Hello everyone and welcome to the Focus Group podcast.

I'm Sarah Longwell, publisher of the bulwark.

And this week we are talking about a civilizational change that is almost too big for a political punditry show like this one,

but we're going to try anyway.

We're talking about AI, artificial intelligence.

Usually on this show, we slice and dice the American public, eight ways from Sunday,

but what we've heard has not had a super obvious political valence, at least not yet. Unlike most topics we cover on

this show, AI does not break down neatly along partisan lines. It's something we're all sorting

through in real time. So a lot of what you're going to hear is about how people across the

political spectrum are using AI and the pitfalls they're running into, both for themselves and for

their information diets. My guest today is Megan McArdle, economics columnist for the Washington Post,

host of their reasonably optimistic podcast, a co-host of Central Air with Josh Barrow and

Ben Dreyfus, and a regular on the dispatch podcast. Megan,

thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. I'm so excited you're here because I'm a big

fan of yours. I read everything you do. It is mutual. And you write a lot about technology.

And so I thought you would be an excellent guest for this show. Why do you write so much about

technology? So fun biographical detail

before I went to business school in the early 1990s and mid-1990s, I became an IT person, totally by

accident. Like a help desk? I was a help desk. I designed and built basically networks for banks.

Oh.

The server workstation part, not the part that makes your IP packets go out on the

internet and find other stuff.

...