Interesting Times

Pornography gets the blame for a lot of societal problems, including the so-called “sex recession.” Can porn ever really be ethical? Erika Lust thinks so. The adult filmmaker sees porn as an art form. She’s a self-described feminist who centers women’s desires and fantasies in her work. But how different is the product she’s making?

Lust sits down with Julia Yost, senior editor at “First Things,” to make the case for porn. Together, they discuss the adult film industry, stigmas around sex and translating fantasy into reality.

Note: As we work on relaunching “Interesting Times,” the show will feature a series of guest hosts in the coming months.

• 00:00 - Intro
• 01:22 - How Erika Became a Pornographer
• 03:51 - Behind the Scenes of an Adult Film
• 08:07 - The Relationship With Performers
• 08:55 - Porn vs. “Euphoria”
• 10:16 - Ethical Porn
• 13:00 - Accurately Depicting Female Pleasure
• 14:22 - Making Porn as a Feminist
• 16:03 - Andrea Dworkin and the Anti-Porn Feminist Movement
• 19:06 - “The Golden Era of Porn”
• 20:55 - Fantasizing Under The Patriarchy
• 24:01 - Sexuality In Ancient Rome
• 26:15 - The Cornell Seven and Sexual Risk
• 34:30 - Why We Need Stigmas
• 40:55 - Is Porn Causing the Sex Recession?
• 42:23 - “The Most Vanilla People Have the Hottest Sex Lives”
• 43:23 - Porn Addiction and Compulsive Behavior
• 46:44 - Religious Conservatives Aren’t Ashamed of Sex

(A full transcript of this episode is available on the Times website.)

Thoughts? Email us at [email protected]. Please subscribe to our YouTube Channel, Interesting Times.

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The Trump administration wants to accelerate the use of artificial intelligence for scientific discovery. But can its plan succeed without prioritizing universities?

Guest host Tyler Cowen speaks with Michael Kratsios, President Trump’s top science and technology adviser, about the White House’s new blueprint for American innovation and what it means for the next generation of scientists.

• 00:00 Intro
• 00:54 The model for scientific research today
• 02:49 What's the scientific evidence that science has been broken?

Note: As we work on relaunching “Interesting Times,” the show will feature a series of guest hosts in the coming months.

(A full transcript of this episode is available on the Times website.)

Thoughts? Email us at [email protected]. Please subscribe to our YouTube Channel, Interesting Times.

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Amazon Music. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

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Dwarkesh Patel is one of the most important voices in the artificial intelligence world. Deeply embedded in San Francisco’s tech community, he has interviewed nearly every tech chief executive at length.

This week’s guest host, Tyler Cowen, a professor of economics at George Mason University, sits down with Mr. Patel to discuss why researchers are resigning, whether A.I. could become conscious and if he’ll ever get an A.I. girlfriend.

Note: As we work on relaunching “Interesting Times,” the show will feature a series of guest hosts in the coming months.

• 00:00 Intro
• 01:31 What Inspired the “Dwarkesh Podcast”
• 02:47 Documenting Wild Human History
• 04:18 What The Public Doesn’t Understand About A.I.
• 06:25 The Mood in San Francisco
• 06:51 Dwarkesh Didn’t See This Coming
• 09:08 Should More A.I. Researchers Resign?
• 11:09 Unreleased Frontier Models
• 13:26 Pausing A.I. 
• 15:45 A.I. Psychosis & Consciousness
• 21:14 What Tech Bros Do for Fun 
• 23:50 Bay Area Culture
• 24:06 A.I. Boyfriends v. Girlfriends
• 26:02 Are A.I. Therapists Good?
• 26:54 What Dwarkesh Got Wrong
• 27:44 What’s The Next Big Thing?
• 29:13 Robot Predictions
• 30:26 What Jobs Are Safe?
• 35:21 The Speed of A.I. Adoption
• 37:12 Milestones To Watch
• 42:58 What If 2035 Looks Normal?
• 44:39 Dwarkesh In 2045
• 46:27 Skepticism On A.I. Revenue
• 48:01 How Podcasting Has Changed Dwarkesh

(A full transcript of this episode is available on the Times website.)

