Make Me Smart April 3, 2023 Transcript

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Kimberly Adams 

Hello, I’m Kimberly Adams, coming to you from St. Paul, Minnesota. Welcome back to make me smart. Where we make today make sense. It’s Monday, April 3. Kai is off this week. And joining me today instead is Marketplace’s Matt Levin. Hey, Matt. Welcome back to the podcast.

Matt Levin 

Hey, thanks for having me Kimberly. Good to be here.

Kimberly Adams 

Yes. And I am actually at company headquarters. APM HQ in St. Paul, Minnesota for a couple days. And even from here I’ve got some news fixes and you do too. We got some smiles. And how was your weekend Matt?

Matt Levin 

How was my weekend? I don’t know. I can’t even remember what I do anymore on the weekends. I’m teaching a journalism class at night. And I was grading, grading papers a lot this weekend. Was your weekend more exciting?

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah, I had my cherry blossom party and it was good times. And then my flight to St. Paul got canceled so that I ended up on this like epic journey today to get from DC to New York, to Memphis to St. Paul in order to get here in time for the show. It was an adventure. But speaking of…

Matt Levin 

I’m gonna forsee an answer to this. Which was your favorite airport?

Kimberly Adams 

I mean, LaGuardia looks much nicer now than it used to but National Airport is my home airport. So I kind of, I’m a little partial to it. But the St. Paul airport is huge, man. It’s like really, really big. I don’t know. I have to get used to it. See which one I like. Will decide on the way out.

Matt Levin 

Sounds good. I look forward to the reviews.

Kimberly Adams 

But I guess the fact that you’re teaching a class relates a bit to your news fix there.

Matt Levin 

It does. So as you know, I am somewhat obsessed with ChatGPT and artificial intelligence broadly. Kimberly, do you think we talk too much about ChatGPT or not enough about ChatGPT at Marketplace?

Kimberly Adams 

I think probably not enough. I know that we’re planning to do a deep dive on it at some point in the coming weeks because I think this is just huge, like society changing technology. Like just talking to my sister. She says it’s like changed her life. She uses it.

Matt Levin 

Already?

Kimberly Adams 

Yes, she uses it in her teaching. She uses it when she’s like working on job applications. She’s using it, you know, helping her prepare to see to see some of her clients. She used it last week to set up a meal plan for her family for the week. She asked, she told ChatGPT what she had in the fridge and in the pantry and said come up with a meal plan for my family this week that, you know, and she’s using it all the time. And she says it saved her hours if not days of time every single week. And she is not a very tech savvy person.

Matt Levin 

Well, I’m glad your answer was yes. Because in my head I keep going back and forth of like am I too obsessed with this or or is this like covering the printing press when it first arrived? Like it feel like…

Kimberly Adams 

I think it kinda is.

Matt Levin 

I think it kind of is to Okay, so let me get to the news fix. Italy, this news dropped late last week, Italy has banned chat GPT. To my…

Kimberly Adams 

Hmm good luck.

Matt Levin 

I know. And the reason I I wanted this as the news fix is that I think the reason behind it is interesting. So Italy has a data privacy agency. And the data privacy agency basically said, “Hey, ChatGPT, we have data privacy concerns here. You need to suspend operations for 20 days and figure your data stuff out.” And so ChatGPT basically said, “Okay, we do that and we welcome regulation,” which is a mantra you actually hear quite often in the AI community. But the privacy portion of this was especially interesting to me. Because I keep thinking about a story I did about how Chat GPT could revolutionize search. And one of the maxims I think, in maybe old Silicon Valley was, social media is who you pretend to be and search is kind of maybe the dark underbelly of who you are, or the, you know, I’m butchering that maxim, but you get the point. Because people share very intimate details with the Google search engine, right? They kind of don’t think about “oh, I’m, you know, asking something very sensitive here and giving that information to a company,” they kind of treat it as a input output machine. Exactly! And it’s super interesting. I wonder how people are going to react to a Chat GPT-like technology? Will they be more forthcoming with their information? Will they actually provide even more sensitive data because it is human-esque? Or will they because it’s human-esque say, “whoah whoah whaoh I’m not going to tell you, you know, that I’m looking for foot fungus cream or whatever” Like, you’re gonna, you’re gonna hold that against me someday AI. So…

