Live: Anthropic co-founder on AI and jobs

Summary

Planet Money: Live – Anthropic Co-Founder on AI and Jobs

Date: April 22, 2026
Host: NPR’s Planet Money team (various hosts including Erica Barris, Kenny Malone, Alex Mayasi)
Special Guest: Jack Clark (Anthropic Co-Founder), Darrell Fairweather (Redfin Chief Economist)

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Episode Overview

This special live episode of Planet Money was recorded during the show's nationwide book tour, featuring conversations with influential thinkers about the intersections of economics, technology, and society. The highlight is a deep-dive interview with Jack Clark, co-founder of Anthropic, about the future impact of artificial intelligence on jobs and the economy. The episode also includes a lively discussion in Seattle with Darrell Fairweather, chief economist at Redfin, on the economics of housing and how behavioral economics shapes our daily lives.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Introducing the Book Tour and Audience-driven Approach

• [00:27] – [03:08] The Planet Money team shares experiences from their book tour, emphasizing engagements with diverse audiences and interactive segments like the "wisdom of the crowds" game.
• Memorable audience interactions and topics ranged from the Jones Act to unmade episodes about drugs, highlighting the unpredictable but insightful nature of their live shows.

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2. San Francisco Stop: Interview with Jack Clark, Anthropic (AI and the Economy)

A. Jack Clark’s Science Fiction and Perspective on the Future

• [05:14] – [08:13]
• Jack Clark’s early science fiction writings presented scenarios where AIs autonomously design, manufacture, test, and market products, raising the existential question: If machines do everything, what is left for humans?
  • Quote:
    “If you end up in a world where you have a closed loop production system with just machine to machine to machine to machine, and then people buy stuff, people need money. Well established.” – Jack Clark [08:01]
• Clark suggests the need to reimagine capitalism and introduce mechanisms like “taxing the robots” to reallocate machine-generated wealth to people.

B. Dual Role: Science Fictionist and AI Shaper

• [08:13] – [09:47]
• Jack is unique as both a shaper of the technology and a writer imagining its consequences.
  • Quote:
    “I view it as like messages in a bottle I’m trying to throw out of this semi frightening AI lab, which I’m a principal character in.” – Jack Clark [09:14]

C. The Impact and Moral Responsibility in Shaping AI

• Clark acknowledges excitement and trepidation about AI’s trajectory.
  • Quote:
    “I find myself staring into the face of change that we haven’t experienced in perhaps a century. And I...I don’t know how we’ll respond.” – Jack Clark [12:24]
• Referenced C.S. Lewis's "Screwtape Letters" to illustrate how technology like the telephone fundamentally changed human relations, drawing a parallel to the upcoming AI revolution.

D. AI Progress, Mythos Model, and Security

• [13:37] – [17:09]
• Discussion about Anthropic's Mythos model, which is highly effective at tasks like hacking, leading to unique ethical and security dilemmas.
  • The model has not been made public but is shared with select major companies for defensive purposes.
  • Quote:
    “It’s our regular Claude, and it just... Claude turns out to be good at hacking now as well.” – Jack Clark [15:09]
• On concerns about creating a “weapon and shield,” Jack reassures no predatory business model; he advocates for some AI capabilities (like cyber defense) to become a “true utility” provided at cost.

E. The Future of Work and Education

• Clark foresees a society where most code (and similar intellectual work) is generated by AI, potentially shifting human roles toward review and guidance (“guild system”).
• [17:15] As a parent, he hopes for a future where technology enables more togetherness and curiosity, rather than isolation.
  • Quote:
    “AI actually can answer these questions for you and can allow us to maintain that kind of childlike curiosity into adulthood...that’s my optimistic story.” – Jack Clark [18:56]
• Stresses a radical upending of education, emphasizing curiosity and lifelong learning over rote memorization, to prepare people for an AI-saturated future.