Thoughts? Email us at [email protected]. Please subscribe to our YouTube Channel, Interesting Times.

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Amazon Music. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

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Literacy is declining sharply across the West. In the era of vertical video, who has the time or concentration to read a long article — let alone a whole book?

As we lose the ability to read long-form text, we might also be losing the capacity for democratic deliberation and self-governance. That’s the argument this week’s guest, the Times of London columnist James Marriott, makes in his recent book, “The New Dark Ages.” He sits down with guest host Mary Harrington to discuss our return to oral culture, the political consequences and what we can learn from the medieval era about storing information in a digital world.

Note: As we work on relaunching “Interesting Times,” the show will feature a series of guest hosts in the coming months.

• 00:00 Intro
• 00:52 What Is Post-Literacy
• 02:05 The Data Behind the Decline
• 05:21 The Shift Toward Video
• 09:44 Why Reading Is Hard
• 10:45 Walter Ong on Oral vs. Literate Cultures
• 14:27 Tribal Politics and Emotion
• 18:21 The Reading Revolution
• 21:14 Literacy as an Engine for Democracy
• 25:15 Medieval Literary Culture
• 27:27 What We Can Learn the Medieval Era
• 30:13 Remembering Everything and Nothing
• 33:49 How Bukele Communicates Visually
• 37:04 Monarchy vs. Dictatorship
• 41:38 Is Postliteracy a Right-Wing Phenomenon?
• 43:29 Can We Resist the Slide?
• 46:33 Closing

(A full transcript of this episode is available on the Times website.)

Thoughts? Email us at [email protected]. Please subscribe to our YouTube Channel, Interesting Times.
 

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Amazon Music. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

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Nick Bostrom rose to prominence for predicting artificial intelligence doom more than a decade ago — garnering support from figures like Elon Musk, Sam Altman and Bill Gates. But now he’s retreating from those warnings, focusing his attention on a more complex question: What if A.I. succeeds beyond humanity’s wildest imaginations? Will we be bored out of our minds? Are we too infantile to understand what’s coming?

Guest host Spencer Klavan, the associate editor at the Claremont Review of Books, presses Bostrom on the potential uses and abuses of superintelligence, rationalist ethics and what makes us human.

Note: As we work on relaunching “Interesting Times,” the show will feature a series of guest hosts in the coming months.

00:00 Intro
01:07 What is P(doom)?
04:44 Bostrom’s Doomsday Scenarios
06:14 Vulnerable World Hypothesis
08:27 The Best-Case Scenario of Superintelligence
12:37 The Problems We Can’t Solve in Utopia
14:47 Paths to Superintelligence
17:02 What Kind of Utopia Do We Want to Live In?
21:56 The Values Worth Keeping in Utopia
32:42 Bostrom’s Influence on Effective Altruism
38:04 Are Existential Warnings Helpful?
43:52 The Trajectory of Humanity
46:51 Why Bostrom Wants Utopia  

(A full transcript of this episode is available on the Times website.)

Thoughts? Email us at [email protected]. Please subscribe to our YouTube Channel, Interesting Times.

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Amazon Music. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

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Many Americans are losing faith in elections. Proposed solutions from across the political spectrum to restore faith in the process — early voting, mail-in ballot restrictions and voter ID laws — seem to have the opposite effect.

But lack of trust in elections is a symptom of a broader problem: America is living through an era of democratic dissatisfaction. That’s what the New York University law professor Richard Pildes argues on this episode of “Interesting Times.” He and the guest host, Sarah Isgur, the editor of SCOTUSblog, discuss why Americans are so worried about the midterms and how to fix our electoral system and restore trust.

