How to Avoid the Partisan Trap Even at The Washington Post w/ Megan McArdle

Summary

Conversations With Coleman: How to Avoid the Partisan Trap Even at The Washington Post w/ Megan McArdle

Release Date: August 11, 2025

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Introduction

In this episode of Conversations With Coleman, host Coleman Hughes welcomes Megan McArdle, a seasoned columnist at the Washington Post. With a rich background spanning from her early blogging days to her current role, Megan delves into critical discussions surrounding media partisanship, the intricacies of the American healthcare system, and the burgeoning influence of artificial intelligence in education.

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1. Megan McArdle’s Journey to Columnism

Megan shares her unconventional path to becoming a prominent columnist at the Washington Post. From her early days blogging under pseudonyms to navigating the tumultuous job market post-dot-com bubble, Megan recounts how serendipitous events and persistent curiosity led her to journalism.

Megan McArdle [04:23]: “Entirely by accident?... I realized at some point that this was not my calling.”

Having faced multiple job layoffs and career shifts, Megan's resilience and passion for writing eventually anchored her at esteemed publications like The Atlantic, Newsweek, and Bloomberg before joining the Washington Post in 2018.

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2. Navigating Audience Misinterpretations and Institutional Roles

Coleman praises Megan’s ability to maintain objectivity amidst rising partisan divides, highlighting her high "batting average" in addressing issues without succumbing to extreme biases.

Coleman Hughes [03:57]: “One of the columnists with the highest batting average... not being influenced by the partisan crazes.”

Megan explains that her focus often leans towards critiquing the left, not out of favoritism towards the right, but because her team lacks columnists dedicated to that angle. She emphasizes the importance of institutional goals over personal branding in mainstream media settings.

Megan McArdle [14:48]: “We are trying to do a broad page. We're not trying to have you read the same column eight times with different bylines on it.”

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3. The Economics of Information: Understanding Asymmetric Information

Delving into her Twitter handle’s origin, Megan elucidates the economic principle of asymmetric information and its pervasive impact across various sectors, including healthcare.

Megan McArdle [14:59]: “Asymmetric information is the idea that when you are, for example, doing a transaction with someone, insurance is a good example of this.”

She contextualizes how asymmetric information led to issues like the death spiral in insurance pools, underscoring the challenges in creating balanced markets where all parties have equitable information.

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4. Dissecting the American Healthcare System

Megan offers a nuanced analysis of the American healthcare system, countering popular narratives that place blame solely on insurance companies and pharmaceutical firms.

Megan McArdle [21:12]: “The root cause of the dysfunction of the system is that we have like nine different systems, many of which are created by the government one way or the other.”

She introduces the concept of principal-agent problems, illustrating how misaligned incentives among stakeholders contribute to inefficiencies. Megan critiques the fragmented nature of U.S. healthcare, historical policy missteps like the absence of a fee schedule in Medicare, and the resulting over-treatments and cost escalations.

Megan McArdle [30:22]: “People are convinced that the two evil actors in this are the insurance companies and pharma. In fact, pharma is producing is probably saving us money on net.”

Megan also contrasts the U.S. system with single-payer models, highlighting the trade-offs between cost control and service accessibility. She argues that while single-payer systems may lead to longer wait times, the U.S. market-driven approach suffers from its own set of complex inefficiencies.

Megan McArdle [37:11]: “But almost anything would be better than the mess we have.”

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5. Institutional Challenges in Adapting to AI in Education

Transitioning to the impact of artificial intelligence, Megan and Coleman explore how tools like ChatGPT are reshaping educational methodologies and the inherent challenges faced by academic institutions.

Megan McArdle [53:47]: “And I think there's a bigger question, which is that the governance of universities is completely ill equipped to handle any of this.”

Megan critiques the traditional academic focus on research over teaching excellence, arguing that this hampers the ability of universities to effectively integrate AI into curricula. She emphasizes the need for educational reform that prioritizes teaching adaptability and real-world skill application over rigid research agendas.

Megan McArdle [60:14]: “If you were the czar and had complete control over a top college, what changes might you institute?”

Both discuss the potential for AI to undermine traditional educational signals, such as writing proficiency and cognitive abilities, while also recognizing the unique value that human relationships and on-the-ground reporting bring to journalism—elements that AI cannot replicate.

Megan McArdle [80:55]: “And those are the two areas where journalism is really going to add value.”

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Conclusion

Throughout the episode, Megan McArdle provides insightful critiques of systemic issues within media and healthcare, while also addressing the transformative effects of artificial intelligence on education and journalism. Her balanced approach underscores the importance of institutional integrity and the need for adaptive strategies in an increasingly complex socio-political landscape.

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Notable Quotes

• Megan McArdle [03:57]: “That is extremely flattering. Thank you. That's what I'm aiming for.”

• Megan McArdle [21:12]: “The root cause of the dysfunction of the system is that we have like nine different systems...”

• Megan McArdle [37:11]: “But almost anything would be better than the mess we have.”

• Megan McArdle [53:47]: “The governance of universities is completely ill equipped to handle any of this.”

• Megan McArdle [80:55]: “Those are the two areas where journalism is really going to add value.”

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This comprehensive summary encapsulates the pivotal discussions between Coleman Hughes and Megan McArdle, highlighting her expert perspectives on avoiding partisan pitfalls within major media institutions, unraveling the complexities of the American healthcare system, and navigating the disruptive influence of AI in education and journalism.

Transcript

[Coleman Hughes]

Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today is Megan McCardle. Megan is a columnist at the Washington Post, where she covers economics, finance, and government policy. She originally gained prominence through her early 2000s blog, Asymmetrical Information, later writing for outlets like the Atlantic, Bloomberg, and Newsweek. She's also the author of the Upside of why Failing well Is the Key to Success. In this episode, we talk about what Megan's Washington Post readers get wrong about her. We talk about what exactly is wrong with the American healthcare system, touching on insurance, pharmaceutical companies, and the role of bad incentives. We also talk about the legacy of Obamacare. Next, we talk about the influence of AI on education, including how to use AI in the classroom. So without further ado, Megan McArdle.

[Megan McArdle]

Why.

[Coleman Hughes]

Are podcasts like this one at all popular? We can't compete with the resources of a place like cnn. I can't give you the sheer volume of analysis that the New York Times can, but there's one thing I have that those organizations trust. I think my audience listens to me because they found my judgment to be trustworthy in the past, but have found mainstream media organizations to be the exact opposite. That's why I love Ground News. They're an app and website designed to help you escape ideological echo chambers by pulling in the world's perspective on today's most emotionally and politically charged issues. Ground News breaks down the political bent reliability, ownership, and location of each reporting source so you understand that news isn't simply reported. Often narratives are crafted. For example, consider a recent story about the Department of Education informing my alma mater, Columbia University, that they broke federal anti discrimination laws and failed to comply with accreditation requirements. There are many different ways to frame this story. Instead of your typical news feed that uses algorithms to push or suppress certain angles, if you go to Ground News Coleman, you can zoom out and understand the full scope of the story. For instance, you can see that the Bloomberg headline frames it as Trump targeting Colombia over pro Palestine protests, which is a framing more sympathetic to the protesters. Whereas Arut Sheva frames it as Trump moving to strip Colombia of its accreditation over anti Semitism concerns, which is a framing more sympathetic to Trump as well as to Jewish students. Even the difference between the phrasing matters here is Trump targeting or is he moving to strip? The same action is being described, but the first one sounds far more negative than the second. These are the kinds of observations you begin to notice when you start using Ground News. That's why I got you 40% off the same vantage plan that I use just go to groundnews.com Coleman and expand your worldview with unlimited access to all the features I mentioned, plus their browser extension and exclusive newsletters. Get a well rounded view of the world, think critically about what you read, and find common ground between perspectives. That's groundnews.com Coleman for 40% off their vantage plan available for a limited time only. Okay. Megan McArdle, thanks so much for coming on my show.

[Megan McArdle]

Thanks for having me.