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3. Seattle Stop: Interview with Darrell Fairweather, Redfin (Economics in Daily Life & Housing)

A. Economists at Work in Everyday Products

• [21:41] – [23:02]
• Fairweather shares her journey from academic economics to roles at Amazon and Redfin, using “behavioral economics” to improve employee engagement and retention.
  • Quote:
    “My job was to work on employee engagement, especially for our more frontline call center employees, and to figure out how to keep them from quitting, how to keep them happy, how to give them career opportunities.” – Darrell Fairweather [22:45]

B. Marketplace Algorithms and Dynamic Pricing

• [23:02] – [25:47]
• Economists help build “dynamic pricing” systems – the surge pricing in ride-shares, and now even in grocery stores.
  • Observes possible backlash and suggests alternatives (like allocation by waitlists) when surge pricing clashes with perceptions of fairness.
  • Quote:
    “Maybe willingness to not moan is another way to allocate it.” – Kenny Malone [25:47]

C. Housing: Zoning and the “Musical Chairs” Metaphor

• [26:38] – [28:58]
• Discussion about reforms to single-family zoning, the movement towards “YIMBY” (Yes In My Backyard), and why new housing supply often appears as luxury housing.
  • Fairweather uses musical chairs as a metaphor:
    “The people who already own houses are sitting in their chairs...if you’re not adding more chairs in, you can’t get first time homebuyers into the market so easily.” – Darrell Fairweather [28:14]

D. Empathy, Growth, and Future Generations

• [28:58] – [30:29]
• Emphasizes the importance of thinking of future residents in zoning and housing debates.
  • Quote:
    “I wish the communities had the mentality that it is their responsibility to grow because we know there’s going to be future generations that are going to need housing. I wish that people cared more about future residents.” – Darrell Fairweather [29:23]
  • Highlights the conflict between current residents’ desire for stability and the needs of future community members.
  • Quote:
    “Empathy in economics. It happens.” – Kenny Malone [30:29]

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• “If you end up in a world where you have a closed loop production system with just machine to machine to machine...people need money. Well established.” – Jack Clark [08:01]
• “You need to tax the robots and AI companies significantly and you need to somehow find a way to reallocate money from this machine economy to the human economy.” – Jack Clark [08:02]
• “I view it as like messages in a bottle I’m trying to throw out of this semi frightening AI lab...” – Jack Clark [09:14]
• “AI actually can answer these questions for you and can allow us to maintain that kind of childlike curiosity into adulthood...” – Jack Clark [18:56]
• “My job was to work on employee engagement, especially for our more frontline call center employees, and to figure out how to keep them from quitting, how to keep them happy, how to give them career opportunities.” – Darrell Fairweather [22:45]
• “Maybe willingness to not moan is another way to allocate it.” – Kenny Malone [25:47]
• “I wish that people cared more about future residents.” – Darrell Fairweather [29:23]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [05:14] – Start of Jack Clark (Anthropic) interview
• [07:39] – AI, closed-loop manufacture, and capitalist rethinking
• [13:37] – Security risks and the Mythos model
• [17:30] – Future of education and work in an AI world
• [21:41] – Darrell Fairweather on behavioral economics in big tech
• [23:02] – Dynamic pricing and consumer-facing algorithms
• [26:38] – Housing economics, zoning, and “musical chairs” analogy
• [28:58] – Empathy in housing policy and future generations

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Tone and Language

The episode was engaging, occasionally humorous, and accessible, with honest personal reflections from both the hosts and their guests. Jack Clark expertly balanced optimism and deep caution about the transformative power of AI, while Darrell Fairweather grounded economic theory in relatable, everyday phenomena. The hosts encouraged audience participation and used metaphors and storytelling to make complex economic ideas tangible.

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Summary Takeaway

This episode synthesized the very real anxieties and possibilities as AI transforms work, wealth distribution, and education, while also showing how everyday economic policies—from surge pricing to housing—shape lives in concrete ways. Both guests emphasized the need for new empathy, creativity, and bold policy thinking to shape a humane economy in the face of rapid technological and social change.

Transcript

[Sponsor/Advertiser]

Support for npr and the following message come from Edward Jones. What does it mean to live a rich life? Maybe it's full of brave first leaps, tearful goodbyes, and everything in between. And with over a hundred years of experience, your Edward Jones financial advisor can help. EDWARD Jones Member SIPC this is Planet Money from npr.

[Erica Barris]

Hey, everyone. For the past couple weeks, the Planet Money team has been on the road on book tour.

[Kenny Malone]

Tonight, live from New York, the Planet Money book launch.

[Alex Mayasi]

I'm in San Francisco. What's going on?

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

So excited to be in Boston.

[Kenny Malone]

Hello, everyone. Thank you.

