The Treasury Department announced today that the U.S. could default on its debt as early as June 1. For the past few months, House Republicans have used the debt limit as a bargaining chip to secure spending cuts. As the new deadline looms over us, we are wondering: Is there a way out? And, an unassuming Supreme Court case could change how a slew of laws are interpreted. Plus, video-chatting parrots make us smile.
Here’s everything we talked about today:
“The Luring Test: AI and the engineering of consumer trust” from the Federal Trade Commission
“Supreme Court will consider major case on power of federal regulatory agencies” from SCOTUSblog
“U.S. must raise debt limit by as early as June 1 to avoid default, Treasury says” from The Washington Post
“The U.S. could hit the debt ceiling by June 1, much sooner than expected, Yellen warns” from NBC
“Trump to appear at CNN town hall in New Hampshire” from CNN
“NASA’s Perseverance rover loses its hitchhiking ‘pet rock’ after more than a year together on Mars” from Live Science
“Scientists Taught Pet Parrots to Video Call Each Other—and the Birds Loved It” from Smithsonian magazine
Have a comment or question about something we talked about? Send it our way! Leave us a voicemail at 508-U-B-SMART or write to makemesmart@marketplace.org.
Make Me Smart May 1, 2023 Transcript
Note: Marketplace podcasts are meant to be heard, with emphasis, tone and audio elements a transcript can’t capture. Transcripts are generated using a combination of automated software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting it.
Kai Ryssdal
Jayk, you ready?
Kimberly Adams
Ready, ready, ready. I’m Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to make me smart where we make today make sense.
Kai Ryssdal
Turn on the little red light that says on air and magic things happen. I’m Kai Ryssdal. Thanks for joining us on this Monday, the first of May. Today we’re gonna do a little news and then a story or two that’s making us smile. And then we get out of your hair. Ms. Adams, what do you got?
Kimberly Adams
One of them ties in very nicely with the interview you did today with the…or well you didn’t do today but it aired today with Lena Khan. The FTC has an blog post today about artificial intelligence, which you asked Khan about. And it’s called the “Luring Test: AI and the engineering of consumer trust.” And it’s it’s one of the FTC attorneys in advertising practices laying out just just some warnings of things to keep an eye out for that these generative AI tools are probably likely going to be used to, quote “better persuade people and change their behavior.” And there’s a lot of things that was, that were highlighted in this piece that have sort of been kicking around in the periphery of my brain, but were put to words here. And it said “many of these chat bots are effectively built to persuade, and are designed to answer queries and confident language even when those answers are fictional. A tendency to trust the output of these tools also comes in part from automation bias, where people may be unduly trusting of answers from machine machines, which may seem neutral or impartial.” And if you think about it, if you ask your phone, what the weather is, and your phone tells you what the temperature is outside, even if it doesn’t feel that way, you’re gonna be like, “Oh, I wonder what what’s wrong with me,” right? Because you sort of default to trusting these, you know, the technology that becomes by default authoritative. And when we know that these bots are making stuff up sometimes there’s a real risk there. Anyway, there’s there’s a lot of thought provoking pieces being written about generative AI and I’m… I like reading them because I do still think that this is a big moment and giant tech shift in our culture that’s ongoing.
Kai Ryssdal
I think you’re totally right. And I think we’re not ready for it, Americans specifically. But humans, generally speaking are credulous people. And you know if the robot tells us something, well God is the robot, it must be true. And it ain’t it ain’t you know? Yeah, totally. Yeah, we’re not ready.
Kimberly Adams
Um, my other one is a Supreme Court case on that I’m keeping an eye on. This is, you know, there’s there’s the cases, there’s the cases that get a ton of attention. And then there are the cases that actually have these big impacts. And you don’t really noticed so much. So this one is Chevron versus the National Resources Defense Council. Sorry, not, that’s not what it is. It’s a different one. But 40 years ago, there was a case, Chevron versus the National Resources Defense Council, in which the Supreme Court ruled that when a regulation or a law is unclear, the government should defer to a federal agency’s interpretation of it right? And in this case, it’s a fishing company that is saying, it’s here we go. Doo doo doo doo, Loper bright enterprises versus Raimondo is one of the cases. And there are all of these cases, there’s a couple of them, that basically want the supreme court to review the Chevron case and say that when a regulation is not clear, we shouldn’t in fact, defer to what the federal agency thinks. We should back up off of it, and let you know the company or whatever, decide what to do and operate on the side of less government, which as you can imagine, a lot of conservatives who want smaller government would really love to see this thing overturned. And it could really shift how the US handles these types of, these rules.
