This is Planet Money from NPR.
Hey, everyone.
For the past couple weeks, the Planet Money team has been on the road on book tour.
Tonight, live from New York, the Planet Money book launch.
I'm in San Francisco.
What's going on?
So excited to be in Boston.
Hello, everyone.
We say hello, Seattle.
Is that a thing we get to do on Book Tour?
We have been crisscrossing America doing live shows to help promote the new Planet Money book.
We've been in New York, D.C., Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles.
And this is a rare thing that we don't get to do very often.
We don't get to meet and talk with so many of you.
In DC, we played this game with the audience to demonstrate a concept known as the wisdom of the crowds.
This is the idea that if you ask a large group of people to guess the price of something like a piece of art, the average will actually be pretty close to correct.
You all guessed that this piece of art is worth, oh, come on, guys, $693 trillion?
I don't think that's right.
It wasn't a perfect study.
In New York.
Our hosts Amanda Aronchik and Mary Childs answered audience questions about how we choose what stories to report or not report.
It was weird to look at the list of episodes that I thought I was going to make, and one of them was just cocaine.
We also have a running thread where we just yell drugs at each other because we keep wanting to make a how does a drug become legal episode?
Yes, but the lawyers have said no.
And at every stop we have gotten the true delight of meeting so many of our listeners turned readers, some of whom it seems like maybe should be writing their own economics books.
My name is Ryan and I'm really glad you were talking about cargo shipping because I'd like to hear your thoughts on the Jones Act, which was briefly and for the longest.
For those who aren't like maritime shipping nerds, i'll just contextualize briefly the jones act is a subsection.
Yeah actually, please do do our job for us.
I love this.
Now we do have a few stops left on this book tour, but obviously we can't make it to every city in america, can't actually make it to most of them really and so we thought Not everyone can come to the book tour.
Let's bring the book tour to everyone.
Hello and welcome to Planet Money.
Hello and welcome to Planet Money.
Hello and welcome to Planet Money.
Hello and welcome to Planet Money.
Hello and welcome to Planet Money.
I'm Erica Barris.
In every city on the tour, we've been doing these interviews with special guests.
They've been Planet Money regulars, like economists Raj Shetty and Emily Oster, and some people in the news, like the co-founder of Anthropic Jack Clark.
By April 2027, AI systems should be able to do tasks that might take a person 150 hours.
What is that?
That's almost a month's worth of work, which requires strange things to happen in the economy.
But what task is it doing?
What task are you thinking of?
What's the last bit of work that took you a month?
Writing these questions for you took more time than I wanted.
Yeah.
And also people like economist Daryl Fairweather, who's trying to help regular people understand the massively complex housing market.
So I think a good metaphor for the housing market is musical chairs, like the people who already own houses are sitting in their chairs.
And whenever there's a new spring housing market, some people get up and they move and they select a new chair.
And if you're not adding more chairs in, you can't get first time homebuyers into the market so easily.
Today on the show two stops from our live book tour San Francisco and Seattle, where we'll talk about AI anxiety and how you yes, you could be the key to fixing the housing crisis.
So first stop, San Francisco, where we got to talk with the co-founder of Anthropic, Jack Clark.
As you know, Anthropic and their AI models, Claude and now Claude Mythos, are raising all sorts of thorny questions about what AI can do and what it can't.
And we were, of course, going to ask Jack about all of that.
But we wanted to start with some writing.
He published online several years before starting Anthropic, a series of short stories that give some perspective into how he thinks about the future.
Here he is with Planet Money host, Kenny Malone.
Is it fair to call these science fiction?
It is fair to call them science fiction.
I'd like to give people a little taste of what's in here.
So the one I want you to read that feels very Planet Money...
It imagines in the year 2025, we'll forgive you because you're a little wrong on that one.
But in the year 2025, you imagine a factory in China.
It is overseen by a robot factory line and AI is overseeing the robots.
And then AI is also trying to imagine new types of products.
And then if you just want to read.
When new candidate products are found, it runs for a series of tuned expert systems.
And if it gets a high enough score, simulates the product in a high fidelity simulation.
If it passes these tests, then a candidate product is produced, airlifted by drone to a nearby human focus group and, if it satisfies their criteria, is sold on an eBay-like auction site frequented by the factory's thousands of distributors.
Okay.
So...
We imagine a world where AI is able to both control the robots that make the product innovate and design the products, ship them off to human focus groups and then sell them to humans.
So here's my question for you.
Where are we the humans in this story?
Are we off in a field dancing, eating dates in the sun?
And maybe more importantly...
How do we have money to buy the products that we didn't help make?
Sort of a serious question.
