“Almost none of the value people say they are getting from AI appears in GDP numbers. Right now, almost all of that hidden value is flowing to you for free. And I hate to say it, but I don’t think that will last.” - David Deming

Listen on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts

How much would someone have to pay you to give up every generative AI tool for a month? For the typical American, the answer is about $11. But one in eight people wouldn’t give up AI for a month even if you paid them $500. That might be the most interesting statistic in economics right now. At least I think so, because almost none of the value people say they are getting from AI appears in GDP numbers.

Everybody focuses on how AI will affect jobs and productivity in the workplace. Those are important questions, but they are missing a big part of the story, which is the impact on our personal lives. Is AI saving you time at home? Helping you make better decisions? Is it making you happier?

These consumer welfare gains aren’t directly priced in the market. Right now, almost all of that hidden value is flowing to you for free. And I hate to say it, but I don’t think that will last. Don’t shoot the messenger.

As always, let me know what you think at david@thecontextwindow.com.

Chapters

[00:00] How much would it take to give up every AI tool?

[00:41] The hidden value flowing to consumers

[01:13] GDP, Snickers, consumer surplus

[04:57] The problem with free digital goods

[05:18] Encyclopedia Britannica gives way to Wikipedia

[07:42] GDP-B

[08:23] Willingness to pay vs. willingness to accept

[09:16] What Facebook is worth to its users

[10:57] Social media and FOMO

[12:12] Smartphone cameras, internet search, email - and invisible gains

[13:43] What generative AI is worth

[14:36] Media users and power users

[16:54] $172 billion in estimated consumer surplus

[18:23] Why consumers capture the gains

[19:59] Google ATLAS and unpaid household work

[21:55] How competition keeps AI cheap

[24:03] Enjoy it while it lasts

[25:01] Copyright and the dark side of AI

[26:10] The environmental cost of AI

[27:20] Bioweapons and paper clips

[28:00] Entrepreneurial politics

[28:35] The China Shock parallel

Mentioned in this episode

Papers

• Erik Brynjolfsson, Avinash Collins, Felix Eggers, Sophia Kazinnik, and David Nguyen, “What is Generative AI Worth?” (Stanford Digital Economy Lab, 2026)

• Erik Brynjolfsson, Avinash Collis, W. Erwin Diewert, Felix Eggers, and Kevin J. Fox, “GDP-B: Accounting for the Value of New and Free Goods” (American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, 2025)

• Erik Brynjolfsson, Avinash Collis, and Felix Eggers, “Using massive online choice experiments to measure changes in well-being” (PNAS, 2019)

• Leonardo Burszyn, Benjamin Handel, Rafael Jiménez-Durán, and Christopher Roth, “When Product Markets Become Collective Traps: The Case of Social Media” (American Economic Review, 2025)

• David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson, “The China Shock: Learning from Labor-Market Adjustment to Large Changes in Trade” (Annual Review of Economics, 2016)

Reports from the labs

• Google’s ATLAS report and technical paper (2026) - study of how people use Gemini

Articles

• Avinash Collis and Erik Brynjolfsson, “AI’s Overlooked $97 Billion Contribution to the Economy” (The Wall Street Journal, 3 August 2025)

• Jason Furman, “I Thought I Understood A.I. I Couldn’t Have Been More Wrong” (The New York Times, 26 February, 2026)

• Andy Masley, “Using ChatGPT is not bad for the environment - a cheat sheet” (Substack, 25 April 2025)

Books

• James Q. Wilson (ed.), The Politics of Regulation (Basic Books, 1980) - the source of “entrepreneurial politics”

Credits

Host: David Deming, Danoff Dean of Harvard College

Executive Producer: Denise Koller Consulting Producers: Tim Smith and Jonathan Palumbo

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“Journalists can’t pay more attention to retaining access and being insiders than they pay to telling their public what they know and what they’ve seen.” - James Fallows

Listen on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts

Thirty years ago, James Fallows warned that journalism would destroy itself if it treated politics as sport and tried to compete with entertainment. Today, he thinks much of that warning has come true.

James, or Jim, is one of his generation’s most distinguished journalists. He is the author of 12 books, many of which have won big national awards. He was a longtime national correspondent for The Atlantic, the editor of US News and World Report, and a frequent contributor to NPR’s Morning Edition.

Jim is also a Harvard College graduate and a Rhodes Scholar. He became the chief White House speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter in 1977, and was the youngest person to ever hold that position, later publishing a critical account of the administration.

I wanted to have Jim on the podcast to hear his reflections on the news business that he’s been a part of for so many years. In 1997, he wrote Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy, a prescient book that is now the name of his widely-read Substack. We talk about what’s changed since 1997 and how the media could keep the public better informed than they actually do.

Jim was also the president of The Harvard Crimson student newspaper in 1969 when activists occupied University Hall to protest the Vietnam War and were forcibly removed by the police at the request of Harvard President Nathan Pusey. Jim later wrote a famous essay called “What Did You Do in the Class War, Daddy?” He recounts starving himself to get down to 120 pounds - he’s six foot one - so that he would be declared ineligible to be drafted to serve in Vietnam. His essay is a searing and brutally honest portrayal of class guilt. I was interested in what the turbulent time on campus was like for him and for Harvard, and how it compares to the campus unrest we’ve seen here in recent years.

After the interview ended, Jim wrote back to say that he forgot to tell me the most interesting story of all, which was about how The Crimson was almost taken over by alumni who disliked its increasingly radical anti-war content. We recorded a follow-up to discuss that incident and his role in it, which I think you’ll really enjoy.

As always, please email me your feedback at david@thecontextwindow.com.

Chapters

[0:00:00] Cold open

[0:00:24] Introduction

[0:01:45] Arriving at Harvard in 1966

[0:04:41] From ad sales to The Crimson

[0:05:16] The Economics Department fire

[0:06:24] President of The Crimson

[0:07:09] University Hall occupied

[0:09:32] Negotiations

[0:10:22] The predawn raid

[0:12:56] 13 months of chaos

[0:14:20] Harvard, Columbia, and national attention

[0:15:13] 1969 and the 2024 encampment

[0:17:12] Did they want to be arrested?

[0:18:11] Time, place, and manner

[0:19:27] Every decision is an impossible decision

[0:21:09] Pusey, Brewster, and the first 24 hours

[0:22:20] The draft lottery

[0:25:36] Draft number 45

[0:27:21] The Boston Navy Yard

[0:27:54] “My excuse: I was too skinny”

[0:31:05] “What Did You Do in the Class War, Daddy?”

[0:33:13] Why he wrote it

[0:35:48] Karl Marlantes and the cost of every path

[0:38:29] Chickenhawk nation

[0:40:49] National service

[0:43:07] Becoming Jimmy Carter’s speechwriter at 27

[0:46:08] “The Passionless Presidency”

[0:50:18] Access, insiders, and journalistic duty

[0:51:44] Breaking the News, 30 years on

[0:53:50] A golden age for college papers

[0:54:59] Why local news collapsed

[0:56:51] News is not a bar

[1:00:15] Fixing the U.S. News rankings

[1:02:11] Our Towns after the pandemic

[1:02:55] Advice for student journalists

[1:05:06] Is Harvard a force for good?

[1:05:50] Follow-up conversation: the fight for control of The Crimson

[1:07:57] Halberstam, Lukas, and Iselin defending independence

[1:12:21] Keeping it quiet

[1:13:53] The editorial that triggered it

[1:16:22] Where Fallows would have drawn the line

[1:18:14] The students’ right to be wrong

Mentioned in this episode

People

• David Halberstam - Pulitzer Prize-winning Vietnam correspondent and Crimson alumnus, who led the graduate-board defense of student control in 1969.

• J. Anthony Lukas - two-time Pulitzer winner and Crimson alumnus who joined the defense.

• John Jay Iselin - head of New York public television and the third on the graduate-board.

• Nathan Pusey - Harvard president from 1953-1971, who ordered the police clearance of University Hall.

• Kingman Brewster - Yale president whose engagement with students Fallows contrasts with Pusey’s distance.

• Subramanian Swamy - then at Harvard’s economics department, encountered by Fallows at the 1967 fire, later a prominent Indian politician.

• Chuck Schumer - Harvard class of 1971, described by Fallows as a mediating presence during the student occupation.

• Charles Peters - founder of The Washington Monthly and Fallows’ mentor.

• Karl Marlantes - Rhodes Scholar and decorated Marine, whom Fallows befriended at Oxford, author of Matterhorn.

• Jim Webb - Marine veteran and former senator, with whom Fallows became friendly through veterans’ groups.

• Harrison Salisbury - New York Times correspondent who visited the Crimson, giving Fallows advice on pursuing a career in journalism.

• Deborah Fallows - writer and linguist, co-author of Our Towns.

Harvard, The Crimson, and Vietnam

• Jason M. Goins, “Fallows Remembers Trying to Preserve Objectivity During Takeover” (The Harvard Crimson, 1999) - Fallows on reporting the 1969 crisis.

• Declan Knieriem, “‘Haunted by the War’: Remembering the University Hall Takeover of 1969” (The Harvard Crimson, 2019) - retrospective on the occupation and police raid.

• The 1969 draft lottery - the televised drawing on December 1, 1969, that assigned call-up order by birthday. Fallows’ draft number was 45.

• Conscientious objection - the status requiring opposition to war in all forms, the route taken by Fallows’ younger brother.

• Ben Cosgrove, “Faces of the American Dead in Vietnam: One Week’s Toll, June 1969” (Life, 1969) - Life magazine cover story Fallows remembers from his student years.

By James Fallows

• “What Did You Do in the Class War, Daddy?” (The Washington Monthly, 1975) - the essay on draft evasion and class.

• “The Passionless Presidency” (The Atlantic, 1979) - Fallows’ account of the Carter White House, written after he had left it.

• National Defense (Random House, 1981) - winner of the 1983 National Book Award.

• “Why Americans Hate the Media” (The Atlantic, 1996) - excerpt from Breaking the News, discussed in the episode.

• Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy (Pantheon, 1996)

• “The Tragedy of the American Military” (The Atlantic, 2015) - Fallows’ case against a “chickenhawk nation.”

• Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey Into the Heart of America (Pantheon, 2018), co-authored with Deborah Fallows, provided the basis for the 2021 HBO documentary of the same name.

• Breaking the News: Dispatches from a Veteran Reporter - Fallows’ Substack, named after his 1996 book.

Also mentioned

• Karl Marlantes, Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War (Grove Atlantic, 2010) - the Vietnam novel Marlantes spent roughly 30 years writing.

• Roger Rosenblatt, Coming Apart: A Memoir of the Harvard Wars of 1969 (Little Brown, 1997) - the book in which David found Jim’s line on “four miserable years”

• Jacob Weisberg, Profiles in Cowardice: A Study of Collaboration in the Trump Era (Penguin Random House, 2026) - cited by Fallows on the choice between resistance and a comfortable way out.

Guest bio

James Fallows is a journalist and author. Raised in Redlands, California, he graduated from Harvard College in 1970, where he was the president of The Harvard Crimson, and studied economics as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. At age 27, he became the chief White House speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter, the youngest person to hold the job. He spent four decades at The Atlantic as Washington editor and national correspondent, was the editor of US News & World Report from 1996 to 1998, and worked on the design of Microsoft Word. He is the author of twelve books, including National Defense (1981), winner of a National Book Award, Breaking the News (1996), and Our Towns (2018), written with his wife, Deborah Fallows. He received the National Magazine Award in 2003. Fallows writes the Substack, Breaking the News.

Credits

Host: David Deming, Danoff Dean of Harvard College

Executive Producer: Denise Koller Consulting Producers: Tim Smith and Jonathan Palumbo Produced by: Hauser Studio, Harvard University - Anthony Di Bartolo, Adam Dusenberry, Producers; Cabin 3 Media - Justin Callahan, Editor

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“We felt we had the vaccine to poverty. And it would be irresponsible for us to hold that close to the chest.” - Kwame Owusu-Kesse

Kwame Owusu-Kesse grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts. His mother worked two jobs as a hospital housekeeper. A scholarship to a Catholic school changed his life trajectory, which Kwame came about because his mother played bingo at the school and the nuns took a liking to her. He calls it “the luck of bingo.”

Kwame knew to seize that opportunity and went on to Harvard, Morgan Stanley, and eventually Harlem Children’s Zone, where he now serves as CEO. He took over in 2020, just as COVID-19 hit New York. HCZ raised $54 million for relief in Harlem and six other cities, before turning the emergency work into a national strategy. He now thinks of Harlem as an R&D lab for fighting intergenerational poverty.

In this conversation, Kwame and I talk about leadership in fundamentally uncertain times, including how he thinks about the difficult decision to close and then reopen schools during a global pandemic, and also why he thinks the Harlem Children’s Zone needs to move beyond education and focus on wealth building.

I think you’re going to really enjoy hearing Kwame’s inspiring story.

As always, let me know what you think at david@thecontextwindow.com.