Kai Ryssdal
We have to be clear that what’s at stake here in this Chevron case, is the administrative state. And the administrative state, which are the rules, laws and regulations by which this economy works, right. That’s what’s at risk here. And it’s forget, forget, don’t forget, because it’s critically important, but forget just the mifepristone and the abortion pill case, right? This is… and and the FDA and what it’s allowed to do. This would now be everything. Its mining regulations, its paperwork, regulations, it’s I mean you name it, and the administrative state has some slice of it as the US economy runs. And it’s not too far stretch to say that conservatives on the Supreme Court don’t favor the administrative state. And so if they decide to get rid of the chevron rule, Katy bar the door man. Who knows what’s gonna happen?
Kimberly Adams
Yeah, that didn’t do a very good job of articulating the two cases that seem that are likely gonna get bundled together on this. It’s Loper bright enterprises vs. Raimondo, who you also talked to you recently. Gina Raimondo. And then Murray versus UBS security, that one is a whistleblower case. But you know, they kind of tie into the same idea of what you just said.
Kai Ryssdal
Yeah, it’s a very big deal. Okay, so speaking of big deals, I can’t decide which of these to do first, and which of these annoys me more, but I’ll go with a visceral one first. CNN announced today that it’s going to do a town hall with Donald Trump in New Hampshire sometime in the next 10 days. Caitlin Collins is going to moderate. And I would just like to point out that the American media is about to commit the same set of errors that it did in 2016 by normalizing the behavior of a person who, who still rejects the results of the 2020 election, who without too terribly much argument, incited an insurrection in the Capitol, and continues to defy reality today. And that’s really bad. That’s really, really bad.
Kimberly Adams
I’m not ready to say that it’s the American media about to do it right now…
Kai Ryssdal
It’s CNN! It’s one of the biggest cable channels out there. Even though its audience is relatively tiny, it carries a disproportionate oomph and CNN, once again, CNN which sorry, this really irritates me. But CNN who under Jeff Zucker in 2016, as you know, gave hours of airtime to Donald Trump, going so far as to broadcast an empty podium in the lead up to his events because it got clicks and ratings and made Jeff Zucker and CNN piles of money. They’re doing the same thing. Because unless Caitlin Collins is gonna stop every sentence that Donald Trump says that’s false, which she won’t do, this is the same thing. Okay, so end of rant.
Kimberly Adams
And are they giving a townhall to Nikki Haley? Are we going to see townhalls for Robert Kennedy? And you know, all these other people who have announced that they’re running. I should say like, there are lots of people in media who are pushing back against this and I was looking at the front page of The Huffington Post, and it’s like, giant letters. CNN rolls out the red carpet for Trump. Basically critizising..
Kai Ryssdal
It’s appalling. I do. I do wonder what the conversation is sorry to interrupt. I do wonder what the conversations are like inside the halls at CNN, truly.
Kimberly Adams
Oh, for sure. For sure. I mean, maybe people are scared to speak up right now.
Kai Ryssdal
Maybe, because it’s tough times yeah. Alright. Anyway. So that’s my rant for the day. Here’s the the other substantive thing, which is also very, very, very not good news, Janet Yellen and the Congressional Budget Office, Janet Yellen, obviously the Secretary of the Treasury and the CBO, the nonpartisan observer, and analyst of all things for Congress said today that the X date, which is to say the day that Janet Yellen actually runs out of money to pay our debts because she’s been moving money around for a long time because she has to because Republicans in Congress won’t raise the debt limit. The X date could be as soon as January… sorry, as soon as June the first. June the first is 31 days from right now. Are you kidding me? And Republicans in the in the house are now saying, “Oh, we did our bit. It’s up to Biden and and Chuck Schumer.” And I, I’m this this will be very bad. Sorry. I’m kind of speechless. End of rant.
