Something's been nagging at us all holiday break. With each fresh revelation about Facebook, new thoughts arise about whether or not to participate on the platform, and whether that really makes a difference or not. But quitting Instagram, which is, of course, owned by Facebook, feels quite a bit harder. We're attached! Our listeners tell us th ...…

In this new year, maybe you've resolved to improve yourself, or you might return to projects and problems left hanging in 2018. One approach to try: design thinking. We talked with Sarah Stein Greenberg, who runs the design program at Stanford University, about the fundamentals, promises and limits of a design-centered approach to just about ev ...…

We spent a lot of 2018 talking about free speech online and what responsibility social media platforms bear for the information or ideas shared on them. We'll probably spend 2019 talking about it a lot, too. For now, let's think back to the summer, when conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his Infowars brand were getting booted off virtually ever ...…

This Christmas Eve, we're regifting one of our favorite interviews from the past year. Adam Conover's TruTV show, "Adam Ruins Everything," is back for a new season. His mission is kind of like ours: Challenging assumptions and questioning everything in a bid to make us all smarter. Doesn't that sound useful over the holidays?This interview orig ...…

It's our last new episode of 2018, which means it's time to check in on the predictions we made this time last year. Were we right or wrong? And what's coming next? Some of our favorite guests are back to help out, like activist Ai-Jen Poo, comedian Adam Conover and librarian of Congress Carla Hayden. And, of course, we'll hear from you and wha ...…

Longtime listeners will know Kai Ryssdal and Molly Wood are limited to one newsy Fixation Fix a week by their band of strict podcast producers (hi). But this week, in the spirit of the season, we're giving them a chance to go wild. Open all the tabs you want, hosts! We'll make you a little smarter about corporate proxy warfare, the way you talk ...…

Is capitalism working for enough people? We've been wrestling with that question since way back in episode two. Molly Wood and Kai Ryssdal have taken it to economists, business leaders and experts of all political stripes. Now, moral capitalism (or conscious ... sustainable ... whatever-you-like-to-call-it capitalism) is getting a ideological b ...…

Housing is the biggest driver of wealth and debt for most families in America. It's inextricably linked with the health of the economy, so as the market shows signs of cooling off, this week we're getting smart about it. We get a sort of "House Hunters" story from a listener who shows how her family is hitting stumbling blocks as they try to mo ...…

It's tough to admit you have a filter bubble, and even harder to break out of it. But we all live in one: Social networks are programmed to serve up content they think will appeal to you, and that can create a feedback loop that keeps diverse voices out of your media diet. So what can you do? We asked visual journalist Jon Keegan. He worked on ...…

On a day that saw Amazon seemingly flex on dozens of cities all around the country over some 50,000 jobs, you might find yourself wondering just how big a company can get. We've been wondering that ourselves, about all kinds of companies, so we called up Tim Wu. He's got a new book on the subject, called "The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the ...…

By the time this episode is out, midterm results will be rolling in. So let's take a pause before that wave hits to ask: How are you doing? We'll hear from some listeners about what they thought they knew and what's changed since last election. In that same spirit, we'll revisit our interview from Trump's first 100 days in office with author Ge ...…

People love to hate on polls. Since the experts seemingly got the 2016 election so wrong (or did they?), pundits and politicos have been quick to trash polling. But it feels like we've been in a perpetual state of polling the last two years. We couldn't even resist putting one out before this show. We need someone to tell us what to believe, so ...…

With "early decision" and "early action" deadlines looming for colleges across the United States, graduating high school seniors are stuck figuring what any given school will actually cost. They're pondering the mix of private loans, federal loans, scholarships and grants, and factoring in housing, books and fees before they sign on any dotted ...…

It's getting cheaper and easier to make your house smart. That's exciting for many people. And concerning, too. Listener Jordan Parry got in touch a while back as her landlord was getting ready to install connected thermostats, keyless locks, water sensors and more smart features in her building — and she wanted to know about her right to prote ...…

It's time for another Explainathon, the biannual tradition when we put Kai and Molly to the test: In 30 minutes, they'll try to answer as many of your questions as possible. It's going to be tough, because this might just be our widest-ranging 'thon yet: Gamers! Trade wars! Gas prices! Bots on the trading floor! Plus, Kai and Molly will try to ...…

Quick programming note right up top: Kai is out sick this week, so we've had to delay our biannual Explainathon until next week. But! Instead we're gonna talk about ... weed. Pot. CBD. THC. Marijuana. It's a big business that's poised to become much bigger: By 2022, legal revenue is expected to hit $23.4 billion in the United States, even as th ...…

This is a really special episode, folks. We're talking with Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress. She's the first woman and the first African-American to hold the job, presiding over some 167 million items in the Library. It may just be the least-partisan part of Congress, an invaluable public resource that endures in an age of polarization ...…

Decades after it was first introduced, virtual reality finally feels like it’s on the precipice of enormous potential. And it’s not all entertainment — VR could change the way we go to work, communicate with loved ones or train ourselves to deal with difficult situations. But that got one of our listeners wondering: Who’s thinking about the dra ...…

In the push for tax cuts last year, President Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans said companies would use the money they saved to reinvest in workers, build new factories and help propel the economy to even faster growth. Nine months later, we've seen something very different. There's been a dramatic increase in stock buybacks, which is ...…

As top executives from Twitter and Facebook (and maybe Google?) get ready testify for Congress on fake account and election interference, tweets from President Trump have steered the conversation to questions of anti-conservative bias on these companies' platforms. One of the President's particular claims - that search results are skewed agains ...…

We talk about wage stagnation around here a lot. If the labor market is tight, companies are raking in money with a bull market and tax breaks and the GDP is humming along, why aren't workers getting a raise? One possible explanation: Massive companies like Amazon are partially responsible, due to both reduced competition for workers and algori ...…

This week is a listener request episode. After our shows on design thinking and the blockchain, a lot of you asked about Civil. It's the journalism platform behind ventures like The Colorado Sun and the ZigZag Podcast, and it's powered by blockchain. We've got Civil COO Lillian Ruiz on the show today to tell us all about it, along with Colorado ...…

The dam finally burst last week as many of the internet's largest platforms, like Facebook, YouTube and Apple Podcasts, banned conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. His site, InfoWars, has gained legitimacy from President Donald Trump in recent years, even as it spews hate speech and tars Sandy Hook victims as government-employed "crisis actors." Not ...…

Where were you in 1998? Kai Ryssdal was just starting his career in public radio. Slate staff writer Leon Neyfakh was in middle school, watching the Clinton impeachment play out on television with parents who were sympathetic to the president. Season two of Neyfakh's podcast "Slow Burn" tackles that scandal, challenging our thinking about Monic ...…

Journalists love to list the disparate items caught up in the trade war. Blue jeans! Cranberries! Bourbon! Ginseng! There's something giddy about the seeming randomness of it. But lists of tariffs are not random. They're made by actual people looking very carefully at products and politics across international borders. Former U.S. trade officia ...…

In some ways, Elon Musk is made for our times. He's a fiercely polarizing billionaire who's positioned himself as a singular visionary, capable of remaking the auto industry and revolutionizing space travel while building rescue submarines on the side. He knows his way around a Twitter fight, too. But why do the media, Tesla fans and Musk himse ...…

We've told you about other wild uses for blockchain technology besides bitcoin: mortgages, weddings and more. Now it's time to go down the cryptocurrency rabbit hole — or maybe the bitcoin mineshaft? Joon Ian Wong is managing director at cryptocurrency news site CoinDesk. He takes us back to his reporting for Quartz on a bitcoin mine in Inner M ...…

Make Me Smart loves the art of the zoom out. Wages aren't rising? Let's look at how capitalism is or isn't working for people. Big leak at Facebook? Let's talk about the ethics of running a huge tech company. And one way to approach big problems is to change your thinking about them in a big way. So could an issue with an economy or a corporati ...…

This is what a trade war looks like. Trump has been standing his ground on tariffs (he's even had a law drafted called the FART Act — U.S. Fair and Reciprocal Tariff Act). And now the retaliation is rolling out — from Canada, China and from the EU. Canada's tariffs took effect this week. China's retaliatory package of $34 billion in tariffs is ...…

If you work in an office, chances are you've sat through some pretty lame harassment training — videos, click-through programs and materials that might feel straight out of the '90s. For many of us, these trainings are something to squeeze in between real work and groan about at meetings. Not exactly a path to real change in the #MeToo era. Mor ...…

By now, you've probably seen them. Heart-wrenching images of parents and children separated and the southwest border, sent to jail or youth detention centers. The Trump administration's "zero tolerance" for illegal border crossings is just one of several seismic changes to immigration enforcement in recent weeks. Immigrants seeking asylum from ...…

Federal Communications Commission Chair Ajit Pai was on something of a victory lap Monday when he talked with Kai on Marketplace about the repeal of net neutrality. The rule change became official this week. Molly has interviewed Pai two times during the long process of rolling back Obama-era regulations that made internet service providers tre ...…

Could you explain blockchain in a few sentences? After this episode, we hope you'll be able to get close. Pamela Morgan, an attorney and educator, breaks down blockchain for us with the metaphorical help of ... kitties, yarn and pina coladas. There are thousands of blockchains, and you can use the technology for much more than cryptocurrencies ...…

When we called up business ethicist Greg Fairchild from the University of Virginia this morning, we expected to have a wide-ranging conversation to get at Kai's question of a few weeks back: Are there market-based solutions to ensure better ethics? We didn't expect we'd have such a timely case study in Disney-owned ABC and "Roseanne." The netwo ...…

Unless you've been living under a rock, you've probably seen a email or two (or a million) saying something along the lines of "we're updating our privacy policy." Why now? Well, tomorrow is the deadline for companies to comply with Europe's General Data Protection Regulation, also known as GDPR. Today's show is all about GDPR. It's a GDPaRty! ...…

It started with an email about butter. We got it in our listener submission inbox, and it was mostly nonsense with a sketchy link. You probably get spammy emails like this every day. Do you ever wonder who sent them, or what they're trying to accomplish? Well, reader, we clicked the link. Then we called Jonathon Morgan, CEO of the cybersecurity ...…

What would a Hippocratic oath look like for the people we trust with our data? That's one of the questions NYU professor Laura Norén asks in her course "Ethics for Data Science." Consumers should be pushing for more empowered, informed consent, she says, because right now they have two choices: blindly agree to give up your data to [insert soci ...…

Molly Wood dives even deeper into radical economics this week with Glen Weyl of Microsoft Research, who's also a visiting scholar at Yale and co-author of the new book "Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society." He says inequality is at the root of most problems facing our world, and those problems are worse becaus ...…

Make Me Smart often asks if capitalism is working for enough people. But writer and capital-t Thinker Umair Haque is taking it a step further, asking if capitalism might be altogether obsolete. He notes it's ill equipped to address huge, pressing issues like climate change and financial inequality. And if the economy is technically growing — if ...…

When Robin Steinberg and David Feige were public defenders in New York, they saw thousands of clients — often poor people of color — stuck in jail because they couldn't make bail for minor offenses. They started the Bronx Freedom Fund to pay that bail and help people stay in their jobs and with their families while awaiting their day in court. ...…

What does the sketch comedy TV show "Adam Ruins Everything" have in common with our podcast? Well, we kinda share the same mission. In his TruTV show, live tours and podcast, comedian Adam Conover takes on topics we think we know about — like dieting, going green, taxes and, uh, circumcision — then punctures our assumptions with facts and comed ...…

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's loooong testimony on Capitol Hill is over, and we have so many thoughts we added an episode to hash them out. So we're back, asking big questions: What problem do lawmakers think they need to solve? Is that even the most pressing problem? And do they know enough about Facebook to tell the difference? Plus, now tha ...…

As we taped this week's episode, Mark Zuckerberg was about to begin his testimony in front of Congress. Lawmakers are expecting an explanation for how Facebook's self-professed mission to "bring the world closer together" gave way to its current privacy fiasco. But is data collection and use always the bad guy? Nancy Lublin, founder and CEO of ...…

Instead of making ourselves smart about news stories this week, we're taking a broader look at The News. It's truly not just navel gazing to say our highly polarized marketplace of ideas and current political strife may have something to do with the media we consume. We'll talk about the economics of reporting, online echo chambers and whether ...…

Mark Zuckerberg has agreed to testify before Congress about the Cambridge Analytica scandal, but does he get it? Like, really get it? And, crucially, do we? Harvard's Yochai Benkler is on the show today to make us smart about what the data economy hath wrought, and what it means for us as citizens. Plus, one of our listener-experts tells us how ...…

Kai and Molly are getting smart about last week's nationwide walkout organized by high school students pushing for stricter gun control. First Amendment expert and lawyer Ken White (also a Twitter personality) lays out the law and history of free speech in schools. We hear from high school students, look back at the landmark case Tinker v. Des ...…

Where were you when the economy collapsed? We're coming up on the 10-year anniversary of the fall of Bear Stearns, a time when Kai and Molly both happened to be hosting daily news shows. We'll take a listen back, and talk about what was or wasn't known at the time. Then we sit down with National Domestic Workers Alliance director Ai-jen Poo. Sh ...…

We've missed you guys. You've sent us a lot of great insights over the break, and Kai and Molly return with all-new full episodes next week, wading back into the big topics we want to get smart about. Tell a friend to subscribe. We'll see you March 13.

Rahm Emanuel likes to talk. The two-term mayor of Chicago and former White House chief of staff to President Barack Obama spoke with us at length about everything from populism to immigration. He told us that Chicago is a "welcoming" city, not a sanctuary city. He's got a special chair. And he's got some sharp words for "Mr. Moody's Doom and Gl ...…

The Columbia River Bar is one of the most dangerous places in the world for ships of all sizes. That's where the Columbia River Bar Pilots come in. These specially trained experts pilot cargo and passenger ships of all sizes across the bar into the river that separates Oregon from Washington. Capt. Deborah Dempsey was the first woman to become ...…