Last month, the unemployment rate for recent college grads surged to nearly 6 percent. Compared to the overall economy's jobless rate, the unemployment rate for recent grads is higher now than in any month on record, going back at least four decades. Business school grads are struggling, too. Last year, The Wall Street Journal reported that elite MBA programs saw that their most recent classes had "worse job-placement outcomes last year than any other in recent memory."

What’s going on? Today’s guest is David Deming, an economist at Harvard who studies education and the future of work. We walk through some plain-Jane theories about the weakening labor market for young college grads. But then, as you’ll hear, the conversation expands to consider the coming storm of AI—and how artificial intelligence is changing education and the workforce for young people.

To read more on this topic, check out Derek's Atlantic column from last week.

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [email protected].

Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: David Deming

Producer: Devon Baroldi

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Today, we are witnessing an unprecedented assault on American science. Thousands of workers have been dismissed from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. Billions of dollars are being cut from the NIH and NSF. Talented scientists are leaving the field (or leaving the country). Clinical trials and longitudinal studies are ending without explanation. Major research universities are under direct attack, with billions more dollars being withheld for political purposes.

Today, I want to do three things: First, I want to review what's happening to American science and why it’s so serious. Second, I want to explore how we got here—how the American science system works, and where it came from. And third, I want to discuss what a real reformist agenda for American science would look like.

So, for the first time, this is a triple-barreled podcast. First we speak to Holden Thorp, the editor-in-chief of Science and the prestigious Science journals. Second, we talk to Bhaven Sampat, a researcher and historian at Arizona State University, about the history of the NIH. And finally, we talk to Pierre Azoulay, a researcher at MIT, who has spent considerable time and energy studying how American science works and how it could work better.

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [email protected].

Host: Derek Thompson

Guests: Holden Thorp, Bhaven Sampat and Pierre Azoulay

Producer: Devon Baroldi

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In the last few weeks, for the first time in my life, I’ve seriously thought about the 21st century not being another American century.

A recent essay in the journal Foreign Affairs by Rush Doshi and Kurt Campbell put things as starkly as I’ve ever seen. Some people are still stuck in a mode of thinking about China as being a place that just makes things of little value and significance. But Made in China means something different now. Technologically, China dominates everything from electric vehicles to fourth-generation nuclear reactors. Militarily, it features the world’s largest navy. Its shipbuilding capacity is 200 times as large as America’s. In a world built of cement and steel, China makes 20 times more cement and 13 times more steel than the U.S. In a world whose future will be full of electric vehicles, batteries, drones, and solar power, China makes two-thirds of the world’s EVs, three-quarters of its electric batteries, 80 percent of consumer drones, and 90 percent of solar panels. In a world where wars are won by the largest militaries, consider that China’s navy will be 50 percent larger than the U.S. Navy by the end of the decade.

Today's guests are Kurt Campbell and Rush Doshi. Both men served on the Biden National Security Council. Campbell is the chairman and cofounder of The Asia Group. Doshi is director of the China Strategy Initiative at the Council on Foreign Relations and an assistant professor at Georgetown University.

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [email protected].

Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Kurt Campbell and Rush Doshi

Producer: Devon Baroldi

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In 1937, a Rhode Island psychiatrist named Charles Bradley ran an experiment on 30 child patients who had complained of headaches. He gave them an amphetamine, that is a stimulant, called Benzedrine, which was popular at the time among jazz musicians and college students. The experiment failed, in one sense. The headaches persisted. But he noted that half of the children responded in what he called spectacular fashion, as teachers said these children seemed instantly transformed by the drug. Rather than being bored by their homework, they were interested in it. Rather than being hyperactive, they became more “placid and easygoing.” Rather than complaining to parents about chores, they would make comments like: “I start to make my bed, and before I know it, it is done.” Bradley published the results in The American Journal of Insanity, and it marks perhaps the origins of our treatment model for ADHD.

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, has always been hard to define. It’s harder still in an age when everybody feels like modern entertainment and the omnipresence of our screens make it hard for anybody to concentrate and sit still. But clearly, some people struggle with concentration and stillness more than others. ADHD has many classic symptoms, but it is typically marked by patterns of inattentiveness—frequently losing items, failing to follow multistep instructions—or by hyperactivity: say, fidgeting, or, for some children, being literally incapable of sitting in one place for more than half a second. In a way, I’ve always disliked the phrase "attention-deficit disorder," because ADHD is not about a deficit of ordinary attention but a surplus of feral attention—an overflowing of raw, uncontrollable noticing.

Last week, the journalist Paul Tough published a long, 9,000-word essay in The New York Times Magazine about ADHD called "Have We Been Thinking About ADHD All Wrong?" Tough asked hard questions about why diagnoses are soaring. Is this evidence of an epidemic? Or is it evidence of overdiagnosis? Paul is today’s guest. We talk about his blockbuster essay, what its loudest critics said about it, what its loudest advocates said about it, and why they both might be wrong.

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [email protected].

Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Paul Tough

Producer: Devon Baroldi

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Last week, a team of astrophysicists from the University of Cambridge announced that they had discovered the “strongest indication” ever of extraterrestrial life. The source did not come from Mars or Venus or any nearby moon. It came from K2-18b, a massive planet some 120 light-years from Earth.

If this finding checks out, it is, without question, one of the most important discoveries in the history of science. But many scientists think that ... well, it might not check out at all.

Today’s guest is Sara Seager, a celebrated astrophysicist at MIT. Seager is a pioneer in the study of exoplanets and their atmospheres. She has done as much as practically anybody to develop the science of interpreting light from faraway stars to make inferences about planets. In today’s show, Seager and I slowly worked our way up to last week’s announcement by building a foundation of the basic science at play. What are exoplanets? How do we know that they’re there? How do we have any idea about the chemicals present on that planet if we can’t send probes to test their air? What does the K2-18b finding really tell us? And what larger philosophical questions about life and aliens are raised by this new science of exoplanet atmospheres?