Kimberly Adams
Rant number two
Kai Ryssdal
I know right?
Kimberly Adams
Yeah. There’s there’s no way around it. This is real bad and it’s getting close to worse. And I I don’t see the way out yet. And that’s particularly disturbing.
Kai Ryssdal
I read this afternoon that the Senate is in session for 13 days between now on the first of June. And two of those days that it’s nominally you’re supposed to be in session are Fridays and and the Senate doesn’t like to work on Fridays. So yeah, there’s not a lot of time. It’s not a lot of time. I don’t know. Alright. Jayk. Jayk. All right. I should just come clean right here. I’m a little grumpy today, as you might have been able to tell from the first seven minutes of this podcast, so I do not have a make me smile. My apologies. Just don’t have it.
Kimberly Adams
It’s okay. I’ll go ahead and do two. I’ll do the one that I sent you and then the one that I had. So the one that I was suggesting for you is, it’s it’s sort of bittersweet. So we’ve talked before about the pet rock that NASA’s perseverance rover has had for more than a year. It lost the rock. You know, it fell off the wheel. And, you know, this little rock that just sort of lodged in the wheel and it wasn’t hurting anything. It was just like, sort of photobombing every so often that, you know, this was like Perseverance’s is rock. And so now the rock, the hitchhiking pet rock has has fallen off. After more than a year. It’s more than half the time that Perseverance has been on Mars. So that’s, that’s one which is you know, it’s bittersweet, but it’s kind of fun. The other one is a story in Smithsonian Magazine that, courtesy of someone on Discord who flagged this to me, scientists have taught pet parrots to video call each other, and the birds apparently loved it. So parrots are I guess very social creatures, but a lot of people will have them like just one as a pet and they get lonely. And they trained these cockatoos to you know, use a tablet to initiate a video call with other parrots. And then it says “domesticated parrots and learn to initiate video chats with other pet parrots had a variety of positive experiences such as learning new skills.” Yeah. “It says lonely parents are unhappy parrots so researchers set set out to find a way for some of the estimated 20 million pet birds living in the United States to connect with each other”
Kai Ryssdal
Oh man. I hadn’t seen that bit. That’s a lot of birds
Kimberly Adams
A lot of birds. I remember when I was in LA somebody was telling me that there’s like all of these like green parrots that y’all have.
Kai Ryssdal
Oh, man, up by my house. Yeah.
Kimberly Adams
That I guess came from like somebody accidentally releasing them at one point and then they just bred.
Kai Ryssdal
Yep. And every now and then you see flocks of like a dozen flying over and they’re loud. And they’re, they’re cool to look at. They’re gorgeous, this bright green, but wow. Yeah, that’s it’s actually a thing. It’s actually a thing. Parots. Who knew. Alright, we’re done for today. Tomorrow we’re gonna do a Tuesday show. We’re going to talk about child labor in the United States, specifically illegal child labor. If you’ve seen any of the reporting, it’s kind of incredible and horrifying. We want to know why it’s becoming more frequent and why some states are trying to rollback, and have rolled back actually, child labor protections. That’s actually happening out there.
Kimberly Adams
As always, if you have a question, comment or suggestion we are here for it. You can leave us a voicemail at 508-U-B-SMART. You can also email us at makemesmart@marketplace.org
Kai Ryssdal
Make Me Smart is produced by Courtney Bergsieker. Today’s program was engineered by Jayk Cherry. Ellen Rolfes writes our newsletter. Our intern is Antonio Barreras.
Kimberly Adams
Marissa Cabrera is our senior producer. Bridget Bodnar is the director of podcasts … And Francesca Levy is the executive director of Digital and On Demand.
Kai Ryssdal
Excellent. Excellent.
Kimberly Adams
I was thinking you are so lucky that we didn’t have the show yesterday because you were definitely gonna get an it’s gonna be May joke so you were saved.
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