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

We say hello, Seattle. Is that a thing we get to do on book tour?

[Erica Barris]

We have been crisscrossing America doing live shows to help promote the new Planet Money book. We've been In New York, D.C. boston, San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles. And this is a rare thing that we don't get to do very often. We don't get to meet and talk with so many of you. In D.C. we played this game with the audience to demonstrate a concept known as the wisdom of the crowds. This is the idea that if you ask a large group of people to guess the price of something like a piece of art, the average will actually be pretty close to correct.

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

You all guessed that this piece of art is worth. Oh, come on, guys, $693 trillion. I don't think that's right.

[Erica Barris]

It wasn't a perfect study. In New York, our hosts Amanda Aronczyk and Mary Childs answered audience questions about how we choose what stories to report or not report.

[Kenny Malone]

It was weird to look at the list of episodes that I thought I was going to make, and one of them was just cocaine.

[Sponsor/Advertiser]

We also have a running thread where

[Kenny Malone]

we just yell drugs at each other because we keep wanting to make a How does a drug become legal? Episode. Yes, but the lawyers have said no.

[Erica Barris]

And at every stop, we have gotten the true delight of meeting so many of our listeners turned readers, some of whom, it seems like, maybe should be writing their own economics books.

[Kenny Malone]

My name is Ryan, and I'm really

[Alex Mayasi]

glad you were talking about cargo shipping,

[Kenny Malone]

because I'd like to hear your thoughts

[Jack Clark]

on the Jones act, which was briefly

[Alex Mayasi]

and for the longest. For those who aren't like maritime shipping nerds, I'll just keep contextualize briefly.

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

The Jones act is a subsection. Yeah, actually, please do do our job for us. I love this.

[Erica Barris]

Now, we do have a few stops left on this book tour, but obviously we can't make it to every city in America. Can't actually make it to most of them, really? And so we thought, not everyone can come to the book tour. Let's bring the book tour to everyone.

[Alex Mayasi]

Hello and welcome to Planet Money.

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

Hello and welcome to Planet Money.

[Erica Barris]

Hello and welcome to Planet Money.

[Kenny Malone]

Hello and welcome to Planet Money.

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

Oh, wow, that's good.

[Erica Barris]

Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Erica Barris. In every city on the tour, we've been doing these interviews with special guests. They've been Planet Money regulars like economists Raj Shetty and Emily Oster and some people in the news, like the co founder of Anthropic, Jack Clark.

[Jack Clark]

By April 2027, AI systems should be able to do tasks that might take a person 150 hours. Now that. What is that? That's almost a month's worth of work, which requires strange things to happen in the economy.

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

Yeah, but like, what task is it doing that's gonna. Like, what task are you thinking of?

[Jack Clark]

What's the last bit of work that took you a month?

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

Writing these questions for you took more time than I wanted.

[Jack Clark]

Yeah, yeah.

[Erica Barris]

And also people like economist Darrell Fairweather, who's trying to help regular people understand the massively complex housing market.

[Kenny Malone]

So I think a good metaphor for the housing market is musical chairs. Like the people who already own houses are sitting in their chairs and whenever there's a new spring housing market, some people get up and they move and they select a new chair and, and if you're not adding more chairs in, you can't get first time homebuyers into the market so easily.

[Erica Barris]

Today on the show, two stops from our live book tour, San Francisco and Seattle, where we'll talk about AI anxiety and how you, yes, you could be the key to fixing the housing crisis.

[Sponsor/Advertiser]

This message comes from Schwab. At Schwab, you can get everything from self directed investing to full service wealth management all in one place. No matter your investing goal, life stage amount to invest or know how you can invest your way. With Schwab.

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[Erica Barris]

So first stop, San Francisco, where we got to talk with the co founder of Anthropic, Jack Clark. As you know, Anthropic and their AI models, Claude and now Claude Mythos are raising all sorts of thorny questions about what AI can do and what it can't. And we were of course going to ask Jack about all of that, but we wanted to start with some writing. He published online several years before starting Anthropic, a series of short stories that give some perspective into how he thinks about about the future. Here he is with Planet Money host Kenny Malone.

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

Is it fair to call these science fiction?

[Jack Clark]

It is fair to call them science fiction.