[Coleman Hughes]

So I've been reading you for a long time. You're a longtime columnist at the Washington Post, and in my view, one of the columnists with the highest batting average in terms of just getting issues right, in terms of not being influenced by the partisan crazes on the right and the left on any particular moment. And so you've been a pleasure to read for that reason.

[Megan McArdle]

That is extremely flattering. Thank you. That's what I'm aiming for.

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah.

[Megan McArdle]

Whether I always hit it or not. Yeah.

[Coleman Hughes]

So let's start briefly with your background. I know you, you've had sort of various odd jobs in the past before becoming a journalist. And I know that your father was also a big influence on your kind of intellectual curiosity and so forth. So how did you end up becoming a columnist?

[Megan McArdle]

Entirely by accident? I, before I, when I graduated from college in the 90s, because I am an old lady and I ended up working in, I worked for a variety of companies that showed an astonishing ability to go out of business like 2 months after I joined to the point where a friend of mine who'd become like an equity research assistant at I believe, Morgan Stanley, it's a long time now, said, you know, I want you to let me know. Here's a list of our companies that we cover. And if any of these people makes you a job offer, tell me because I'm going to short the stock. And then I eventually landed actually a job that I held for five years in IT consulting through completely. I was an English major. This was not my destiny. And I decided I wanted to be a writer when I was 8 years old. And then I just ended up doing network administration tasks for various companies. And I realized at some point that this was not my calling. It wasn't that I was terrible at the job, although I guess you'd really have to ask my clients whether I was terrible at the job. But I remember coming in one day and people said, you know, how was your weekend? And I said, oh, man, I saw this great band and it was amazing. It actually was not amazing. It was go Bordello but they did do a very good live show. And everyone stared at me silently through this monologue. And then there was a pause and someone said, I built a fiber channel network in my basement this weekend. And that was the moment when I realized these are not my people. I liked them, but I didn't care enough to do this on the side. And so I decided to go to business school. The last refuge of everyone who doesn't know what they want to be when they grow up. And while I was there, I wrote the gossip column for my business school newspaper. It's the only journalism I'd ever done. I didn't write for the DP when I was at Penn. I never wanted to be a journalist. I wanted to be a fiction writer. I realized that that was impractical, so I was going to get a real job. Unfortunately, the dot com bubble burst. The consulting firm that had hired me laid off the entire associate class without any of us ever starting. And 911 happened. And so I ended up down at ground zero, where I started a blog that took off way more than I expected. Eventually that job ended and I was looking around. I spent, you know, I spent a good two years from 2001 to 2003 trying to find a full time career. And eventually I got. I met someone at a blogger meetup who worked for the Economist on the web team. And I said to her, well, if you guys ever have any jobs, let me know because I love the Economist. And I would. I don't think I was very serious about that. I was blogging a lot, but I didn't think of myself as a journalist. But there was a job. I applied for it. I somehow got. They had like 150 applicants and somehow they selected me. Terrible mistake. And then I ran my blog on the side. I, you know, edited for them, I wrote some pieces for them. And in 2007, I was still reeling from a terrible breakup and two people in my office had been dating. And when he proposed, she said no. And then the. The company sent her to Paris for four months. And so I went to my boss and was like, can I go somewhere? He's like, you can't go to Paris. He doesn't work here. But if you can find some somewhere, we have an office and you can shift your own housing. You can go somewhere else for a while to get out of the city. And so I. The only place I could figure out to go was Washington D.C. which is where my sister lived. I. While I was there, I went to a dinner for the Atlantic, where there were a bunch of bloggers explaining how blogging worked to the Atlantic. Hilariously, they made job offers to everyone at that dinner except Ezra Klein, which was a terrible mistake. And I ended up blogging for the Atlantic for five years. Did a brief stint at Newsweek and it's death throes, then went to Bloomberg. And that's where I really started columnizing rather than blogging at the Atlantic. I was really blogging. I was also writing long form pieces for the magazine on business. And then in 2018, the Washington Post hired me. And so that is my the capsule history of Megan McArdle.

[Coleman Hughes]

All right, so you've been at the Washington Post then for seven years by my counter.

[Megan McArdle]

Yeah, it's like forever in Megan years.

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah, it's like dog years or.

[Megan McArdle]

Yes, indeed. I wasn't like a terrible job hopper, but around five years, I would tend to start getting restless and feel like I had either figured out the place and figured out what to do for the audiences. And of course, once you've done that, it's hard to keep doing something different, or I would feel like I had figured out that what the place did I wasn't good at or it wasn't what I wanted to do. So I would sort of start hopping again.

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah. So speaking of your audience, the Washington Post and perhaps other newspapers now have this great AI function where they summarize all the comments. They summarize the vibe of the comments.

[Megan McArdle]

Oh, you've been reading my comments, have you?

[Coleman Hughes]

I've been reading the Vibe summary. The vibe summary of the comments. And that's something I would never normally have done on a column like yours three years ago, but I wouldn't have gone through all the comments and see, what do randos on the Internet think of, think of Megan McArdle's views? Because I usually get to the end of your columns and think, yeah, that's a really. That seems like a very right down the middle, balls and strikes analysis of what's going on here. But it looks like the vibe of the comments. Often there's quite a bit of pushback. What do you think that, like, what does your Washington Post audience, what do you feel they most get wrong about you? Your views? You know, how do you gen. What's the pattern of their, their, their, their mistakes? If in your view, I think that.

[Megan McArdle]

It'S very nice of you to say that. I try to call balls and strikes and I do, but we all have our own biases, right? This is humanity. You never get beyond them. But I think that what my audience misses is that they will ask me, why didn't you write about this? Why didn't you write about that? Why didn't you write about this other thing? Because I do tend to write more about the errors of the left. It's not the only thing I write about. I've certainly, you know, I just wrote a blistering column about RFK Jr. As well as some of the mistakes that were made during the pandemic, which I think helped give us RFK Jr. But they will, and I get this on Twitter, too, is that they will ask me, how come you always write about this thing the left did that thing the left did, and you didn't write about all these terrible things that Trump did. And one answer to that, and an answer that I actually try to fight against, is that I just don't have that much left to say about why I think Donald Trump is not a good president. I said it in 2015 when a lot of liberals still thought this was funny. Ha ha. And hoping he would. Were hoping he. So that he'd be easy to beat. Oops. I said it in 2016 and 2017 and 2018. And I. I am running out of ways to say he is unstable, he has a short attention span, and his theory of kind of domestic policy is often wrong. Not always. Like, there are areas where I agree with him, but I think he is not an effective leader, and he's not an effective leader at delivering what his audience wants either. And I think Doge is a good example of where I think there was a constituency. There are multiple constituencies for reforming government and making it work better. But he didn't take a serious approach to that. You know, Doge goes in for three months. This is a. The government is a behemoth. You're not going to get it in three months. But the thing is, I'm part of a team at the Post, right? I am not. If I were writing my own blog, I would write a lot more about my. My worries about Trump, my disagreements with Trump, et cetera. We have a lot of columnists who cover that territory really, really well. They're often saying what I would have said about why this or that is bad. What we don't have as many of is columnists saying where the left is making mistakes. And so that is where I tend to focus, because we're trying to do a broad page. We're not trying to have you read the same column eight times with different bylines on it. And so people interpret this as like, I have a secret agenda to. You know, I'm going to pretend that I'm. I don't like Trump, but really, I love Trump. And this is all part of my secret agenda to advance Trump. Is that saying that I'm against Trump, and then I'm actually just talking, pointing out all the ways the left is wrong. And I understand to some extent why it looks that way to them, but in fact, the real answer is, you know, I have to do things that other people on my team are less likely to do. I'm not just building my personal brand. I'm working in an institution. And I think one of the reasons that people don't think of that is that we are getting worse at working in institutions and thinking about institutions as institutions. Right. Media, social media especially, has turned a lot of people, including you and me, into our own brands. And I like. I think that's great. I probably spend too much time on Twitter, you know, honing my brand, although that's not really how I think of it. I spend too much time on Twitter because I like to argue, but that, in fact, there's a lot of deep work that goes on in institutions. And to be successful as an institution, you have to think holistically, you are not a collection of, you know, 20 brands, because then why do you. Why did you. Why do the brands need you? Right. What do you. It's one thing when you owned a printing press and that was the only way for them to get their voice out. It's not now. To work in an institution is to think about doing maybe some less of what you want to do and trying to do things that create collective value for everyone, you yourself included. And so that's the thing where I understand why they have that perspective, but I think it's skewed.