It's a good question.
So I think, if AI goes as far as people think, you actually need to reconceptualize how capitalism in the largest possible sense works.
I think if you end up in a world where you have a closed-loop production system with just machine to machine, to machine to machine, and then people buy stuff, People need money.
It's well established.
That is the thing.
So you need to tax the robots and AI companies significantly and you need to somehow find a way to reallocate money from this machine economy to the human economy.
One of the things that occurred to me in reading this book Can people get this, by the way?
Is this like a thing?
You can get it for free online at jackclark.net, but I haven't figured out how to sell the book yet.
Each time I try and make an actual book to sell, I get sidetracked, and the last time was when I was starting Anthropic and when I got busy.
Surely someone will publish your book, Jack.
It's on my list.
It plagues me.
I have a Google Doc that I stare at on my free moments.
Having gone through a series of reporting on books and how they get made, I suspect you'd be an attractive candidate to a publisher.
One of the things that did occur to me in reading your book is that science fiction writers, by definition, are imagining a future.
They're predicting a future, but you may be genuinely the only one that I can think of who is simultaneously shaping the future, and we are all living in the world that your technology is creating.
And so I do genuinely wonder if that changes how I should read this book.
Like, should I think of your writing as a blueprint, as instructions, as a warning, as advice on how to live in Jack Clark's future?
Yes.
There's a band Jawbreaker, and they have a lyric which says my fiction beats the hell out of my truth.
And so the newsletter is mostly me writing about AI research papers.
But the fiction stories are where I'm basically trying to grapple with what's happening in my moral and ethical responsibility in it.
So you can read them, and I view it as like messages in a bottle I'm trying to throw out of this semi-frightening AI lab which I'm a principal character in.
And so you are warning us, and You're warning us.
You're not warning us.
I guess that's why you said yes.
It's exciting.
Is it?
It's exciting.
I think it's very exciting.
Is everyone excited?
That's about the response I expected, to be honest.
Eerie applause.
But it's change, right?
And with that comes some amount of trepidation, right?
Well, yes.
For me, a lot of trepidation, personally.
That may just be me.
I don't know.
We talked earlier today.
This was a very funny interaction.
So Jack, I met Jack briefly early today.
And this is the greatest reason to run out of room.
He's like, I must run and make some predictions.
And I was like, what is happening?
And you paused to briefly explain that you had made a series of predictions, essentially that would come true in 2026 of September and they had done very well, and you had to go make another set.
So what were your predictions?
Share them with us. us now.
If we see any of these on Polymarket, though, we know where they came from.
Well one, I think again, if you do the time thing, it doesn't seem wild that by April 2027 AI systems should be able to do tasks that might take a person 150 hours.
What is that?
That's almost a month's worth of work, which requires strange things to happen in the economy.
Yeah, but what task is it doing?
What task are you thinking of?
What's the last bit of work that took you a month?
Writing these questions for you took more time than I wanted.
Yeah, yeah.
So tasks like this.
No, I mean tasks that might take a person a really, really long time.
Might be designing a complicated piece of circuitry, doing a very, very involved research project involving reading and cross-referencing many things building a piece of software.
The kinds of tasks that we currently pay extremely talented people large amounts of money to do are exactly the type of tasks which ai systems are kind of creeping into.
So that has some implications.
Yeah, the other prediction we made was you know, we've talked about how um, the majority of the code at anthropic is written by ai systems like claude.
Well, all of us in the room thought by april, maybe a hundred percent of the code is, which led to us say what are we doing?
And I think that we invented a guild system where we would sit around analyzing and critiquing the code that Claude writes and verifying that it's correct.
And I can't work out if this is like a really fun country club style job or if it paints some different picture.
Right.
You're going to tell me.
I don't know, Jack.
I find it all.
I waffle between horrified and optimistic.
And I find I'm just is that kind of where everyone else is?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Where do you do that?
I find myself staring into the face of change that we haven't experienced in perhaps a century.
And I don't know how we'll respond.
A hundred years ago, C.S.
Lewis wrote a book called The Screwtape Letters, which is about a demon in hell whose job is writing letters to their boss a senior demon, a manager demon about their attempts to corrupt a person on Earth.
And they have a letter where they say wonderful news my human has just got an invention called the telephone.
And the telephone means that whenever my person is alone and would otherwise introspect on themselves and be drawn closer to God, they will instead pick up the phone and call their friends, which brings them closer to hell.
What does that get right and wrong?
What it gets right is that things like phones actually massively changed how people relate to one another.
Yes.
But I don't think that we're all like doomed to hell because we have phones.
Well... Well.
I realize now I picked the wrong example, but...
