Dan is the Wayne Perry Professor of Taxation at NYU Law School, is a graduate of Princeton University and Yale Law School. Before entering law teaching, he spent three years each in private practice, and at the Joint Congressional Committee on Taxation, where he worked on the Tax Reform Act of 1986. In 1987, Shaviro began his teaching career at the University of Chicago Law School, and he moved to NYU in 1995. In 2023, he received the National Tax Association’s Daniel M. Holland Medal, recognizing lifetime achievement in, and outstanding contributions to, public finance.

Shaviro’s scholarly work mainly focuses on tax policy and other fiscal policy, along with inequality and the intersections between law, literature, and social science. His books include Bonfires of the American Dream in American Rhetoric, Literature, and Film (2022), Fixing U.S. International Taxation (2014), Decoding the U.S. Corporate Tax (2009), and Do Deficits Matter? (1997). He has also published a novel, Getting It (2010), and a memoir, Now Is Now and Then Is Then.

At NYU School of Law Shaviro teaches various tax and other courses, including a scholarly colloquium on tax policy and public finance.

With the leading ten AI companies comprising one third of the value of the S&P and none showing a profit plus the threat they pose to our jobs, let alone humanity, we best keep careful track of the industry. My former graduate student, Seth Benzell, is one of our nation's top AI experts. Seth discusses AI's so-called scaling law, the problem of too little data to fit the industry's parameters mystically being cured by double descent, and the bitter lesson. Seth also talks us through how much money AI can save and, therefore, make by replacing humans in accomplishing existing tasks.

Seth is an assistant professor of Management Science at the Argyros School of Business and Economics at Chapman University. He's a Digital Fellow at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy as well as a Digital Fellow at the Stanford HAI Digital Economy LabHe received a B.A. in economics and a B.S. in physics and mathematics from Tulane University before earning his economics PhD at Boston University. Seth's website is https://www.sethgbenzell.com/. He works on the economics of digitalization, including automation, networks, and information systems. Seth and his co-host, Andrey Fradkin have a terrific podcast, called Justified Posteriors, that focuses on AI.

Orlando Patterson is simply mesmerizing. We all take "freedom" for granted. But Orlando has studied what it is and isn't -- now and across the millenia. The result of this immensely deep as well as deeply fascinating scholarship is a sober take on what we take for granted -- that freedom is clear cut, fundamental, universal, and here to stay. Orlando sets us straight, not based on opinion but based on decades of profoundly insightful research. Please share this podcast to any and all -- blue, red, and purple. "The Land of the Free and the Brave" is not something to take for granted -- certainly not now when our individual and collective freedoms are subject to daily erosion. In this regard, it is worth recalling these words from President Kennedy.

The most powerful single force in the world today is neither Communism nor Capitalism, neither the H-bomb nor the guided missile -- it is man's eternal desire to be free and independent.

A public intellectual, Professor Patterson was, for eight years, Special Advisor for Social policy and development to Prime Minister Michael Manley of Jamaica. He was a founding member of Cultural Survival, one of the leading advocacy groups for the rights of indigenous peoples, and was for several years a board member of Freedom House, a major civic organization for the promotion of freedom and democracy around the world. More recently he has chaired the Commission for the Transformation of Education in Jamaicabased in the Office of Prime Minister Andrew Holness of Jamaica. The author of three novels, he has published widely in journals of opinion and the national press, especially the New York Times, where he was a guest columnist for several weeks. His columns have also appeared in Time Magazine, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, The Jamaica Gleaner, The Public Interest, The New Republic, and The Washington Post.

He is the recipient of many awards, including the National Book Award for Non-Fiction which he won in 1991 for his book on freedom; the Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award of the American Sociological Association; the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature, the Barry Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Hegel Prize from the city of Stuttgart, Germany He holds honorary degrees from several universities, including Yale, London University, the University of Chicago, U.C.L.A. and La Trobe University in Australia. He was awarded both the Order of Distinction and the Order of Merit by the Government of Jamaica. the nation’s third highest national honor. Professor Patterson has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1991 and of the American Academy of Science and Letters since its founding in 2024.

Orlando Patterson, a historical and comparative sociologist, is the John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. He previously held faculty appointments at the University of the West Indies, and the London School of Economics where he received his Ph.D. His academic interests include the origin, culture and practices of freedom; the comparative study of slavery and ethno-racial relations; and the cultural sociology of poverty and underdevelopment with special reference to the Caribbean and African Americans. He has also written on the cultural sociology of sports. Professor Patterson is the author of numerous academic papers and 10 major academic books including, Slavery and Social Death (1982/2018); Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (1991); The Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black Youth (2015); The Confounding Island: Jamaica and the Postcolonial Condition (2019); The Paradox of Freedom: A Biographical Dialog (2023); and Enslavement: Past and Present (2025)