Say More

For a minute there, it really felt like cryptocurrency was going mainstream. Exchanges were thriving and generating billions of dollars for investors. Now, the industry is facing dozens of lawsuits and bankruptcies, and billions of investor dollars have been lost. The industry is struggling to scrape back legitimacy, while government regulators scramble to catch up. On this week’s episode of Say More, Shirley talks to Molly White, an expert critic of the crypto industry and a fellow at Harvard’s Library Innovation Lab. Email us at [email protected].

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The 2024 election season is in full swing in New Hampshire and other key primary states. While a Trump-Biden standoff may feel inevitable, recent history has shown us anything is possible in politics. A gaggle of GOP candidates are running to beat Trump, who is fighting legal battles on multiple fronts. President Biden is flagging in the polls and facing constant questions about his age. On today’s episode, Shirley talks to Boston Globe Opinion writers Kimberly Atkins Stohr, Joan Vennochi, and Carine Hajjar about the state of the race. Email us at [email protected].

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When it comes to the crush of the American daily news cycle, Heather Cox Richardson has always taken the long view. The New England-based historian gained wide popularity writing casual, history-informed summaries of the news — a perspective millions of readers were hungry for. Her new book is called “Democracy Awakening.” Shirley sits down with Heather to talk about the evolution of the GOP, the uncertain health of our democracy, and why Americans need to know history to understand the present. Email us at [email protected].

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Many scientific advances can be traced back to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The university has long been a leader in engineering and technology. But with great power comes great responsibility. What role should places like MIT play in determining how science is developed and used? Shirley sits down with the new president of MIT, Sally Kornbluth, to discuss the ethics of controversial AI research and what the  university is doing in the fight against climate change. Email us at [email protected].

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What do Richard Nixon, Thomas Paine, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. have in common? All of them pushed for guaranteed income programs, where the government would just give people money on a regular basis. So that idea has been around for a long time. But it's now being tested and adopted in cities all over the country — with the prospect that AI-driven automation will force humans to find new ways to learn a living. Today's guest, Jill Shah, helped lead and fund what was, at the time, the country’s largest guaranteed income pilot: 2,000 families in Chelsea, Mass., just north of Boston. So how did it work out? Email us at [email protected].

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Kara Swisher knew the internet would be a big deal long before it was obvious to the rest of us. For more than two decades, Swisher has had a front row seat to the rise of the Silicon Valley tech titans – people she's covered in various columns and podcasts, always incisively. Her foresight about the rise of technology and her sharp insights have made her a leading voice among tech and media entrepreneurs. She joins Shirley to talk about her relationship with social media, government regulation of AI, and what her next big idea might be. Email us at [email protected].

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Before Drew Gilpin Faust was the first woman president of Harvard University, she was a historian of white supremacy and civil rights in the South. And before she studied it, she lived it. Faust was raised in a conservative family in segregated Virginia, where women and people of color were expected to know their place. She joins Shirley to discuss her new memoir, “Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury.” Faust shares how understanding the history of racism and oppression is essential to moving forward toward a more just society. Email us at [email protected].

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In the nearly 15 years she’s written the Love Letters advice column for The Boston Globe, Meredith Goldstein has fielded just about every question imaginable. Love, dating apps, marriage, divorce, long-distance relationships, sex, cheating, jealousy, unhinged in-laws — you name it, she’s been asked about it. Today Shirley has Meredith on the show to explore why the Love Letters column and podcast are so popular, and what Meredith’s community of readers, listeners, and letter-writers has taught her about the place love and romance occupies in our lives. Email us at [email protected].

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It’s arguably the most important number in the US economy: the federal funds rate, better known simply as the Federal Reserve’s “interest rate.” The Fed picks a rate eight times a year, which dictates how easy it is for consumers and businesses to borrow money for entrepreneurship, home buying, credit cards, and more. But Susan Collins, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston — the first woman of color to lead any regional federal reserve bank — says the Fed’s job goes way beyond setting interest rates. On today’s episode, she talks about traveling across New England to meet families struggling with the high cost of housing and child care, and how their stories influence decisions made by the nation’s central bank. Email us at [email protected].

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What if your doctor were a computer program? With recent quantum leaps in artificial intelligence, that’s now a possibility in our lifetime. The use of AI in medicine is expanding rapidly, bringing the potential for incredible innovations – such as unprecedented access to specialized medical knowledge for rural areas – as well as big risks, like unregulated bots entrusted with too much power. Today’s guests, Zak Kohane and Carey Goldberg, have just published a book together, called “The AI Revolution in Medicine: GPT-4 and Beyond.” Zak is a computer scientist, a practicing endocrinologist, and chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School. Carey is a longtime health and science journalist who’s reported for The Boston Globe, The New York Times, WBUR, and Bloomberg. Email us at [email protected].

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