Solutions with Henry Blodget

The media industry is under assault. This week, we turn to one of the world’s most experienced and trusted media observers for a solution: Ken Auletta, who has covered the industry for almost 50 years for the New Yorker. Auletta has studied the rise of cable TV, the Internet, and today’s tech giants, and profiled figures such as Rupert Murdoch, Ted Turner, and Barry Diller. We discuss how trust in the media broke and what might fix it.

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President Trump surprised many people a few weeks ago when he signed an executive order accelerating research into psychedelics. Compounds like psilocybin, LSD, MDMA, ketamine, and others have developed large and enthusiastic followings in the past decade, and some seem quite promising in the treatment of depression, PTSD, addiction and other conditions. Unusually, they are also one of the very few issues that have support across the political spectrum. This week, we discuss why this is a turning point for psychedelics and what might come next with Anne Philippi, a former journalist at Vogue, Vanity Fair, and GQ who now runs The New Health Club, a media organization dedicated to psychedelics.

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Anil Seth is concerned about the “mythology of conscious AI” – the growing argument that LLMs and other AI systems might one day achieve consciousness. Seth is a Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex and a leading expert on consciousness. He’s skeptical that AI will ever achieve true consciousness, and argues there’s danger in perceiving these technical systems as feeling beings. Today, we discuss that danger, and what science even defines as "consciousness."

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In the summer of 2024, a baby named KJ was born with a rare disease with a 50% mortality rate. Six months later, he became the first patient to receive personalized gene editing therapy. He is now healthy and thriving. Dr. Jeff Coller, who directs the RNA Innovation Center at Johns Hopkins University, says KJ’s treatment could be the most important medical story of the decade. Today, Dr. Coller explains the ground-breaking science behind KJ’s treatment, and what it will take to bring it mainstream.

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Dr. Kira Hoffman once fought fires as a firefighter. Now she works on starting them - for the sake of wildfire prevention. Dr. Hoffman is a fire ecologist at the University of British Columbia and an expert in why wildfires are getting worse and the solutions that can mitigate their damage. We discuss why she forecasts a “dire” wildfire season this year, how fire policy has transformed over the past century, and what Americans can do across the country to protect their homes now.

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Recent high-profile tragedies, FAA understaffing and underinvestment, and ballooning TSA lines during the government shutdown have many questioning whether U.S. air travel is as safe as we've been told — but what's the reality? And how do we make it safer, cheaper, and more comfortable?

Darryl Campbell is the aviation-safety correspondent for The Verge. We discuss potentially privatizing the TSA, why we're facing a shortage of air traffic controllers and what we can do about it, and how air travel got needlessly politicized.

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One of the biggest issues in the last few elections has been… immigration. And yet: most Americans support legal immigration and a path to citizenship, and aren't worried about immigrants taking their jobs. So why can't the U.S. enact clear policy?

Alexander Kustov, professor of migration at the University of Notre Dame, recently wrote a book entirely dedicated to this question and practical solutions, titled In Our Interest: How Democracies Can Make Immigration Popular. Today, we discuss his research, his argument that immigration needs to be more selective, and what the U.S. could learn from other countries' immigration policies.

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Ethan Mollick, a Wharton professor and author of the Substack One Useful Thing, describes today’s AI systems as a “jagged frontier," where AI outperforms humans in some tasks but falls short in others. This unevenness means the technology won’t replace all jobs, but it will reshape how we work and which skills matter most. In this episode, we discuss why management and delegation are becoming more valuable, how AI could disrupt the traditional career ladder, and how Mollick is using AI in his classroom to accelerate and deepen learning.

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What’s it like to talk to a “digital twin” of a relative who died before you were born? How will the increasingly lifelike digital representations of people change how we grieve?

Amy Kurzweil deeply considers these questions in her graphic memoir, Artificial: A Love Story. It's about her experience helping to create a chatbot based on her grandfather. Amy’s father, Ray Kurzweil — a technology inventor and futurist — built the bot back in 2018. In this episode, we discuss how AI could change how we grieve, and complicate the very meaning of consciousness.

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More than three years into the AI era, the predictions of an AI job apocalypse are still coming fast and furious. Here are reasons to be more optimistic.

Harvard economist and researcher David Deming studies technology and the future of work. He’s dug into technological shifts of the past for clues about what might happen to the U.S. labor market now, and he’s even quantified the rapid rate of adoption of generative AI.

