Michael Shellenberger is an activist and author. He joins the podcast to talk about his book San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities. He discusses debates around homelessness in San Francisco, the ideology driving the homelessness advocacy community, how the West coast differs from the rest of the world in its treatment of mental illness and addiction, and whether there is hope of political change.

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What's Wrong with the West Coast? | Michael Shellenberger & Richard Hanania

Discussions with CSPI scholars and leading thinkers in science, technology, and politics. 

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Rob Henderson joins the podcast to talk about his book Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class. The conversation starts with a discussion about the recent controversy in which Rob was unable to find a book store that would host his launch. Rob also shares insights into his writing style, which focuses on conveying his experiences in a matter-of-fact way rather than dwelling on his internal emotional state. Richard then questions him about the story of his biological parents, and whether he would ever want to reconnect with them, particularly the Korean grandfather who started out as a police detective and then struck it rich as the owner of a fertilizer company. The two go on to discuss other aspects of Rob’s life story, including what the friends he grew up with think of his success, what it was like in the military, including stints in Qatar and Kyrgyzstan, and when he began questioning elite narratives surrounding issues like the importance of family stability and personal responsibility. Finally, Rob talks about what is next for him now that the book promotion tour is winding down.  

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Nature, Nurture, and Overcoming Hardship | Rob Henderson and Richard Hanania on "Troubled"

Romina Boccia is the director of budget and entitlement policy at the Cato Institute, where she writes about government spending, the debt problem, and entitlement reform. She also has a Substack called the Debt Dispatch that you can subscribe to here.  Romina joins the podcast to discuss available paths to deal with the coming entitlement crisis. One potential way to get politicians out of making tough choices is to create a debt commission that takes responsibility for unpopular reforms. Romina has written about using the model of the BRAC commission, which was relied on to close down military bases at the end of the Cold War. The conversation also touches on the politics of debt, how policymakers are thinking about these issues, Paul Ryan as an unappreciated hero of our time, and much more. Near the end, Romina reflects on her career as a DC policy-wonk, and why she is motivated to help ensure that America continues to be the land of opportunity. If we don’t get entitlements under control, it could potentially degrade our entire way of life. For more discussion on this topic and the difficult choices our leaders will soon be facing, see the previous CSPI podcast with Brian Riedl.  Listen to the podcast with Romina here or watch the video on YouTube.  

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Debt Commission to the Rescue? | Romina Boccia & Richard Hanania

Brian Chau writes and hosts a podcast at the From the New World Substack, and recently established a new think tank, the Alliance for the Future. He joins the podcast to discuss why he’s not worried about the alignment problem, where he disagrees with “doomers,” the accomplishments of ChatGPT versus DALL-E, the dangers of regulating AI until progress comes to a halt in the way it did with nuclear power, and more. With his background in computer science, Brian takes issue with many of those who write on this topic, arguing that they think in terms of flawed analogies and know little about the underlying technology. The conversation touches on a previous CSPI discussion with Leopold Aschenbrenner, and the value of continuing to work on alignment.  Brian’s view is that AI doomers are making people needlessly pessimistic. He believes that this technology has the potential to do great things for humanity, particularly when it comes to areas like software development and biotech. But the post-World War II era has seen many examples of government hindering progress, and AFF is dedicated to stopping that from happening with artificial intelligence.  Listen to the conversation here, or watch the video here.  Links Donate to AFF AFF manifesto Brian on diminishing returns to machine learning, and discussing AI with Marc Andreessen Vaswani et al. on transformers Limits of current machine learning techniques 

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The Threat of AI Regulation with Brian Chau

Andrew Roberts (website, follow on X) is a historian, Visiting Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and a member of the House of Lords. He joins the podcast to talk about his Napoleon: A Life.  The conversation begins with a discussion of different counterfactuals regarding ways in which Napoleon might have been able to stay in power, which leads to Roberts explaining his view that the wars of the era could be understood at least in part as resulting from a rejection of free trade. Other topics include: * Meritocracy as a guiding principle of the French Revolution and a justification for Napoleon’s regime * Napoleon’s personal magnetism and why men were willing to follow him * The relationship with Josephine, and whether or not it influenced any of his political decision * Whether Napoleon was in fact the greatest general of his time See also Hanania’s audio review of the Ridley Scott film, and Roberts’ reviews in Commentary and The Times. For an edited transcript of this conversation, see here.  

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Ideology, Trade, and War | Andrew Roberts & Richard Hanania on Napoleon

Brian Riedl is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, focusing on budget, tax, and economic policy. His previous jobs include chief economist to Senator Rob Portman (R-OH), and positions on the Marco Rubio and Mitt Romney presidential campaigns.  He joins the podcast to talk about the financial future of the United States, with a special focus on entitlements. Medicare is projected to run out by 2031, and Social Security only two years later. Because of politicians kicking the can down the road for so long, this will mean that the federal government will at that point have to either implement massive benefit cuts for seniors or significantly raise taxes across the board. Brian talks about his experience in Washington, the history of negotiations over the debt, and what politicians say when you bring up these facts. We appear to be in an undesirable equilibrium, where everyone’s incentive is to ignore the issues involved, while the status quo is leading us towards disaster. Despite liberals wanting to tax the rich and conservatives calling for a cut to foreign aid and non-entitlement forms of domestic spending, the numbers for such proposals don’t add up. We will either get entitlement spending under control, or become taxed at the level of Europeans. In one important way, we will actually be worse off than Europe, because their welfare states pay for services and benefits that go to families across a wide section of the population. We are potentially building a US welfare state that will have high taxes primarily to funnel money to the elderly. The fact that older Americans are richer than those who will be supporting them makes the future we are moving towards even more absurd.  Links Brian Riedl: chart book on spending, report on the limits of taxing the rich, CNN op-ed on interest rates, NYT op-ed on Biden’s promises on entitlements Brian’s X page, Manhattan Institute website 

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What's Wrong with the West Coast? | Michael Shellenberger & Richard Hanania

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