But it gets at the shape of this, right?
Like we are going to experience immense change and we're looking at it and we're trying to think through what it means for how we relate to us as people.
And it will change how we relate to one another.
Yeah.
I want to shift gears from your writing for a second because you made a lot of news lately.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, it was exciting.
I mean, you've made a lot of news lately.
But most recently, there's a new AI model called Mythos.
Please correct me if I get any of this wrong.
So Mythos.
And that seems to be really good at hacking if someone wanted to use it for that.
And so you have not made this model public yet.
You've given it to something like 40 or 50 companies to, I guess, gird themselves from the tool that you made.
Yes.
Okay.
So that's companies like Apple and Google and Amazon.
And, as far as we could tell, the only financial institution that I've seen reported is JP Morgan.
Maybe has it to test, but I believe Treasury Secretary Scott Besant has called you asking for this.
So question one is, how have these phone calls been?
Like... I have a high tolerance for weird phone calls at this point in time.
Yeah?
I think the nature of the conversations we're having is we have been saying for years that AI systems would get better and they would keep getting better until they got better than people at most tasks, and it started in coding last year.
Don't be surprised when they get better at other tasks as well.
That doesn't go down super well on the call, so then you frame it as well.
What do we do about this?
And I think the challenge is this isn't a special model.
This is representative.
This isn't your hacking model, is it?
It's our regular Claude.
And it's really good at hacking.
Claude turns out to be good at hacking now as well.
Cool, that's cool.
Look, I know, I know.
Look, we contain multitudes.
We can be optimistic and terrified at the same time.
What it means is there will be many systems like this, and the world is going to adapt to this.
We have a chance to use it to make much of the world much more secure.
But at the same time, we now have these new capabilities in the world we have to contend with.
Is it true?
There's just the one financial institution in the mix of people getting to test their own systems.
We announced 40 and we've been expanding it a bunch over time, so I don't know exactly if it's just for one or if we've expanded it already, but more people are being added over time right now.
Do I need to be checking my banking account to see if money is going away?
No, unless you're spending it.
I mean, I might be.
San Francisco is a great city for spending money.
The food is good.
So right now you're offering this tool to companies for free, but there is this feeling in the back of my mind like you have invented both the weapon and the shield.
And so what happens when you want to charge for this?
It does feel a little bit like, hey, you know, shame if something happens to that company of yours.
It's If you don't pay for our product.
Yeah, we think that business strategies which tend more towards mafia than anything else are probably not long-term resilient, so we won't be doing that.
I do think that the shape of this in the future is parts of AI need to become actually a true utility, where you would expect things like cyber defense capabilities to be something that you provide, like at cost or at the cost of it costs you to provide you with no margin.
I'm sorry if my financial officer is listening to me say that, but it's the.
It's the shape of where you end up in the future, where there are all these capabilities that matter for society.
You need to proliferate those into society without charging society for it or you end up in a really bad incentive structure.
You now have two children.
You just got back from parental leave.
So you're imagining a future for them as well.
And so I am wondering, what is the future you're imagining for them?
How do you think that they will fit into the world that you are creating?
And what skills will you prioritize for them?
I mean, I imagine, if we get this right, a better future where people get to spend more time with one another and less time being kind of atomized and driven away from their families and friends.
This requires you to actually solve the distribution problem.
Me, personally?
Yes, you.
Congratulations.
We're solving economics together.
But how you get there, along with the advocacy I've talked about, is actually thinking you're going to need to completely rethink education and sort of upend it.
You're going to need to upend how education works in pretty fundamental ways.
And you're going to have to teach people to be Much more curious.
I am struck by how my child constantly asks me questions.
It's obviously sometimes very enraging when you get asked the same question 50 times a day.
But sometimes it's amazing.
Like, you know, why are camels, why do they have humps or anything like this?
I got that one too and I was like...
I don't know.
But as you go into being an adult you get kind of the skill of asking questions beaten out of you by rote learning and working in regular jobs and your friends saying for heaven's sake Jack, stop asking these insane-sounding questions.
Yeah.
AI actually can answer these questions for you and can allow us to maintain that kind of childlike curiosity into adulthood in a way that I think is very mind-expanding and wonderful.
And I think that's going to lead the world to really exciting places where everyone has the inventiveness that you have as a child, but you can still use it and are encouraged to use it more as an adult.
That's my optimistic story.
Yes.
I do want to end with the final line from your preface, which I do recommend reading, but the final line you have chosen is good luck to us all.
Yes.
And I think we'll end on that one.
Jack, thank you so much.
Thanks very much.
Appreciate it.