Deming doubts AI will cause a jobs apocalypse, but he does believe things will change. He tells us his ideas for how we can AI-proof our jobs.

Note: this conversation was originally recorded in the summer of 2025.

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Elon Musk says humanoid robots represent the biggest business opportunity in the history of the world. But what problems do these robots actually solve? And why do they have to look like humans?

We pose those questions and more to Dr. Jonathan Hurst this week, one of the pioneers of modern robotics. He’s the co-founder and Chief Robot Officer at Agility, which makes a humanoid called “Digit," which is actually working in warehouses.

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Dr. Robert Wachter has been a physician for decades, and he thinks that in the future, you might prefer an AI doctor over him (at least sometimes).

Dr. Wachter is the Chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco and a best-selling author. To report his most recent book, A Giant Leap: How AI Is Transforming Healthcare and What That Means for Our Future, he spoke to over 100 experts across medicine and technology. The result is a compelling argument for how AI can unburden both doctors and patients, and broaden access to quality healthcare worldwide.

We discuss the future of "digital twin" doctors, how physicians are already using AI, the risks of de-skilling due to an over-reliance on AI, and how Dr. Wachter is using ChatGPT when it comes to his own health.

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The U.S. is falling behind in its economic competition with China. One potential solution? An expansion of executive power. That’s according to investor and contributing New York Times columnist Steven Rattner. Rattner served as counselor to the Treasury secretary in the Obama administration; he was known as President Obama’s “car czar,” for leading the team that saved the auto industry in the wake of the financial crisis. Today, we discuss why Rattner’s recent trip to China convinced him the U.S. is not winning, and his practical ideas for how we can turn things around — and fast.

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When Elon Musk started Neuralink in 2016, he tapped leading neurosurgeon Ben Rapoport to join as a co-founder. But two years later, citing safety and scalability concerns, Rapoport left to co-found a rival company: Precision Neuroscience. Today, we speak with his co-founder, Michael Mager, about what sets Precision apart, the future of brain–computer interfaces (BCIs), and what Precision has already been able to achieve with over 70 implanted patients.

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Jeff Selingo is not impressed with how colleges are responding to AI. Selingo has spent decades covering higher education and work, and recently spoke with dozens of professors, administrators, and students about what he calls “the campus AI crisis.” While some faculty are still trying to ban the new technology entirely, others struggle to build smart programs to teach students how to use AI. So what is the right way for colleges to embrace AI? How do we prepare students to enter the job market today? We ask Selingo how he’d redesign higher education for the moment.

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Bill Gurley is a legendary venture capitalist known for backing Uber, Zillow, GrubHub, and many others. But when he started his career, he thought he was going to be a computer engineer. How did he make the pivot? That is just one story Gurley tells in his upcoming book, Runnin' Down a Dream: How to Thrive in a Career You Actually Love. In this episode, Gurley shares his words of wisdom, and, of course, we ask his thoughts on the colossal bubble-in-the-making that is AI.

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Venture capitalist, writer, and researcher Paul Kedrosky thinks it's likely that in the near future, an AI crash will cause widespread damage to the economy—but he's still optimistic about the technology anyway. Today, he tells us why, and shares his boldest predictions about AI, including why OpenAI won't last, and why he'd bet against any of the Mag 7, too.

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Economist Eswar Prasad believes the world’s economic order is stuck in a doom loop. While globalization has increased global prosperity, it’s also left many people behind. That has set off a global “politics of resentment,” enabling the rise of populist leaders who promise a return to economic independence and nationalism. So what do we do about it? Despite the title of Professor Prasad’s new book, The Doom Loop: Why the World Economic Order Is Spiraling into Disorder, he does have answers, and some optimism.

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Your devices could soon be decoding your most intimate thoughts. It’s just a matter of time, according to neurotechnology expert Nita Farahany. There are already devices on the market that track our brain waves, from rings to smartwatches to new products like Meta’s neural band. How do we safeguard our cognitive liberty?

Nita Farahany is a Professor of Law and Philosophy at Duke University and the author of The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology. We discuss the benefits and risks of opening our brains to our tech in education, work, law, and life.

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If we're truly in an AI bubble close to bursting, how do we avoid economic catastrophe? That's a question we bring to Andrew Ross Sorkin this week, whose new book, 1929: The Inside Story of The Greatest Crash in Wall Street History, has as much to say about the present as it does the past. We ask Andrew what warning signs he sees in the market, how the government should respond to a crash, and what lessons from the 1920s apply today.