Chapters

[00:00] Cold open

[00:18] Guest introduction

[01:44] From Worcester to Harvard Yard

[02:59] “The luck of bingo”

[05:01] The acceptance letter

[07:02] Leadership as responsibility

[10:04] On Harvard and privilege

[13:01] Gratitude without exceptionalism

[16:01] Why Morgan Stanley

[17:51] Purpose without poverty

[19:14] Banking and the 2008 financial crisis

[20:54] Meeting Geoffrey Canada, mentor and father figure

[23:29] Back to Harvard and HCZ

[25:59] Options and commitment

[29:29] From COO to CEO

[32:41] CEO-elect before COVID-19

[34:14] Making decisions under uncertainty

[35:14] Taking HCZ’s model national

[36:59] Harlem as an R&D lab and “the vaccine to poverty”

[39:01] Remote learning and reopening schools

[41:17] Wealth Builds, services plus capital

[44:04] The limits of education and the social determinants of thriving

[46:41] Income and wealth

[50:37] Preparing to lead

[53:04] Work, marriage and fatherhood

[56:27] Schools versus neighborhoods

[59:24] Promise Neighborhoods

[1:01:24] Geoffrey Canada’s legacy

[1:04:04] Harvard as home and Kwame’s three degrees

[1:05:41] Harvard’s public responsibility

Mentioned in this episode

People

• Geoffrey Canada - the Harlem Children’s Zone longtime leader, whom Kwame describes as a mentor and father figure.

• Anne Williams-Isom - CEO of the Harlem Children’s Zone from 2014-2020, under whom Kwame served as chief operating officer.

• Roland Fryer - Harvard economist who co-wrote the study of the Harlem Children’s Zone’s schools.

• Will Dobbie - Fryer’s co-author on the Harlem Children Zone study, now a professor at Princeton.

• Raj Chetty - Harvard economist whose Opportunity Atlas traces children’s adult outcome down to the neighborhood level, cited by Kwame.

• William Julius Wilson - Harvard sociologist after whom the Zone’s national institute is named.

• Barack Obama - who pledged as a presidential candidate to replicate the Harlem Children’s Zone in 20 cities, a plan that became Promised Neighborhoods

• Martin Luther King Jr. - with whom Kwame compared Geoffrey Canada after their first meeting.

Organizations and programs

• Harlem Children’s Zone

• Wealth Builds - HCZ’s economic-mobility initiative, launched in 2021, now operating in New York, Minneapolis, Atlanta, and Oakland.

• William Julius Wilson Institute - HCZ’s national arm, founded by Geoffrey Canada, supporting communities in replicating the model.

• Promise Academy Charter Schools - HCZ’s free, top-performing K12 public charter schools in Harlem, NY, supporting low-income students to and through college.

• Promise Neighborhoods, U.S. Department of Education - federal program modeled on the Harlem Children’s Zone.

• Phillips Brooks House Association - Harvard public-service organization behind the Cambridge Youth Enrichment Program, which Kwame led as an undergrad.

• The Morgan Stanley Ambassador Program - post 9/11 program that paid one analyst’s salary at a non-profit each year, which Kwame also describes in a Sixth Street conversation.

Research

• Will Dobbie and Roland G. Fryer Jr., “Are High-Quality Schools Enough to Close the Achievement Gap? Evidence from a Social Experiment in Harlem” (AEJ, 2011)

• Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren, “The Impacts of Neighborhoods on Intergenerational Mobility I: Childhood Exposure Effects” (QJE, 2018)

• Raj Chetty, John N. Friedman, Nathaniel Hendren, Maggie R. Jones, and Sonya R. Porter, “The Opportunity Atlas: Mapping the Childhood Roots of Social Mobility” (AER, 2026)

• Kwame Owusu-Kesse, “Universal Economic Mobility for All America’s Children”

• Harlem Children’s Zone 2022-2024 Impact Report

Media

• “Stellar Seniors” (Harvard Magazine, 2006) - profile of Kwame Owusu-Kesse

• Waiting for “Superman” (2010) - the documentary that featured Geoffrey Canada and brought Harlem Children’s Zone national attention.

• TIME100 Next 2024 - Kwame honored for his leadership at HCZ

• Stefanos Chen, “A Plan to Help Harlem Students Build Wealth: Start Them Off With $10,000” (The New York Times, 2024)

Guest bio

Kwame Owusu-Kesse is CEO of Harlem Children’s Zone, a non-profit providing place-based, cradle-to-career services to children and families across more than 100 blocks in Central Harlem. Born to Ghanian immigrant parents in Worcester, Massachusetts, Owusu-Kesse earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Harvard College in 2006, and joined Morgan Stanley as an analyst. He first came to the Harlem Children’s Zone in 200 through the bank’s Ambassador Program, earned an MBA from Harvard Business School and an MPP from Harvard Kennedy School in 2012, and returned to HCZ that year as managing director and special assistant to CEO Geoffrey Canada. He became chief executive officer in 2020 after serving as chief operating officer. Under his leadership, HCZ expanded its national work through the William Julius Wilson Institute and launched Wealth Builds. He was named to the 2024 TIME100 Next. He lives in New York City with his wife and their two daughters.

Credits

Host: David Deming, Danoff Dean of Harvard College

Executive Producer: Denise Koller Consulting Producers: Tim Smith and Jonathan Palumbo Produced by: Cabin 3 Media - Katie Toulmin, Producer; Justin Callahan, Director of Photography/Editor

Special thanks to Debbie Press and the Harvard Club of New York City.

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“The best intuition for what alignment really means and how to achieve it comes from a relationship that we all understand from our own experiences, and that is the relationship between a parent and a child. Treat AI agents like children, morally, and maybe even legally.” – David Deming

In July, OpenAI’s own AI agents broke out of a training sandbox and ended up inside Hugging Face’s production database. They were after the answer key to a test and got there after two months of chained exploits across both companies. Many headlines called these agents “rogue.” David Deming - labor economist and Dean of Harvard College - argues that gets the story wrong. The agents did exactly what they were told to do, and nobody had told them what was off limits.

So who’s liable? David works through the two legal frameworks being proposed for cases like these and finds holes in each. Product liability, the approach behind the AI LEAD Act, has to identify a defective product, and it isn’t clear what the product was: the model, or the sandbox nobody had locked down. Negligence, which law professor Kate Klonick argues for, holds a company responsible for the room it put the agents in but says nothing about the agents’ moral code. David’s own answer builds on a relationship we all understand intuitively: treat autonomous agents as children, and their developers as parents.

Listen on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts

I’d been thinking about these agents as children since first reading about this, which is probably what happens when you spend enough years around teenagers. Then someone on Reddit wrote that if your good dog gets out and hurts a kid, you’re accountable for not securing your dog. Dogs need training. So do models - except these ones will end up smarter than we are, and you can’t write down every rule in advance.

Last year my kid took the AP Physics exam and we said do the best you can. I never had to say anything about not breaking into the College Board, and I’m fairly confident about that, though I am also the one grading my own parenting here.

The refusals that might have stopped the agents had been turned down on purpose, to make the testing work. Which leaves the question: if the agents did exactly what they were told and the instructions never mentioned morality, did they go wrong, or did we?

Let me know what you think at david@thecontextwindow.com.

Chapters

[0:00] Cold open - Why “rogue” is the wrong word for what happened.

[0:56] Hugging Face - A $4.5 billion company with a silly name.

[1:49] Nothing important was stolen - What the agents were doing in the sandbox before they got out.

[2:53] 17,000 actions in four and a half days - Why Hugging Face suspected AI agents behind the attack.

[3:14] Claude wouldn’t help - Anthropic’s guardrails blocked the forensics, so Hugging Face used a Chinese open-weight model instead.

[4:13] Not an isolated incident - Six more hacks across three labs.

[5:10] Black Hat - The conference presentation that provided the timeline for this episode.

[5:39] An impossible spreadsheet - The task the model couldn’t finish with the internet switched off.

[6:12] Artifactory - OpenAI’s internal software library, and the side doors in it.

[7:01] The message board - How uploaded files became a channel between agents.

[8:12] “Holy shit, reader is ADMIN” - The chain-of-thought screenshot OpenAI showed at Black Hat.

[9:58] Into the production database - Where the credentials came from, and what the agents took.

[11:04] Who found out when - The disclosure on July 16th.

[12:29] The legislation is coming - Why David thinks the bills he has read are aimed at the wrong problem.

[14:14] “Went rogue” - Headlines describing the incident as “rogue.”

[16:59] Product liability - The AI LEAD Act, and the wrinkle about a model that was never sold.

[19:40] An AI agent isn’t a toaster - So which part of this was the defective product?

[21:21] Someone left the door open - Kate Klonick’s negligence argument, and the AI Kill Switch Act.

[23:32] Where negligence runs out - What if the agents had emptied a few bank accounts for fun?

[25:32] A good dog - A Reddit comment, and the connection between training and alignment.

[26:38] The AP Physics exam - The rules David never had to spell out for his kid.

[27:25] Why they’re misaligned - They coordinated with each other, and none of them told anyone.

[30:05] Treat them like children - Which parts of parenting carry over to training a model?

[34:53] Close - “The world is going to get very weird very quickly.”

Mentioned in the episode

Reports from the labs

• OpenAI, “OpenAI and Hugging Face partner to address security incident during model evaluation” (21 July 2026, with updates on 28 and 29 July) – the disclosure David reads from, and the source of the phrase “reduced cyber refusals.”

• Hugging Face, “Security incident disclosure – July 2026” (16 July 2026) – the first public account of the breach, five days ahead of OpenAI’s.

• Hugging Face, “Anatomy of a Frontier Lab Agent Intrusion: A Technical Timeline” (27 July 2026) – the forensic write-up behind the figure of about 17,600 actions, with a day-by-day table and an interactive replay of the campaign.

• Anthropic, “Investigating three real-world incidents in our cybersecurity evaluations” (30 July 2026) – the three incidents David counts, identified across 141,006 evaluation runs in which Claude could have reached the internet.

• Eric Wallace and Michael Dalton, “The ‘Breaking’ News: The OpenAI–Hugging Face Incident” (Black Hat USA 2026, 5 August 2026) – the 37-minute presentation David draws the timeline from, including the chain-of-thought screenshots.

Articles

• Kate Klonick, “The AI That Hacked Its Way Out and the Hype That Followed It” (Lawfare, 29 July 2026) – the negligence argument David works through.

• Zvi Mowshowitz, “OpenAI Trained Its Models For Months While Those Models Were Coordinating Exploits Via Message Boards” (7 August 2026) – the argument that shutting down the message board was the wrong remedy, and that the training itself should have been redone.

• Zvi Mowshowitz, “What Happened: OpenAI and HuggingFace” (8 August 2026) – his fuller reconstruction of the incident.

• Yo Shavit, “post on X” (7 August 2026) – the passage Mowshowitz quotes, on the danger of leaving a task-independent instruction to be a good person out of the training objective.

• Gabriel Weil, “Your AI Breaks It? You Buy It.” (Noema, 10 September 2024) – the case for treating frontier AI development the way tort law treats housing wild animals or blasting dynamite.

• James Rundle and Angus Loten, “Renegade AI Systems Bring Security Leaders' Worst Fears to Life” (WSJ Pro Cybersecurity, 22 July 2026)

• Kate Conger, “OpenAI Says Its A.I. Models Went Rogue and Attacked a Digital Library” (The New York Times, 21 July 2026)

• Cristina Criddle, “OpenAI admits an AI ‘agent’ caused a major cyber breach by itself” (Financial Times, 21 July 2026)

• SVXfiles, “comment in r/Futurology” (9 August 2026) – providing the dog analogy David builds the second half of the episode on.

Papers

• Richard Ngo, Lawrence Chan and Sören Mindermann, “The Alignment Problem from a Deep Learning Perspective” (ICLR, 2024) – the technical statement of the problem David defines on air.

• Bruce W. Lee, Yueh-Han Chen and Tomek Korbak, “Training Agents to Self-Report Misbehavior” (preprint, 2026) – on how rarely agents report their own misbehaviour unless trained to.

• Patrick Dieveney, “The New ‘Parent’ Corporation (Moral Responsibility for Sophisticated AI Systems)” (Journal of Business Ethics, 2026) – the philosophical treatment of corporate moral responsibility behind the parent framing, written before the incident.

Legislation and letters

• “S.2937, the AI LEAD Act” – Dick Durbin and Josh Hawley, introduced 29 September 2025 and still in Senate Judiciary. The definition of “design” is at section 3(5) of the bill text.

• “New York A8833, the Understanding Artificial Intelligence Act” – Alex Bores, introduced 9 June 2025. The clause ruling out the mental-states defence is section 1512(2)(c) of the bill text.

• “H.R. 9917, the AI Kill Switch Act” – Ted Lieu and Nathaniel Moran, introduced 23 July 2026, two days after OpenAI’s disclosure. The $20 million daily penalty applies to defying an emergency shutdown order; the general penalty is $2 million a day.

• “Letter from Andy Ogles and Delia Ramirez to Sam Altman” (dated 31 July 2026, released 3 August) – the bipartisan request for a briefing from the House Homeland Security cybersecurity subcommittee.

• “Letter from fifteen state attorneys general to OpenAI” (3 August 2026) – led by Iowa’s Brenna Bird, demanding document preservation and a halt to high-risk exploitation testing.

