Frames of Space

You can find my Patreon page here. Jennifer Pahlka is the author of Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better, which highlights the myriad of reasons why the US government often fails to successfully implement the laws it passes. In this episode, I got a chance to speak with her about why government bureaucrats are so important, the tension between accountability to process and accountability to outcome, and how to make laws easier to implement once they get passed. Show Notes: Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better by Jennifer Pahlka "Minoritarianism Is Everywhere" by Steve Teles, Foreign Affairs "In Defense of the deep state" by Francis Fukuyama, Asia Pacific Journal of Public Administration

You can find my Patreon page here. Emma Camp is a senior editor at Free Expression, a newsletter in the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal. She is known for her cultural commentary on subjects like mental health, gender relations, and the myriad of ways that Gen Zers are shaping up to be very different from their predecessors. In this episode, I got a chance to speak with her about the prevalence of therapy culture, the nature of modern marriage, and why Gen Z tends to be disproportionately afraid of rejection compared to earlier generations. Show Notes "Lindsay Clancy Isn’t an Everywoman" by Emma Camp, WSJ Opinion This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life by Lyz Lenz The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto by Leah Libresco Sargeant

You can find my Patreon page here. Peter Wildeford is the Head of Policy at The AI Policy Network and a board member at the Institute for AI Policy and Strategy (AIPS). He is also a member of the AI safety community, and has dedicated his career to controlling the pace of AI progress so that it doesn't get out of our control. He believes that there is a non-trivial chance that AI growth might lead to mass catastrophe for the world, or even the extinction of the human species. In this episode, I got a chance to speak with him about why it's so important to take action on AI as soon as possible, the concept of AI misalignment, and how AI agents are often grown rather than built. Show Notes "Pacing the Frontier" by Peter Wildeford, The Power Law

You can find my Patreon page here. Darby Saxbe is a professor of psychology at the University of Southern California and the writer behind the Substack "Natal Gazing." She is known for her research on parenthood and family formation. Lyman Stone is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies. He writes about how to address declining birth rates on his own Substack. Darby and Lyman have argued with each other quite a bit online, but this is the first time they've ever spoken to each other in a live conversation. In this episode, I got a chance to speak with them about the extent to which pro-family policies can raise birth rates, the gap between liberals and conservatives on fertility rates, and how to fix our current levels of societal distrust. Show Notes "Why family-friendly policies don’t boost birth rates" by John Burn-Murdoch, The Financial Times "It's Right-Wing to Love Your Family" by Lyman Stone

You can find my Patreon page here. Annie Lowrey is a staff writer at The Atlantic who focuses on economic issues like welfare policy, income inequality, and what an ideal tax policy would look like. She is the author of the recent book The Time Tax: How the Government Wastes Our Time—and How to Fix It. In this episode, I got a chance to speak with her about why it's so painful to file taxes in the US, why American bureaucracy is so cumbersome for so many people, and how Democrats and Republicans both contribute to the problem in their own ways. Show Notes The Time Tax: How the Government Wastes Our Time―and How to Fix It by Annie Lowrey "The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero" by Patrick McKenzie, Bits About Money Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson