The relationship between the US and Europe is deteriorating along both security and economic dimensions. The Trump administration has imposed tariffs, while also being sharply critical of NATO allies. So what are European leaders to do? Hope things go back to normal in the US? Or perhaps become closer with China? Our guest on this episode says the latter would be a grave mistake. This episode was recorded live on April 1 at the DC headquarters of the Council on Foreign Relations. We spoke with Gina Raimondo, now a CFR Distinguished Fellow, who previously served as the commerce secretary in the Biden Administration, and prior to that was the governor of Rhode Island. She discusses her view that European industry is being hollowed out by China, and that the only path forward is a global, unified, non-China trading bloc, which is an idea that's being thwarted by the Trump administration. We also talk about the legacy of the CHIPS Act, and her fears about AI creating mass unemployment and destabilizing our democracy.

Read more:
US Lawmakers Propose Crackdown on Chip Tool Sales to China
Cheap Chinese Cars Are Waiting on Detroit's Doorstep

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There's obviously a lot of talk these days about AI and possible destruction of white collar jobs. Intuitively bankers might be expected to be victims of this. But before we can answer whether AI can disrupt an industry, or a line of work, we have to know what the job actually entails. What do investment bankers actually do, and why are they paid for it? To answer this question, we speak with Scott Bok, the longtime former CEO of the investment bank Greenhill. Scott is also the author of the book Surviving Wall Street: A Tale of Triumph, Tragedy, and Timing. We discuss how the industry changed in his career, what type of people thrive in it, and how AI could change the nature of the profession.

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When you consider the fact that many people don't know how and where to place a comma, it's safe to say that AI is already better than most people at writing. It's clean copy. It can be surprisingly persuasive. And sometimes, it's even informative. But there's frequently still something about it that just seems... off. Many people can tell quite quickly when they're reading AI-generated text. And beyond the style, the existence of AI generated text has all kinds of ramifications, from making it easier for students to cheat, to the rise of deceptive chatbots, to potentially degrading the experience on sites like Reddit. So how do you actually tell if a piece of writing was generated by AI? On this episode, we speak with Max Spero, the CEO of Pangram Labs, a company that built software to detect whether a piece of content was AI generated or not. We talk about the advanced techniques they use, the risk of false positives and false negatives, and what AI writing means in general for the future of the Internet.

Read more:
The AI Video Apps Gaining Ground After OpenAI Declared Sora Dead
Credit Derivative Trading Shatters Records on Iran War, AI Fears

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Oil has shot up by a lot since the start of war with Iran. But it could still get much worse. So far, the massive disruption (due to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz) has been cushioned by the drawing down of inventories and distributions from strategic stockpiles. Meanwhile, there is some oil still on tankers that has yet to be delivered. According to Bloomberg Opinion columnist Javier Blas, the potential remains for oil to go much, much higher. On this episode, we speak with Javier about the scale of the shock, why the pain is extraordinarily high in East Asia, how this compares to past oil shocks, and what the world would look like if Iran retains control of the Strait.

Read more:
Oil Falls on Signs From US, Iran of Openness for War Resolution
Trump’s God Squad Exempts Gulf Drilling from Endangered Species Protections

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This week, NASA is scheduled to launch Artemis II, a mission that will send astronauts around the moon for the first time in more than 50 years. But this comes at a time when the space agency is facing some pretty big funding challenges, as well as growing competition with private players like SpaceX. In this episode, we speak with Alexander MacDonald, who served as NASA's first chief economist and is now a senior associate at the Aerospace Security Project at CSIS. We talk about why the space agency had economists, how space exploration is funded, and how NASA measures its own economic impact. Please note, this episode was recorded March 10.

Read more:
Nasdaq Speeds Up Index Entry for SpaceX, Large IPOs With New Rule
SpaceX Knocks Boeing From Dominant Role in NASA Moon Mission

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When we last spoke to Marco Argenti, chief information officer at Goldman Sachs, we were talking about how the bank was deploying AI, including the development of its own internal tools. But that was a year and a half ago and a lot has changed since then, especially with the arrival of agentic platforms like Claude Code. So what exactly is Goldman Sachs doing with AI now? And what has its experience with the new tech been like so far? On this episode, we catch up with Marco to discuss what AI deployment at the bank actually looks like at the moment — including how AI coding is changing the work of its developers and engineers — to all the data challenges and regulatory concerns that come with integrating this technology at scale.

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The last big story right before the war in Iran started was the collapse in the relationship between the Pentagon and Anthropic, with the latter objecting to any potential use of its models in either fully autonomous weapons or domestic surveillance. Of course, this story immediately become more relevant with the start of the war, and the reporting that Anthropic's technology was in fact utilized at the start of hostilities. But what does that mean? How are these models used? And what would a fully autonomous weapons system actually entail? On this episode, we speak with Paul Scharre, the executive vice president and director of studies at the Center for a New American Security. He has written two books on the subject of AI in warfare, and previously worked inside the Department of Defense on some of these very questions. We discuss the future of autonomous weaponry, and the various ethical and technological dimensions such weapons would entail.

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Ripple effects from the war in Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz continue to widen. There's yet another brewing shortage, this time in helium. While most people associate helium with balloons and funny voices, the element is used in a surprisingly wide variety of industrial settings, including semiconductor production, where its role in advanced lithography has been growing rapidly. But helium mining and exploration in North America has been practically non-existent for a variety of reasons. And while the US used to have a strategic helium reserve, the government started selling that down in the late 1990s. On this episode, we speak with Nicholas Snyder, the founder and CEO of North American Helium, which does helium mining in Canada. We discuss the properties of helium that make it so useful, as well as the difficulties of expanding global production and distribution.

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