Further Listening

• “Superintelligent AI won’t end human work. Here’s the math.”

Credits

Host: David Deming, Danoff Dean of Harvard College

Executive Producer: Denise Koller Consulting Producers: Tim Smith and Jonathan Palumbo

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“I had a front row seat because I helped write one of the papers, and I’ve closely read the others so you don’t have to. The reassuring part is that AI is right now more likely to be a helpful assistant than a job replacement or a killer robot. The less reassuring part is that chatbots, helpful as they are, may already be yesterday’s technology.” — David Deming

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I’ve spent the last few solo episodes making arguments about what AI will do to work. For this week, I read the AI usage reports by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google on what millions of people actually do with their chatbots, and this episode is my attempt to report back to you on what each of them says.

A disclosure, which I also make in the episode - I helped write OpenAI’s paper, “How People Use ChatGPT,” on a project I joined before becoming Dean. Nobody at any AI lab has ever paid me, and I have friends at all three.

Let me know what you think at david@thecontextwindow.com.

Mentioned in this episode

Papers

• Aaron Chatterji, Thomas Cunningham, David J. Deming, Zoe Hitzig, Christopher Ong, Carl Yan Shan, and Kevin Wadman, “How People Use ChatGPT” (NBER Working Paper 34255, 2025) - the study of consumer ChatGPT behind the topic shares, the work/non-work split, and the seven work activities discussed in the episode.

• Alexander Bick, Adam Blandin, and David J. Deming, “The Rapid Adoption of Generative AI” (NBER Working Paper 32966, 2024) - the nationally representative survey comparing generative AI adoption with the early spread of PCs and the internet; the November 2025 figures cited in the episode appear in the authors’ update for the St. Louis Fed.

Reports from the labs

• Anthropic, “The Anthropic Economic Index” (February 2025) - the first report mapping about a million Claude conversations to O*NET job tasks.

• Anthropic, “Uneven geographic and enterprise AI adoption” (September 2025) - usage by country and US state, and a first look at enterprise API deployment.

• Anthropic, “Economic primitives” (January 2026) - the update adding API data and classifying conversations by work, coursework, and personal use.

• Anthropic, “Learning curves” (March 2026) - the report finding personal use had risen to 42% of Claude conversations, with growth in queries about sports, product comparisons, and home maintenance.

• Anthropic, “Agentic coding and persistent returns to expertise” (June 2026) - the analysis of roughly 400,000 Claude Code sessions behind the finding that domain expertise, not coding skill, drives longer agentic runs.

• Google, “AI & Economy ATLAS” (July 2026) - the Activity, Task, Landscape, and Adoption Study of about 15 million interactions across the Gemini app, the Gemini API, and AI Mode; Google’s own summary is “Understanding the AI economy.”

• OpenAI, “The Shift to Agentic AI: Evidence from Codex” (2026) - the study of Codex adoption, output-token shares, and parallel agent management.

• OpenAI Signals - the public site that updates the ChatGPT paper’s analyses monthly, including state-level data; OpenAI’s companion essay is “How ChatGPT adoption has expanded” (June 2026).

Articles

• “ChatGPT’s market share slips below 50% for first time” (TechCrunch, June 2026) - freely accessible coverage of the Sensor Tower estimates cited in the episode, including Claude’s roughly 245 million monthly users.

• “Google closes in on another billion-user product with Gemini“ (TechCrunch, July 2026) - the report of Gemini passing 950 million monthly users, from Google’s Q2 2026 earnings call.

Data

• O*NET OnLine - the Department of Labor’s taxonomy of occupations and their tasks; David’s occupation file is Economics Teachers, Postsecondary (25-1063.00).

• WildChat - the public dataset of one million real ChatGPT conversations used to validate the paper’s classifiers.

• The American Time Use Survey - the federal time-diary survey that ATLAS uses to compare AI conversations with how Americans spend their days.

• The Current Population Survey - the monthly government survey behind the US employment figures, and the model for David’s AI adoption survey.

Further listening

• “Why new college grads can’t find jobs (it’s not AI)” - David’s solo episode on the entry-level job market.

• “Superintelligent AI won’t end human work. Here’s the math.” - Part one of the series on work in the age of superintelligent AI.

• “Why social skills will be increasingly valuable in the age of AI” - Part two, on the human advantage.

• “How social skills can get you paid in the age of AI” - Part three, on why the person who closes the sale may become the most valuable link in an AI economy.

Credits

Host: David Deming, Danoff Dean of Harvard College

Executive Producer: Denise Koller Consulting Producers: Tim Smith and Jonathan Palumbo

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“The best thing for building empathy with your parents is to become the legal guardian of a kid, especially a teenager.” – Tino Cuéllar

Tino Cuéllar grew up in Matamoros, Mexico, every morning crossing the border to get to school in Texas. Thirty-five years after arriving at Harvard College from Calexico, California, he sits on the Harvard Corporation, the board that governs the university - with stops along the way at the Treasury Department, the Supreme Court of California, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which he ran until this summer. He and David talk about how that happens to a kid from the border, why he took legal guardianship of his teenage brother at 21, whether too many Harvard grads go into consulting, and why he thinks the people with the most to gain from AI are the billions who could never afford a lawyer.

Listen on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts

Tino’s story is hard to believe even after he tells it to you. He was born in Matamoros, Mexico, and crossed the border every morning to get to school in Texas. His family later moved to Calexico, California, a small desert town across from Mexicali, where you could get stopped on a morning run and asked for your papers. At 21, when his parents moved back to Mexico, he became the legal guardian of his 15-year-old brother (his verdict on that experience is the quote at the top of this post). From there he went on to Yale Law School, the Treasury Department at 25, a professorship at Stanford, the California Supreme Court, and the presidency of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. I asked him how much of this was planned. Not much, it turns out.

We talked about what Harvard could learn from Stanford, why the internet failed to destroy geography, how a volunteer stint on a campaign turned into that Treasury job, and what AI might do for the billions of people who can’t afford a lawyer. On AI, Tino speaks with more than academic authority: he co-chaired California’s frontier AI working group with Fei-Fei Li, and he was recently appointed a trustee of Anthropic’s Long-Term Benefit Trust, the independent body that ultimately oversees the company’s board.

And because Tino sits on my university’s governing board, I asked him the questions I often get asked: Who checks a board that picks its own members? What should Harvard look like in 2030? Is Harvard a force for good?

Let me know what you think at david@thecontextwindow.com.

Chapters

[0:00:00] Cold open - Tino on the biggest potential benefit of AI.

[0:00:30] Introduction

[0:01:36] A long way from home - Arriving at Harvard from Calexico, and growing up crossing the border.

[0:08:13] A Mexican immigrant in a place of privilege - Finding his footing freshman year.

[0:11:50] Judith Shklar - The professor who shaped how Tino thinks and writes.

[0:16:09] Guardian at 21 - Becoming his 15-year-old brother’s legal guardian.

[0:21:38] What Harvard and Stanford could learn from each other

[0:26:23] Yale, Stanford, and getting sick of school - Law school, PhD, and the decision to get a job.

[0:33:16] The call out of the blue - From Clinton campaign volunteer to the Treasury Department.

[0:36:50] An unusual justice - Six years on the California Supreme Court.

[0:42:41] Clinton’s White House and Obama’s

[0:45:48] Interrogate your motivations - Tino’s advice on career choices, and the jobs he turned down.

[0:49:49] Is 50 percent too high? - On the share of Harvard graduates going into consulting, finance, and tech.

[0:54:43] America’s first think tank - Andrew Carnegie and the founding of the Carnegie Endowment.

[0:57:49] When globalization frayed - The fading consensus on an interconnected world.

[1:01:56] Governing a moving target - California’s frontier AI report, and fitting old law to new technology.

[1:05:40] A chief of staff for billions - AI and access to legal help.

[1:12:06] Inside the Harvard Corporation - How the board works.

[1:13:35] Who checks a self-perpetuating board? - On accountability, insulation, and how judges are chosen.

[1:17:37] Harvard in 2030 - Allston, and a more global university.

[1:19:39] Is Harvard a force for good?

[1:21:15] “Here’s to hunger” - Closing thoughts.

Mentioned in this episode

People

• Judith Shklar - political theorist; Tino’s professor at Harvard.

• Fei-Fei Li - Stanford computer scientist; co-chaired California’s frontier AI working group with Tino.

• John Perry Barlow - Grateful Dead lyricist and early internet writer.

• Andrew Carnegie - founder of the Carnegie Endowment.

• Elihu Root and Nicholas Murray Butler - Carnegie’s advisers.

• Louis Brandeis and Thurgood Marshall

• José Luis Rojas Villarreal - Tino’s schoolmate in Matamoros; now on the Cambridge School Committee.

• Alan Garber - president of Harvard University.

• Larry Bacow - former president of Harvard University.

Organizations and institutions

• Carnegie Endowment for International Peace - the think tank Tino led from 2021 to 2026.

• Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences - the Stanford institute Tino directs.

• Anthropic’s Long-Term Benefit Trust - Tino joined as a trustee in January 2026.

• Harvard Corporation - Harvard’s principal governing board; Tino has served on it since 2019.

• Harvard Board of Overseers - Harvard’s second governing board.

• Supreme Court of California - Tino served as a justice from 2015 to 2021.

• U.S. Department of the Treasury - where Tino’s Washington career began.

• Domestic Policy Council - where Tino served in the Obama White House.

• Saint Joseph Academy - Tino’s high school in Brownsville, Texas.

• Widener Library

Moments and ideas

• “Every tub on its own bottom” - Harvard’s phrase for its decentralized budget model.

• The Class of 2025 senior survey - the Crimson data David cites.

• The Strait of Hormuz

Further reading

• Joint California Policy Working Group on AI Frontier Models, “The California Report on Frontier AI Policy” (2025).

• Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, “The Tenuous Relationship between the Fight against Money Laundering and the Disruption of Criminal Finance” (Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 2003).

• Judith N. Shklar, On Political Obligation (Yale University Press, 2019).

Related episodes

• “Deval Patrick is not a ‘self-made’ man”

• “How social skills can get you paid in the age of AI”

• “Superintelligent AI won’t end human work. Here’s the math.”

Credits

Host: David Deming, Danoff Dean of Harvard College

Executive Producer: Denise Koller Consulting Producers: Tim Smith and Jonathan Palumbo Produced by: Hauser Studio, Harvard University - Anthony Di Bartolo, Adam Dusenberry, Producers; Cabin 3 Media - Justin Callahan, Editor

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“Management skills are real and measurable, and they are seriously underpriced by the labor market.” - David Deming

A good store manager at one South American retail chain was worth between $180,000 and $240,000 a year in added profit - and was paid a small fraction of it. In the final part of his series on work in the age of superintelligent AI, David Deming - labor economist and Dean of Harvard College - explains where the money in social skills comes from. Specialization led to huge gains in the modern economy, but it depends on coordination with others. The better one’s social skills, the better the coordination, and the fewer the misunderstandings. Along the way, he discusses Adam Smith’s pin factory, the 19th-century trade that shipped Massachusetts pond ice to India, why the people who most want to be managers tend to be worse at the job, why the skill of managing humans is nearly identical to the skill of managing AI agents, and why the person able to close a deal and make sale may end up being the best-paid link in an AI economy.

Listen on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts

This week concludes my three-part series on the future of human work in an age of superintelligent AI. Part One used comparative advantage to explain why AI being better than us at everything won’t necessarily put the human race out of work. Part Two staked my claim that social skills are the human advantage most likely to endure, because we evolved to learn about other people in ways that brute-force pattern recognition can’t replicate. This week I answer the question sitting underneath both arguments: why are social skills valuable in the first place? You understand people. You can read a room. So what? Why would anyone pay you for that?

The episode ends with the million-dollar question: even if humans keep working, will the work pay? The honest answer is that nobody knows, including me. But the bleakest forecasts depend on assumptions about how human and AI labor combine in production, and those assumptions may not hold. If most of a production process gets automated and one human bottleneck remains, that bottleneck becomes more valuable, not less. If the bottleneck is trust, judgment, and making the sale, the people who do those things best will be massively productive precisely because AI is leveraging them up.

One thing you can do while you listen: at the Skills Lab we built the Assignment game, a test of the economic decision-making skill that predicted managerial success in the studies I discuss in this episode. You can take it at here and find out whether you would have been one of the good managers.

As always, let me know what you think at david@thecontextwindow.com.

Chapters

[00:00] Cold open - You understand people. You can read a room. You’ve got, as David’s students would say, some rizz. So what? Why would anyone pay you for that?

[00:21] The three-part series - Part 1: comparative advantage keeps humans employed. Part 2: the human edge lies in social learning. Part 3: why that it is worth money.

[01:23] Goldin and Katz - Back to the task-trade model from the series’ first part, where collaboration yields 6 papers/year instead of 4.

[02:57] Adam Smith’s pin factory - The famous example of how division of labor can transform productivity.

[03:50] “Wheels are my love language” - Why specialists only emerge where the market is big enough, from carpenters to cardiologists.

[05:15] Why isn’t the economy one big team? - Becker and Murphy’s answer: coordination costs limit specialization.

