The Context Window with David Deming Podcast

David Deming
  • 5.0 (12)
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The conversations that matter most need context. Harvard Dean David Deming talks with leaders and thinkers about how they became who they are — the detours, the doubt, and the people who helped along the way. thecontextwindowpodcast.substack.com

  1. 1d ago

    Jason Furman | The price of ignoring Econ 101

    David's guest today is Jason Furman, an economist and professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, where they've been colleagues for the past several years. Before coming to Harvard, Jason had a distinguished career in government. He worked in the White House during the entire Obama administration, including as the chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers from 2013 to 2017, and he was one of the chief architects of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which helped the country climb out of the depths of the Great Recession. Jason is now a contributing writer at The New York Times and the faculty director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government here at Harvard, and he co-teaches EC 10, Introductory Economics, one of Harvard's largest courses. David and Jason both love economics and have chosen careers in it, but they've come to it from totally different directions. Jason's experience is much more practical and hands-on than that of most other academic economists. David asks him about his career path into policymaking and politics, what he learned from his time in Washington, and what advice he would give to people who want to work in government, too. David also ask him for a crash course in macroeconomics. Why is inflation bad? Why has it been so much higher over the past few years than everybody expected? And what can we do about it? What happens when governments try to inflate away their debt? And of course, I ask him about the economic impacts of AI and what we might expect in the years ahead. For show notes and full episodes, subscribe to The Context Window with David Deming: ⁠https://thecontextwindowpodcast.substack.com This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thecontextwindowpodcast.substack.com

    Jason Furman | The price of ignoring Econ 101

  2. Sep 23

    Matthew Yglesias | An A.I. safety guide for normal people

    How seriously should we take the risks of superintelligent A.I.? ⁠Matthew Yglesias⁠⁠ joins David Deming for an A.I. safety guide for normal people who are just paying attention. Matt is a journalist and founder of the widely read newsletter ⁠Slow Boring⁠, which he started in 2020 after leaving the news site ⁠Vox⁠, which he co-founded with Ezra Klein and Melissa Bell in 2014. He is one of the masters of what some people call “⁠explanatory journalism⁠,” meaning going beyond just the facts and trying to help readers really understand the context around an issue. Matt has been writing about A.I. and related issues for a long time, but as he acknowledges in his column, A.I. safety has finally gotten the public’s attention, and the politics and policy of A.I. might move fast from here onward. In this conversation, David asked Matt why A.I. safety is suddenly getting so much attention, how seriously we should be taking the risks of superintelligent A.I., and what it might realistically look like along the way to go from friendly chatbots on a computer screen to serious safety issues and even human extinction. They also talk about the politics of A.I. safety, on how to realistically slow things down with China also racing for the lead and whether Matt thinks a frontier A.I. lab could be nationalized in the next few years. Read Matt's column, "A simple plan to save the world from rogue A.I.": ⁠https://www.slowboring.com/p/a-simple-plan-to-save-the-world-from ⁠ For show notes and full episodes, subscribe to The Context Window with David Deming: ⁠https://thecontextwindowpodcast.substack.com This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thecontextwindowpodcast.substack.com

    Matthew Yglesias | An A.I. safety guide for normal people

  3. Sep 16

    Gina Raimondo on what companies owe workers in the AI economy

    David Deming's guest today is former U.S. Secretary of Commerce and Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo. Secretary Raimondo grew up in Rhode Island, where her father worked at the Bulova watch factory in Providence until it closed down, leaving him unemployed in his mid-50s. Today, she is trying to help workers avoid a similar fate as we transition to an AI economy. In June, she and former Governor of Indiana Eric Holcomb launched RAISE US, a national organization working with employers and states to prepare the American workforce move into new jobs. David asked Secretary Raimondo how sure she is that widespread job losses are coming due to AI, how she plans to measure which initiatives are working, whether training programs can create jobs, and what obligations big companies and frontier AI labs have to help. The two also talk about wage insurance, job sharing, how to prepare for an uncertain future, including the advice she gives to her own children. Then Secretary Raimondo gave David homework and challenged him to design a tax incentive for companies to invest in people. He took her up on it - and shares his proposal after the interview. For show notes and full episodes, subscribe to The Context Window with David Deming: https://thecontextwindowpodcast.substack.com This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thecontextwindowpodcast.substack.com

    Gina Raimondo on what companies owe workers in the AI economy

  4. Sep 9

    Cate Hall | The problem with being a high achiever

    In today's episode, David talks to Cate Hall about her book You Can Just Do Things: How High-Agency People Get What They Want Out of Life, written with Sasha Chapin. Agency is all the rage these days. Tech CEOs like Sam Altman have said that high agency is the skill they are hiring for in the age of AI. High agency people know what they want and they just get things done. But Cate's own life shows how difficult it can be to figure out what you want in the first place. Cate was an incredibly high achiever from a young age. She double-majored in biochemistry and philosophy, graduated from Yale Law School, and was on the fast track with prestigious clerkships and a top job at a fancy law firm. But she was miserable. She quit law and became a very successful poker player, then struggled with drug addiction for about three years and lost everything. After rebuilding her life, she became co-CEO of a biotech company and later the CEO of the Astera Institute, a multibillion-dollar private foundation. How did she do it? Her answer is agency. Cate shares advice on how to be more agentic in your own life, like staring into the abyss, communicating directly instead of expecting people to read your mind, and learning to love the moat of low status. She and David also discuss purpose, love, religion, and why willingly accepting constraints on your life can itself be an exercise of agency. You Can Just Do Things, written with Sasha Chapin: https://www.catehall.com/the-book Cate's newsletter, Useful Fictions: https://usefulfictions.substack.com/ For show notes and full episodes, subscribe to The Context Window with David Deming: https://thecontextwindowpodcast.substack.com _ If you or someone you know is struggling with substance use, SAMHSA’s National Helpline offers free, confidential help and treatment referrals, and is available 24 hours a day. Call 1-800-662-HELP (4357) or visit FindTreatment.gov. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thecontextwindowpodcast.substack.com