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

I'd like to give people a little taste of what's in here. So the one I want you to read that feels very Planet Money, it imagines in the year 2025, we'll forgive you because you're a little wrong on that one. But in the year 2025, you imagine a factory in China. It is overseen by a robot factory line and AI is overseeing the robots. And then AI is also trying to imagine new types of products. And then if you just want to

[Jack Clark]

read, when new candidate products are found, it runs through a series of tuned expert systems and if it gets a high enough score, simulates the product in a high fidelity simulation. If it passes these tests, then a candidate product is produced, airlifted by drone to a nearby human focus group, and if it satisfies their criteria, is sold on an ebay like auction site frequented by the factory's thousands of distributors. A bidding process takes place and in a few days or weeks, data comes back about how the product succeeds in the market, if it does better than the existing product. More parts of the factory are dedicated to creating new products in this style. And the improvisation line begins exploring the latent space of the new products.

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

Okay, so we imagine a world where AI is able to both control the robots that make the product, innovate and design the products, ship them off to human focus groups, and then sell them to humans. So here's my question for you. Where are we the humans in this story? Are we off in a field dancing, eating dates in the sun? And maybe more importantly, how do we have money to buy the products that we didn't help make? Sort of a serious question.

[Jack Clark]

It's a good question. So I think if AI goes as far as people think you actually need to reconceptualize how capitalism in the largest possible sense works. I think if you end up in a world where you have a closed loop production system with just machine to machine to machine to machine, and then people buy stuff, people need money. Well established.

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

That is the thing. Yep.

[Jack Clark]

So you need to tax the robots and AI companies significantly and you need to somehow find a way to reallocate money from this machine economy to the human economy.

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

One of the things that occurred to me in reading this book is, can people get this, by the way, Is this like a thing?

[Jack Clark]

You can get it for free online at jackclark.net, but I haven't figured out how to sell the book yet. Each time I try and make an actual book to sell, I get sidetracked. And the last time was when I was starting Anthropic and then I got busy.

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

Surely someone will publish your book, Jack.

[Jack Clark]

It's on my list. Plagues me. I have a Google Doc that I stare at on my free moments.

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

Having gone through a series of reporting on books and how they get made, I suspect you'd be an attractive candidate to a publisher. One of the things that did occur to me in reading your book is that science fiction writers, by definition, are imagining a future. They're predicting a future. But you may be genuinely the only one that I can think of who is simultaneously shaping the future. And we are all living in the world that your technology is creating. And so I do genuinely wonder if that changes how I should read this book. Like, should I think of your writing as a blueprint, as instructions, as a warning, as advice on how to live in Jack Clarke's future.

[Jack Clark]

Yes. There's a band Jawbreaker, and they have a lyric which says, my fiction beats the hell out of my truth. And so the newsletter is mostly me writing about AI research papers, but the fiction stories are where I'm basically trying to grapple with what's happening in my moral and ethical responsibility in it. So you can read them. And I view it as like messages in a bottle I'm trying to throw out of this semi frightening AI lab, which I'm a principal character in.

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

And so you are warning us. And you're warning us. You're not warning us. I guess that's why you said yes.

[Jack Clark]

It's exciting and it's.

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

Is it?

[Jack Clark]

It's very. If it's exciting, I think it's very exciting.

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

Is everyone excited? That's about the response I expected to be eerie.

[Jack Clark]

APPLAUSE but it's change, right? And with that comes some amount of trepidation, right?

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

Yes, for me, a lot of trepidation. Personally, that may just be me. I don't know. We talked earlier today. This is a very funny interaction. So Jack. I met Jack briefly early today and this is the greatest reason to run out of room. He's like, I must run and make some predictions. And I was like, what is happening? And you paused to briefly explain that you had made a series of predictions essentially that would come true in 2026 of September. And they had, they had done very well and you had to go make another set. So what were your predictions?

[Jack Clark]

Okay, there's two.

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

Share them with us now. We see any of these on polymarket, though, we know where they came from.

[Jack Clark]

Well, one, I think, again, if you do the time thing, it doesn't seem Wild that by April 2027, AI systems should be able to do tasks that might take a person 150 hours. Now what is that? That's almost a month's worth of work, which requires strange things to happen in the economy.

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

Yeah, but like, what task is it doing? That's like, what task are you thinking of?

[Jack Clark]

What's the last bit of work that took you a month?

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

Writing these questions for you took more time than I wanted.