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah. So your Twitter handle is asymmetricinfo, as in asymmetric information. Can you explain what that concept means and why did you choose that as your handle?

[Megan McArdle]

Yeah. So, by the way, I was told, a social media guru once asked me, did you deliberately choose a bad Twitter handle so you'd be hard to find? And I said, no. I thought that was very clever. So, back in the. When I was originally started blogging, I was blogging as Live from the WTC under a pseudonym, which didn't really take. It was Jane Galt. There's a long story there. I'm not actually an objectivist, but I thought it was a very funny pseudonym. And my oldest readers still know me as Jane Galt. And we'll Talk, you know, so some of the.

[Coleman Hughes]

That's a reference to John Galt.

[Megan McArdle]

It's a reference to John Galt. And the way this actually got started was that in 1996, I think, or 1997, I was reading the comments at the New York Times. Unlike you, I actually love comment sections. I go into my comment section, which always shocks people. I spent a lot of time curating my comment section right up until the Washington Post, where it just overwhelmed me. It's too many people. I can't. But I had a pretty vibrant community, which is now actually got a Facebook group they named after Jane Gault. Although they're really. The community is not about me, it's about them. They developed a lot of relationships between each other and. And it's lovely to see that. I made. Yeah, I didn't make it. They made it. But I created the space. I helped curate this group that's still like, they visit each other, they chat. It's really lovely. So when I left the World Trade Center, I had to come up with a new name for my blog. And I should say I am terrible at writing headlines. I'm terrible at naming things. I'm bad at, like, graphic design and all of that stuff. So I had a pret. I made a. Probably not a very good little header, and I thought, what am I going to put in it? And I said asymmetric information. And then I decided for some reason to call it asymmetrical information. So asymmetric information is the idea that when you are, for example, doing a transaction with someone, insurance is a good example of this. When you are going to get insurance, you know more about your health status. For example, if you're going to get life insurance, you know more about whether you are, say, extremely depressed and contemplating suicide, or whether you like to drive your car at 100 miles an hour or whether you have a heart condition than the insurance company does. And that's asymmetric information. And when asymmetric information gets too bad, it can prevent transactions from happening. And so, for example, this was something people worried a lot about with Obamacare and why they ended up using a mandate to force people to buy insurance. What they're worried about is that people would be like, oh, I can buy insurance anytime. I guess I won't buy insurance until I need it. And when that happens, you get what's called a death spiral, where the only people in the pool are super sick, which drives the price of the insurance up, because, of course, that price is related to the average cost of Caring for people. And then the wellest people left in the pool drop out. And this actually happened in New York state before Obamacare because they had passed a, what's called a community rating. You can't underwrite these policies. You can't exclude people. But they hadn't added a mandate. And the price just kept going up and up and up because the wellest people kept dropping out of the pool. So solving asymmetric information problems, creating markets when they're present and when they're really distortionary is one of the big tasks of economics. And I thought it was just a fun. And I feel like every, you know, all the time out there, we're dealing with asymmetric information problems. Journalists are, you know, we are constantly worried about what are the people telling me. Or is what they're telling me true? Is what they're telling me true? But they have left out the crucial fact that I need to know to understand that it's everywhere. And so that was, that was the genesis of it. And then when I went to Twitter, which is, I think like 2008, I don't even remember it's been so long. By then I was at the Atlantic, I was blogging, and I just took my blog name, which eventually, by the way, was like stripped off of my blog. And it was just my blog, it was just Megan McArdle of the Atlantic. But I took that and I made it my Twitter handle. And that is the, the long ago origins of my, of my name.

[Coleman Hughes]

Okay, so speaking of health insurance, I want to talk a little bit about Luigi Mangione, the, the heartthrob healthcare CEO murderer. So to, I mean, you've been covering healthcare for a long time. You wrote a lot about Obamacare. You, I think this has been, you know, I, I, from my perception, kind of one of the top five areas of focus for you over the years, I would say definitely. So I think it goes without saying, and I'm gonna, having read you a long time, I'm gonna predict you are anti murder. So we don't have to litigate.

[Megan McArdle]

Don't try to like, put me in a box. I contain multitudes. Yes, I am anti murder.

[Coleman Hughes]

But if we were to just take Luigi Mangione's diagnosis, such as it is, of the problems with the American healthcare system, as explained in his manifesto, his choice to target an insurance CEO, as opposed to say a big pharma CEO or the leader of a network of hospitals or any number of potential targets, he quite specifically chose a health insurance CEO and diagnosed the Deepest problem with the cost of health care as lying with the insurance, the bean counting insurance companies that are okay, denying you coverage.

[Megan McArdle]

And.

[Coleman Hughes]

Making the whole system, you know, confusing enough that people can really get hit with surprising bills in difficult situations and so forth. To what extent is that diagnosis analytically correct?

[Megan McArdle]