    Cate Hall | The problem with being a high achiever

  5. Sep 2

    AI is worth far more than we pay for it

    How much would someone have to pay you to give up every generative AI tool for a month? For the typical American, the answer is about $11. But one in eight people wouldn’t give up AI for a month even if you paid them $500. In this solo episode, David Deming suggests that might be the most interesting statistic in economics right now - because almost none of the value people say they are getting from AI appears in GDP numbers. Everybody focuses on how AI will affect jobs and productivity in the workplace. Those are important questions, but they are missing a big part of the story, which is the impact on our personal lives. Is AI saving you time at home? Helping you make better decisions? Is it making you happier? These consumer welfare gains aren’t directly priced in the market. Right now, almost all of that hidden value is flowing to you for free because consumers pay little to nothing for AI tools. David works through consumer surplus, GDP-B, the worth of Wikipedia, Facebook, smartphone cameras, and generative AI, and explains why the era of free AI might be over soon. For show notes and full episodes, subscribe to The Context Window with David Deming: https://thecontextwindowpodcast.substack.com This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thecontextwindowpodcast.substack.com

    AI is worth far more than we pay for it

  6. Aug 26

    James Fallows on how the press failed America

    In 1996, James Fallows warned that journalism would fail if it treated politics as sport and tried to compete with entertainment. In this conversation with David Deming, he explains why he thinks that prediction has come true. Fallows discusses the difference between reporting for the public and protecting one’s access to powerful insiders. He recalls serving as Jimmy Carter’s chief White House speechwriter and then publishing a critical account of the administration after he left. The conversation begins with Fallows’ earliest experiences as student journalist: covering Harvard’s anti-war protests in 1969, watching police remove activists from University Hall, and watching the Vietnam draft lottery on television, then losing enough weight to fail his military physical. In a separately recorded follow-up at the end, Fallows returns to The Crimson and an attempt to take editorial control away from its student during the 1969 upheaval. James Fallows is a longtime journalist and writer. At age 27, he became the chief White House speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter, the youngest person to hold the job. He spent four decades at The Atlantic as Washington editor and national correspondent, was the editor of US News & World Report from 1996 to 1998, and worked on the design of Microsoft Word. He is the author of twelve books, including National Defense (1981), winner of a National Book Award, Breaking the News (1996), and Our Towns (2018), written with his wife, Deborah Fallows. He received the National Magazine Award in 2003. Fallows writes the Substack Breaking the News. For show notes and full episodes, subscribe to The Context Window with David Deming: https://thecontextwindowpodcast.substack.com This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thecontextwindowpodcast.substack.com

    James Fallows on how the press failed America

  7. Aug 19

    Kwame Owusu-Kesse on why education alone won't end poverty

    Kwame Owusu-Kesse grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts. His mother worked two jobs as a hospital housekeeper. A scholarship to a Catholic school changed his life trajectory, which Kwame came about because his mother played bingo at the school and the nuns took a liking to her. He calls it “the luck of bingo.” Kwame seized that opportunity and made it to Harvard, Morgan Stanley, and eventually Harlem Children’s Zone, where he now serves as CEO. He took over in 2020, just as COVID-19 hit New York. HCZ raised $54 million for relief in Harlem and six other cities, before turning the emergency work into a national strategy. He now thinks of Harlem as an R&D lab for fighting intergenerational poverty. In this conversation with David Deming, Kwame talks about leadership in fundamentally uncertain times, including how he thinks about the difficult decision to close and then reopen schools during a global pandemic, and also why he thinks the Harlem Children’s Zone needs to move beyond education and focus on wealth building. For show notes and full episodes, subscribe to The Context Window with David Deming: https://thecontextwindowpodcast.substack.com This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thecontextwindowpodcast.substack.com

    Kwame Owusu-Kesse on why education alone won't end poverty

  8. Aug 12

    Treat AI agents like children

    In July, OpenAI’s own AI agents broke out of a training sandbox and ended up inside Hugging Face’s production database. They were after the answer key to a test and got there after two months of chained exploits across both companies. Many headlines called these agents “rogue.” David Deming - labor economist and Dean of Harvard College - argues that gets the story wrong. The agents did exactly what they were told to do, and nobody had told them what was off limits. So who’s liable? David works through the two legal frameworks being proposed for cases like these and finds holes in each. Product liability, the approach behind the AI LEAD Act, has to identify a defective product, and here the model and the sandbox were not controlled by the same party. Negligence, which law professor Kate Klonick argues for, holds a company responsible for the room it put the agents in but says nothing about the agents’ moral code. David’s own answer builds on a relationship we all understand intuitively: treat autonomous agents as children, and their developers as parents. For full show notes and new episodes, subscribe to The Context Window with David Deming: https://thecontextwindowpodcast.substack.com/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thecontextwindowpodcast.substack.com

    Treat AI agents like children
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The conversations that matter most need context. Harvard Dean David Deming talks with leaders and thinkers about how they became who they are — the detours, the doubt, and the people who helped along the way. thecontextwindowpodcast.substack.com

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