[Jack Clark]

Yeah, yeah. So tasks like this. Yeah, no, I mean tasks that might take a person a really, really long time might be designing a complicated piece of circuitry, doing a very, very involved research project involving reading and cross referencing many things, building a piece of software. The kinds of tasks we currently pay extremely talented people large amounts of money to do are exactly the type of tasks which AI systems are kind of creeping into. So that has some implications.

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

Yeah.

[Jack Clark]

The other prediction we made was, you know, we've talked about how the majority of the code at Anthropic is written by AI systems like Claude. Well, all of us in the room thought By April, maybe 100% of the code is. Which led to us say, what are we doing? And I think that we invented a guild system where we would sit around analyzing and critiquing the code that Claude writes and verifying that it's correct. And I can't work out if this is like a really fun country club style job or if it's paint some different picture.

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

Right. You're going to tell me, I don't know, Jack. I find it all. I waffle between horrified and optimistic and I find I'm just. Is that kind of where everyone else is?

[Jack Clark]

Yeah.

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

Yeah. Where do you do that?

[Jack Clark]

I find myself staring into the face of change that we haven't experienced in perhaps a century. And I. I don't know how we'll respond. 100 years ago, C.S. lewis wrote a book called the Screwtape Letters, which is about a demon in hell whose job is writing letters to their boss, a senior demon, a manager demon, about their attempts to corrupt a person on Earth. And they have a letter where they say, wonderful news. My human has just got an invention called the telephone. And the telephone means that whenever my person is alone and would otherwise introspect on themselves and be drawn closer to. To God, they will instead pick up the phone and call their friends, which brings them closer to hell. Now, what does that get right and wrong? What it gets right is that things like phones actually massively changed how people relate to one another.

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

Yes.

[Jack Clark]

But I don't think that we're all, like, doomed to hell because we have phones. Well, well, I realize now I picked the wrong example, but it gets at the shape of this. Right. Like, we are going to experience immense change, and we're looking at it, and we're trying to think through what it means for how we relate to us as people, and it will change how we relate to one another.

[Sponsor/Advertiser]

Yeah.

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

I want to shift gears from your writing for a second because you made a lot of news lately.

[Jack Clark]

Yeah, I mean, you know, it was exciting.

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

I mean, you've made a lot of news lately. But most recently, there's a new AI model called Mythos. Please correct me if I get any of this wrong. So Mythos, and that seems to be really good at hacking, if someone wanted to use it for that. And so you have not made this model public yet. You've given it to something like 40 or 50 companies to, I guess, gird themselves from the tool that you made.

[Jack Clark]

Yes.

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

Okay. So that's companies like Apple and Google and Amazon. And as far as we could tell, the only financial institution that I've seen reported is JP Morgan, maybe has it to test. But I believe Treasury Secretary Scott Besant has called you asking for this. So question one is, how have these phone calls been? Like,

[Jack Clark]

I have a high tolerance for weird phone calls at this point in time.

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

Yeah.

[Jack Clark]

I think the nature of the conversations we're having is we have been saying for years that AI systems would get better and they would keep getting better until they got better than people at most tasks. And it started in coding last year. Don't be surprised. And they get better at other tasks as well. And that doesn't go down super well on the call. So Then you frame it as well. What do we do about this? Yeah, and I think the challenge is this isn't a special model. Right. This is representative.

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

This isn't your hacking model, is it?

[Jack Clark]

It's our regular Claude and it just.

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

It's really good at hacking.

[Jack Clark]

Claude turns out to be good at hacking now as well.

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

That's cool. Look, I'm. Look, Claude's cool. I know, I know. It's. Look, we contain multitudes. We can be optimistic and terrified at the same time.

[Jack Clark]

But what it means is there will be many systems like this and the world is going to adapt to this. We have a chance to use it to make much of the world much more secure. But at the same time, we now have these new capabilities in the world we have to contend with.

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

Is it true there's just the one financial institution in the mix of people getting to test their own Systems?

[Jack Clark]

We announced 40, and we've been expanding it a bunch over time. So I don't know exactly if it's just for one or if we've expanded it already, but more. More people are being added all the time right now.

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

Do I need to be checking my banking account to see if money is going away?

[Jack Clark]

No.

[Kenny Malone]

Okay.