Well, let me say this right. There's another concept in economics called principal agent problems, which is where you do not have the same incentives as people working for you. And what you have in the healthcare system, because the way we pay for it is so weird and diffuse, is that you don't have these same incentives as the other people in the system. Right. For me, I want unlimited care, the best possible. I want to have the best possible doctor. I want to have any possible treatment that could conceivably help me. That's not, no one in, you know, Warren Buffett can afford to have that. But that's not practical. You can't have everyone getting every single thing they might conceivably want. And that is true, to be clear, in every system in the world. In fact, the United States is bad at rationing. It's not good at rationing. We are not good at denying people treatments. We probably over treat people. And I don't mean this in terms of cost. We're a rich country. We can basically afford what we're doing. For example, end of life is something somewhere where you see this a lot. And I think the statistic that we spend too much at the end of life is a little, you know, people will say, well, like 25 or 50% of spending is in the last year of life. And that's true, but you don't know it's the last year of life. Like my mother went from, I mean, she had copd, so she was not healthy, but there was no reason to think that she was going to die imminently. And six weeks later she was dead after a series of incredibly expensive hospital stays. And that's just something that it happens. People destabilize. You spend a tremendous amount of money, but we do a lot of treatments that are probably marginal, that it's not clear that there's a huge benefit to them. And of course there's a cost. And I think you see this with cancer patients where doctors actually will often choose different things than what most patients do. Because doctors don't want to tell people, like, it's time to give up. They're reluctant to say that. And the doctors, when they get cancer, it's not that they don't keep trying, they do, but they recognize earlier that it's time to stop because not because they're trying to save the system money, because they see that at some margin doing these highly speculative. I don't. Not. This probably won't work, but why not give it a go for $500,000 or whatever? I mean, these treatments have side effects and they're quite severe. And they just decide not to pursue every last possibility. But that's. We want the option to pursue every last possibility. No system can provide that. And the insurer in America is the place that makes that clear that you can't. You don't. It's not just between you and your doctor because you're not paying for it if you're paying for it in plastic surgery. It's also actually not just between you and your doctor. Plastic surgeons worry a lot about the problem of people who have like body dysmorphic disorder and will just keep getting surgeries that in the judgment of everyone who is not that person are not helping them and are in fact harming them because they will never get over their belief that they're not right. And they will keep. They will destroy their body trying to fiddle with it. But it is more true in plastic surgery that it's between you and your doctor. You're playing, you're paying for it. And so you can decide whether you want to have enormous breasts or liposuction or whatever. And it's no one else's business, but when someone else is paying for it, it's their business. And what I think is, you know, what you see in the healthcare system, interestingly, is everyone, everyone, Everyone who's not in the. Who's not a wonk, who doesn't study this issue. They're all convinced that the two evil actors in this are the insurance companies and pharma. In fact, pharma is producing is probably saving us money on net. They are saving us from having surgeries which are usually worse than drugs. Not always. Sometimes you decide it's like, get it, like, take care of the problem for good. But drugs can prevent a lot of things. They prevent strokes, they prevent cardiovascular. Right. It's much cheaper and better for everyone if you take your hypertension meds rather than having a stroke. But unlike a lot of other things in the system, that's the place where consumers are most consistently reminded that they are paying for this every month. You got to go fill the bottle. Insurers, similarly, are where people see that there are things that they maybe want to do and they're not being allowed to do. In fact, that's not what's driving the cost. The insurers are holding down the cost. That's their job in the system. In fact, I think a lot of people aren't aw. They're medical, they're regulated. They can't. When they deny claims, that's saving money for the claims holders. They can't make more profit that way. In fact, they make less profit because they have something called a medical loss ratio. Really, you know, wonky term. Basically what it means is they have to pay out a certain amount of their premiums and claims and it is somewhere between 80 and 85, 85% depending on the size of the company, the size of insurer, but basically. And then the rest goes to overhead and then there's actually a quite small profit. They're not, it's not a very profitable industry. And so they like. They don't make money by denying you claims. What they do is hold premiums down by denying you claims. And the. That has to happen. Britain does it, you know, every system does it. But what's different is that in the us, it's transparent. And this is because our system's so fragmented, there are so many different insurers, they each negotiate different deals with doctors and hospitals and all the rest of it. So your doctor, when he's talking about treatment with you, does not know whether it's covered or not. Right now, if you're in the nhs, that doctor knows whether it's covered. They don't tell you about things that aren't covered. You never hear about it, you're just told, this is what we do. And so I'm at Kaiser, which is the closest thing that the United States has to, to the nhs. And that's my experience. They just tell me what I'm going to do and then I do it. Now I have a lot of external resources to find out if maybe there's something else I should do. But that's, there's a lot of peace of mind in that. So I think where the error is though, is that in fact that fragmented system doesn't ration care more than other systems. Russians care less than other systems for a whole bunch of reasons, including the fact that the incentives of the government and the, and you know, the national system, or the insurer, because some of them have private insurers who are working in a highly government regulated market. The incentive in those cases is aligned. They all have decided, we're going to cover this and we're not going to cover that. And that's the schedule. But in the US you have the, the government's incentive is just to tell insurers they should cover everything, right? Any individual legislator, their incentive is to just. And this is why in fact HMOs became a bad name because they were doing a really good job of cost control and they held down cost cost growth in the late 90s and then legislators made them stop and then cost shot up, which is part of the reason Obamacare was so popular, because costs were really rising very quickly after legislators made it harder and harder to deny treatments. And then of course, patients want treatments. Employers have cross cutting incentives where on the one hand they want to hold their premiums down and on the other hand, when Bob in shipping, his kid has a rare pediatric cancer, no one wants Bob and shipping's kid not to get the best possible coverage. Right? And so there's all of these cross cutting incentives that actually make it much harder for us to control cost than other countries. Although I will say this, we often think about ourselves as having a cost growth problem and we actually don't anymore. We had a cost growth problem in the 80s in a big way, in the late 90s and early 2000s in a less dramatic way, although still significant. And now costs have roughly stabilized as a percentage of gdp with the exception of the pandemic. It's a big exception, but that was an emergency event. That's not normal. Our costs aren't growing faster than they are in other countries. We just started from a higher level. We let our costs get out of control 30 years ago and we never brought the level of, of cost down, but we did stabilize the growth and we're now at a level that's like basically sustainable. But it is still going to be frustrating to people that their doctor will say, well, let's do this. And then the insurer will come back and say, oh no, you can't have, you have to have the generic instead of the brand name. You have to have this procedure instead of that. We're going to make you wait or get pre authorization or all the rest of it. Try physical therapy before you get surgery. That frustrates people. And they blame the insurers for just being greedy and hurting people for profit. The insurers are not doing anything appreciably different from what a government insurer does elsewhere. The government makes exactly the same kinds of calculations and they're in general less generous than what American insurers do.

[Coleman Hughes]

I remember looking at the actual profit margins, which it's, you know, you Can Google of, of like United Healthcare and all these other insurance companies. And they were like low single digit percentages in recent years, which is like, you know, not that much higher than a grocery store or like a, like a, you know. So I read the manifesto and I thought this guy understands absolutely nothing about the healthcare system. Not that I'm any kind of expert, but I already understand it better than he does. And, and I essentially felt the same thing, which is that there's nothing more psychologically painful than getting the rejection from your insurance saying we can't cover this procedure that you formed an expectation is the best. So it's the natural object of hatred, but it doesn't actually mean that it's in any way the root cause of the dysfunction of the system.

[Megan McArdle]

No, the root cause of the dysfunction of the system is that we have like nine different systems, many of which are created by the government one way or the other. Right. There's obviously Medicare and Medicaid. There's also employer sponsored health insurance, which exists only because during World War II when there were price controls, companies were looking for ways to lure workers to work for them. And health insurance was exempt from the price controls. And so they would, they, they used this as a fringe benefit to attract people to their companies and then they made it more and more generous. There are tax benefits for doing this. This is all an entirely weird. We've also got the va, we've got the Indian health system, right? We've got, we've got Tricare and the military. We've got all of these different systems and people, it's not seamless moving between them, right? People get into the cracks. We've then got all of these individual insurers who are competing less than in other countries on a really tight regulated package. But we also have a legacy of bad policy design in other ways. So for example, doctors and nurses and basically everyone in the US healthcare system makes more than their counterparts abroad. And that's because when Medicaid was, when Medicare was started in the 1960s, they didn't have a fee schedule. They just said usual and customary fees. Well, doctors had a lot of latitude to decide what was usual and customary. And so their income started going up really fast. And then, you know, being a doctor in 1950 was not a really good high income job in the way that it is now. That's a legacy of Medicare. And then they started trying to control this and then the costs move to hospitals. And it's been. My husband actually wrote a great article for Reason magazine which I commend to all of your listeners and this is now 10 or 15 years old, but called Medicare whack a mole where every time they would whack one of the cost centers, another cost center would pop up and the money would just flow into that channel instead. And we've been trying for decades to get a handle on that. And we're never going to I think is the actual answer is that we're just going to kind of muddle along because the other piece of this is we've done a lot of bad policy design, but each piece of bad policy design has created stakeholders and those stakeholders will freak out if you try to take anything from them. So obviously the doctors and nurses, they are extremely effective at not having their incomes cut. But you also have, you know what a Obamacare wanted to do, really wanted to do, what the kind of vision was if they had had their druthers, if you talk to people you could, it would, it was basically with some details changed. Either people just wanted a single payer system or they wanted something like the Swiss system or the Dutch system where basically there's these tightly regulated insurers. They compete on a package of benefits and on like customer service and how nice their offices are and but they're, they're basically all offering the same stuff and that everyone is in that and the government just picks up the tab for the really poor people. And I think that if you asked a lot of the architects of Obamacare that was really their vision is we're going to do this system where everyone's getting good insurance, it's all the same stuff and so forth and they couldn't do it. And why couldn't they do it? Because people who had employer sponsored health insurance went ballistic right there. People say like Medicare for all pulls well and this is kind of true and kind of not the trick there is that you pull pieces of it. Should people be able to buy into Medicare at any age that will pull well, should people be able to buy into Medicare at any age? If this costs us like 8000 a person in the United States and then, you know, it's trillions of dollars. That is not a popular proposition. And similarly people are fine with add ons. What they're not fine with is losing what they have. And what they have actually is part of the problem in some ways. Now look, I support a really free market system. My, my preferred health care plan would be that there is no health care plan for under say 10 to 15% of adjusted gross income. Is that you, you sort that out yourself. If you have catastrophic expenses, the government will pick up the tab, 100% of the tab above whatever that level is. But almost anything would be better than the mess we have. But you can't touch it. It's like, look, I love Kaiser, I don't want to leave Kaiser. I don't want you to take it and give me Medicare for All and promise me it's going to be just as good as Kaiser. Because I don't believe you. And you probably shouldn't, I'm probably correct not to believe them. And so that creates a huge obstacle to reform. If you really can't touch anything that anyone has in a serious way, you are just really, really constrained in what you do. And what people end up doing, what reformers end up doing is that they, they're then like, okay, well, here's this gap I'm going to add. I'm going to do another program here. And that just makes everything worse. Right? Because now you've got yet another complicated piece of the system in which there's new gaps that arise in between, there's complex interactions. And so we're probably never going to have the dream system that I. Partly because the dream system that everyone wants doesn't exist. Right. If you talk to liberals, there's like this fantasy European system where you just go to the doctor and your bills are negligible and they cover everything and it's amazing. Right. And that's, that's not real.