Kimberly Adams 

As a commodity. I’m glad you brought that up because that’s actually been one of the reasons that I’ve been kind of hesitant to explore the technology more. Because I feel like anything I ask it is effectively feeding the data set, you know, and in feeding it information about me and look, I know there’s a ton of information about me on the internet already. You just feed in those transcripts that make me smart, and you know, all there is to know about me. But I don’t know it feels like a you’re by using it, you’re kind of opting in to letting yourself become a part of the giant brain that is ChatGPT

Matt Levin 

Yep. How polite are you to the to the ChatGPT?

Kimberly Adams 

Well, that’s just it I’m not really using it. I’m very polite to Siri. But you know, sometimes it sounds like me. So you know.

Matt Levin 

Alright, well, that’s my news fix. What do you got Kimberly?

Kimberly Adams 

I’ve got two of them actually. The first one is a story that you rightfully spotted I was going to latch on to today, which is that we are coming up on the date when millions and millions, I guess as of Saturday coming up this Saturday, millions and millions of people who have been on Medicaid during the pandemic might get kicked off because during the pandemic, there was a special rule that said… it expanded the number of people who could be on Medicaid, which is the health insurance plan for people who are low income or have some other considerations. And then once people were on it, states were not allowed to kick them off during the pandemic. Well, that expires on Saturday. And there are all sorts of numbers about how many people might end up losing health insurance coverage as a result of this, and it could be up to 15 million people. And the New York Times has a really powerful story, you know, kind of following some of the people who have to call those folks to let them know that they’re at risk of losing their coverage. And by the way, the reason that people would be losing their coverage is because they would have to verify that they were still eligible. During the pandemic you didn’t have to verify that you still met the eligibility requirements, and the eligibility requirements were expanded. So now, people whose situations may have changed, will have to prove that they are still eligible. And some of those programs are really, really hard to get into, especially without the extra pandemic expansions of them. I remember when I was in New York a couple of months ago, they were running all of these ads, saying, reminding people to check their eligibility status and to go to these websites and things. Because they didn’t want people to get caught out closer to the deadline and not have a plan for coverage. Because, you know, if you’re finding out this weekend, that you know, you lose your coverage and then something happens you know, you’re in a real lurch. So yeah.

Matt Levin 

Yeah, it’s it’s interesting. I feel like all of these expanded safety net programs that like when you look at like poverty rates, we actually made strides. Like I’m thinking of the Child Tax Credit, right?

Kimberly Adams 

It knocked child hunger, like in half or something like that.

Matt Levin 

That’s right. And SNAP, the food stamps program. Like they’re all kind of now withdrawing. We’re we’re peeling off the safety net that was expanded during COVID.

Kimberly Adams 

Which is interesting, because you have these sort of lofty goals that people say are important. Like, we want to end child hunger, right? What should we do to end child hunger? And we literally just had this case study of something that works to significantly reduce child hunger. And we’re not going to keep doing it. Which is pretty wild. Okay. My other news fix is because even though I’m in St. Paul today, I am, unfortunately, a creature of Washington. And it’s so hard to look away from all of the Trump stuff. So Trump arrived in New York today. He’s likely going to be, you know, arraigned tomorrow in New York and get, you know, his mug shot and his fingerprints and everything like that. But what I’m more interested in is all of the money. Trump has raised at least $4 million so far, according to The Hill and several other sources, off of this news of his indictment. And I’ve gotten… I’m on so many, so many email lists of politicians, fundraising and Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and all these other things. And everybody, not just Trump, is fundraising off of this. The Democrats are fundraising off of it. The Republicans are fundraising off of it. Individual members of Congress are fundraising off of it. Trump’s making money off of this. And there’s another story in media light, Media Matters, that Meta is making money off of this because now that Trump is allowed back on Facebook, they are making money off of the ads that he is running to make money off of the fact that he’s been indicted. And that is it American politics in a nutshell.

Matt Levin 

I know it’s it’s, it’s like satiric in and of itself. It’s it’s a lucrative indictment. It’s amazing.