[Jack Clark]

Unless you're spending it.

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

I mean, I might be. San Francisco is a great city for spending money.

[Jack Clark]

It's.

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

The food is good. So right now you're offering this tool to companies for free. But there is this feeling in the back of my mind like you have invented both the weapon and the shield. And so what happens when you want to charge for this? It does feel a little bit like, hey, you know, be ashamed if something happens to that company of yours if you don't pay for our product.

[Jack Clark]

Yeah. We think that business strategies which tend more towards mafia than anything else, are probably not long term resilient, so we won't be doing that. I do think that the shape of this in the future is parts of AI need to become actually a true utility, where you would expect things like cyber defense capabilities to be something that you provide, like at cost or at the cost of it cost you to provide you with no margin. I'm sorry if my financial officer is listening to me say that, but it's the shape of where you end up in the future where there are all these capabilities that matter for society. You need to proliferate those into society without charging society for it, or you end up in a really bad incentive structure.

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

You now have two. Two children who just got back from parental leave.

[Jack Clark]

Yep.

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

So you're Imagining a future future for them as well. And so I am wondering, what is the future you're imagining for them? How do you think they will fit into the world that you are creating? And what skills will you prioritize for them?

[Jack Clark]

I mean, I imagine if we get this right, a better future where people get to spend more time, more time with one another and less time being kind of atomized and driven away from their families and friends. This requires you to actually solve the distribution problem.

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

Me personally?

[Jack Clark]

Yes, you. Congratulations, we're solving economics together. But how you get there, along with the advocacy I've talked about, is actually thinking you're going to need to completely rethink education and sort of upend it. You're going to need to upend how, how education works in pretty fundamental ways. And you're going to have to teach people to be much more curious. I am struck by how my child constantly asks me questions. It's obviously sometimes very enraging when you get asked the same question 50 times a day, but sometimes it's amazing, like why are camels, why do they have humps? Or anything like this?

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

I got that one too. And I was like, I don't know.

[Jack Clark]

But as you go into being an adult, you get kind of the skill of asking questions, but beaten out of you by rote learning and working in regular jobs and your friends saying, for heaven's sake, Jack, like stop asking these insane sounding questions. AI actually can answer these questions for you and can allow us to maintain that kind of childlike curiosity into adulthood in a way that I think is very mind expanding and wonderful. And I think that's going to lead the world to really exciting places where everyone has the inventiveness that you have as a child, but you can still use it and are encouraged to use it more as an adult. That's my optimistic story.

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

Yes, I do want to end with the final line from your preface, which I do recommend reading. But the final line you have chosen is good luck to us all. Yes, and I think we'll end on that one, Jack. Thank you so much.

[Jack Clark]

Thanks very much.

[Kenny Malone]

Appreciate it.

[Erica Barris]

Jack Clark, the co founder of Anthropic, talking with Planet Money host Kenny Malone. A quick clarification. That reference to the Screwtape letters was basically correct. In it, C.S. lewis does write about noise writ large as a distraction to man. It was in a different private letter that he talked about the downsides of gadgetry, including the wireless radio. After the break, what it's like to be a behavioral economist for Amazon.

[Jack Clark]

Foreign

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[Erica Barris]

Welcome back. We have another interview from the tour I'm going to play you part of it's with Darrell Fairweather. Darrell is a behavioral economist and author of the book Hate the Economic Cheat Codes for Life, Love and Work. She's also quoted many times in our book Economic, especially on the topic of housing.

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

Check the index. She's in there a lot.

[Alex Mayasi]

Yeah. So please welcome Darrel Fauxweather.

[Erica Barris]

Darrel's currently the chief economist at Redfin, the realty company and she used to be a senior economist at Amazon in Seattle, which is where she joined us. Here she is talking with hosts Kenny Malone and the main author of the Planet Money book, Alex Mayasi, about how the work of economists is baked into so much of our daily lives.

[Alex Mayasi]

I think your career demonstrates something that I've found quite interesting, which is I think my standard image of an economist was always kind of a professor and they do research. But when you went to work at Amazon, like was your job titled behavioral economist?

[Kenny Malone]

Yes, they hired me specifically to be behavioral economist because they didn't want people at the, at the part of the company that I was working at to get too nervous that they were hiring some economists in. It was going to like cut roles or make things harder for people. So they wanted people to know that I had a softer touch and my training is in behavioral economist. And I think that is a signal to people that, you know, I think about things, you know, a bit more holistically than maybe the typical economist.