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [email protected].

Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Sara Seager

Producer: Devon Baroldi

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In the past three weeks, we've spoken to economists about the tariffs. We’ve spoken to a historian about the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act and the 100-year legacy of American protectionism. We've spoken to supply chain expert Jason Miller from Michigan State about why China is set up to win the upcoming trade war. But the voice we haven’t heard is the voice of business. People who run companies are screaming at whoever will listen that the White House agenda will decimate business and plunge their industries into a recession.

Today’s guest is Molson Hart. He’s run a manufacturing business in the U.S. for the last 15 years. His company, Viahart, manufactures consumer products in China, Indonesia, and Vietnam and sells them both in stores and online—mostly in the U.S. His biggest vertical is toys, including Brain Flakes, which are molded plastic disks that kids and adults can snap together to build things.

This is not a bleeding-heart lefty. Quite the opposite: This is a guy who is rooting for the Trump agenda to succeed. This is a guy who told me in our interview he wants to believe that the Trump team has its heart in the right place when it comes to bringing back manufacturing in the long run. And yet he has called these tariffs not just a bad idea … but the worst economic policy in American history.

I spoke to him this week, and he was just incredibly compelling and thoughtful about the toy industry, why it’s so difficult to bring back American manufacturing quickly, and how these tariffs could do incredible damage to America’s small businesses. So we’ve decided to rush out this interview a little sooner than we intended, in part because it’s great and in part because this news story is moving so quickly, it’s hard to know what reality will even look like next week.

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [email protected].

Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Molson Hart

Producer: Devon Baroldi

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The U.S. is in the opening innings of a full-blown trade war with China. What does that actually mean? What do we sell to China? What does China sell to us? How is each country dependent on the other for the supply of electronics, food, machines, and goods? Jason Miller, a professor at Michigan State and an expert on global supply chains, tells Derek that in the trade war between the U.S. and China, one of these two countries seems better positioned to weather a protracted trade dispute—and it’s not the U.S.

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [email protected].

Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Jason Miller

Producer: Devon Baroldi

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The 1920s and the 2020s share a special kinship. One hundred years ago, the U.S. was grappling with a mix of growth, technological splendor, and generational anxiety—a familiar cocktail (albeit, from an era where cocktails were illegal). The era’s young people felt uniquely besieged by global forces. “My whole generation is restless," F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in This Side of Paradise. “A new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken."

America was changing. And change always implies a kind of loss. We were moving toward cars and cities and manufacturing. And that meant we were moving away from horses and farmland and agriculture. And so, in 1930, just months into the Great Depression, Herbert Hoover signed a new piece of legislation to restore farmers to their previous glory. It was a great big tariff—the Smoot-Hawley Tariff. Rather than save the economy, it deepened the depression.

Today, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff is one of the most infamous failures in the history of American politics. To suggest that it holds lessons for this moment in history is to state the obvious. Our guest is Douglas Irwin, an economist and historian at Dartmouth University and an expert on the economic debates of the Great Depression. We talk about the economic motivations of the Smoot-Hawley tariff, the congressional debates that shaped it, the president who signed it, and the legacy it left. We talk about the economic instinct to preserve the past—an instinct that has never gone away in American history—and the profound irony, that some efforts to return America to its former glory can have the unintended effect of robbing America of a richer future.

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [email protected].

Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Douglas Irwin

Producer: Devon Baroldi

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Donald Trump's tariff plan has set global markets on fire. What are they for? What are they trying to accomplish?

Fresh off his black-out-rage session on CNBC, Derek talks to Matthew Klein, the author of ‘The Overshoot’ newsletter and coauthor with economist Michael Pettis of the widely acclaimed economics book ‘Trade Wars Are Class Wars.’ We talk about the Trump tariffs, their place in history, the goal of reindustrialization, and why our problem with China is a malady worth solving—even if Trump’s medicine is just making us sicker.

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [email protected].

Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Matthew Klein

Producer: Devon Baroldi

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Donald Trump's second term has been a breakneck whirlwind: tariffs announced, tariffs unannounced, tariffs reannounced, allies threatened, and global coalitions ripped apart. What sort of a world are Trump and the White House trying to build?

If you stand back from the brush strokes, and take in the full mural, it is possible to see something like a grand economic strategy. One way his chief economic advisers have put it is that we’re using America’s power in the 2020s as leverage to rebalance the global economy in a way that helps U.S. companies grow faster.

There are several questions to ask about this stated economic strategy. One is whether or not it’s working. When tariffs designed to buoy the auto manufacturing economy lead instead to hundreds of layoffs among steelworkers getting walloped by trade wars—as they did this past week—it's hard to be confident that Trump's gambit is paying off.

A very different question to ask is whether Trump’s economic strategy is _economic—_or, strictly speaking, strategic—at all. Much of our geopolitical agenda today seems to be a simple extrapolation of Donald Trump’s personality. His proclivity for audacious promises. His tactic of using leverage to squeeze counterparties. His preference for mano a mano deal-making over coalitional bargains.

Today’s guests are Rogé Karma, a staff writer for The Atlantic, and Jason Furman, an economist at Harvard. We talk about the new world order Trump seems to be accelerating us toward. But we also talk about Trump himself, an unusual leader whose governance style often seems to have more to do with personal leverage than with policy. By evaluating the White House along both of these fronts, perhaps we can begin to see around the corner and understand what kind of a world, and what kind of a global economy, Donald Trump is pulling into view.

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [email protected].

Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Rogé Karma and Jason Furman

Producer: Devon Baroldi

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