There are all kinds of societal concerns emerging out of the rise of artificial intelligence. Will it put us all out of work? Will fraudsters be able to use deepfakes — technology that can replicate our images and our voices — to scam us? We're in uncharted territory and nobody knows for sure how society will negotiate these risks. While many people are familiar with ChatGPT, its founder Sam Altman also co-founded Worldcoin, which aims to mitigate these risks. Enter: The Orb, an eyeball-scanning device that could provide everyone with a unique personal identifier. Think a global social security number, except you never have to share what it is with anyone. On this episode, we speak with Alex Blania, the CEO and co-founder of Tools For Humanity, the developer behind the Orb and the Worldcoin project, on his company's vision for how this tech can be used for things like proving one's humanness or collecting a Universal Basic Income in a world where AI predominates. 

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There's a lot of frustration about the government's ability to build things in the US. Subways. Bridges. High-speed rail. Electricity transmission. But there's another crucial area where the public sector often struggles, and that is software. We saw it with the infamous rollout of Obamacare. We see it in the UX of the Treasury Direct website. And we saw it in the way state unemployment insurance systems broke during the pandemic. So why is it so hard for the public sector to build and maintain software? On this episode we speak with Jennifer Pahlka, the founder and former executive director of Code for America and author of the new book Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better, as well as Dave Guarino, who recently left the Department of Labor after working on upgrading the unemployment insurance system. Both have a long history of working on public sector software systems and they explain why the problem is so tricky.

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A lot has happened since we last spoke to Brad Setser in April 2020, towards the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. For a start, Setser was appointed to be a trade advisor in the Biden administration during a period of immense disruption. There was lots of talk about a potential reshuffling of the way the global economy works, and things like nearshoring and deglobalization. But some big predictions for the way world trade will function haven't come to fruition. For instance, the US is still running a current account deficit and China is still running a current account surplus. So in this episode, Setser returns to discuss what has and hasn't changed in global trade in the last three years. He's left the Biden administration and returned to the Council on Foreign Relations, where he's a senior fellow. He talks about everything from the US-China trade imbalance to the impact of sanctions on the world economy to China's electric vehicle and plane production, plus the future of the dollar.

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Earlier this year, Odd Lots talked about the idea of companies taking advantage of bottlenecks and other disruptions to raise their prices. Since then, the notion of this type of corporate-led inflation has burst into the public discourse with central bankers and politicians all taking a closer look. But how does this type of inflation differ from more traditional economic interpretations of prices, and what are the implications for monetary and economic policy? In this episode, we talk once again to Isabella Weber, the UMass-Amherst economics professor who dubbed this phenomenon "sellers' inflation" in a paper published earlier this year. She talks about how the way we think about inflation is changing and her own experience of seeing public attitudes shift in real time.

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If you think interest rates seem high right now, you might be operating with too short of a perspective. For a longer-term perspective, you'd want to talk to someone like Jim Grant. On this episode of the Odd Lots podcast, the founder and editor of Grant's Interest Rate Observer and a long-time financial commentator talks to us about why we're at the beginning of a longer-term trend of higher rates that could last decades. He argues that investors will struggle to shake off years of "buy the dip" behavior, a ZIRP mentality, and a misplaced faith in the Federal Reserve. We also discuss what it means for market behavior today.

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Earlier this year, it emerged that the London Metals Exchange had been holding a bunch of bags filled with stones instead of the nickel needed to back trades for major commodities players, including Trafigura. Before that, commodities trader Mercuria was given painted rocks instead of the copper it was supposed to take delivery of. In short, the commodities world is no stranger to fraud. But what is it about the business of trading, moving and storing commodities that makes it so susceptible to scandal? In this episode, we speak to repeat Odd Lots guests and commodities collateral specialists Mercury Group CEO Anton Posner and President Margo Brock, about some recent episodes of counterfeiting in commodities world, why they seem to keep happening, and what could be done to prevent further instances from occurring.

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The US government is spending billions of dollars to build out state-of-the-art domestic semiconductor manufacturing capacity. But spending money is no guarantee of success. In fact, there are already worries that the CHIPS Act passed by the Biden administration isn't succeeding, due to various roadblocks, speedbumps and unforced errors. So what are the odds that it will pay off? And what should we be watching for as evidence of its efficacy? On this episode of the podcast, we spoke with Dan Wang, technology analyst at Gavekal Dragonomics and Adam Ozimek, chief economist at the Economic Innovation Group. This episode was recorded live at Decades, Adam's bowling alley in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, during the #EconTwitterIRL event in April.

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Stewart Butterfield has been at the forefront of two epochal turning points for tech. First, he was the co-founder of the photo sharing site Flickr, that was one of the defining brands of the so-called Web 2.0 and the world of user-generated content. Several years after that, he co-founded Slack, one of the big winners of the software-as-a-service wars, changing how people work and how companies operate. Now we're at another turning point for the tech industry. Layoffs have occurred across the space and AI is putting traditional business models into doubt. On this episode, we speak with Butterfield about his experiences and what he sees coming next for tech.

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In 2011, then-Vice President Biden had a front row seat to a bruising debt ceiling standoff between President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner. That fight arguably derailed the Obama presidency and the nascent economic recovery. After that experience, Biden and his team had insisted that this time they would not negotiate over a debt ceiling increase. Yet here we are, and the current administration is doing exactly that. According to the Treasury Department, we're just days away from the so called "X-date" (when a US default would occur) and both the White House and new House Speaker Kevin McCarthy have been debating what conditions a hike in the debt ceiling should come with. So how did they get into this situation? And what were the other options? On this episode we speak with Skanda Amarnath, executive director of Employ America, and Arnab Datta, senior counsel of Employ America, about the current state of play and how it might have been avoided.

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There's a lot of discussion these days about de-dollarization and whether the US dollar will lose its standing as the world's sole reserve currency. Generally, people seem open to the idea, but they also don't see many good alternatives out there. The renminbi is the obvious candidate to take share away from the dollar, given the size of the Chinese economy and China's role in global trade. But for various reasons, the currency isn't suited to be a global reserve currency. So what would it actually take to become one? And what would be the effects if it started to play a major role in global trade? On this episode of the podcast, we speak with Karthik Sankaran, a longtime FX veteran, about what China would have to do if it really has global aspirations for its currency, and why a more multipolar FX landscape might be good for world financial stability.

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