Romina Boccia is the director of budget and entitlement policy at the Cato Institute, where she writes about government spending, the debt problem, and entitlement reform. She also has a Substack called the Debt Dispatch that you can subscribe to here.

Romina joins the podcast to discuss available paths to deal with the coming entitlement crisis. One potential way to get politicians out of making tough choices is to create a debt commission that takes responsibility for unpopular reforms. Romina has written about using the model of the BRAC commission, which was relied on to close down military bases at the end of the Cold War.

The conversation also touches on the politics of debt, how policymakers are thinking about these issues, Paul Ryan as an unappreciated hero of our time, and much more. Near the end, Romina reflects on her career as a DC policy-wonk, and why she is motivated to help ensure that America continues to be the land of opportunity. If we don’t get entitlements under control, it could potentially degrade our entire way of life. For more discussion on this topic and the difficult choices our leaders will soon be facing, see the previous CSPI podcast with Brian Riedl.

Listen to the podcast with Romina here or watch the video on YouTube.

Brian Chau writes and hosts a podcast at the From the New World Substack, and recently established a new think tank, the Alliance for the Future.

He joins the podcast to discuss why he’s not worried about the alignment problem, where he disagrees with “doomers,” the accomplishments of ChatGPT versus DALL-E, the dangers of regulating AI until progress comes to a halt in the way it did with nuclear power, and more. With his background in computer science, Brian takes issue with many of those who write on this topic, arguing that they think in terms of flawed analogies and know little about the underlying technology. The conversation touches on a previous CSPI discussion with Leopold Aschenbrenner, and the value of continuing to work on alignment.

Brian’s view is that AI doomers are making people needlessly pessimistic. He believes that this technology has the potential to do great things for humanity, particularly when it comes to areas like software development and biotech. But the post-World War II era has seen many examples of government hindering progress, and AFF is dedicated to stopping that from happening with artificial intelligence.

Listen to the conversation here, or watch the video here.

Links

Donate to AFF

AFF manifesto

Brian on diminishing returns to machine learning, and discussing AI with Marc Andreessen

Vaswani et al. on transformers

Limits of current machine learning techniques

Andrew Roberts (website, follow on X) is a historian, Visiting Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and a member of the House of Lords. He joins the podcast to talk about his Napoleon: A Life.

The conversation begins with a discussion of different counterfactuals regarding ways in which Napoleon might have been able to stay in power, which leads to Roberts explaining his view that the wars of the era could be understood at least in part as resulting from a rejection of free trade. Other topics include:

* Meritocracy as a guiding principle of the French Revolution and a justification for Napoleon’s regime

* Napoleon’s personal magnetism and why men were willing to follow him

* The relationship with Josephine, and whether or not it influenced any of his political decision

* Whether Napoleon was in fact the greatest general of his time

See also Hanania’s audio review of the Ridley Scott film, and Roberts’ reviews in Commentary and The Times. For an edited transcript of this conversation, see here.