[Alex Mayasi]

Yeah. Why? Why did Amazon need a behavioral economist?

[Kenny Malone]

Well, this was when they were getting a lot of bad press for all for the way that they were treating their employees, there was this big New York Times expose about it.

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

And was that the peeing in bottles expose?

[Kenny Malone]

I think it was before that.

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

Oh, okay, the first one, there are a couple exposes.

[Kenny Malone]

So my job was to work on employee engagement, especially for our more frontline call center employees, and to figure out how to keep them from quitting, how to keep them happy, how to give them career opportunities. And we actually had data to measure according to that. So that was my role as a behavioral economist.

[Alex Mayasi]

Yeah. And so I think, yeah, I've learned over time how economists are not just professors. Many highly trained economists are out there working on very familiar goods and services that we all know. One of my favorite examples is dating apps that to a surprising degree, the algorithms and dating apps that decide who gets matched with who, who sees which profiles are based on, like, Nobel Prize winning economics research. I'm curious if you have kind of a favorite example or two of ways that economists have been very influential, not in academia, but by working at companies.

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

How are you secretly influencing our lives, Darrell? That's the question.

[Kenny Malone]

Yeah. I think a famous one is rideshare apps. How it used to be that you would just call a cab and the price you would pay was just whatever was on the meter. And then economists got the idea to have dynamic pricing that was set by whatever demand was in that moment and supply was in that moment. And a lot of people don't like that because it feels a little bit unfair. And now it's moving even into grocery stores. It's dynamic pricing. I know there's a lot of pushback towards that.

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

I do see those little price tags that can change. And I wonder, like two seconds ago, was it less? Like, is that what's happening?

[Kenny Malone]

Yeah, this is even true on Amazon. Like, I was tracking the price of my book and my book is now cheaper than it was a couple of weeks ago. So you can get a deal because of that dynamic pricing.

[Alex Mayasi]

So I think this event will push it back.

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

Yeah.

[Jack Clark]

Can we?

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

Can we?

[Alex Mayasi]

Yeah, yeah.

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

If you buy enough, then your friends will have to pay more.

[Kenny Malone]

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[Alex Mayasi]

Yeah. I mean, and so I think we're talking specifically with rideshare about, like, surge pricing.

[Kenny Malone]

If there is more demand, that should, in theory, push up price, because if it doesn't, what you can have are shortages. And shortages are worse than paying more because then there are people who might be willing to pay a higher price who just don't get the option to, but I think there's. I feel like there's kind of a backlash to that now. Like sometimes people prefer things to be allocated based on a wait list because it feels more fair, even if it is more inefficient, because it's not just going to the richest people. So this is where my behavioral economist brain starts working. And I feel like there has to be some at least nuance. And when is surge pricing a bit grotesque?

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

Well, we were talking backstage and earlier about the New York City Marathon. One of the things I think is genius when you read the final chapter, everyone, is that it optimizes for envy. Freeness is the term I've heard, which is less about one specific system of optimization and more about will everyone be cool with this if they get left out for some reason? And that is also a different thing you can optimize for. Surge pricing probably does not do that.

[Kenny Malone]

Yeah, I agree. I mean, it's not. I mean, willingness to pay would only allocate it to people who have the highest willingness to pay. But maybe willingness to not moan is another way to allocate it.

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

I do. I mean, I think the thing that does get left out of the surge pricing and Uber conversation is there is a workforce that in theory is standing by and could quickly jump into their cars and do more rides. And so this is a price. What is the term? Is the price for the signal?

[Kenny Malone]

Market clearing price.

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

Yeah, there's a market demand price that would like, then recruit more people and then would help the price drop. And so in like that circumstance, I think that's what gets left out of that conversation a little bit. But I don't, I don't know that that applies to the store.

[Alex Mayasi]

If it starts raining and prices don't go up for Ubers or lifts, then you don't have this incentive for more drivers to come and get more people where they need to go while it's raining.

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

Anyway, I try to think of that when I grumble about Uber prices, but I mostly just grumble anyway during certain times.

[Alex Mayasi]

Yeah, let's finish with the topic of housing. Something a part of the economy that like so viscerally impacts our lives. What have been some of like the biggest developments in housing in the last five, 10 years while it's been really the focus of your, of your work?