00:00 Existential Election Anxiety
02:38 Era of Democratic Dissatisfaction
04:21 Were Recent Election Reforms a Mistake?
06:09 Campaign Finance Reform
09:22 SCOTUS and Trump’s Mail-In Ballot Executive Order
13:57 Why Did Trump Target Absentee Ballots?
20:32 Should There Be a National Voter Database?
23:58 Proof Of Citizenship Debate
29:48 What Should SCOTUS Do?
35:47 Partisan Manipulation in Elections
42:24 Can the Midterms Be Stolen?
44:51 Closing Thoughts

(A full transcript of this episode is available on the Times website.)

Thoughts? Email us at [email protected]. Please subscribe to our YouTube Channel, Interesting Times with Ross Douthat.

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Amazon Music. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

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President Trump made more than $2 billion last year — far exceeding his presidential salary of $400,000. His growing fortunes are raising questions about his allegiance to investors, particularly foreign ones, as he makes policy decisions and shapes the direction of the country.

The contributing Opinion writer Christopher Caldwell and the Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith discuss how the president has amassed this fortune, whether it’s legal and if the United States is becoming a kleptocracy.

Note: As we work on relaunching 'Interesting Times,' the show will feature a series of guest hosts in the coming months.

00:00 Why Trump’s Wealth Is Unusual
01:30 Presidential Ethics Before Trump
02:28 Trump’s Crypto and Foreign Money Flows
06:12 Is It a Kleptocracy?
07:36 What’s Unconstitutional About Trump’s Finances
10:43 The U.A.E. and Trump’s Foreign Policy
13:41 How Trump’s Weaponization Is Changing Government
16:42 What Congress Could Do
18:59 The Tit for Tat Weaponization
24:13 Can Trump Pardon Himself?
26:57 The “Deep-State” Crackdown
36:59 Oversight Norms and Voter Verdict
42:46 Closing Thoughts

(A full transcript of this episode is available on the Times website.)

Thoughts? Email us at [email protected]. Please subscribe to our YouTube Channel, Interesting Times.

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Amazon Music. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

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“Interesting Times” is on a brief hiatus. Before we return next month, we’re bringing you an interview from “The Ezra Klein Show” with Ross Douthat about his 17 years as a conservative columnist at The New York Times. But Ross and Ezra go back even further, to the nascent days of political blogging. They talk about the seismic changes they’ve witnessed in the media industry over the years and the art of changing minds.

(A full transcript of this episode is available on the Times website here.)

Thoughts? Email us at [email protected]. Please subscribe to our YouTube Channel, Interesting Times.

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Amazon Music. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

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For my final episode as host of “Interesting Times,” I wanted a fitting finale — a conversation that encapsulates the ambition of this show: examining how seemingly radical ideas are steadily entering the mainstream of American politics, technology and culture. Few ideas are as radical as the hope of significant life extension and the quest to live forever.

My guest today thinks he can outrun death. After selling his tech company for hundreds of millions of dollars and experiencing a profound religious crisis, Bryan Johnson turned his own body into the ultimate science project, centered on an explicit mission: Don’t die.

But why does Johnson want to live forever, and what lessons can his algorithmically driven lifestyle bring to the rest of us?

It’s been an honor hosting this podcast and navigating these strange waters with you. “Interesting Times” will be back with new episodes and new hosts in the fall.

(A full transcript of this episode is available on the Times website.)

Thoughts? Email us at [email protected]. Please subscribe to our YouTube Channel, Interesting Times with Ross Douthat.

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Amazon Music. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

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What does a liberal solution to the masculinity crisis look like? As men fall behind in the American educational system and the economy, they’re looking for meaning — and often find it in the wrong places.

My guest today is Scott Galloway, a professor at N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business. Galloway is an unlikely masculinity guru — he’s a liberal academic, a business founder and a married father.

He had a lot to say about the social and economic reasons young men seem to be struggling, but he’s still optimistic about the future.

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

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