E85: Former Berkeley Chancellor Nick Dirks on the Rising Costs and Uses & Abuses of Universities

AEI’s Rick Hess joins Jesse for a wide-ranging conversation on the collapse of academic performance in American schools. They unpack why test scores haven’t recovered since the pandemic, the long-term...

1 Maalis 202546min

In this episode, Jesse is joined by Dr. Dirk Mateer, award-winning educator and professor of economics at the University of Texas at Austin. Together, they dive deep into the growing U.S. national deb...

22 Helmi 20251h 2min

Policy analyst Tad DeHaven (Cato Institute, former deputy budget director of Indiana) joins Jesse to break down why America’s spending problem runs much deeper than "waste, fraud, and abuse." They dig...

19 Helmi 20251h 14min

Why do Americans ask “What do you do?” before “Who are you?” In this episode, journalist and author Adam Chandler joins Jesse to explore America’s deep-rooted obsession with work — and how it compares...

14 Helmi 20251h 15min

From prestige TV to background noise—what happened? In this episode, tech journalist Emily Forlini joins Jesse to break down her viral article on how Netflix is quietly telling writers to simplify scr...

9 Helmi 20251h 8min

In this wide-ranging conversation, Jesse speaks with Dr. Kevin LaGrandeur, AI ethicist and former professor at NYIT, about the dangers of AI hype and the ethical dilemmas emerging from rapid technolog...

7 Helmi 20251h

Computer Scientist, Erik J. Larson returns to discuss the global shakeup in AI sparked by DeepSeek and Alibaba’s Qwen 2.5 Max. We unpack how these models challenge Silicon Valley’s dominance, what mak...

2 Helmi 20251h 48min

Dr. Jon Keeley, senior scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey and professor at UCLA, joins us to break down the record-breaking 2025 California wildfires. He explains how drought, wind, power lines, ...

25 Tammi 202555min