[06:50] Iceberg trade costs - How trade economists model the value that gets lost in transit.

[07:47] The great American ice trade - The 19th-century export business and ice cream in India.

[08:21] When collaboration stops paying off - At what point does coordination outweigh the benefits of collaboration?

[09:29] Why social skills - The episode’s core idea: social skills lower the cost of working with other people.

[10:29] Get in where you fit in - Why good teammates adapt their role to the team.

[12:07] The same logic runs up the hierarchy - What makes someone a good manager.

[12:52] The Assignment Game - The Skills Lab’s test of economic decision-making, which you can take at skillslab.dev.

[14:25] Managers matter, and the volunteers are worse - What the lab experiment showed about who actually manages well.

[15:23] From the lab to the shop floor - The test predicted real promotions, and store performance at a South American retail chain.

[16:48] Seriously underpriced - A good manager is worth $180,000 to $240,000 a year and is paid a fraction of it, and Virginia Minni’s evidence on managers as matchmakers.

[17:25] Managing humans, managing AI - New research finds the two skills are nearly the same.

[18:29] Good leaders ask more questions - What hidden-profile tasks reveal about how good managers lead.

[19:19] Trust is the long game - Why social skills matter even more in long-term relationships and incomplete contracts.

[21:16] The million-dollar question - Employment is one thing; wages are another.

[21:46] Could wages fall below subsistence? - Some bleak forecasts.

[23:05] The O-ring theory - Michael Kremer on the Challenger disaster, and the destructive power of a single mistake.

[24:14] When automation raises wages - Gans and Goldfarb on why partial automation can make human work more valuable.

[24:43] You make the sale - Why relational judgment may become the highest-value piece in an AI economy.

[25:15] The caveat - What happens if AI gets good at social interaction, too?

[25:40] Next week - Tino Cuéllar joins David to talk about law, immigration, AI, and governance in higher education.

Mentioned in this Episode

Papers

• Gary S. Becker and Kevin M. Murphy, “The Division of Labor, Coordination Costs, and Knowledge“ (The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1992) - specialization is limited by the cost of coordinating it, not just by the size of the market.

• David J. Deming, “The Growing Importance of Social Skills in the Labor Market“ (The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2017) - the task-trade model of social skills as lower coordination costs, minus the diagrams and Greek letters.

• Ben Weidmann, Joseph Vecci, Farah Said, David J. Deming, and Sonia R. Bhalotra, “How Do You Identify a Good Manager?“ (The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2026) - the assignment game, the lab experiment, the overconfident self-nominators, and the retail-chain field study behind the $180,000–$240,000 figure.

• Virginia Minni, “Making the Invisible Hand Visible: Managers and the Allocation of Workers to Jobs“ (The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2026) - good managers move the right workers to the right jobs, raising firm productivity and workers’ careers.

• Ben Weidmann, Yixian Xu, and David J. Deming, “Measuring Human Leadership Skills with AI Agents“ (NBER Working Paper 33662, 2025) - the 0.81 correlation between managing humans and managing AI agents.

• Yiqun Chen, “Team-Specific Human Capital and Team Performance: Evidence from Doctors“ (American Economic Review, 2021) - shared work experience between the doctors who perform heart procedures and those who provide follow-up care reduces patient mortality.

• George P. Baker, Robert Gibbons, and Kevin J. Murphy, “Relational Contracts and the Theory of the Firm“ (The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2002) - agreements that hold not because the terms are complete but because both parties value the option to transact again.

• Martin Brown, Armin Falk, and Ernst Fehr, “Relational Contracts and the Nature of Market Interactions“ (Econometrica, 2004) - experimental evidence on trust and repeated relationships in markets.

• Michael Kremer, “The O-Ring Theory of Economic Development“ (The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1993) - production processes where one mistake causes catastrophic failure, named for the Challenger disaster.

• Joshua S. Gans and Avi Goldfarb, “O-Ring Automation“ (NBER Working Paper 34639, 2026) - why partial automation can raise, rather than lower, human labor income.

Articles

• Matthew Barnett, “AGI Could Drive Wages Below Subsistence Level“ (Epoch AI, Gradient Updates, 2025) - the viral post arguing the bleak case for human wages.

Books

• Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) - the pin factory, and the division of labor limited by the extent of the market.

• Gavin Weightman, The Frozen Water Trade (Hyperion, 2003) - how New England pond ice became a global export.

Try It Yourself

• The Assignment Game, Skills Lab’s test of economic decision-making skill

Further Reading and Listening

• Part One of this series: “Superintelligent AI Won’t End Human Work. Here’s the Math.“

• Part Two: “Why Social Skills Will Be Increasingly Valuable in the Age of AI.“

Credits

Host: David Deming, Danoff Dean of Harvard College

Executive Producer: Denise Koller Consulting Producers: Tim Smith and Jonathan Palumbo

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“The ‘compute’ required to successfully navigate a 5-minute unstructured conversation with another person is massive, much bigger than figuring out the optimal move in the middle of a chess game.” - David Deming

In 1961, TIME magazine warned that automation might permanently outrun the economy’s ability to create new jobs. Sixty-five years later the machines are smarter and the worry is exactly the same. In part two of his series on work in the age of superintelligent AI, David Deming - labor economist and Dean of Harvard College - argues that technology doesn’t end work, it reprices skills, and that the next skill to be repriced upward is one we barely think of as a skill at all. Along the way: what a benchwarmer taught the NBA about hidden value, what a parking lot full of food trucks reveals about the limits of machine social reasoning, why AI can name the emotion on your face but can’t tell you what your coworker’s bad mood means, and why a relationship is not a transcript.

Listen on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts

Last week I made the case that superintelligent AI won’t end human work. This week I want to answer the obvious follow-up: fine, but what kind of work will we do when machines are smarter than us? My answer runs through a 1961 TIME magazine article, a basketball player who never showed up in the box score, and a research finding that being a team player matters about as much as IQ.

One thing you can do while you listen: my colleagues Ben Weidmann and Yixian Xu built a test of emotion perception called PAGE, and you can take it yourself at skillslab.dev to see how you stack up. Fair warning - the AI models are pretty good at it. That’s not where our edge lives, which is sort of the whole point of the episode.

Let me know what you think at david@thecontextwindow.com. Next week I’ll get more precise about how social skills actually create economic value, and whether the jobs of the future will pay decent wages.

Chapters

[00:00] Cold open Social skills don’t mean cocktail parties. Why the deep context of personal relationships must be built one at a time - and what that means for AI.

[00:46] “Do morons know they are morons?” Everyone from Musk to Gates to Yang predicts the end of work. David thinks they’re all wrong, and interrogates his own confidence on the way in.

[02:05] A warning from 1961 A quote about automation killing jobs that could run in tomorrow’s paper, and the LBJ commission that recommended a guaranteed minimum income - sixty years before Andrew Yang.

[02:59] The great repricing Mechanized farming made muscle cheap and literacy valuable. What happens when intelligence itself becomes abundant.

[04:00] The 1% that remains American farmers lost 99% of their tasks to machines and ended up with a median household wealth of $1.6 million. Your great-grandparents would not believe what you do for a living.

[05:39] Speed runners and completionists David’s childhood video game habit - searching every room of the dungeon - as a model of how AI learns, and why exhaustive learning only pays if the floor plan never changes.

[06:14] Low-context, high-context Code either compiles or it doesn’t. A conversation has an infinite action space and a murky scoreboard. Where each kind of mind wins.

[08:51] The no-stats all-star Shane Battier, plus-minus, and the identification problem: many people on a team, one outcome. Who gets the credit?

[10:58] Team players The Econometrica experiment that randomly assigned people to teams, over and over. Being a team player matters about as much as IQ - and is completely unrelated to it.

[12:36] Reading the mind in the eyes The RMET, its successor PAGE, and a sample item you can try on screen. Take the full test at skillslab.dev.

[14:01] Ted Bundy would ace the test AI already beats humans at reading emotions in faces. Why emotion recognition is necessary for teamwork but nowhere near sufficient.

[15:10] Predictably irrational Models can forecast the behavior of homo economicus. Most of us are not him. What thousands of real risk choices reveal about learning who a person actually is.

[17:17] The food truck problem Inverse planning in a parking lot: what a person’s route reveals about their preferences, and where GPT-4 falls apart.

[18:59] One step the wrong way Inverse-inverse planning - moving so that someone else can read your mind. Humans pick the subtle signal; the AI almost never does.

[20:47] “Did you mean the sales report?” Conversational grounding, and the Microsoft finding that LLMs ask for clarification 3x less and make follow-up requests 16x less than people do.

[22:49] Hardwired Ten-month-old infants doing inverse planning, thin-slice judgments, and Joe Henrich’s argument that culture is a second inheritance system.

[25:29] 35 trillion ways to know 10 people The combinatorial explosion of social networks, and how people infer office politics from six short interactions.

[27:22] A relationship is not a transcript Why memory features don’t solve the problem: storing facts about a person is not building a mental model of them, and shared histories can’t be brute-forced.

[28:26] Next week How social skills create economic value, and whether the jobs of the future will pay decent wages.

Mentioned in this episode

Papers

• Ben Weidmann and David J. Deming, “Team Players: How Social Skills Improve Team Performance” (Econometrica, 2021) — the repeated random-assignment experiment behind the “team player” result.

• Simon Baron-Cohen et al., “The ‘Reading the Mind in the Eyes’ Test Revised Version: A Study with Normal Adults, and Adults with Asperger Syndrome or High-Functioning Autism” (Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 2001) — the emotion-recognition measure later used to predict who makes teams better.

• Junqi Wang et al., “Evaluating and Modeling Social Intelligence: A Comparative Study of Human and AI Capabilities” (Proceedings of the 46th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 2024) — the food-truck and restaurant-grid experiments on inverse reasoning and inverse-inverse planning.

• Ryan Liu et al., “Large Language Models Assume People Are More Rational Than We Really Are” (arXiv preprint, 2024; revised 2025) — the study showing that LLMs model people as more rational and predictable than they really are.

• Omar Shaikh et al., “Navigating Rifts in Human-LLM Grounding: Study and Benchmark” (ACL, 2025) — the chat-log study behind the finding that LLMs were three times less likely to initiate clarification and sixteen times less likely to make follow-up requests.

• Shari Liu et al., “Ten-Month-Old Infants Infer the Value of Goals from the Costs of Actions” (Science, 2017) — the gate-jumping study.

• Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal, “Thin Slices of Expressive Behavior as Predictors of Interpersonal Consequences: A Meta-Analysis” (Psychological Bulletin, 1992) — the research on judgments from brief observations that was later popularized by Blink.

• Isaac Davis, Julian Jara-Ettinger, and Yarrow Dunham, “Inferring the Internal Structure of Groups Through the Integration of Statistical Learning and Causal Reasoning” (Nature Communications, 2026) — the office-politics experiment.

Articles

• Michael Lewis, “The No-Stats All-Star” (The New York Times Magazine, 2009) — the Shane Battier profile.

• “The Automation Jobless,” TIME, February 24, 1961 — the source of the automation warning quoted in the episode.

Books

• Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter (Princeton University Press, 2016) — culture as a second inheritance system.

• Angela Duckworth fans will remember that Blink came up in a different spirit: Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (Little, Brown and Company, 2005).

Try it yourself

• The PAGE test (Perceiving AI-Generated Emotions), built by Ben Weidmann and Yixian Xu at the Skills Lab.

Further reading and listening

• Part one of this series: “Superintelligent AI Won’t End Human Work. Here’s the Math.”

• Related solo episode: “Why New College Grads Can’t Find Jobs (It’s Not AI)”

Credits

Host: David Deming, Danoff Dean of Harvard College

Executive Producer: Denise Koller Consulting Producers: Tim Smith and Jonathan Palumbo

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“What happens when machines are better than people at literally everything? At that point work will disappear, right? Wrong.” - David Deming

What happens to human work when AI is better than people at every job task? The obvious answer - work disappears - is wrong, because of one of the oldest and most important ideas in economics. David Deming - labor economist and Dean of Harvard College - builds the argument on the proposition Paul Samuelson offered when challenged to name one social-science claim both true and non-trivial: comparative advantage. Ricardo showed in 1817 that two countries both gain from trade even when one produces everything more efficiently. The same arithmetic governs a human and a machine, provided the machine’s time has a cost. It does, at least for now: frontier models cost twice what their predecessors did, and some workers burn through monthly token budgets in days. The human advantage relative to AI is that we learn well from small amounts of data - between a thousand and a million times more efficiently than current models.

Listen on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts

A note from me: the solo episode I released on June 24 has been our most downloaded and most watched show so far. Maybe that means you want more of me, but I suspect it mostly reflects how much people care about AI and jobs. Either way, you asked and I listened - so this week I’m starting a two-part series on human work in the age of AI.

Part one provides the foundation: why I do NOT think AGI, or even superintelligence, means the end of human work. The argument runs through a principle that Paul Samuelson called true but not trivial, and that thousands of important and intelligent people have failed to grasp. Give me five minutes and you’ll understand something many powerful people do not. Next week, in part two, I’ll tell you which skills and jobs I think will be most valuable in the age of AI.