[Coleman Hughes]

Right.

[Megan McArdle]

So that is not a real system that exists anywhere.

[Coleman Hughes]

Tell me what's wrong with this opinion? If anything, in America, the worst thing that happens to, that happens still on a regular basis is that you get hit with, you know, several thousand dollars in an ambulance bill. And you know, this is a, this is the kind of thing that can and does happen in America. In America you can pay with money in the extreme case. In the UK you can pay with time in the extreme case. So you see these cases which New York Times and others have reported on, where you call the 911 equivalent in the UK and the ambulance gets there eight hours from now.

[Megan McArdle]

Right.

[Coleman Hughes]

So is it the case that, you know, Bernie Sanders and probably Luigi Mangione, they want a single payer system. Isn't it just true that in an American style system you can pay in money in the worst case, but in the single payer system you're likely to pay in time?

[Megan McArdle]

Yes, with a qualification. Right, single payer. There's lots of different kinds of national health insurance programs. Single Payer, which is what they have in Canada, like they're single payer. There's also like what they have in Britain where the government's running the health system directly. You have Canada where it's single payer and there's no real private competition. You have systems like Australia where there's a basic government system. And then. So there's lots of different ways to do this. But yes, yes, I would say that the more the government is the loan provider in one way or another, either because they're paying all the bills or because they're actually directly running the system, the more that that's the case, the more you are likely to end up in a situation where you're rationing by queuing, which is the technical. Right, Is you stand in line. And if you look at the wait times in the UK and Canada, they are to my eye, insane for things that are elective in the sense that getting a hip replacement is elective. But having watched my grandmother go through that, it wasn't very elective because she couldn't walk until she got one right. So she just had to. And she was in terrible pain every time she had to get up and go to the bathroom or anything. It was really awful to watch. And waiting a year or two for that surgery is a big deal. Waiting a year or two for your imaging or. I mean like the, when people tell me the wait times, I, I'm sometimes shocked when they'll say, yeah, I waited six months. Now this is not true for everything. Right. Like, I have definitely talked to people who got pretty timely cancer care. Trauma care tends to be, you know, if you roll into the, the ER having with a gunshot wound, they're not going to like put you on a list. But more and more stuff goes to the back of the line. And why does that happen? Because when something is growing in the private sector, the government doesn't have either the incentive or the ability to stop it from growing. When something's growing on the government budget, they can just say no. Right. And when they are under budget pressure, that's what they do. And so the reason that the, the UK and Canada have the biggest problems is just that they spend the, they spend less money on their system. They're not, I mean, Ireland spends very little on their system and should really spend more. But you know, they could provide faster service if they spent more money and built more capacity. But the political incentive is not to build capacity because it's so expensive to maintain. And you're always making this trade off between, well, I could spend this money on nine other things the taxpayers want, or I could reduce wait times. And wait times just tend to go to the back of the queue. There's just like to. I did not mean to make that pun. But they just, they tend. It's very hard to fix wait times because if you think about the. There's a lot of things in life where the last mile gets progressively more expensive, right? So if you're building a fiber optic network, laying the big trunk lines is not cheap by any means, but it's actually even more expensive just to get the last mile to someone's house. And the reason is there's a bunch of houses in between you and them and it's going to take a little. Whereas they tend to lay big lines out where there's no people. And so there's just a lot of things that have that characteristic, getting the last bit of reliability in a system. And the way I think about this is in the heyday of Uber and Lyft when people were like, I'm not even going to own a car. I'm just going to sell a car and just take Ubers and Lyfts because they were being subsidized by, by people who are trying to gain market share. I never hear that now that the prices have gotten semi rational. But you know, I asked the reason we didn't sell our car, even though we drive it so infrequently that we've had to replace the battery, some ridiculous, I think three times in the last three years because we keep forgetting to drive it and, and then the battery dies. But we have two very large dogs and if one of those dogs needs to go to the emergency vet, he needs to go right now. Not when I can get an Uber pet. And so that one use case I'm maintaining a car for basically that use case and a couple of other small use cases and otherwise I could totally get around on public transit, my feet, et cetera. But I have to have this extremely expensive vehicle that I then have to pay thousands of dollars to insure and find a parking space for and gas and maintenance for this one use case, right? That is like that use case is more expensive than every other thing I do. Like, those last things are often just very hard to get. And so getting enough capacity in the system to take care of 95% of your cases can cost like less than getting enough capacity to make sure that you have 100% under two hours or whatever. I mean, not literally. It's not literally going to cost less, but that last 5% of spare capacity, that last 10% of spare capacity is phenomenally expensive because that's where it's lumpy. Right? Your first 80%, it was just like, people get colds, they do this, they do that. You have. It's pretty. It's a pretty predictable flow, and then you can just keep. But that last, that last 5 to 10% is the stuff that doesn't happen actuarially in neat, like, little bundles. It happens. You know, the ER, you go to the ER, you have the ambulance demand, and suddenly you've got 87 cases. Well, if I had all of these spare ambulances, I could just send it. But having all those spare ambulances means I have a lot of ambulances with crews that are often underutilized. America makes the decision to just have a lot of redundancy, other systems because the government's paying for it very directly and is making a budget. Not like the US where the government's paying for it and they find out what they're paying after the government is paying for it in advance, making a budget, deciding how many ambulances to buy, and they decide to buy fewer than would cover all of that peak capacity. Right? And that's how those calculations. That was a little shaggy dog.

[Coleman Hughes]

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[Megan McArdle]

Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile Now. I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited Premium Wireless for $15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun if we made $15 bills, but it turns out that's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a [e-mail] Switch upfront payment of 45 for 3 month plan equivalent to 15 per month required new customer offer for first 3 months only. Speed slow after 35 gigabytes of networks busy taxes and fees extra.

[Coleman Hughes]

C mintmobile.com let's pivot topics now and talk about artificial intelligence, the large language model revolution that's happening now. You've written quite a bit about this and so there's a few different buckets we could talk about. The first I want to touch is like, what's going on with education and AI in the classroom? How has ChatGPT been sort of affecting how teachers teach, how students learn, and so forth? So to give you my window on this, I recently taught for three months at the University of Austin, a small seminar course, and just this past January through March. And you know, my view as someone who loves ChatGPT personally, I use it every day. I'm, I think I use it so much because I'm very intellectually curious and there's just always something that I want to know about randomly. So it's, it's like a massively fun tool for people like me. And so I have like a generally positive outlook on it. I think people should use it. I think students should use it. And regardless of whether they're what they should, they're going to. I'm also, I don't believe that professors in general can detect when their students have used it. I'm not saying you can never detect it. Obviously there have been many students have been caught using it on essays and so forth. But I think in general students have a greater incentive to cheat really well than professors have to catch them. And obviously the dirty little secret is that similar kind of to how you were saying, doctors don't like to tell their patients that there's nothing more I can do for you. You're, you're a few months from dying. Professors don't want to catch their students cheating because it's a hassle for us. Like it's, you know, God forbid if, if I'm right about your cheating, that creates paperwork and meetings for me. Like literally creates extra work that I'm not getting paid for. You know, and even let's say I have a really good bullshit detector, I'm right 95% of the time. Well, one in 20 I'm going to accuse a student of cheating who in fact did not cheat. That creates a much, much bigger headache for me because now I've actually harmed the student and now I could potentially be in trouble. Right. So professors have almost no incentive to catch, no personal incentive to catch cheating. Students individually have a pretty strong incentive to cheat successfully because your grade goes up grade. So I just, yeah, I don't, from an incentives point of view, I don't buy that professors as a class are going to win the war on cheating. And so my approach as a professor was to say, fine, to use GPT as your personal research thinking buddy, tutor at home. There are going to be no assessments that you could even possibly cheat on in this class. It's all going to be blue books. And if I could do it again, I would also go for the oral exam for a variety like maybe, yeah, in class, quizzes, class participation, blue books. It's a cheat proof class. And that's to me, that's gotta be the future of teaching. So what do you make of this?

