Assistant Professor at Chapman University; Fellow, MIT IDE and Stanford DEL; Co-host of Justified Posteriors Podcast https://xitter.cf/t.co/BJbcIOiwuv

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Joined January 2014
We’re launching the Justified Posteriors Podcast, co-hosted by Andrey Fradkin and me - Seth Benzell. Thanks to Tyler for today’s shoutout -- he’s a key inspiration. We evaluate research on the Economics of AI and Tech, with a good helping of wit and light hearted irreverence.
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Seth Benzell - the LA-atic Stranger retweeted
is nathan fielder actually playing a character? said i’d run nathan fielder’s voice through soma, so here it is: 45 clips from 2008 to now. about half in character (nathan for you, the rehearsal, talk shows), half as himself (podcasts, festival q&as) i expected the deadpan to show up somewhere in his voice. it basically doesn’t. 13 of 14 voice measures can’t tell persona nathan from real nathan. same pace too, 177 vs 175 words a minute. his reply timing doesn’t give it away either the one thing that changes is his words. in his shows he says “um” and “like” about a third as often as on podcasts. but that’s mostly the edit. live on talk shows, still in character, he’s almost back to normal he’s also flatter than 70 of the 80 public figures we’ve measured. and he and elizabeth holmes land on the same voice print, bamboo. close on melody, different on almost everything else, so not twins holmes’ voice changed depending on who was in the room. his doesn’t. maybe the character is just him with the ums edited out
in honor of the doc of a generational releasing today, we obsessed over @ElizabethHolmes voice a lot can be said about her, but her voice is irrevocably distinct and…practiced we pulled 16 recordings of her from 2014 to 2017, we’ve pulled them from ted talks, charlie rose, cnn, mad money, a bunch of conference panels, and 3 full days of her deposition. about 4 hours of her talking total we've been running her voice through @try_soma before the documentary drops and honestly the deposition sounds like a different person: - hedging (“i think”, “i believe”, “sort of”) went from 3.8 to 19.5 per 1,000 words, about 5x. every deposition day was higher than every public appearance - stumbles went from 29 to 50 per 1,000 words - her sentences got simpler, 2.3 clauses per sentence down to 1.8 - her pitch dropped too, 152 hz in public to 136 hz under oath the part i didn’t expect: if you score her against normal population benchmarks she looks totally fine. good to excellent in almost every recording, deposition included. her hedging under oath (17 to 23 per 1,000 words) is still technically “normal” for people in general it’s only when you compare her to HER that the shift shows up. against her own baseline it’s super obvious which is kind of the whole point of what we’re building. a score that compares you to everyone else would’ve totally missed this also fun fact, she’s at her most polished on stage. slowest pace (129 words per minute), cleanest speech (3 filler words per 1,000). on tv she’s way faster, 177 wpm. so even her “public” voice isn’t one voice maybe we’ll run it again with @nathanfielder 's You Can See Everything, since that’ll be the first new audio of her since 2017?
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Seth Benzell - the LA-atic Stranger retweeted
Beautiful meal with @tylercowen and Fuschia Dunlop!
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Seth Benzell - the LA-atic Stranger retweeted
I don't think anyone has any idea what to make of this (from @I_Am_NickBloom survey)
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Seth Benzell - the LA-atic Stranger retweeted
Us millennials got to stick together
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In next Monday's episode of Justified Posteriors, we have the great Sarah Bana of LSE to talk how AI is changing hiring, academic publishing and religion. Sarah used a cool metaphor for how AI may change labor productivity: AI as Steroids vs. Shoes vs. Coach.
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Seth Benzell - the LA-atic Stranger retweeted
My frequent co-author Chiara Farronato, who's not on Twitter, just wrote a nice HBR article summarizing a lot of recent research (including ours) on digital platforms. Do check it out! hbr.org/2026/11/the-new-plat…
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Fat tails
the gap between being very very good and being great is so tremendous. salieri and mozart
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Seth Benzell - the LA-atic Stranger retweeted
in high dimensional space hills are rare so you end up dying on saddle points
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In the most recent episode of Justified Posteriors, @AndreyFradkin and I update our priors with @pawtrammell of @EpochAIResearch. We discuss whether international regulation of AI is probable or good. In this clip, Phil shares reasons he sees for optimism.
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Fat tails everywhere with eyes to see
The stats here are pretty striking. The top 5 econ students of their cohort, at PhD admission, are in expectation 3x better than ranks 6-25, 4x better than 26-50, almost 10x better than ranks 151-200
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Seth Benzell - the LA-atic Stranger retweeted
Our episode with @pawtrammell discussing AI2040 (by @eli_lifland, @RyanGreenblatt, @DKokotajlo, @romeovdean) and the case for and feasibility of a global AI treaty is now posted. I've seen surprisingly little engagement with these ideas by economists, so we're happy to fill the gap. empiricrafting.substack.com/…
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Seth Benzell - the LA-atic Stranger retweeted
40 years ago, the legendary Frank Fisher told me (and the rest of our class in the MIT PhD program) that Bob Hall was the most brilliant economist that he'd ever worked with. It took too long, but I'm glad to see the @NobelPrize Committee recognize what the rest of the field has long known.  Congrats, to Bob Hall
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Seth Benzell - the LA-atic Stranger retweeted
Recent AI progress unbundles expertise from the workers that possess them: know-how that used to be tacit and inalienable can now be codified and duplicated at scale across the economy. We document some facts about this new market for human expertise.
1/ Modern AI systems are built on human expertise which is accumulated by paying humans. We measure this market: in a new note with @zoebcullen and @andrewjkoh we track ~213,000 expert hires and ~$540m in estimated compensation at posted rates on one leading platform. iemlab.org/projects/human-wo…
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Seth Benzell - the LA-atic Stranger retweeted
This Hall & Jones paper is a favorite. People want to spend more on healthcare as they get richer. We should expect that healthcare as a percentage of spending should continue to increase as AI gets better. A year of life is a lot more valuable than a marginal unit of material consumption.
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Seth Benzell - the LA-atic Stranger retweeted
Coming next week to the pod, @pawtrammell discusses the economics of a global AI treaty and the AI2040 scenarios. In this clip, he postulates that AI will make cooperation easier.
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Seth Benzell - the LA-atic Stranger retweeted
I can suggest an equation that has the potential to impact the future: P = NP + AI
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Seth Benzell - the LA-atic Stranger retweeted
In the spirit of Alan Lomax in the late 1930s, we urgently need an ethnographer to be crisscrossing the planet, capturing oral histories of mathematicians as they go through what is happening
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Seth Benzell - the LA-atic Stranger retweeted
The problem with this is that they could've earned more than 3.5-5%/year over a 40 year career in treasuries or better in riskier assets. This isn't a compromise as much as a tax. And you'll be hard-pressed to see younger people be excited to continue social security if they tax it now. Social security needs a structural reform.
On average, Boomers are getting paid more from Social Security than they “paid into it.” A lot more. Like double, and that’s counting inflation and interest. In raw dollars, they’ll get four to seven times what they paid in. So what about this compromise, to at least stave off insolvency and save billions: you get back what you paid in, but no more. Young families won’t be forced to finance a 250 percent return on your “investment.” That seems extremely reasonable, doesn’t it? It doesn’t go nearly as far as I would like. But it’s a very fair compromise. It completely negates any claim that you didn’t get the money back that you “paid in.” And yet I suspect that this comprise will not be satisfactory. Why is that? Because this debate actually has nothing to do with “getting back what you paid in.” The REAL demand is for a lot more than that.
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