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The data is in: remote work is better for everyone. At least when it’s done right. Stanford Economics Professor Nicholas Bloom has been studying hybrid work since before the pandemic, and he says that companies that have embraced remote work have seen gains in productivity and retention while lowering costs. So why are executives at JP Morgan and Amazon ordering employees back? Today: Professor Bloom explains his data-backed recommendation for the right number of days to spend at the office.

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Best-selling author, podcaster, and professor Scott Galloway is worried about men. He sees them falling behind and he thinks the left, especially, is overlooking their crises. So he’s provided his own guidance in a new book, “Notes on Being a Man.” Part memoir and part advice, Galloway argues that a man’s job is to “protect, provide, and procreate.” Today we ask: where does that leave women? What can be done to help young men, especially on the job market? And in a society where many women are the breadwinners of their households, what does “provide” mean for men?

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Electricity prices in the US are skyrocketing. What’s going on? We asked Vox correspondent Umair Irfan, who covers energy policy, to explain. Plus, why Irfan says clean energy could be a winning issue for Democrats. And not because it’s better for the planet, but because it’s cheap.

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Business Insider recently told its reporters they could use AI to write first drafts of their stories. It was a notable decision by editor-in-chief Jamie Heller, and made BI one of the first mainstream media outlets to embrace AI. We ask Heller what exactly AI is being used for in the BI newsroom. Plus: what skillsets still feel way out of ChatGPT’s reach, and why this is still a good time to get into journalism.

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John Harris, the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Politico, is a short-term pessimist and long-term optimist. In this episode, we appeal to his optimism and ask how the US can recover from its current politics of contempt. Harris shares his analysis of President Trump as the most successful third-party candidate in American history, casts doubt on the fantasy of the “rational center” candidate, and considers what it might take for both parties to present a strong vision for the future.

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In the 1990s, Dr. Stephanie Woolhandler did something her colleagues at Harvard called “crazy:” she decided to work with a senator named Bernie Sanders on healthcare reform. Dr. Woolhandler had already founded an advocacy group called Physicians for a National Health Program, which declared the for-profit healthcare system broken and proposed one solution: single-payer national health insurance. (Or, as Sanders calls it, Medicare for all.)

Dr. Woolhandler, now a distinguished professor at Hunter College, says this solution is more urgent than ever. Our healthcare costs are soaring and people are only getting sicker. Today we ask Dr. Woolhandler: how did we get here, why is a single-payer system the only answer, and how can it be feasibly implemented?

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Have smartphones destroyed a generation?

That was the title of a viral essay by Dr. Jean Twenge in The Atlantic in 2017, which first catapulted her work into the spotlight. For years before The Anxious Generation, Dr. Twenge (who now collaborates with Jonathan Haidt) was raising the alarm about social media use and teen mental health. Now, Dr. Twenge has released clear guidelines for parents on how to manage the technology in their kids’ lives. In this episode, we interrogate the evidence linking anxiety and depression to social media use and hear about the non-negotiable solutions Dr. Twenge lays out in her new book, 10 Rules for Raising Kids in a High-Tech World.

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Roughly 20 years ago, Digg was known as the homepage of the internet. The social and news platform was so big that Alexis Ohanian, the founder of Reddit, referred to it as “the enemy.” But things have changed, and this year, the site's original founder Kevin Rose teamed up with Ohanian to revamp and relaunch Digg.

Now, in this age of AI, the new Digg is betting on the long-term value of real human connection. Kevin Rose tells Henry his plans to make a social platform that might actually be good for humanity: from how Digg will authenticate a "heartbeat" behind its users, to its ambitions to pay moderators and become a “living breathing social Substack.”

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Certain personality traits can determine how happy you are, sometimes more than income and IQ. That’s according to author and journalist Olga Khazan. Hoping to shed some of her more neurotic personality traits, Khazan recently set out to change her personality for the better… and succeeded. Today, Khazan tells us how. Plus: we hear about another recent discovery — why Khazan thinks she might be “doomed to be a tradwife.”

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Anne Applebaum is an award-winning historian and journalist who studies democracy and dictatorship. Her latest book, Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, explores how autocracies are working together to undermine democracy across the globe. Fortunately, Applebaum also considers how democracies can maintain their power against the siege of authoritarianism. Today, why is democracy worth fighting for and how can it be protected in the U.S? Plus: Poland as a guide for how to reverse years of democratic backsliding.

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