[Kenny Malone]

In the last five years, there's been a lot of movement to eliminate single family zoning, which is this idea that you can only build one house on one plot of land in a neighborhood and single family zoning is behind why There's a scarcity of housing in cities like Seattle and many cities across the country. But there's actually been a lot of progress to get rid of that and replace it with multifamily zoning. It's been a very slow moving progress. And just because you change the zoning doesn't mean the housing changes overnight. The housing has to get developed. But in the last five years there has been a big movement, the Yimbys. Yes. In my backyard, as opposed to the nbys know, in my backyard. The Yimbys seem to be winning this ideological fight, which is really encouraging to see because it is based on economic principles, supply and demand and people are. It's finally starting to click in politicians minds and voters minds that this is how you get more affordable housing.

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

Can we come up with a metaphor for this phenomenon which is like there's been more increased density zoning and yet people would see new houses built that were like expensive townhouses and they would be mad about it. So like, doesn't make sense. You're allowed to build more houses, but all I see over here are very

[Alex Mayasi]

expensive houses, which is a common objection about zoning. It's like, well, you know, a new apartment building was built, but it's very expensive to live there. And I feel like rents are still going up. Everything's still so expensive.

[Kenny Malone]

Yeah. So I think a good metaphor for the housing market is musical chairs. Like the people who already own houses are sitting in their chairs and whenever there's a new spring housing market market, some people get up and they move and they select a new chair. And if you're not adding more chairs in, you can't get first time home buyers into the market so easily. But if you were to add some luxury, plush, nice chair. Yes. It's probably going to go to a very wealthy person, but then that wealthy person is not going to be sitting in the folding chair anymore. And that chair opens up for a first time home buyer.

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

Or they're less likely to be sitting in the folding chair because we know some people will buy two chairs sometimes. That is true.

[Kenny Malone]

Hopefully they rent it out.

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

Yes, yes.

[Alex Mayasi]

I want to finish with a quote actually from the book, which is something you said to me that really stuck with me. So I'm going to read the quote here. You told me. I wish the communities had the mentality that is their responsibility to grow because we know there's going to be future generations that are going to need housing. I wish that people cared more about future residents. Could you tell me a bit more what you mean There.

[Kenny Malone]

Yeah. My frustration with the way that housing works in this country is that it's usually determined by local residents, usually people who are homeowners themselves who go to their local town halls or local city halls and advocate for less housing because they don't want to see their neighborhoods change. They don't want to see new condo buildings or apartment buildings going up. And the people who don't get a vote are the people who don't live in that area but would like to move in that area or the people who maybe are kids and one day they'll be adults and they'll need to get a house of their own. Those people's voices aren't heard. So I wish that the focus was less on what's best for current residents and what's best for the residents who might live here 5, 10, 15 years from now.

[Alex Mayasi]

Yeah. So this is absolutely the focus of a chapter of the book. But we love that because what could be more understandable that you choose a neighborhood, you don't want it to change. But there's a trade off because of all the people who are need housing in the future. And it does seem like there's a way. Economics is so much about incentives and laws and policies, but this was something really about empathy that you're pointing out as important.

[Kenny Malone]

Empathy in economics. It happens.

[Interviewer (possibly Erica Barris or another host)]

Darryl, thank you. You can find her. She's in the index. I had her sign my index in my book. I recommend that

[Erica Barris]

Daryl Fairweather is the chief economist at Redfin. That's our show. There are still stops left on the book tour. I will be in Pittsburgh tonight, April 22nd doing the Planet Money Game Theory game show as part of the tour. Then there are shows and in Chicago on the 23rd and Toronto on the 27th. Come by, say hello, maybe grab a copy of the book. More [e-mail] you can now find our book Planet Money, a guide to the economic forces that shape your life in bookstores. If you go spot it, please let us know what section it is in. We'll have one more installment of our book series soon where we dive into the secretive world of bestseller lists. Thanks to everyone who came out so far and who picked up a copy. This episode of Planet Money was edited and produced by Eric Mennell and Emma Peasley. It was fact checked by Sierra Juarez. It was engineered by Robert Rodriguez and Kwesi Lee. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer. I'm Erica Barris. This is npr. Thanks for listening.

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