Make Me Smart
1,022 episodes - English - Latest episode: 13 days ago - ★★★★★ - 4.6K ratingsEach weekday, Marketplace’s Kai Ryssdal and Kimberly Adams make today make sense. Along with our supersmart listeners, we break down happenings in tech, the economy and culture. Every Tuesday we bring on a guest to dive deeper into one important topic. Because none of us is as smart as all of us.
Homepage Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Episodes
Deep thoughts about deepfakes
September 03, 2019 22:17 - 25 minutes - 11.8 MBDeepfake videos can make for a lot of fun … someone’s face on someone else’s body saying something completely out of context — like Bill Hader doing an impression of Tom Cruise with Cruise’s face superimposed. But the implications of this technology are serious, from disinformation to political upheaval. Here to walk us through it is Berkeley School of Information professor Hany Farid. Plus, professional dogsledder Blair Braverman answers the Make Me Smart question.
So, when’s that recession gonna start?
August 27, 2019 23:24 - 18 minutes - 11.8 MBTalk of a coming recession has only gotten more heated this week, following a meeting of central bankers at Jackson Hole and a bunch of trade back and forth at the G7. Markets rebounded Monday, but the yield curve remains inverted and the global economy is still slowing down. So what now? We called Neil Irwin, senior economics correspondent at “The New York Times,” to help us figure out what we should be watching for, and what happens next
The “Hunger Games” of streaming
August 20, 2019 22:49 - 41 minutes - 11.8 MBUsed to be you signed up for cable and voila, you’re watching your favorite shows (as well as a bunch of stuff you don’t care about, for maybe too high a price). Then streaming came along. First Netflix. Then Amazon. Hulu. And now a whole new batch of subscription services are about to launch: Disney+, HBO Max, Apple TV Plus. It’s getting more complicated and competitive, with content jumping off some platforms and clustering onto others. What services will survive this battle? And why is th...
What does your privacy mean to you?
August 14, 2019 00:23 - 28 minutes - 11.8 MBRegulators, tech journalists and the most informed consumers have been wringing their hands about “privacy” online for years. But just as more users and regulators start taking notice, heavy hitters like Apple and Facebook are announcing their renewed commitment to “your privacy” … with very different definitions. It’s hard to take control of privacy when you’re not even sure what that means anymore. To help draw some distinctions we’re joined by Laura Moy, associate professor and executive ...
The economy still isn’t working for people of color
August 07, 2019 00:17 - 35 minutes - 11.8 MBWe know economic inequality in America is real and keeps growing. We know people of color, especially black people, are hit the hardest. That’s not news. What is new is the wave of politicians, primarily Democrats, who are speaking more candidly about race and inequality than ever before. There’s also new research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland into the massive wealth gap between black and white Americans, which has barely changed since the 1960s, thanks, mostly, to unequal pay. ...
It’s time to pay attention to TikTok
July 30, 2019 23:46 - 37 minutes - 11.8 MBLil Nas X’s “Old Town Road,” the meme turned song of the summer, has been the number-one song in country for a record-breaking 17 weeks. It originally took off on TikTok, a video-sharing app you should really be paying attention to. It’s been downloaded a billion times, and Facebook execs flagged it as competition during recent Congressional testimony. It’s also owned by a Chinese company, Bytedance, that was just hit by FTC fines for collecting children’s data. This week, The Wall Street Jo...
Why even have a debt ceiling?
July 23, 2019 23:30 - 32 minutes - 11.8 MBKai and Molly are reunited at last, and they’re trying something new. We asked the staff here at Marketplace to send in their burning questions they want to get smart about, including the debt ceiling, that Equifax settlement and CBD. All that, plus your thoughts on our recent episode on ~*~*outer space.~*~*~
Space — the final business frontier
July 17, 2019 01:00 - 38 minutes - 11.8 MBFifty years ago today, the Saturn V rocket took off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, carrying the first men to walk on the moon. Today, we’ll mark that milestone by looking ahead to the exploration, colonization and militarization of space. By some estimates, the current space economy is worth $400 billion, and it could reach $1 trillion by 2040. Here to break it all down with Molly Wood is Marketplace’s de facto space reporter Kimberly Adams and Politico’s Jacqueline Feldscher, who co-...
The end of history (majors)
July 09, 2019 22:50 - 34 minutes - 11.8 MBPresident Donald Trump gave a speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial last week to mark the Fourth of July. Critics and Democrats went after Trump for politicizing the occasion, though many presidents of both parties have done the same in the past. Do such knee-jerk reactions mean we have lost understanding of the importance of history? It’s personal for Kai Ryssdal, an undergrad history major who often finds the past a useful way to make sense of today. Here to talk with us about what h...
The view from Shanghai
July 02, 2019 23:27 - 31 minutes - 11.8 MBKai Ryssdal lived and worked in China during the ’90s, and has made several trips there over the past 20 years. But most of the time he keeps tabs on the world’s second-largest economy the way most of us do: through the news. There are the headlines about the trade war, concerns about government overreach, the candidates stumping about China as an economic enemy, this week’s protests in Hong Kong. That’s a lot of noise that often brings us no closer to understanding what life’s actually like...
How did CEO pay get so bloated?
June 25, 2019 19:50 - 34 minutes - 11.8 MBWe’re kicking off a new series focusing on a topic that comes up a lot around here: Is the economy working for everybody? Today we’re talking about CEO pay. Some chief executives make up to 1,000 times more than their average employees. It didn’t used to be this way. Here to talk with us about CEO and worker compensation is Heather Boushey, executive director of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. Finally: Time is running out! Support “Make Me Smart” today and get exclusive Marketpl...