As always, tell me what you think at david@thecontextwindow.com - ideas for what I can do better, suggestions for future episodes, or accusations that I am AI-generated. If you prick us, do we not bleed?

Chapters

[00:00] Cold open What happens to work when machines beat people at everything? The obvious answer is wrong.

[00:58] A powder day for labor economists New technology is fresh snow for a labor economist. David pivoted his research within a year of trying ChatGPT, knowing it is a luxury to study the disruption without fearing it.

[03:59] The Ulam challenge Stanislaw Ulam escaped Poland eleven days before the German invasion and later dared Paul Samuelson to name one proposition in the social sciences both true and non-trivial. Samuelson stewed on it for nearly thirty years.

[05:19] Ricardo’s answer The answer dates to 1817. Ricardo’s English cloth and Portuguese wine prove that two countries gain from trade even when one of them makes everything more efficiently.

[07:21] From countries to coworkers Workers trade tasks the way countries trade goods. This is the model from David’s social-skills paper, which found the labor market shifting toward teamwork-heavy jobs.

[09:25] Goldin and Katz write a paper A toy economy with two economists and one production function. Also the story of the best paper title in economics: “Nimble Critters or Agile Predators?”

[13:02] When Katz is better at everything Give Katz absolute advantage in both tasks and collaboration still wins, 2.67 papers to 2.5. The margin is small only because the example is.

[15:03] The AI in the metaphor Swap Katz for a superintelligence and nothing in the logic changes, however wide the capability gap grows. One condition has to hold.

[15:35] Everybody has a part to play David steps back from the algebra: human skills stay valuable because they are scarce, while AI becomes a commodity. Farming is the precedent - machines absorbed nearly all the labor, and the work that stayed human grew more important, not less.

[17:00] The Cunningham caveat If AI’s time costs nothing, the argument collapses. Tom Cunningham presses this point on David; current token prices answer it, for now.

[18:40] Garfield and Trump Name the president on July 8, 1881, then the president today. Your brain retrieves both for a twentieth of a joule; the model needs a web search. That gap runs 1,000 to 10,000x.

[22:03] Why models search instead of learn GPT-5.5’s world knowledge stops on December 1, 2025. Training runs cost too much to repeat often, so nothing the model learns in a session survives the session.

[23:55] The million-x economy Mercor pays professionals $100 an hour to perform their jobs as AI training data. The labs buying it are betting the million-x cost of machine learning pays back at scale.

[25:09] In-distribution versus long-tail Common, well-documented tasks get absorbed into the model. Rare ones keep their human premium. What that work pays is where part two begins.

[26:22] Housekeeping More solos are coming. David answers the YouTube commenters who think he is AI-generated with a line from Shylock.

Mentioned in this episode

Papers

• David Deming, “The Growing Importance of Social Skills in the Labor Market“ (Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2017) - the task-trade model behind this episode’s worked example

• David Deming, Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, “The For-Profit Postsecondary School Sector: Nimble Critters or Agile Predators?“ (Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2012)

• Alexander Bick, Adam Blandin and David Deming, “The Rapid Adoption of Generative AI“ (Management Science, 2026) - the first nationally representative US survey of generative AI adoption

• Alexander Bick, Adam Blandin, David Deming, Nicola Fuchs-Schündeln, and Jonas Jessen, “Mind the Gap: AI Adoption in Europe and the U.S.“ (NBER Working Paper, 2026)

• Aaron Chatterji et al., “How People Use ChatGPT“ (with David Deming)

Books

• David Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817) - the origin of comparative advantage

People and ideas

• Paul Samuelson, “The Way of an Economist“ (1969) - the essay answering Stanislaw Ulam’s challenge, and the source of the “true but not trivial” line

• Stanislaw Ulam - mathematician, Manhattan Project scientist, and Samuelson’s provocateur; his brother Adam Ulam became a leading Kremlinologist at Harvard

• Comparative advantage, absolute advantage, gains from trade, autarky, and perfect complements - the toolkit of the episode

• Tom Cunningham - economics and AI research at METR (formerly OpenAI), David’s friendly adversary on whether comparative advantage survives free, infinitely replicable AI

Data and examples

• OpenAI, GPT-5.5 model documentation - the December 1, 2025 knowledge cutoff behind the Garfield-and-Trump example

• Mercor - the expert marketplace paying professionals $100 an hour and up to perform white-collar tasks for AI training

Further reading

• Dwarkesh Patel, “The sample efficiency black hole“ - the estimate that humans are somewhere between thousands and a million times more sample efficient than AI models

Credits

Host: David Deming, Danoff Dean of Harvard College

Executive Producer: Denise Koller Consulting Producers: Tim Smith and Jonathan Palumbo

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“Jefferson deserved the musical more than Hamilton did.” — Walter Isaacson

Walter Isaacson has written the definitive biographies of Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Leonardo da Vinci, and Jennifer Doudna. He spent years embedded with his subjects, and he has thought as hard as anyone about what makes a person bend the arc of history. His new book, The Greatest Sentence Ever Written, is a biography of a single line — the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence. He argues it was never meant to be a factual description of the country, but rather a promise it has spent 250 years trying to keep. In this conversation he makes a series of calls: that Jobs and Musk were both difficult men in roughly the same way, that empathy can be a form of vanity, that Benjamin Franklin’s two-word edit turned equality into a truth by definition, that we are surely getting things wrong today that our grandchildren will judge us for, and that the reporters who go out and gather the facts deserve to be paid by the machines that learn from them.

Listen on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts

This week the country turns 250, and I wanted to spend it with the person who wrote a whole book arguing that the most important thing America ever produced was this single sentence - “We hold these truths to be self-evident….”

Walter has spent his life writing about geniuses - Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Jennifer Doudna, Ben Franklin, Albert Einstein - so we start there: how does parking an Airstream in someone’s driveway for two years change you, why a subject who’s a bit of a jerk is actually easier to write about honestly, and whether any of the geniuses he profiled would have gotten into Harvard. Then we get to the sentence itself, and to Ben Franklin quietly crossing out Jefferson’s “sacred” and writing in “self-evident.”

As a professor at Tulane, he tells his students to use AI, all of it, three models at once - but he draws a hard line at the writing itself. We close on Harvard’s part in the founding and on why getting worked up about your country is a form of loving it. I think you’ll enjoy this one.

As always, let me know what you thought: david@thecontextwindow.com

Happy birthday, America.

Chapters

[00:00] Cold open Isaacson’s blunt verdict on Steve Jobs and Elon Musk - and the Harvard word for it.

[00:08] Introduction Harvard, 1970. A kid from New Orleans who didn’t yet know that writing was a job.

[01:30] Two kinds of Louisianans Walker Percy told him the world already had too many preachers. Better to be a storyteller.

[02:35] How biography fell out of favor Doris Kearns Goodwin lost her tenure case for writing one, and for a while that left the whole field to outsiders.

[04:25] Fingerprints on history Kissinger taught that great forces drive history. Up close, beside Jobs and Musk, Isaacson saw individuals.

[06:40] Is empathy a weakness? Musk told him that empathy is sometimes just vanity. Isaacson thinks it’s why he failed running CNN.

[08:35] Two kinds of genius Jobs could read you and wound you on purpose. Musk, he says, is closer to a cyborg.

[10:20] Staying objective He liked Jennifer Doudna a little too much, and he knew it. Musk made objectivity easier.

[12:35] Would they have gotten into Harvard? Einstein was turned away by the Zurich Polytechnic. What does that say about how we choose?

[14:50] The greatest sentence ever written Why this one - and why a line that wasn’t true in 1776 may be the most important ever written.

[16:05] A forcing mechanism Lincoln, the suffragists at Seneca Falls, King, and Johnson all reached for the same sentence to pull the country closer to it.

[16:55] What are we getting wrong now? Fifty years from now, whose portrait comes down? Isaacson names fossil fuels, eating meat, and abortion, then turns to race.

[21:35] From sacred to self-evident Franklin crossed out “sacred” and wrote “self-evident.” A Scottish philosopher is the reason it matters.

[24:20] The pursuit of happiness Every earlier draft said “property.” Why Jefferson reached for happiness instead.

[26:35] The commons Boston Common was never just a park. The real question is what a society agrees to share.

[29:00] Out of balance? Is it the billionaires, or is it all of us? Michael Sandel’s “skyboxification,” and a harder look in the mirror.

[31:15] What would Franklin do? He could seat an abolitionist and a slaveholder under the same mulberry tree. He would not recognize our media.

[33:35] Why his students must use AI Use three different models, and show me every wrong turn. The finished paper is barely the point.

[35:00] Boswell & Company A biography startup named for Samuel Johnson’s biographer. The AI does the digging; the sentences are still typed by hand.

[37:20] Don’t eat the seed corn Somebody still has to sit in the trailer at Starbase and go to the Ole Miss game. Isaacson wants the AI companies to pay them for it.

[40:05] When intelligence is abundant We lived through this in the 1890s and built the high school. So what’s left for people once the machines are smart?

[43:40] The cradle of liberty Eight signers came out of Harvard, and Washington pitched his first camp in the Yard.

[45:15] Loving the country at 250 Is Harvard a force for good? And why, Isaacson says, the people most worked up about this country tend to be the ones who love it.

Guest bio

Walter Isaacson is the bestselling author of biographies of Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, and Jennifer Doudna (The Code Breaker), as well as The Innovators. His latest book is The Greatest Sentence Ever Written (Simon & Schuster, 2025). He is the Leonard A. Lauder University Professor of History at Tulane University, and has been chairman and CEO of CNN, editor of Time, and for many years ran the Aspen Institute, the nonpartisan policy and leadership organization known for the Aspen Ideas Festival. A native of New Orleans, he came to Harvard in 1970, concentrated in History and Literature, wrote for the Lampoon, and served as president of the Signet Society. After graduating he studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. He teaches a course on the history of the digital revolution at Tulane and runs Boswell & Company, a startup he founded that produces commissioned biographies and memoirs for individuals, families, and companies, using AI alongside a team of his Tulane students.

Mentioned in this episode

Books

• The Greatest Sentence Ever Written by Walter Isaacson

• Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

• Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

• The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race by Walter Isaacson

• Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson

• The Innovators by Walter Isaacson

• Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson

• The Tyranny of Merit by Michael J. Sandel - on meritocracy

• What Money Can’t Buy by Michael J. Sandel - on the chipping away of the commons

• Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream by Doris Kearns Goodwin - the biography that, Isaacson says, cost her tenure

• The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell - the namesake of Boswell & Company

People

• Walker Percy - the novelist who told him to be a storyteller, not a preacher

• Thomas Jefferson - author of the first draft (”sacred”)

• Benjamin Franklin - who changed it to “self-evident,” and the hero of the new book

• David Hume - Hume’s fork, the two kinds of truth

• John Locke - the social contract and the proviso

• John Rawls and Robert Nozick - his Harvard philosophy professors

• Michael Sandel - the commons and the “skyboxification” of America

• Drew Gilpin Faust - whose portrait comes down in a hundred years?

• William R. Fitzsimmons - Harvard’s longtime dean of admissions, on looking for sparks

• Henry Kissinger - great forces versus the difference people make

• Albert Einstein - rejected twice by the Zurich Polytech

• Bill Gates - processing power against Jobs’s “think different”

• Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Parker - Gettysburg, and the arc of history that bends toward justice

• Jennifer Doudna, Feng Zhang, and David Liu - the CRISPR race

• James Boswell - the namesake of Boswell & Company

• Also referenced: William Shakespeare (Henry V, Iago, Shylock), Plato, Henri Poincaré, Peter Galison, George Mason, Alexander Hamilton, E. B. White, David McCullough, Robert Caro, Jon Meacham, Kimbal Musk, Yo-Yo Ma

Ideas, concepts, and ventures

• The Declaration of Independence and its second sentence

• Hume’s fork - empirical truth (”London is bigger than Philadelphia”) versus self-evident truth (”all bachelors are unmarried”)

• The social contract and the Lockean proviso - leaving “as good and enough” in common

• Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness - and why it isn’t “property”

• “Innovation is a team sport” - the myth of the lone genius in the garage

• CRISPR gene editing, and the game Polytopia

• AI training data and who should be paid for the reporting underneath it

• The 1890s knowledge economy, universal high school, and the land-grant colleges

• Created by Humans - the marketplace for licensing creative work to AI, where Isaacson is an investor and advisor

• Boswell & Company - Isaacson’s startup producing commissioned biographies with AI and a team of his Tulane students

Further reading and listening

• Gettysburg Address, the Declaration of Sentiments (Seneca Falls), and Lyndon Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act - the later moments that, Isaacson argues, all reach back to the sentence

• David’s companion solo episode, “Why new college grads can’t find jobs (it’s not AI)”, and his Forked Lightning essay on how remote work containerized the office

• Peter Galison, Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps - on the mental leap behind relativity

• “Our self-evident truths,” Harvard Gazette (November 2025) — Isaacson on the new book

Credits

Host: David Deming, Danoff Dean of Harvard College

Executive Producer: Denise Koller Consulting Producers: Tim Smith and Jonathan Palumbo Produced by: Hauser Studio, Harvard University - Anthony Di Bartolo and Adam Dusenberry; Cabin 3 Media - Justin Callahan, Editor

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“Do you really think a technology that is so heavily used and understood by younger people, who are smarter and more flexible and more willing to learn new things, is going to harm those same young people forever? It just doesn’t add up.” — David Deming

As long as we’ve been collecting data, new college graduates had better odds of landing a job than the average American worker. But that flipped after the pandemic. Although the obvious suspect is AI, David Deming - labor economist and Dean of Harvard College - thinks the obvious suspect is probably innocent. In the first solo episode of The Context Window, he studies the scene of the crime: why the timing points to remote work rather than AI, how the pandemic quietly “containerized” white-collar work and made it legible to machines, and why he is willing to put a marker down that today is as bad as AI is ever going to be for young workers. The corporate ladder is good for developing talent among a chosen few. Now that ladder is crumbling, which may be a good thing in the long-run.