[Megan McArdle]

Yeah, I have, so I taught a class, I've taught a few journalism classes. And the thing I always taught them, pass fail. And the thing I always said was I'm not going to try to catch you cheating. You have, you are adults. You have a choice. You have a Washington Post columnist here, a Bloomberg columnist who is going to teach you as well as she can what she knows about her profession. If you want that this is pass fail. If you show up and you hand in something, you will pass. But you can get, I'm not going to try to make you get for your $250,000 the value that's here, whatever that is, maybe there's no value. Maybe they should like just come and sleep through my class, but I can't. You know, you're now you guys are in your 20s, you were old enough to go get killed in a war and you were old enough to like, not old enough to drink because somewhat of our somewhat irrational policy laws. But like I, my job is not to make you get something out of this. My job is to make it possible for you to get something out of this. But that's, that was easier for me to do because it was pass fail. Right. I think it's a really, I think you're right that the incentives are bad. But I also think there's a bigger question, which is that, you know, what I was saying is this is a pass fail class. It's like a half credit. It's not the difference between you going to grad school and not. So you should enjoy this class. You should only be here if you want to be here and learn something and you should get what you can out of it. Be in the discussion. Do this right. Like, don't sit here and passively just try to, you know, put the time in and grab the grade, get what you can. But that's not really realistically how most people think about an education. Right? The, the way most people think about a college education and especially the incredibly expensive four year residential college experience that both you and I had, where you are not majoring in like engineering, is that the vat? The primary reason people are willing to pay six figure sums for that is to get the kid a good job when they get out. And the primary reason that that works is that getting into one of those schools, getting into an elite school, signals that you have usually a class background, that you have a certain network, that you have a certain amount of cognitive ability, a certain amount of conscientiousness. Not that much. In my case, I was a really terrible student. But that signals that to employers, if you are coming from one of many schools, you have signaled that you can put your butt in a seat for four years, show up, turn in your assignments on time, and the value of what you actually learned in that class, it's quite unclear whether they value that at all, whether there's a low value. But if you look at the sheepskin effect, which is that there is a real discontinuity between finishing all but one semester of college and finishing college in the labor market. And it's not because they wait until the last semester to tell you all the good stuff. Right? Right. You are signaling a lot of stuff about yourself.

[Coleman Hughes]

This is Brian Kaplan's argument in the case of.

[Megan McArdle]

This is Bryan Caplan's argument. Education, basically, by. Yeah, but one of the things that it signals, right, is that you had to do all of these complicated. If you're, if you're a humanities major, you had to do a bunch of complicated research tasks, read a lot of stuff, assimilate it into something basic, some basically coherent idea about the world, and write that down in sentences that could be understood by another human being. They may not be the most glistening, beautiful prose in the entire world, but they can be read and comprehended and the value of that skill is itself declining. AI is going to undercut the value of reading and writing, of doing what I do, what you do, which is reading and assimilating vast amounts of text and then translating it into words for other people. And colleges, I think, have not grappled with that more fundamental problem. I mean, first of all, they haven't grappled with the cheating problem. You're right. When I talk to academics, they're all just kind of, you know, home baking solutions or not. Some of them have just given up. Some of them are being really innovative and designing assignments that you cannot cheat on because the object is to use AI to do something cool. That's like Mike Munger at Duke is doing this. But a lot of them are terrified. And I think the even bigger problem than that is that beyond the fact that they have, the value of this signal is decreasing. Is that like society loaded all of these different tasks onto universities. It loaded dating, finding a, you know, finding a spouse and, or at least finding some friends who can find you your spouse later, that's less relevant to your generation than to mine. But to my generation, that was a big thing. You would meet your boyfriend in college and hopefully you would marry that person. Right? Not in the way that my mother's generation would joke about getting her Mrs. Degree. We were also there to get a job, but. And hopefully maybe even learn something and become more interesting people. But there was, you know, dating was a big feature of it. We loaded finding, sorting people for employers onto it. We loaded training onto it, onto this medieval institution that weirdly, the people teaching it have no idea, for example, what's happening in the job market at all. They're also really not selected for their ability to use AI. Well, right. If you wanted to design something that is going to prepare kids for the world of AI, if you were starting that from scratch, you would not go out and be like, you know, what I need is a bunch of experts in 14th century Renaissance literature. That would not be your first choice who have spent their entire Lives in archives, reading and writing critical theory, theory about, you know, this, their, their period or political scientists or go through the disciplines. And to be clear, I'm not denigrating what they do, I'm saying that if you were starting from scratch, you definitely would not be like yes, what we need is a bunch of PhDs in sociology to, to handle this task and that thing. And also so the university is really unoptimized to handle the problems of preparing the workforce for AI. The signal, the thing, it wasn't great. Well optimized to handle the problem of preparing people for the workforce of 1990 or 2010 either. But that didn't matter because the value of the signal was itself valuable. Right. It was signaling abilities, some of which had been honed at university and some of which hadn't, but it was signaling a bundle of abilities that were valuable in the job market.

[Coleman Hughes]

So hold on, can I stop you right there? So, so presumably though today it's still signaling a mix of IQ conscientiousness, maybe to some degree competency at a certain higher upper class way of holding yourself. And wouldn't those all still be valuable even in a post AI world? Even if this more narrow ability to basically do our kind of work is being competed away.

[Megan McArdle]

Sort of. I mean, I think that that's true for people who were in college when chatgpt, but it's turtles all the way down. High school kids are using it too.

[Coleman Hughes]

Sure.

[Megan McArdle]

And so ultimately what it may be signaling is that you are smart enough to cheat without getting caught, which is I guess a kind of. But you know, if you went to employers and were like, do you want a bunch of people who are smart enough to cheat without getting caught? They might have questions about, for example, should you put those people in your accounting department? And so I think, I do think it's a problem like the value of the signal is going to degrade so strongly and the real value of the skill is also going to degrade. And, and the even bigger problem now that I've copied is that the governance of universities is completely ill equipped to handle any of this. Right. These, it's, everything's run by committee, no one's in charge. And so no one has the ability even, you know, they're, they're all forming committees on their how to do AI. But what happens when the committee reports are people going to go out into the classroom, show people how to do it right, and then check back and make sure we're getting a valuable assessment tool? No, they're going to put out some guidelines, and the professors will implement them with varying degrees of precision, and then that will be that. And the problem is the university is a bundle. So you can be Mike Munger and teaching a great AI optimized class. I've never been in his class. I just, I know him personally and I assume he's doing a pretty good job. But if your colleagues all over the university are bad at this, and they are not, and people are noticing that graduates are coming out without skills that are useful to them, it doesn't do you any good to be the one guy who's good because employers don't know who you are.

[Coleman Hughes]

Right.

[Megan McArdle]

And so there's a real problem of how are you going to reform this when you have a faculty that's selected for their research abilities, not even their teaching abilities, and certainly not their AI abilities, when you cannot kind of reform the institution very effectively, when you can't reform classroom practice very effectively. I think universities have a massive problem that they have not really begun to confront. There are, there are exceptions to this. People like Hollis Robbins are writing great stuff about this, but in general, I don't think they understand the scope of their problem. I think they understand the narrow problem of like, we have a lot of kids who are cheating and we gotta fix that. But you can fix it within class assessments. Right? You can fix it that way. But those bigger problems of how do you make this institution that has gotten. That has basically been hiring its faculty for 50 years based on their ability to publish articles that almost no one else ever reads on quite narrow specialized topics, and which has this crazy governance system that makes it very hard to change anything? How do you take that institution and transform it into an institution that is preparing kids for the AI job market?