Bonus: This Is Uncomfortable, episode 2
June 22, 2019 16:00 - 23 minutes - 11.8 MBMarketplace has a brand-new podcast: “This Is Uncomfortable.” Every Thursday, host Reema Khrais tells stories about life and how money messes with it. This week’s episode is all about the baggage that comes with crying at work, and it features a certain Marketplace host. Listen to that episode here, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
What’s in a face?
June 18, 2019 19:57 - 33 minutes - 11.8 MBSan Francisco banned government agencies from using facial recognition last month, citing civil liberty concerns. It’s a baby step in regulating technology that could make some aspects of life safer and more convenient, but comes with a host of unintended consequences for surveillance, profiling, discrimination and so on. But the recognition tech is already out there, in your face and accumulating data being used by the federal government and tech giants like Amazon. Today, BuzzFeed senior t...
The internet as we know it rests on 26 words from 1996
June 11, 2019 23:39 - 33 minutes - 11.8 MBYou might not know what Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act says, but it affects your life every day. This short passage of the law says online platforms are not legally liable for what people say or do in the spaces they run. Trillions of dollars in company valuation and the sharing of content as we know it rests on the rule. But in the era of deep fakes, election meddling and radicalization by algorithm, is it time to revisit Section 230? If you got rid of it, what kind of r...
Your crash course on the Indian economy
June 04, 2019 23:51 - 42 minutes - 11.8 MBIndia is the largest democracy in the world, a major American ally and something of a counterpoint to a rising China. The country’s 900 million eligible voters just reelected Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who’s facing an economic slowdown and the loss of special trade status with the United States. Anu Anand, host of the Marketplace Morning Report from the BBC World Service, is here to talk us through it. She’s spent years reporting in and out of India and just got back from covering the ele...
Huawei and the tech cold war
May 28, 2019 22:26 - 36 minutes - 11.8 MBHuawei hasn’t been a household name in the U.S. But that’s changing as the Trump administration proceeds with its ban on American companies doing business with the Chinese tech giant. Industry allegations of Huawei spying and theft date back more than a decade. If relations remain chilly, China could start making more of its own software and components, erecting an “iron curtain” in tech that could be a big part of a total rewiring of the global economy that harkens back to…the Cold War. Ste...
Antitrust the process
May 21, 2019 23:34 - 32 minutes - 11.8 MBRemember when we had Tim Wu on the show to talk about Big Tech parallels to the monopoly-controlled Gilded Age, and what that future might bring? Well, six months later the future has arrived. Kind of. The Supreme Court ruled this month that a huge antitrust lawsuit against Apple and its app store could move forward, and Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes wrote a massive New York Times op-ed calling for the company to be broken up. And the conversation among legal thinkers is changing. Here to...
How to survive climate change
May 14, 2019 22:55 - 38 minutes - 11.8 MBIt’s time to shift our approach to climate change. The truth is, it may very well be too late to avoid the worst consequences of our warming planet — lost ecosystems, millions of plants and animals going extinct, scarce water and more extreme weather. It may be time to focus more on technology that will help us adapt. That’s the focus of “How We Survive,” the new series from Molly’s other show, “Marketplace Tech.” Here to talk with us about climate adaptation and how it’ll impact the economy...
What. The. Fed.
May 07, 2019 23:04 - 34 minutes - 11.8 MBThe Federal Reserve’s got quite the puzzle on its hands. We’re dealing with one of the longest job growth streaks in modern history. And yet, the economy isn’t working as expected. Interest rates and inflation are simply not behaving according to standard economic models. And it’s the Fed’s job to figure out what’s going on in the name of keeping things stable and growing. New York Times’ senior economics correspondent Neil Irwin returns to break things down for us. Plus, we hear from the ‘I...
CRISPR for beginners
April 30, 2019 14:53 - 34 minutes - 11.8 MBYou might remember the story from last fall: A scientist in China claimed to use the gene editing tool CRISPR to make twin babies resistant to HIV. That specific type of eye-popping genetic experimenting is illegal in the United States, but make no mistake, we are in the middle of a gene-editing gold rush. Big Pharma, agriculture and manufacturing are all clamoring to get in the game. Today we hear from a listener who’s already using the tool in his work, then turn to Wired staff writer Mega...
What does “Medicare for all” actually look like?
April 23, 2019 03:04 - 37 minutes - 11.8 MB“Medicare for all” was a fringe idea just a couple years ago, but it’s moved front and center in the political conversation ahead of the 2020 presidential election. Democratic candidates are getting asked about Medicare for all or announcing plans to implement it, and health care stocks are sliding at the suggestion of it. Now, we’re still a long way off from this kind of seismic change to the way Americans get their health care, but in the meantime, Vox senior editor Sarah Kliff is here to ...
The future of work is anchor jobs and side hustles
April 17, 2019 01:10 - 34 minutes - 11.8 MBWe’re headed for the biggest year of IPOs since the ’90s dot-com boom. Lyft just went public, valued at $26 billion, with Postmates and Uber set to follow. Vested employees will become overnight millionaires, but what about the millions of independent contractors who deliver the food and drive the passengers? Lyft relies on its 1.4 million freelance drivers who earn, on average, $17.50 per hour with no benefits or organizing power. What’s that mean for the U.S. workforce? We get smart on the...