Solutions with Henry Blodget

One of the biggest issues in the last few elections has been… immigration. And yet: most Americans support legal immigration and a path to citizenship, and aren't worried about immigrants taking their jobs. So why can't the U.S. enact clear policy?

Alexander Kustov, professor of migration at the University of Notre Dame, recently wrote a book entirely dedicated to this question and practical solutions, titled In Our Interest: How Democracies Can Make Immigration Popular. Today, we discuss his research, his argument that immigration needs to be more selective, and what the U.S. could learn from other countries' immigration policies.
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Ethan Mollick, a Wharton professor and author of the Substack One Useful Thing, describes today’s AI systems as a “jagged frontier," where AI outperforms humans in some tasks but falls short in others. This unevenness means the technology won’t replace all jobs, but it will reshape how we work and which skills matter most. In this episode, we discuss why management and delegation are becoming more valuable, how AI could disrupt the traditional career ladder, and how Mollick is using AI in his classroom to accelerate and deepen learning.
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What’s it like to talk to a “digital twin” of a relative who died before you were born? How will the increasingly lifelike digital representations of people change how we grieve?

Amy Kurzweil deeply considers these questions in her graphic memoir, Artificial: A Love Story. It's about her experience helping to create a chatbot based on her grandfather. Amy’s father, Ray Kurzweil — a technology inventor and futurist — built the bot back in 2018. In this episode, we discuss how AI could change how we grieve, and complicate the very meaning of consciousness.
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More than three years into the AI era, the predictions of an AI job apocalypse are still coming fast and furious. Here are reasons to be more optimistic.

Harvard economist and researcher David Deming studies technology and the future of work. He’s dug into technological shifts of the past for clues about what might happen to the U.S. labor market now, and he’s even quantified the rapid rate of adoption of generative AI.

Deming doubts AI will cause a jobs apocalypse, but he does believe things will change. He tells us his ideas for how we can AI-proof our jobs.

Note: this conversation was originally recorded in the summer of 2025.
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Elon Musk says humanoid robots represent the biggest business opportunity in the history of the world. But what problems do these robots actually solve? And why do they have to look like humans?

We pose those questions and more to Dr. Jonathan Hurst this week, one of the pioneers of modern robotics. He’s the co-founder and Chief Robot Officer at Agility, which makes a humanoid called “Digit," which is actually working in warehouses.
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