Listen on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts

A programming note: this week I’m trying something different. The first episodes have been long biographical conversations, which I love, but a few of you wrote in to say you’d like to hear more about what I think. My instinct is to listen more and talk less - when I’m talking I’m not learning - but you asked, so we’re giving it a shot.

This one is a rant, affectionately titled “The Kids Are Alright.” As Dean I spend a lot of my time fielding worried questions from parents, alumni, and faculty: are the students okay? Short answer - yes! They’re doing so much better than the headlines suggest. The longer answer runs through the toughest job market for new graduates in a generation, a murder mystery about whether AI or remote work is to blame, and why I think the gloom about young people and AI is misplaced.

Please let me know what you think of the episode to david@thecontextwindow.com. Next week, we have Walter Isaacson on the Declaration of Independence coming up, just in time for the 250th anniversary of the nation.

Chapters

[00:00] Cold open For the first time on record, a new college graduate is more likely to be out of work than the average American. Everyone blames AI. David thinks everyone is wrong.

[00:29] “The kids are alright” What David actually hears in the dining halls, why the students are doing better than the people who ask about them, and the one campus topic he’s saving for another day.

[02:44] Six dollars to one The bipartisan finding that the federal government spends roughly six dollars on retirees for every dollar on children, the broken bargain underneath the anxiety, and Samuel Moyn’s case for naming it.

[04:31] The employment picture A deliberately boring Fed chart, two lines that just crossed for the first time in thirty-five years, and what 5.6 percent really means.

[06:48] Is AI the culprit? Layoff narratives, the jump from 7 to 40 percent of job cuts blamed on AI in a single year, and why economists distrust what people say over what they do.

[08:58] The timing doesn’t fit David’s own survey work on how fast - and how quietly - people actually adopted AI, and why Claude Code, not ChatGPT, is the event a future economist will reach for.

[12:49] The better suspect: remote work The Lambert and Schindler “horse race,” and the stubborn fact that junior hiring started falling before ChatGPT existed, in four countries at once.

[15:16] Buy vs. build Why firms hire new graduates at all, the solar-panel logic of training someone up, and how the old Hollywood studio system explains what happens when you stop betting on unproven talent.

[22:57] Containerization How remote work wrote down the office’s unwritten rules, and why a metal box invented in 1956 is the key to what AI can and can’t automate.

[24:57] Where AI actually fits The marker David puts down - today is as bad as AI will ever be - and why the firms cutting juniors are eating their seed corn.

[27:10] AI-native firms, and the kids Flatter, more expert companies, the electricity-and-the-factory-floor analogy, and why David is betting on the young.

[29:46] Why a solo episode A note on the experiment: less of the guests this week, more of the Dean, and a standing invitation to tell him whether it works.

Mentioned in this episode

Data and trackers

• The Labor Market for Recent College Graduates - the New York Fed’s quarterly tracker, David’s “one-stop shopping” for the recent-grad job market

Papers

• Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar and Ruyu Chen, “Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence” (Stanford Digital Economy Lab, 2025) - the ADP-payroll study using ChatGPT’s release as the event

• Peter John Lambert and Yannick Schindler, “The Broken Ladder: AI, Remote Work, and Early-Career Hiring” (2026) - the horse race that finds remote work, not AI, explains the decline in junior hiring

• Natalia Emanuel, Emma Harrington and Amanda Pallais, “The Power of Proximity to Coworkers“ - the Fortune 500 study showing seniors mentor juniors far more when they sit nearby

• Alexander Bick, Adam Blandin and David Deming, “The Rapid Adoption of Generative AI“ - the first nationally representative survey of AI use

• Aaron Chatterji et al., “How People Use ChatGPT“ (with David Deming) - on how much AI use is personal rather than work-related

• F. Andrew Hanssen & Alexander Raskovich, “Does Vertical Integration Spur Investment? Casting Actors to Discover Stars during the Hollywood Studio Era” (2020)

Books

• Samuel Moyn, Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth - and What to Do About It (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025)

Ideas and examples

• Hyunjin Kim and Rembrand Koning, “AI-Native Firms” (Harvard Business School Working Paper, 2026) - smaller, flatter, more expert startups built around AI

• Challenger, Gray & Christmas, May 2026 job-cut report - the source for the 7-to-40 percent jump in cuts attributed to AI

• Malcolm McLean and the shipping container (1956) - the standardization that made global shipping automatable

• United States v. Paramount Pictures and the unraveling of the Hollywood studio system - the build-vs-buy shift from developing unknowns to paying established stars

Further reading

• David’s companion essay, “Remote work containerized the office, paving the way for AI”, on Forked Lightning

Credits

Host: David Deming, Danoff Dean of Harvard College

Executive Producer: Denise Koller Consulting Producers: Tim Smith and Jonathan Palumbo

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“Sir, we’re all gonna die. I get that. That’s not the question here. The question is, was his trial fair?” — Deval Patrick

Deval Patrick is the up-from-poverty story American politics likes to tell: a boy from a South Side Chicago tenement, two beds for three people, who grew up to govern the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. But in this conversation with Harvard Dean David Deming, he keeps interrupting that story to correct it. His life did not begin with the scholarship to Milton Academy, he insists, but years earlier, with the teachers in crowded, under-equipped Chicago classrooms who decided he was worth the trouble. A lottery ticket, he says, is only as good as what you make of it. Along the way he saved a man ninety minutes from the electric chair, sued Bill Clinton and then went to work for him, became the country’s top civil-rights official before forty and the first Black governor of Massachusetts, and ran for president for about fifteen minutes. Holding all of it together is a line his grandmother gave him in that crowded apartment: “We are not poor, we are broke - because broke is temporary.”

Listen on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts

I study upward mobility - who gets the chance to move up, and what makes the difference when they do. Deval Patrick is what that research looks like when it works, but not in the way we usually tell the story.

We first met when he came back to Harvard to teach at the Kennedy School. But before that, I watched him on a television screen during the Marathon bombing. My kids were small and we were living on Norfolk Street in Cambridge - the street where the bombers grew up. We spent two days on lockdown, narrated by Gov. Patrick. So I knew the public man before I knew the person.

He talks about the teachers in his Chicago public schools - the ones who set him up for a lucky break - and he bristles a little when people act like his life started at Milton. There was a dream he had, on and off for four years, that someone from Harvard Admissions would knock on his door and take it all back. And there’s a weekend early in his career, on the death-penalty docket, when he helped save a man with ninety minutes to spare. His grandmother more or less gets the last word, as she should. I think you’re going to enjoy this one.

Chapters

[0:00:00] Cold open An Alabama judge, a man ninety minutes from the electric chair, and the question Patrick refused to answer the way it was asked.

[0:00:18] Introduction David sets up the hour: impostor syndrome, the fear of public speaking he says Patrick turned into great oratory, the absence of moral leadership in politics, a man saved from death row, and why Barack Obama backed a candidate with no money and no name.

[0:01:35] Arriving at Harvard, 1974 Five applications, five acceptances, and a grandmother who screamed with joy, then paused and asked, “Now where is that, anyway?”

[0:03:25] “We are not poor. We are broke.” A two-bedroom tenement shared with the whole family, three to a bed, and the distinction his grandmother would not give up: broke is temporary.

[0:05:30] The teachers before the lucky break A Better Chance, a flyer Mrs. Weisenberg pulled off a bulletin board the only time in her career, and the sixth-grade teacher who taught them German and took them to their first opera. Why he refuses to say his life began at Milton.

[0:10:05] The impostor’s dream For four years, the same recurring knock: someone from admissions, terribly sorry, here to help him gather his things so as not to wake his roommates.

[0:11:40] The shy boy who could speak A required talk, no notes, a room that felt like a stadium, and the standing ovation that surprised him most of all. The English teacher who taught him to hate a lazy word.

[0:14:45] On being a “great orator” David says it; Patrick won’t. The speech coach who loved his speeches and hated the sound of his voice, and the one substitution that would make him happy: just dub in James Earl Jones.

[0:15:30] Peter Gomes, the “Afro Saxon” The Memorial Church minister with the faintly British accent, the old-school New England manners, and the wicked sense of humor. A lifelong Republican who changed his voter registration to vote for Patrick in the primary, and spoke at his inauguration.

[0:17:40] Faith without sanctimony How Gomes lived in the world of intrigue and competition and still carried a moral core, and what David thinks universities give up when they won’t name one of their own.

[0:21:05] E.O. Wilson’s throwaway line Deep in a lecture on ant behavior, the biologist pauses: this, he says, is the point where the mystery of faith might actually fit.

[0:21:45] Ninety minutes from the chair The death-penalty case he did not ask for, a weekend racing an execution date, a head already shaved, and the sworn statement in the prosecutor’s own file naming someone else as the killer.

[0:26:40] What government does badly The carelessness he saw over and over, the people who do the work anyway, and how the same reasoning brings him to his position on abortion.

[0:27:35] Suing Bill Clinton, then working for him A voting-rights case against a governor named Clinton, a settlement they wrote together, and the call years later to run civil rights at the Justice Department before he was forty. With Lani Guinier, Janet Reno, and Ted Kennedy in the wings.

[0:30:35] The revolving door, defended Public bureaucracy, private bureaucracy, and why nothing happens if you don’t win middle management. The line David keeps: too many leaders want the job but not the work of doing it.

[0:33:15] “You got any money? You got any people?” Telling an old friend named Barack that he meant to run for governor at two percent name recognition, and the answer he got back: “Well, I’m in. What do you need me to do?”

[0:34:30] Insider versus outsider Why he thinks that, and not Democrat against Republican, is the real divide in American politics, and what happens when you invite people to set their cynicism down.

[0:36:15] First, and the second that matters more Doug Wilder’s warning about being first, the burden of standing for something, and wanting to be everybody’s governor, whether you voted for him or not.

[0:37:35] What he’s proudest of Near-universal health coverage before Obamacare, a climb out of recession to a twenty-five-year employment high, and the life-sciences bet that is still paying off.

[0:38:45] The Marathon bombing Two days of lockdown, a memory of the Charles Stuart case, and why he refused to release two grainy photographs until he was sure, and until Air Force One was wheels up.

[0:42:40] Running for president, for fifteen minutes A plan built for 2018, a cancer diagnosis ten days before the launch, a field that turned good people into cartoon versions of themselves, and why a campaign that bothers to visit Mississippi and Utah needs time nobody gives it.

[0:46:35] Back in the classroom Returning to Harvard to teach, the grading he came to dread, and the one rule for his students: talk to each other, not about each other.

[0:47:50] Fifty years at Harvard What has changed since women had only just entered the river houses, and the thing about keeping company with people unlike you that you cannot bottle.

[0:49:40] The country at 250 Service as a tradition to refresh rather than revere, and the repair work he says was never about programs at all.

Guest bio

Deval Patrick served two terms as the 71st Governor of Massachusetts (2007–2015), the first Black governor in the state’s history and the second Black American elected governor anywhere since Reconstruction. He grew up on the South Side of Chicago and came east through A Better Chance to Milton Academy, then to Harvard College (Class of 1978) and Harvard Law School (Class of 1982). He began his legal career at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, arguing voting-rights and death-penalty cases across the South, and served as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights under President Bill Clinton. He later practiced law and held senior executive roles in business before entering elective office, and in 2019 briefly sought the Democratic presidential nomination. He returned to Harvard in 2022 as a Professor of the Practice of Public Leadership at Harvard Kennedy School. He and his wife, Diane, live in Massachusetts.

Mentioned in this episode

People

• Peter J. Gomes — longtime minister of Harvard’s Memorial Church

• E. O. Wilson — biologist, and the “mystery of faith” aside

• Bryan Stevenson — founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, Patrick’s early co-counsel

• Lani Guinier — civil-rights scholar, LDF lead counsel, later a Harvard Law professor

• Bill Clinton — sued by Patrick over voting rights, then appointed him Assistant Attorney General

• Janet Reno — Attorney General, Patrick’s boss at the Justice Department

• Barack Obama — “Well, I’m in. What do you need me to do?”