[Coleman Hughes]

So if you were the czar and had complete control over a top college, what changes might you institute?

[Megan McArdle]

Well, I think I would probably at an even more basic level. I think that in a lot of the humanities, the whole publish or perish model is bad. I think there are like really deep problems with the way that academia hires and promotes. And I understand the institutional reasons that happened, but this obsessive focus on who has the best publication record. Right, that that's what that is. What has status in academia? Not teaching well, not any of the rest of it. It's nice if you teach well. They, they're, they're happy if you teach well. They admire people who teach well, but that's not what has status in their world. And there is an argument for that in the sciences. Although I think even in the sciences, it's not entirely clear to me how much do you really benefit from being taught by a Nobel Prize winning physicist if being taught Physics 101 by a Nobel Prize physicist rather than, you know, a TA who is closer to your age and better at teaching? I don't know the answer to that, but I just think this obsessive focus and then like the humanities got science envy and they all started doing it too. Well, if you're. It's not that you shouldn't be publishing if you're writing about Renaissance literature or something, but, you know, it's not like there's stunning new developments in Renaissance literature. We have all of the books. They're not. I'm. I'm slightly. I'm going to get really mad English professors writing to me. And so I'm not saying that it's not valuable exactly, but that you should not, it should not be like for an English professor. I think if you want butts in seats and English is losing majors incredibly fast, I think in part as a result of this, if you want to bring people into the classroom, you don't need to communicate your incredibly narrow theory. What you need to communicate is a love of books. I just finished Middlemarch, which I guess has gone a little viral on Substack and everyone's reading Middlemarch and I was also reading it, but not because I saw it on Substack and it was so good. I was sad. I was both elated that I had read it and I was sad because it was over. And I don't have that experience with that many books these days. But that's. To me, this is the purpose of bringing people into English classes, right? It's not to teach them to identify the socially problematic behavior in people who have been dead for 300 years. It's to show them the human experience, to open their minds to another time, to let them see. Right. And that's not what they're selecting on. They're selecting on. Have you written articles that five other professors have read in your subfield? I would just stop that. I would stop the. I would evaluate people for teaching, not research, in a lot of fields where I think. And I wouldn't stop them from doing research. I wouldn't say research is bad, but I would just say, you know, it's okay if you don't publish. If you were a great teacher. My best teacher in my English major or one of my best two teachers, he taught a class on Twain. And it was fantastic, and everyone loved him and he didn't get tenure. And I eventually asked someone why that happened. He ended up at the University of the Pacific, and I went back to Penn and I was doing a thing at the writer's house. And I asked why that happened. And they said, well, you know, his research wasn't really that impressive. And I was like, okay, but he had all of these students who came out of his classes on fire for Mark Twain. And he also. And he said, well, students aren't necessarily a good judge of what they learned. And I was like, I remember what he taught me. And let me tell you, the people who are more prestigious and you're a little. I don't remember anything. I remember.

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah. I would also. I would also, like, argue, a la Brian Kaplan, that just like the amount that anyone retains from any college class is just by default, very low, but you can retain a kind of lifelong passion for the topic.

[Megan McArdle]

Well, and also, he did this really interesting thing with his Twain class, which I recommend to people who are interested in reading literature, which was he made us read all of Twain's dreck. We didn't just read Connecticut Yankee and Huckleberry Finn and Tom Saw Raitt. We read Pudd' nhead Wilson. We read the stuff he was churning out by the fistful when he was on election. He went bankrupt in the 1890s and then spent the next five years on constantly obsessively writing and lecturing, trying to make enough money back, make enough money to pay his creditors. We read all that, and that was actually really good because I think the way we usually teach literature is the kind of the highlight reel, right? You see all of the. You see the best thing every writer wrote. And instead of that, we just saw everything this writer wrote. And it was a very different experience, and it was just a wonderful class. I remember it 30 years now. 35 years. When did I graduate from college? No, not quite 35 years, but 30 years on, I still remember it. And that's what you can give to students. They're not going to come away. You know, they're like. I had three professors there who were really memorable, and none of them was the famous prestigious research I took. You know, I took a class with Elisa New, who ended up as at Harvard. And I don't remember anything from her class except that I wrote something on incidents of A Life in the Life of a Slave Girl and Uncle Tom's Cabin. And I juxtaposed them, and in sort of typical, precocious, I guess, I was a sophomore or a junior, I was a junior. I decided that the interesting thing about these books was that actually like the incidents of a Slave girl, which is a real slave narrative, was in some ways kinder to her owners than Uncle Tom's Cabin. And that really struck me. And so I wrote, I wrote about Stockholm syndrome and this thing where you identify with your captors. Only I didn't define it. I never, I was just like such an arrogant little, like obviously everyone knows what Stockholm syndrome was. So I got it back from the TA and I got it back like a month late because I turned it in a month late. And he said this was one of the best papers I've ever read. I didn't understand all that stuff about Helsinki, but really well done. And I, I, I couldn't remember what I'd written about. I was like, Helsinki? When did, where, where did Helsinki come into my. Yeah and then I read it and I realized that I hadn't defined it and he had no idea what I was talking about. And this I is what pre Google, which is important for you youngins to understand is there was no way to like just go and find out what a term you didn't understand meant and that he could not possibly have understood this paper and that somehow this had made him think it must be very good rather than giving me an F for failing to find my terms. That's the only thing I remember from her class. I don't remember anything she said and I'm sure she's a fine teacher and that many people have had very, I don't want to, you know, sort of slam, but it's just that like that thing what to me, what is for undergraduate English which is not going to produce a large number of researchers and professors, right. What is it going to produce is a lot of people who have read books and you can either make that a wonderful exciting experience for them that inspires a lifelong passion for literature or you can make it a dull rote experience for them, in which case what the hell are you doing?

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah, I think you know, from my experience, limited experience teaching, I think of, I think of teaching definitely a seminar course, but I guess I think it would also apply to a lecture in the humanities, to be clear, not in statistics or engineering, but I think of it a little bit like being the warm up comedian in a, in, in a, in a comedy show. Because if you, if you go down to the Comedy Cellar, they don't just hit you with the first comic of the night. There's a warmup comic that it's really essential to the show because it sets a tone and sets a mood. And only once that mood is set is the audience really capable of letting go of themselves and fully surrendering to the comic like mode of being. And you know, so a lot of it is like my job is to set a tone and a mood in the room such that once that mood is set, the students will start accessing parts of themselves and their minds in relation to the material. That just creates a kind of magic conversation that is just like generally hard to snap into. And so, and once that mood is set, like, you almost don't have to do that much because suddenly they're so into the topic for these this hour that they end up having some of the most profound and unusual and unique and out of character conversations with their fellow students than they would ever normally have. Like, that's really what it's about. But I think for a lot of professors selected on this niche research model, their default mode is like, impress my peers. Impress about 50 peers in the world whose opinion I care about. And I think a lot of them who lack self awareness maybe don't know to take off that hat when they enter a classroom and become like the warm up comic.

[Megan McArdle]

Yeah, I mean, I think that's a really big piece of it. But it's also just that, look, teaching is hard. Not everyone's good at it. Right. There's lots of things I'm never going to be good at. And that if you are selecting mostly on research ability, if that's what you really care about, you're going to get not as good teachers as if what you really cared about. If you were selecting on teaching ability. Right. And there's some overlap obviously being familiar with your topic matters, et cetera. Right. But I think there's a threshold beyond which, and I think this varies by discipline. Again, if you are in the sciences, it's probably really after kind of introductory courses, it probably gets progressively more important to be near the cutting edge of your field. Right. Like students probably benefit more from being around that. But I don't think there's like a cutting edge of Renaissance literature. Right. We have the canon doesn't mean that. And lots of people can have really interesting thoughts that will engage kids. But it's also just true that the best person to teach someone something is not always the person who's best at it.

[Coleman Hughes]

Oh yeah, sure, that's right.