Jack Clark, the co-founder of Anthropic talking with Planet Money, host A quick clarification.
That reference to the screw tape letters was basically correct.
In it, C.S.
Lewis does write about noise writ large as a distraction to man.
It was in a different private letter that he talked about the downsides of gadgetry, including the wireless radio.
After the break, what it's like to be a behavioral economist.
Welcome back.
We have another interview from the tour I'm going to play you part of.
It's with Daryl Fairweather.
Daryl is a behavioral economist and author of the book Hate the Game.
Economic Cheat Codes for Life, Love and Work.
She's also quoted many times in our book, especially on the topic of housing.
Check the index.
She's in there a lot.
Yeah.
So please welcome Daryl Fairweather.
Daryl's currently the chief economist at Redfin, the realty company.
And she used to be a senior economist at Amazon in Seattle, which is where she joined us.
Here she is talking with host Kenny Malone and the main author of the Planet Money book, Alex Mayasi, about how the work of economists is baked into so much of our daily lives.
I think your career demonstrates something that I've found quite interesting, which is I think my standard image of an economist was always kind of a professor.
And they do research.
But when you went to work at Amazon, was your job titled behavioral economist?
Yes.
They hired me specifically to be behavioral economist because they didn't want people at the part of the company that I was working at to get too nervous that they were hiring some economist in who was going to cut roles or make things harder for people.
So They wanted people to know that I had a softer touch.
And my training is in behavioral economist.
And I think that is a signal to people that I think about things a bit more holistically than maybe the typical economist.
Why did Amazon need a behavioral economist?
Well, this was when they were getting a lot of bad press for the way that they were treating their employees.
There was this big New York Times expose about it.
Was that the peeing in bottles expose?
I think it was before that.
Oh, okay.
The first one.
There were a couple of exposes.
So my job was to work on employee engagement, especially for our more frontline call center employees, and to figure out how to keep them from quitting, how to keep them happy, how to give them career opportunities.
And we actually had data to measure according to that.
So that was my role as a behavioral economist.
Yeah.
And so...
I think, yeah, I've learned over time how economists are not just professors.
Many highly trained economists are out there working on very familiar goods and services that we all know.
One of my favorite examples is dating apps.
That, to a surprising degree, the algorithms and dating apps that decide who gets matched with who, who sees which profiles, are based on Nobel Prize winning economics research.
I'm curious if you have kind of a favorite example or two of ways that economists have been very influential Not in academia but by working at companies.
How are you secretly influencing our lives, Daryl?
That's the question.
Yeah, I think a famous one is rideshare apps.
It used to be that you would just call a cab and the price you would pay was just whatever was on the meter.
And then economists got the idea to have dynamic pricing that was set by whatever demand was in that moment and supply was in that moment.
And a lot of people don't like that because it feels a little bit unfair.
And now it's moving even into grocery stores, this dynamic pricing.
I know there's a lot of pushback towards that as well.
I do see those little price tags that can change.
And I wonder, two seconds ago, was it less?
Is that what's happening?
Yeah, this is even true on Amazon.
I was tracking the price of my book and my book is now cheaper than it was a couple weeks ago, so you can get a deal because of that dynamic pricing.
I think this event will push it back up.
If you buy enough, then your friends will have to pay more.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
I mean, and so I think we're talking specifically with Rideshare about surge pricing.
Yes, yes.
If there is more demand, that should, in theory, push up price.
Because if it doesn't, what you can have are shortages.
And shortages are worse than paying more, because then there are people who might be willing to pay a higher price, who just don't get the option to.
But I think there's...
I feel like there's kind of a backlash to that now.
Sometimes people prefer things to be allocated based on a wait list because it feels more fair, even if it is more inefficient, because it's not just going to the richest people.
So this is where my behavioral economist brain starts working.
And I feel like there has to be some at least nuance.
And when is surge pricing a bit grotesque?
Oh.
We were talking backstage and earlier about the New York City Marathon.
One of the things I think is genius when you read the final chapter.
Everyone is that it optimizes for envy freeness is the term I've heard which is like less about one specific system of optimization and more about will everyone be cool with this if they get left out for some reason?
And that is also a different thing you can optimize for.
Surge pricing probably does not do that.
Yeah, I agree.
I mean, willingness to pay would only allocate it to people who have the highest willingness to pay.
But maybe willingness to not moan is another way to allocate it.
I mean, I think the thing that does get left out of the surge pricing and Uber conversation is there is a workforce that, in theory, is standing by and could quickly jump into their cars and do more rides.
And so this is a What is the term?
Market clearing price?
Yeah, there's a market demand price.
That would then recruit more people and then would help the price drop.