Kimberly Adams 

A lucrative indictment indeed. I guess it’s gonna pay help pay his legal fees. Yeah. All right. Definitely time for a smile. Let’s do the hard turn. I heard the story that you picked over the weekend. How fun is this?

Matt Levin 

I love this. I love this story. So yes, this dropped I believe on Friday. When you picture a T Rex, Kimberly, what do you what did you picture before you saw this?

Kimberly Adams 

I mean, the bearing teeth of the Jurassic Park version of like, teeny tiny arms, big head, giant mouth, super sharp teeth bared out and frightening-ish stuff

Matt Levin 

That yes, and that’s certainly the depiction in pop culture thanks to Jurassic Park. And pretty much everything else. Turns out though…

Kimberly Adams 

Don’t forget The Land Before Time.

Matt Levin 

I know. I know. Well, I feel like we might have more Land Before Time-esque depictions now. Because, paleontologist at least in one journal article in the journal Science, very well respected journal. They have discovered that dinosaurs like T rexes had lips. They had lips Kimberly! And so when they close their jaws, it wasn’t like a crocodile which is what paleontologists believed before. But it was covered. You didn’t see like the gnarly things or whatever when a T Rex, I guess tried to eat you. So anyway, I love this. I love the idea of like T-rexes having to like get chapstick at some point. It’s great. This this made me smile when I read it.

Kimberly Adams 

Well, mine is very on brand. For me. It’s a space story. NASA has announced the names of the astronauts who are going on the next moon mission, the first crew under Artemis. And you know as per the promise, the crew is more diverse. There is a black man in the crew, there’s a woman in the crew. And it’s just exciting to see us getting that much closer to the moon, the return to the moon. And this one is going to basically test out a lot of the technology that’s going to be used for the next round of Moon adventures. And so this is the first crewed, according to NASA’s press release, “the first crewed mission on NASA’s path to establishing a long term presence on the moon for science and exploration through Artemis.” And it’s very exciting. And so there’s bios of all the different people on the website. And I think it’s just kind of fun. It’s kind of cool. I’m excited.

Matt Levin 

Have you been to the Johnson Space Center?

Kimberly Adams 

I have not.

Matt Levin 

Oh, you gotta go. You definitely gotta go. Yeah.

Kimberly Adams 

I know. There’s so many like school space, things I want to do. I, I hope that we are able to chat with some of these folks before they take off at some point, hint hint, nudge nudge Marissa.

Matt Levin 

That would be really cool. Marissa get an astronaut!

Kimberly Adams 

Please and thank you. Oh man. I yeah, I’m very excited about this. I think it’s super cool. All right. Um, that’s it. That is it for today for a Monday. Tomorrow, it’s going to be a little bit of a hard show, but it’s an important one. We’re going to be reflecting on gun violence in America. And we’re going to be talking with the Washington Post’s Todd Frankel about that big AR-15 investigation, that we talked about I guess a week or so ago, that is so powerful. And so we’re going to talk to Todd about how the AR-15 sort of came to dominate the American gun market and also how it became this powerful political symbol and we would love you know your questions and things about that.

Matt Levin 

That’ll be good. Until then keep sending your questions, comments, and suggestions or you can send questions, comments, suggestions about that subject to 508-U-B-SMART. S-M-A-R-T. you can also email at makemesmart@marketplace.org. Yes. Dot org.

Kimberly Adams 

We are a nonprofit.

Matt Levin 

Yes, we are nonprofit.

Kimberly Adams 

Make Me Smart is produced by Courtney Bergsieker. Today’s program was engineered by Charlton Thorp with help from Alex Simpson here in St. Paul, MN. Ellen Rolfes writes our newsletter. Our intern is Antonio Barreras.

Matt Levin 

Marissa Cabrera is our acting senior producer. The great Bridget Bodnar is the director of podcasts. And Francesca Levy is the executive director of Digital.

Kimberly Adams 

Look at that timing Matt Levin.

Matt Levin 

Did we nail it? I have no idea.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah, you nailed it. Great Job!

Matt Levin 

Boom!