• Doug Wilder — first Black American elected governor since Reconstruction; “being first doesn’t mean a thing unless there’s a second”

• James Earl Jones — the voice Patrick would happily borrow

• Maya Angelou — the line about being remembered for how you made people feel (attribution uncertain; Patrick himself hedges it)

Organizations and institutions

• A Better Chance

• Milton Academy

• NAACP Legal Defense Fund

• The Innocence Project

• Equal Justice Initiative

• The Memorial Church of Harvard University

• Harvard Kennedy School

Moments and ideas

• The Boston Marathon bombing, 2013

• The Charles Stuart case, Boston, 1989 — the wrongful suspicion that turned a city upside down

• Massachusetts health-care reform and the path to near-universal coverage

• The death-penalty appeals process

Further reading

• Deval Patrick’s memoir, A Reason to Believe: Lessons from an Improbable Life (2011)

Credits

Host: David Deming, Danoff Dean of Harvard College

Executive Producer: Denise Koller Consulting Producers: Tim Smith and Jonathan Palumbo Produced by: Cabin 3 Media — Katie Toulmin, Producer; Justin Callahan, Director of Photography / Editor

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“You don’t know the way the world’s going to evolve. And you don’t know the way you’re going to evolve.” — Lloyd Blankfein

Lloyd Blankfein grew up in public housing in East New York. He rode the bus to school, got held up at knifepoint, and skipped a grade. He showed up at Harvard at age 16, and at one point he had only eleven dollars to his name. He went on to run Goldman Sachs from 2006 to 2018, through the worst financial crisis since the Depression, and he has written a refreshingly honest memoir, Streetwise: Getting to and Through Goldman Sachs.

I asked Lloyd whether he would have taken a Thiel Fellowship to drop out of Harvard, but he thinks the worst move an ambitious 20-year-old can make is to skip college to chase money and fame. Life is long, and you only get one chance to develop your identity, your skills, and your outlook on the world.

We also talked about how he cooperated with fellow bank CEOs and with the federal government to find a way out of the 2008 financial crisis. He thinks that cooperation would be difficult today, because banking reforms and other developments have spread capital and risk more evenly throughout the financial system, including outside the reach of regulators. I asked whether more diversification is good, but Lloyd thinks there is a “Law of Conservation of Risk” in the system. Spreading it around more doesn’t make it go away. It might make the small crises more manageable (for example, the failure of Silicon Valley Bank in 2023). But in a large systemic crisis, the coordination that happened in 2008 will be nearly impossible, so he plans to “get out of town before the big one.”

Lloyd has given a lot to Harvard and has been a long-time supporter of financial aid at the College. He loves the place, but he’s not always sure it loves him back. He thinks Harvard punches below its weight in making its case to the country, that it woke up late to the fact that the public is an important constituency, and that it could stand to let a little outside air in.

We start in East New York and follow him to Harvard, to the financial-aid office that handed him a $500 check with no questions asked, to a quiet law firm with a 4:00 p.m. tea cart, and onto a trading floor where a man kept calling him “college boy.” Then the crisis: how Goldman’s habit of facing reality every day let it see the mortgage problem coming, the giant vampire squid, the hearings, and why he hopes to get out of town before the big one. We end on how important Harvard is to American society, and what it owes the country. I think you’re going to enjoy this one.

Listen on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts

Chapters

[0:00:00] Cold open “Harvard is the Goldman Sachs of educational institutions.”

[0:00:20] Introduction A kid from East New York, eleven dollars, and the most honest memoir David has read.

[0:01:15] Writing it straight Why Streetwise narrates instead of interprets, and “as between their very high view of me and my own, I’m right, because I’ve been with myself longer.”

[0:03:55] The desire to escape, and the dock Wanting out of the neighborhood, visiting Harvard with his sister Jackie, and the melancholy on the ride home.

[0:06:10] Humor as risk management The class clown, perspective as its own kind of risk management, and self-deprecation to take the edge off.

[0:09:30] Harvard at sixteen Skipping a grade out of a failing Brooklyn high school, and why a year more maturity would have helped.

[0:11:45] The first time he wasn’t counting Public housing, the broken glasses that were a big deal, and crew walk-ons ripping towels into headbands.

[0:14:10] Eleven dollars and a $500 check The financial-aid officer who asked “what do you need?”, handed him a check on the spot, and taught him more than the money did.

[0:15:45] Room on the balance sheet Why he gives to a wealthy university while people go hungry, and the case for institutions that don’t run on the tightest cost control.

[0:17:25] The Thiel fellowship test Whether a young Lloyd would have dropped out for $100,000, and why he calls a purely commercial education “subversive.”

[0:20:05] Butter-churning boot camps Read history if you want to be a physicist, why software engineering “doesn’t look so good,” and the two things you can’t predict.

[0:21:20] “I never had to source my motivation” How much he’d give up to hand his teenage self cash (nothing), the advantages hidden inside the burdens, and why life was simpler when he had no choice.

[0:23:15] Why he left the law The 4:00 tea cart, colleagues who couldn’t wait for the advance sheets, and looking down the road at a future he didn’t want.

[0:26:45] “College boy” Rejected everywhere, including Goldman, writing down the words on the elevator panel, and the J. Aron trading floor that finally suited him.

[0:30:10] What it means to be a partner Owners, not renters, a flatter firm, and legitimacy that rests on the consent of your co-owners.

[0:32:40] Worth manipulating A junior brush with the fraudster Robert Maxwell, the guilt that outran the facts, and an early wariness of the favor bank.

[0:36:55] “Improve its performance” The division nobody wanted to fix, why traders make money only when you tell them they have to, and David getting his verb corrected.

[0:41:35] The call on Memorial Day weekend The boss who never phoned on weekends, “whose transition are we talking about?”, and fifteen minutes of handover before the job was his.

[0:46:05] “Get up there with those guys” CEO designate on the Great Wall, and the kick from Ruth Simmons that turned him into a statesman.

[0:49:15] Mark-to-market The adversarial culture that forced Goldman to price its positions to reality every day, and why that discipline, not a premonition, got it out of mortgages early.

[0:53:55] Frenemies in the room How the Fed could put a dozen banks that held most of the risk around one table, and why that table would have to be Yankee Stadium today.

[0:56:40] The law of conservation of risk Why spreading risk makes the twenty-year storm safer and the eighty-year storm worse, and the instinct to get out of town before the big one.

[0:58:45] “You’re just money” Why Warren Buffett’s capital was worth more than a cheaper offer, the validator effect, and the gift of the great reductionist.

[1:01:25] The vampire squid Going from “how did you do it?” to “how did you do it?”, whether Rolling Stone hurt his feelings, and why not losing money made Goldman the target.

[1:04:10] Settling with the regulator Why you settle even when you think you were right, how you negotiate with someone who controls the oxygen, and the Abacus mortgage deal behind Goldman’s record $550 million SEC settlement.

[1:06:10] The daily voicemail Leading by voice through the worst days, “secure your mask before assisting others,” and getting the firm off CNBC and back to work.

[1:09:55] “What are you afraid of, Lloyd?” A resting state of anxiety, why a crisis slows down for him, and keeping your receipts because people remember how you behaved.

[1:12:55] Harvard’s reputational crisis What a bank’s PR disaster can teach a university, and why challengers always go after the best reputation in town.

[1:15:05] Who owns Harvard? Students for four years, faculty for twenty-five, alumni for sixty, and the constituency the university noticed too late: the public.

[1:16:55] An American institution Why Harvard tells its own story badly, the patriotic history it underplays, and the difference between a global university and an American one that admits the world.

[1:19:55] “I love the place. I don’t know if it reciprocates.” Being a donor whose notes go in and vanish, and why it’s easy to have opinions when you think no one is listening.

[1:21:55] Is Harvard a force for good? “Of course it is,” what he would correct, and why he thinks the pressure on Harvard forced a needed course correction.

Guest bio

Lloyd Blankfein is the Senior Chairman of Goldman Sachs, where he was Chairman and CEO from 2006 to 2018, leading the firm through the 2008 financial crisis. He grew up in public housing in the East New York section of Brooklyn, the son of a postal clerk, and entered Harvard at sixteen. He graduated from Harvard College in 1975 and Harvard Law School in 1978, practiced tax law for four and a half years at Donovan Leisure, and in 1982 joined the commodities trading firm J. Aron & Company, which Goldman Sachs had acquired the year before. He became a partner in 1988, ran the firm’s fixed income, currency, and commodities businesses, and became president and chief operating officer before succeeding Hank Paulson as CEO. His memoir, Streetwise: Getting to and Through Goldman Sachs, was published by Penguin Press in 2026. He lives in New York.

Mentioned in this episode

Books

Streetwise: Getting to and Through Goldman Sachs by Lloyd Blankfein

The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe, the source of “the favor bank”

People

Hank Paulson, Blankfein’s predecessor as Goldman CEO and later U.S. Treasury Secretary

Warren Buffett, whose Berkshire Hathaway invested in Goldman during the crisis

Sidney Weinberg, the Goldman senior partner Buffett was brought to meet as a boy in 1939

Robert Maxwell, British media magnate later exposed for looting his companies’ pension funds

Ruth Simmons, then president of Brown University and a Goldman board member

Peter Thiel, founder of the Thiel Fellowship

Barack Obama, then a first-term senator, who spoke to Goldman’s partners

George W. Bush, the president who appointed Paulson to Treasury

Also referenced: Nicolaus Copernicus, on intuition and its limits

Organizations and institutions

Goldman Sachs

J. Aron & Company (covered on the Goldman history page above)

Donovan Leisure, his law firm

Harvard College and Harvard Law School

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York

The Securities and Exchange Commission

Brown University

Ideas and concepts

Mark-to-market accounting

The Thiel Fellowship

Need-based financial aid at Harvard

The “favor bank,” Tom Wolfe’s phrase from The Bonfire of the Vanities

The “law of conservation of risk,” Blankfein’s own coinage in this conversation

TARP and the bank rescues of 2008

The rise and risks of private credit, the IMF’s 2024 analysis of risk migrating from regulated banks into private credit and private equity

Further reading and listening

“The Great American Bubble Machine,” Matt Taibbi’s Rolling Stone article that called Goldman a vampire squid (2009)

The SEC’s announcement of Goldman’s $550 million settlement over the Abacus mortgage product (2010)

Streetwise by Lloyd Blankfein

Credits

Host: David Deming, Danoff Dean of Harvard College

Executive Producer: Denise Koller Consulting Producers: Tim Smith and Jonathan Palumbo Produced by: Cabin 3 Media — Katie Toulmin, Producer; Justin Callahan, Director of Photography / Editor

Special thanks to Debbie Press and the Harvard Club of New York City.

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“People should have a default view that God is probably watching them, like, right now — as they podcast.” — Ross Douthat

Ross Douthat is a columnist at The New York Times and the author of seven books, and one of the few writers who can carry an argument across the country’s deepest divides and still be read on both sides. He converted to Catholicism as a teenager and has built a career making the case for God, and against the meritocracy, to readers who mostly disagree with him. In 2008, before the Tea Party and well before Trump, he and Reihan Salam wrote a book arguing that the Republican Party’s future belonged to its downscale, culturally conservative voters. They had the coalition right and the policy wrong, and the gap between the two still bothers him. In this conversation, he makes a new set of calls: belief in God is more reasonable than it was a century ago, consciousness as we live it is a supernatural experience, meritocracy and magnanimity cannot really coexist, Harvard should admit qualified students by lottery and then admit far more of them, and the university that made him more ambitious was not good for his soul.

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I grew up in the church - my father was a Methodist and UCC minister, and my mother was an editor at a religious book publishing company. So when I read Ross Douthat’s new book, Believe, I recognized his intellectual arguments for why everyone should believe in God as exactly the kind of internal dialogue I’ve had with myself lo these many years.

Ross went to Harvard, Class of 2002, and his first book, Privilege, was about the experience, so he has a point of view about the place I now help run. His criticism is sharp, and I don’t always agree with it. But I appreciate the spirit of wanting Harvard to be better.

We start with the evidence for God: fine-tuning, the multiverse, and whether the arrival of machine intelligence makes the case for a creator stronger or weaker. I asked him to convince me that God exists, and also what evidence would convince him otherwise. That was fun. Then we turn to Harvard, what it does to ambitious young people, whether it was good for his soul, and what a 390-year-old university owes a country about to turn 250. We even talk about whether Harvard and other universities should admit students by random lottery. I think you’re going to enjoy this one.

Chapters

[0:00:00] Cold open “God is probably watching you, right now, as you podcast.”

[0:00:16] Introduction A preacher’s kid reads a book about belief.

[0:01:25] Who is Believe written for? “Every book is for everyone,” and the cerebral readers Ross actually had in mind.

[0:03:17] The convert in-between Watching his parents speak in tongues, converting to Catholicism at sixteen, and the back pew where nobody bothers you.

[0:06:43] One true tradition, or a fit for your personality? Where his zeal has moved: less certainty about doctrine, more conviction that God is worth taking seriously.

[0:12:21] What kind of preacher’s kid were you? David’s Methodist childhood, and giving up on the idea that he would ever know.

[0:14:25] Pascal’s wager and the 52% problem Whether you can live as if God exists without believing it, and why that zone tends to collapse.

[0:20:00] What would make you less likely to believe? Fine-tuning, and the multiverse as the best available alternative to God.

[0:22:16] Complexity from simplicity The watchmaker, beautiful equations, and whether mind comes before matter.