And so in that circumstance, I think that's what gets left out of that conversation a little bit.
But I don't know that that applies to the grocery store.
If it starts raining and prices don't go up for Ubers or Lyfts, then you don't have this incentive for more drivers to come and get more people where they need to go while it's raining.
Anyway, I try to think of that when I grumble about Uber prices, but I mostly just grumble anyway during search times.
Let's finish with the topic of housing something, a part of the economy that, like so, viscerally impacts our lives.
What have been some of the biggest developments in housing in the last five, ten years, while it's been really the focus of your work,
In the last five years there's been a lot of movement to eliminate single-family zoning, which is this idea that you can only build one house on one plot of land in a neighborhood.
Single-family zoning is behind why there's a scarcity of housing in cities like Seattle and many cities across the country.
But there's actually been a lot of progress to get rid of that and replace it with multifamily zoning.
It's been a very slow-moving progress and just because you change the zoning doesn't mean the housing changes overnight.
That housing has to get developed.
But in the last five years there has been A big movement.
The YIMBYs Yes, In My Backyard, as opposed to the NIMBYs, No In My Backyard.
The YIMBYs seem to be winning this ideological fight, which is really encouraging to see because it is based on economic principles supply and demand.
It's finally starting to click in politicians' minds and voters' minds that this is how you get more affordable housing.
Can we come up with a metaphor for this phenomenon, which is like there's been more increased density zoning, and yet people would see new houses built that were like expensive townhouses and they would be mad about it.
So like, it doesn't make sense.
You're allowed to build more houses, but all I see over here are very expensive houses.
Which is a common objection about zoning.
It's like well, a new apartment building was built, but it's very expensive to live there and I feel like rents are still going up.
Everything's still so expensive.
Yeah, so I think a good metaphor for the housing market is musical chairs.
The people who already own houses are sitting in their chairs and whenever there's a new spring housing market, some people get up and they move and they select a new chair.
And if you're not adding more chairs in, you can't get first time home buyers into the market so easily.
But if you were to add some luxury, plush nice chair Yes, it's probably going to go to a very wealthy person, but then that wealthy person is not going to be sitting in the folding chair anymore and that chair opens up for a first-time home buyer.
Or they're less likely to be sitting in the folding chair because we know some people will buy two chairs sometimes.
That is true.
Hopefully they rent it out.
Yes, yes.
I want to finish with a quote actually from the book, which is something you said to me that really stuck with me.
So I'm going to read the quote here.
You told me.
I wish the communities had the mentality that is their responsibility to grow, because we know there's going to be future generations that are going to need housing.
I wish that people cared more about future residents.
Could you tell me a bit more what you mean there?
Yeah, my frustration with the way that housing works in this country is that it's usually determined by local residents, usually people who are homeowners themselves, who go to their local town halls or local city halls and advocate for less housing.
Because they don't want to see their neighborhoods change.
They don't want to see new condo buildings or apartment buildings going up.
And the people who don't get a vote are the people who don't live in that area but would like to move in that area.
Or the people who maybe are kids and one day they'll be adults and they'll need to get a house of their own.
Those people's voices aren't heard.
So I wish that the focus was less on what's best for current residents and what's best for the residents who might live here five 10, 15 years from now.
Yeah.
So this is absolutely the focus of a chapter of the book.
But I really love that, because what could be more understandable that you choose a neighborhood you don't want it to change?
But there's a trade-off because of all the people who are new to housing in the future.
And it does seem like there's a way.
Economics is so much about incentives and laws and policies, but this was something really about empathy that you're pointing out as important.
Yeah, empathy in economics, it happens.
Daryl, thank you.
You can find her.
She's in the index.
I had her sign my index in my book.
I recommend that.
Daryl Fairweather is the chief economist at Redfin.
That's our show.
There are still stops left on the book tour.
I will be in Pittsburgh tonight, April 22nd, doing the Planet Money Game Theory Game Show as part of the tour.
Then there are shows in Chicago on the 23rd and Toronto on the 27th.
Come by, say hello, maybe grab a copy of the book.
More information at planetmoneybook.com.
You can now find our book Planet Money a guide to the economic forces that shape your life, in bookstores.
If you go spot it, please let us know what section it is in.
We'll have one more installment of our book series soon, where we dive into the secretive world of bestseller lists.
Thanks to everyone who came out so far and who picked up a copy.
This episode of Planet Money was edited and produced by Eric Menel and Emma Peasley.
It was fact-checked by Sierra Juarez.
It was engineered by Robert Rodriguez and Kweisi Lee.
Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer.
I'm Erica Barris.
This is NPR.
Thanks for listening.