[Megan McArdle]

Because they are not the people who are so far beyond, they kind of can't get back it's hard to get back to your level and remember what mistakes you made. And this is like, you know, when I was teaching, I was teaching a class on how to write, write an op ed. And I really had to think about what are the building blocks? Right? Not what do I do on a daily basis. Like, I love the sound of my own voice. I could talk about what I do forever. But what is something that for someone who hasn't been doing this for 20 years, what's a way they can, what do they need to understand about the forum? What can they access in an easy way? So I basically taught everyone a kind of a four block structure for. I made everyone write 800 word op eds. Quite rigid in a way. I actually made them read a book called Save the Cat, which is this incredibly rigid. Yeah, so, you know, save the cat for the audience. It's this book about screenwriting which is incredibly prescriptive. Like this happens on page seven, this happens on page nine. And I made them read that to understand. And I did that. In some ways, if you teach a kid to write poetry, I think it's easier to teach someone to write a sonnet than to write blank verse.

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah, sure.

[Megan McArdle]

Because it's too much freedom when you're starting out. You need that, that guideline, that framework gives you more freedom to then think about the pieces instead of having to start by figuring out what it all looks like. But it's, that's hard for people to do. I got a lot of help from my husband who actually developed my, my opening slide deck. How an OP ed is like Star Wars. It was originally his slide deck. I stole it and then expanded it because he's smarter about, he's much smarter about structure than I am. But all of that stuff, that's, you know, sometimes maybe it is better to have people who are less good at research doing more of the teaching. But I definitely, in lots of disciplines, I would not have that. But I, you know, if I were starting now, I don't know, I think I, and I think this is how university presidents feel too. It's so overwhelming. Like, what would I do? I don't know, get rid of tenure, assess everyone on their AI abilities and their ability to teach and then, you know, stack rank those people and the people who can't teach go. I mean, I'm already imagining the angry tweets and blue sky skeets and all the rest of it that I'm going to get for saying that. And to be clear, this is not me saying like Academia, bad journalism is going through the same thing, and we don't like it either.

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah, we don't like.

[Megan McArdle]

AI is going to take a lot of what we do, and a lot of good people are going to get total, totally hammered by that, possibly including me. It's not. This is not a personal, like, it's just a really hard problem. We got a lot of really hard problems. I think there's a huge amount of stuff that is super exciting.

[Coleman Hughes]

But AI, Yeah, I think there's.

[Megan McArdle]

The problems are hard.

[Coleman Hughes]

As for journalism, you know, and taking jobs, my instinct is that there's two kinds of quote unquote journalistic writing. One is like, you know, the, the article about, you know, any given topic that just happened in the news, written by someone whose name I've never heard before and who, you know, an AI could have written that article more quickly. Or let's say, you know, an AI could downsize that breaking news department by. By 50%. Those jobs seem to me very much under threat, as would any job that is, you know, you're writing WM, you know, WebMD's top 10 ways to cure a cold or something, you know. You know, I briefly had a job writing, like, summarizing which strains of weed were the best, even though I didn't like smoking weed. It was like I was just trying to break into the writing world. So I took anything I could get.

[Megan McArdle]

I transcribed earnings calls. Was my first writing job for 85 bucks a call.

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah, well, you gotta get in somehow. So those jobs seem to me maximally under threat. But if I think about someone like me or you people who have personal brands, it's like, why do I read a Megan McCardell column? Why do I listen to a Coleman Hughes podcast, Rita Coleman Hughes essay? It's because partly I care that they wrote it, because I know something about them. They have a brand that I care about. It's a bit more like. And this will seem a pretentious analogy, I don't mean it to be. It's just like the clearest case, which is like, why is an atom for atom copy of a Vermeer worthless, but the original Vermeer is worth millions. It's like, it's not about the product itself. It's about that Vermeer touched it, right? And there's something about that to listening to your favorite podcasters, the columnists that you follow. So I don't think you specifically, or me or Ezra Klein or Tyler Cowan or Ross Douthit or Jamelle Bowie like our jobs. I don't think are under threat because people don't read us merely for the words on the page. They read us partly for. Because of the knowledge of who is behind it. And whatever their association, even if they hate us, they read us because. Because of the person behind it.

[Megan McArdle]

Well, Knockwood, you're correct. Yeah. My assessment is this, is that there's Journalism has two problems and one is on the supply side and one's on the demand side. And the supply side problem is this can be done by a machine. The demand side problem is we're now compete. We now have yet another thing that we're competing for, for people's attention with. Right. It's, you know, social media. That was true too. Every new thing that, that competes with us for attention leaves less attention for us. The other thing is that on the supply side, and yes, I think you are completely correct, the stuff where you're just writing up public information that is going to be less and less done. There's no reason to do it. No one, not even, and I'm not even saying it's not valuable to my institution or someone. People are not going to go to the Washington Post or the New York Times or anywhere else to get a write up of the latest economic data, right? Because they can, they can just ask chat GPT much faster and get a customized. And then unlike when we write it up, when they have a question, they can just say, oh, but what about this? And ChatGPT will tell them, right? So that I think is just going to go away. Where do I think the value in journalism is going to be? It's going to be in people. And I think that in relationships. And I think that also manifests in two ways. One is the value of your relationship with the reader. So people who have a brand, people who have a following, those people are. And I am leaning in more to this. I'm leaning in more to being. I am not writing up the economic data. I am leaning into the. And I will occasionally when I feel like I have something unique and interesting to say about it. But I'm not just going to do a. Well, it's Tuesday. I got to write a column. There was a release because people don't need that from me as much anymore. And being a personality, having people feel like they know you. You know, I joke that podcasts are your imaginary friends. And it's. And it's a little weird because I actually know a lot of people on the podcast that I listen to. So sometimes I'm walking along and it's like I'm having an imaginary friendship with my real friend. And that's weird, right?

[Coleman Hughes]

Yeah, yeah, I've had that too. Camille Foster is a good friend of mine and I like haven't seen him for like nine months, but I feel like I've been hanging out with him, but he hasn't, he hasn't been hanging out with me. So it's like a, it's a problem.

[Megan McArdle]

I have this experience quite frequently. But then the other thing is relationships with sources, right. What is one thing ChatGPT can't do it cannot get a congressional staffer drunk and get it to tell them things about the tax bill. Right. Only a physical reporter can do that. And so that kind of information is also going to be valuable. And those are the kinds, those are the two areas where. And so if I think about how this is like manifested in my own life, partly it's changing what I'm writing about. I'm writing a lot more about like, like how to think about AI and how to, you know, because I think that's where I can add value for my readers. But I also, I spent this spring on a basically non stop conference. There were months where I was literally like, I came home usually on a Friday night, sometimes on a Saturday, took clothes out of the suitcase, put the clothes in the washer, put them back in the suitcase after they got out of the dryer and then I just got on the next plane and it was grueling and there was. But the thing that you can do at conferences that you can't is get new ideas, talking to people, be in a group, listen to people. Right. And I love remote work. I've been working remote since 2006. But you gotta get, it's not asking. GGBT isn't the same because GPT only tells you what you asked.

[Coleman Hughes]

Right?

[Megan McArdle]

Right. And so that thing of creating serendipity for people, having relationships, hearing things that you wouldn't have seen, heard if you hadn't been in the room, that's the other place where journalism is really going to add value. And so those are the two areas I think this is my analysis, for what it's worth. That's where I am attempting to focus what I do, which is really intensive. And then I have to like, I'm taking the summer off, I'm old, I can't do this anymore, but I'll start up in the fall. But doing that thing of being, talking, talking to as many people as possible, being in a physical room with them and then taking that out to your audience is the other area where I think there's going to be a lot of value for journalists, or I hope there's going to be maybe I should say I hope there's going to be some value for journalists. But I do think, you know, who do I read when I think about my own industry? I read Dylan Byers and Oliver Dorsey because those guys are on the phone all the time and they're talking to people and they're giving me information that I can't get anywhere else.

[Coleman Hughes]

Right. All right. Megan McArdle, thank you so much for doing my show.

[Megan McArdle]

Thanks for having me. Bundle and safe With Expedia, you were.

[Coleman Hughes]

Made to follow your favorite band.

[Megan McArdle]

And from the front row, we were.

[Coleman Hughes]

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