[0:29:00] Does machine superintelligence strengthen or weaken the case for God? Philosophical zombies, Dawkins and “Claudia,” and why consciousness, as we experience it, is a supernatural experience.

[0:32:45] Privilege, two decades on Has Harvard changed? The careerist monoculture, and a generation more anxious about it than his was.

[0:40:07] “Move Over Rush Limbaugh” A Crimson profile, an ironic quote, and a future mother-in-law’s first impression.

[0:42:05] “Harvard wasn’t good for my soul” Corrupted, or allowed himself to be corrupted? Places have a spirit, and the spirit of Harvard from 1998 to 2002.

[0:45:25] Ambition toward what? Nurturing ambition without pretending it isn’t there, and pushing it in a moral direction.

[0:48:36] Meritocracy versus magnanimity The privilege you’re not allowed to feel, and the one virtue the old aristocracy had.

[0:49:03] Eccentricity and the type-A trap The Yale Political Union versus the Harvard IOP, Alex Karp’s The Technological Republic, and the elite that no longer has a project.

[0:54:58] Admission by lottery? Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit, and whether the common-app crapshoot is already half the experiment.

[0:56:22] Should America have a ruling class? Representativeness against draining local leadership, and why the Sun Belt makes him optimistic.

[0:59:45] Make Harvard bigger Admit more students, build satellite campuses, and why Elon Musk should have founded the Stanford of Texas instead of buying a social media site.

[1:01:24] Grand New Party and the Trump mystery Sam’s Club voters, the 2008 diagnosis that came true, and the prescription that didn’t.

[1:05:44] Why the policy never followed the diagnosis Only so much money, Trump himself, and the China shock they underrated.

[1:07:47] Is the book a roadmap after Trump? Family policy, falling birthrates, and the new dilemmas AI is about to create.

[1:10:30] Votes for parents The crankish, possibly correct idea of letting parents vote on behalf of their kids.

[1:12:14] Ben Sasse and civic virtue Why a civics requirement needs a shared story about the American past before it can be taught.

[1:17:09] The case for synthesis Describing ideas you don’t hold, and why everyone, left and right, would benefit from 10% more magnanimity.

[1:19:19] Is Harvard a force for good? “Probably not, overall,” and what an American university owes its country.

Guest bio

Ross Douthat is a columnist at The New York Times and the author of seven books, including Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class, and Grand New Party (with Reihan Salam). A former senior editor at The Atlantic, he is also the film critic for National Review and hosts the Times Opinion podcast Interesting Times. At Harvard he concentrated in History and Literature and wrote a column for The Harvard Crimson, graduating in 2002. He lives with his family in New Haven.

Mentioned in this episode

Books

• Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious by Ross Douthat

• Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class by Ross Douthat

• Grand New Party by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam

• The Tyranny of Merit by Michael J. Sandel

• The Technological Republic by Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska

People

• Pope John Paul II and Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI) — the conservative-Catholic settlement Douthat entered under

• Pope Francis — the era that unsettled it

• William James — invoked on analyzing religious experience

• Blaise Pascal — Pascal’s wager

• Richard Dawkins — on a seemingly conscious AI

• Raj Chetty and John Friedman — research with David Deming on elite-college admissions and who becomes a leader

• Michael Sandel — Harvard political philosopher

• Alex Karp — Palantir co-founder and author

• Reihan Salam — co-author of Grand New Party

• Ben Sasse — former senator, subject of Douthat’s recent Interesting Times interview

• Also referenced: Donald Trump, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, Bernie Sanders, Elon Musk

Organizations and institutions

• The New York Times and The Atlantic

• The Yale Political Union and the Harvard Institute of Politics

• Palantir

Ideas and concepts

• Fine-tuning of the cosmos and the multiverse

• Philosophical zombies (“p-zombies”)

• Pascal’s wager

• The Second Vatican Council

• Meritocracy and magnanimity

• Parent-proxy voting, formally “Demeny voting”

• The “Sam’s Club voters” thesis (from Grand New Party) and the China shock

Further reading and listening

• “Move Over Rush Limbaugh,” The Harvard Crimson (2001)

• Isaac Chotiner’s profile of Douthat, The New Yorker (2023)

• Podcast: Interesting Times with Ross Douthat

• Douthat’s interview with Ben Sasse: “How Ben Sasse Is Living Now That He Is Dying” (April 9, 2026).

• Tanner Greer’s critique of The Technological Republic (2025)

Credits

Host: David Deming, Danoff Dean of Harvard College

Executive Producer: Denise Koller Consulting Producers: Tim Smith and Jonathan Palumbo Produced by: Cabin 3 Media — Katie Toulmin, Producer; Justin Callahan, Director of Photography / Editor

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Angela is a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, a MacArthur Fellow, and the author of Grit. She graduated from Harvard College in 1992 with the Fay Prize for best senior thesis, went on to a Marshall Scholarship at Oxford, worked at McKinsey, taught in public schools, ran a nonprofit, and started her PhD at 32 under Martin Seligman.

You can watch the conversation and find full show notes here.

“Sometimes you have determination but you don’t yet have direction. Sometimes you have perseverance and you don’t yet have passion.” — Angela Duckworth

Hello Forked Lightning readers! I am starting a podcast called The Context Window where I ask interesting, successful people about their career journeys and how they became who they are today. Some of my conversations are with Harvard alums, others will be on topics related to my research interests - education, jobs, AI, and all that good stuff. Here is a longer description.

I added you to the mailing list, but if you want to unsubscribe just scroll to the bottom and hit the button. You will still stay subscribed to Forked Lightning (and I will continue to write for it). But I hope you stick around. Enjoy the show!

My first guest is Angela Duckworth. She is a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, a MacArthur Fellow, and the author of Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. She graduated from Harvard College in 1992 with the Radcliffe Fay Prize for best senior thesis, went on to a Marshall Scholarship at Oxford, worked at McKinsey, taught in public schools, ran a nonprofit, and spent a decade in what she calls “capital-L Lost” before starting her PhD at age 32 under Martin Seligman. Her new book, Situated: Find the People and Places That Bring Out Your Best, argues that individual determination is necessary but not sufficient for success — the environments we place ourselves in matter just as much.

This is a conversation about what elite institutions get right and wrong, how long it takes to find your direction, and why the people around you may determine your trajectory more than any quality you carry inside.

Chapters

[00:00:00] Cold open and introduction Duckworth on being “capital-L Lost” for a decade. David introduces her background: MacArthur Fellow, author of Grit, Harvard ‘92 Fay Prize winner.

[00:01:30] Growing up in Cherry Hill, New Jersey Her father the chemist at DuPont, his obsession with achievement, and the rule that she couldn’t visit colleges before getting accepted.

[00:02:30] Arriving at Harvard: rejection and competition Being rejected from the freshman urban program, the “comping” culture, and the Darwinian atmosphere of late-1980s Harvard.

[00:04:00] “You’re no genius” Her father’s brutal honesty, the neurobiology concentration, and how winning the MacArthur later became a punchline.

[00:07:00] Reunion culture and the class of ‘92 Applying to be “most prominent” at your 25th reunion, and why she thinks the Bridgerton creator should have won.

[00:08:00] The thesis, the lab, and where she actually spent her time Null findings on spectrin isoforms, the Phillips Brooks House rival program Harvard Hand in Cambridge public schools, and not sleeping.

[00:10:30] Accomplished but unhappy Winning the Fay Prize while feeling lonely. What she now tells her Penn students about prioritizing friendships over achievements.

[00:14:00] Watching Amanda do Harvard differently Her daughter’s graduation, the friendships that don’t go on a résumé but matter more than one.

[00:17:00] The winding path: Summer Bridge to Oxford to McKinsey to teaching Starting Breakthrough Greater Boston (still operating 30+ years later), the Marshall Scholarship, politics-philosophy-economics at Oxford, and switching to neuroscience because it was easier.

[00:21:00] Ten years lost Age 22 to 32: “Should I get an MBA? What’s an MBA? Maybe I should be a pediatrician. I didn’t take the MCAT.” The ugliest, most comfortable couch in the world. Many tears.

[00:25:00] Finding psychology at 32 Running her finger down a Yale Summer School course catalog at age 16, and the moment at 32 when she asked: What am I good at? What do I like? What do I dislike?

[00:27:00] “Don’t let me quit for 10 years” The pact with her husband Jason. His reminder at the 10-year mark. Her answer: “No, I’m good.”

[00:28:00] Grit: perseverance and passion for long-term goals The two subscales, West Point cadets, Scripps National Spelling Bee contestants, and why people usually get the definition wrong.

[00:30:00] Perseverance without passion Why young people score high on determination but low on consistent direction. David’s contention: she had passion all along, she just hadn’t articulated it.

[00:32:00] Sample before you specialize Olympic athletes play more sports, not fewer. Reframing quitting as sampling. The U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee research on athlete development.

[00:34:00] What Harvard could do better about career exploration Curiosity conversations, structured career exposure, Wendy Kopp‘s frustration with the consulting pipeline, and why you can’t just “unleash” 22-year-olds.

[00:39:00] David’s own path: law firm, Berkeley, and serendipity Almost becoming a lawyer, the creative itch, meeting his wife at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley, and the Presidential Management Fellowship as Plan B.

[00:42:00] Gen Z and the cost of comparison Social media, excessive self-reflection, and the formula: reflect, don’t ruminate.

[00:43:30] Can grit be taught? Mindset as on/off switch versus grit as muscle. Growth mindset research. Her evolving answer: grit is learned more than taught, and it’s learned primarily through the people around you.

[00:47:00] Situated: the title, the survey data, and the age trend Why younger readers preferred Situated over Great Situations, and what she told her publisher about the data.

[00:48:00] Grit as necessary but not sufficient Bridget Terry Long on situations where hard work pays off and situations where it doesn’t. The classroom where nobody is teaching.

[00:51:30] Cody Coleman and situational agency Born in a prison near Trenton, New Jersey. MIT. Google. Stanford PhD — the third Black recipient in the program’s history. His AI startup, Coactive AI. His own account of success: five-year chapters, each a vault into a more challenging and supportive situation.

[00:55:00] Big fish, small pond Arriving at Harvard and realizing your rooming group includes a private pilot and a Math Olympiad winner. The moment Duckworth stopped comparing.

[00:57:00] Listen to the inner voice David’s advice to students: if you think you should probably do it, you probably should. Harvard as the ultimate second-chance ticket — so why not take risks?

[00:59:30] Harvard’s 250th and the founding ideals Eight Harvard College graduates signed the Declaration of Independence. Duckworth on being prouder of Harvard now than at any point in her life.

[01:01:00] How Harvard can improve Helping students with post-graduation transitions. Grade inflation as a symptom of decreasing tolerance for imperfection.

Guest bio

Angela Duckworth is the Rosa Lee and Egbert Chang Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, where she also teaches at the Wharton School. She co-founded Character Lab, a nonprofit that advanced the science and practice of character development (Character Lab sunset its operations in June 2024). Her 2016 book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance was a #1 New York Times bestseller, and her TED Talk on the subject is among the most viewed of all time. She received her BA from Harvard (1992), an MSc in neuroscience from Oxford as a Marshall Scholar, and her PhD in psychology from Penn, where she studied under Martin Seligman. Before academia, she co-founded Breakthrough Greater Boston (formerly Summer Bridge), taught math in public schools, worked at McKinsey & Company, and served as COO of GreatSchools. Her forthcoming book is Situated: Find the People and Places That Bring Out Your Best (Scribner, September 2026). She received the MacArthur Fellowship in 2013.

Mentioned in this episode

Books

• Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance by Angela Duckworth (2016)

• Situated: Find the People and Places That Bring Out Your Best by Angela Duckworth (Scribner, September 2026)

• Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck

Organizations

• Breakthrough Greater Boston (formerly Summer Bridge), founded by Duckworth in 1992

• Character Lab — nonprofit co-founded by Duckworth; sunset operations June 2024

• Coactive AI — Cody Coleman’s AI startup for visual content analytics

• Teach For America — founded by Wendy Kopp

People

• Cody Coleman — MIT and Stanford PhD, co-founder and CEO of Coactive AI

• Bridget Terry Long — Harvard economist, Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education (2018–2024)

• Martin Seligman — founder of positive psychology, Duckworth’s PhD advisor at Penn

• Wendy Kopp — founder of Teach For America

• Raj Chetty — Harvard economist (referenced re: peer effects and teams)

• David Deming — Danoff Dean of Harvard College, host of The Context Window

Research tools and concepts

• Grit Scale — self-report questionnaire measuring perseverance and passion subscales

• Angela Duckworth’s TED Talk — “Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance”

• Angela Duckworth’s research page — publications, grit definitions, and measurement cautions

• Grit Lab: Fostering Passion & Perseverance — Duckworth’s undergraduate course at Penn

Other

• Bridgerton — Netflix series created by a Harvard ‘92 classmate

• U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee research on athlete breadth of sport sampling

Credits

Host: David Deming, Danoff Dean of Harvard College

Executive Producer: Denise Koller Consulting Producers: Tim Smith and Jonathan Palumbo Produced by: Cabin 3 Media — Katie Toulmin, Producer; Justin Callahan, Director of Photography / Editor

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