, and how best to respond to that smaller scale, and therefore, fewer people available to do the actual verification itself. Scott's Mixtape Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thanks again for tuning in! We hope you are having as much fun with this as we are! Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

    59 min

  2. 28 APR

    Episode 8: Poisson Regressions (Finally)

    This week, Caitlin and Scott and Claude debate what a regression is, and then run some poisson regressions of county level marriages in Texas onto travel distance to the nearest county with an abortion provider! If that doesn’t get your heart beating fast, you should go to the doctor because you may be dead! This is a fun episode and hope you like it! Scott's Mixtape Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

    1hr 12min

  3. 21 APR

    Episode 7 of the Odd Couple: Human Verification, I mean, Hannah Verification!

    As I’ve said on here, and others have said repeatedly, the bottleneck in research is probably less so production as it is verification now that researchers have access to AI Agents like Claude Code, Gemini and Codex. But how to verify, and what to verify, is largely something all researchers will have to bumble through themselves. We did it the old fashioned way — we asked Hannah to check Claude’s work by independently going through the marriage records we found herself. In today’s episode, Hannah comes back to tell us what she found. And after today, we are now one episode closer to actually running some regressions! Famous last words. Thanks again for your support of the Odd Couple podcast, as well as my substack. Scott's Mixtape Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

    1hr 6min

  4. 14 APR

    Episode 6 of the Odd Couple: How Will We Draw Our Diff-in-Diff?

    In this episode of the Mixtape with Scott, and season 5's "The Odd Couple", featuring Caitlin Myers and myself (Scott Cunningham), we work with Claude Code to make beautiful figures of our identification strategy -- the change in travel distance to the nearest abortion clinic caused by House Bill 2 closing half of Texas's abortion clinics. We are slowly beginning to prepare for our diff-in-diff strategy using continuous treatment, but not there yet. Scott's Mixtape Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

    1hr 12min

  5. 7 APR

    Episode 5 of the Odd Couple: Making Maps with Claude Code!

    Me and Caitlin Myers are back with our trusted robot command line interface secret agent with a license to kill, Claude Code! This week we continue our live research project studying the closure of abortion clinics across Texas under House Bill 2 and its effect on county marriage certificates, or the flow of new marriages. In the previous weeks, recall Claude Code helped find, pull, store locally marriage certificates — with people’s names and selected demographics for goodness sake! — and then build a panel dataset. But Claude also helped us try to understand what was going on with these date when some irregularities were spotted. And to satisfy by seemingly endless itch, Claude also made us “beautiful decks” according to my rhetoric of decks philosophy at my MixtapeTools repository that contains skills I regularly use. And the deck had beautiful pictures in it. This week we extend that exercise and make maps of Texas with more data as we continue pressing ahead to determine the relationship, potentially causal, of increased travel distance on the flow of people into marriage. Thanks again for tuning in. Tell your friends, family, your old second grade teacher, Ms. Lacy, your barista, the kids next door who sometimes play their music too loud about this amazing podcast with Caitlin Myers at Middlebury College, and me, Scott Cunningham, at Baylor University. Scott's Mixtape Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

    52 min

  6. 31 MAR

    The Odd Couple Episode 4: Introducing Hannah

    If the concept of a podcast where two economists use Claude Code to do research together sounds absurd, well, you would not be wrong. But that has not stopped Caitlin Myers and I from doing it. This podcast is about the two of us using Claude Code to do a research project together on abortion clinic closures and the effect it had on marriage using a Texas natural experiment called House Bill 2, and county level marriage data we collected with Claude in an earlier episode. Some of you had asked to see the “beautiful deck” that Claude made for us last week and so here it is! And here is the YouTube video if you’re wanting to watch us and meet Hannah. The age of AI has shifted things somewhat for researchers where we have to bring in verification of what we do sooner and often. Figuring out how, when and where to do that is something me and Caitlin, as well as most listeners, are trying to figure out too. Caitlin had the idea of embodying our own verification methods with a real live human being — a former student of hers, Hannah Sayre, a recent graduate of Middlebury College. In this episode, we meet Hannah, talk with her and hear about her own story and journey as a young person aspiring to a PhD in economics, and how what her job will be on this project to confirm what we are doing with Claude Code. Plus a little easter egg if you skip ahead is in the video because Caitlin is going to tell us about her new job! Thanks again for your listener and viewer support! This podcast, just like the substack, is a labor of love. So sit back and enjoy! Scott's Mixtape Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

    33 min

  7. 24 MAR

    The Odd Couple Season 5 Episode 3: What's up with this data?

    This podcast is part of my long running podcast called “The Mixtape with Scott”, which had historically been an oral history of economics through in-depth interviews with living economists. After around 130 interviews over four seasons, I’m taking a break to talk about Claude Code with my good friend and coauthor, Caitlin Myers! What we do on the podcast is we are doing a research project together, from start to finish, on abortion and marriage. Specifically, we are studying the effect that of a natural experiment called House Bill 2 that required abortion facilities’ clinicians and physicians to have admitting privileges at hospitals. This led to half the state’s clinics to close causing an increase in travel distance to the nearest abortion facility to rise. Several papers have been written about the effect this had, including one by us, but in this podcast we tackle a question that had not been studied yet — the effect it had on new marriages and new divorces. But where did we get the data for this? Claude Code found it for us. While I knew of the data, we put Claude Code on the task of finding it — which it did. Claude Code found the data for us on its own, downloaded it for us, stored it in our local directory for us, and then did a benchmark analysis for us of that data against other published data sources on Texas marriages. And then Claude Code made a beautiful deck of slides walking us through what it found and what it all meant for us in our project! For the deck alone, I encourage you to follow along. What a world we are living in! Hopefully you find it interesting to see how the sausage gets made — how research projects start, how Caitlin thinks about doing research at all, how slow and meticulous she is about it, and how much fun research can be, as well as how we bring Claude Code into the research process itself. Thanks again for all your support! This has turned out to be a fun. Scott's Mixtape Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

    1hr 14min

  8. 17 MAR

    The Odd Couple Season 5, Episode 2: Setting it up and getting the data

    In this week's episode of the Mixtape with Scott season 5, "The Odd Couple" Scott Cunningham (Professor of Economics at Baylor) and Catilin Myers (Professor of Economics at Middlebury College) set out to use Claude Code to get the data for their project studying travel distance to the nearest abortion clinic's effect on marriages in Texas after House Bill 2 shut down half the state's clinics. As they do, they talk about their project, the trappings of having a third party robot as a colleague and RA on this project done on the air, and articulate aloud the prompts as they do them! Thanks again for all your support! This substack and the podcast are labors of love. Please consider becoming a subscriber at only $5/month! Scott's Mixtape Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Scott's Mixtape Substack at causalinf.substack.com/subscribe

    57 min
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About

The Mixtape with Scott is a podcast in which economist and professor, Scott Cunningham, interviews economists, scientists and authors about their lives and careers, as well as the some of their work. He tries to travel back in time with his guests to listen and hear their stories before then talking with them about topics they care about now. causalinf.substack.com

Information

  • Creator
    scott cunningham
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2026
  • Episodes
    153
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © scott cunningham
  • Show Website
    The Mixtape with Scott
  • Provider

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