Chicago Fed President on inflation, recession, and Trump’s attacks

The economy is strong, prices are still too high, and the job market is sending mixed signals. The Federal Reserve is navigating all of it while fending off the most overt political pressure in its modern history. Austan Goolsbee, President of the Chicago Fed, joins Rapid Response ahead of the Central Bank’s highly-watched meeting in Jackson Hole, to give his most candid read on what's actually going on. He explains why tariffs, war in the Middle East, and six years above the 2% inflation target make this the most dangerous inflation environment he's seen, what Kevin Warsh's new leadership means for how the Fed operates, and why he's a "grim optimist" on AI even as the hype keeps outrunning the results. Plus, what business leaders should actually be watching to get ahead of the Fed's next move. Visit the Rapid Response website here: https://www.rapidresponseshow.com/ See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 2:09Speaker 02

  If you're going to have tariffs and then the war in the Middle East begins, so the price of oil goes up before the tariff shock went away, you gotta keep a very close eye on how the inflation is going to transpire. But I don't want to be the guy who says, this is a once in a hundred year flood.

• 2:31Bob Safian?

  That's Austin Goolsbee, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. I wanted to talk to Austin as the Fed heads into a big gathering today in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to get an insider's perspective on the state of the US economy and how the Fed may act under the new leadership of Chair Kevin Warsh. Austin shares eye-opening insights about what business leaders may be misreading about inflation, AI impacts, and the future of employment. And he talks directly about how the Fed operates in the face of pressure from the Trump White House. While he calls himself a grim optimist, his presence is certainly energetic,

• 3:13Bob Safian?

  and he shares practical, on-the-ground advice for navigating an uncertain environment. So let's get to it. I'm Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

• 3:26Bob Safian?

  I'm Bob Safian. I'm here with Austin Goolsbee, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Austin, great to chat with you.

• 3:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, Bob, great to chat with you.

• 3:36Bob Safian?

  There's a big Fed meeting in Jackson Hole this week. I was wondering how much of what goes on there is theatrics versus substantive engagement? Lots of conversations trying to cajole folks to see things your way? Or more, quote, "working vacation"?

• 3:53Speaker 02

  It's put on every year by the Kansas City Fed because Jackson Hole, Wyoming is in the Kansas City Fed district. But it's rustic. And so you've got all of these central bankers from around the world. You know, the head of the European Central Bank, the head of the Bank of Japan. And they're kind of draping out into these little cabins. So it's good fun. I wouldn't call it theatrics, but there's a lot of learning, for me at least. They're bringing in top people who are giving papers on various subjects. And there is substantive work, I think, that gets done. But it's not an FOMC meeting where we're making any decisions.

• 4:36Speaker 02

  And of course, everybody's sitting on the edge of their seat. They want to know what the chair thinks. And the chair often gives a meaningful speech.

• 4:45Bob Safian?

  I mean, as an economist, you're trained to assess this broad range of factors, right? Jobs and supply chains and prices. And you're trying to integrate all that into this cohesive view in some ways, which there's always uncertainty in. I feel like right now, things seem particularly uncertain with geopolitics and trade. And does it feel that way to you?

• 5:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, it always feels like that. And then it's even worse sometimes. And now is just a really, really strange moment. But Bob, that's no different than business people and startups. In every venue, we're always trying to make decisions under time pressure and without full information. And that's true at the Fed, too. And so that's why I actually think this committee character that it has, where there's 12 Reserve Banks from around the country, and there's seven political appointees, each of which is on a 14-year term,

• 5:48Speaker 02

  staggered so that you kind of try to get this as far out of the realm of political interference as is possible. I think that 19 people sitting around the table, each one with a different worldview, is pretty important at times when you've got this much uncertainty. Because at least we're not thinking the same way. We can yell at each other, get mad at each other. But my colleagues can change my views or how I interpret the data. And I think that's one of the more important aspects of how they have it set up.

• 6:23Bob Safian?

  I mean, I was wondering, too, because your job is trying to create some sort of vision through the uncertainty, whether this kind of environment is like exactly what you're trained for? Or whether like you just can't be trained for times like this?

• 6:36Speaker 02

  Exactly going to be in the line of fire that AI is going to replace you. So I appreciate that you said it was what I was trained for. Yes, kind of. But that doesn't mean that we can't make terrible mistakes. You know what I mean? Yes, you could be trained for it, but you could convince yourself that inflation is temporary. And then it turns out it's not. The analogy is, you know, you're driving to work and there's traffic. And you're kind of, I've been sitting here sometime, should I change lanes? Sometimes you shouldn't have changed lanes. And when you switch, then the other lane goes. But sometimes you drive by and you're like, oh dang, there was a wreck in that lane.

• 7:21Speaker 02

  Like, I would have just sat there for the whole day if I didn't change lanes. It's exciting in the worst way. You know, we've got wars, we've got tariffs, we've got a bunch of stuff that's driving up inflation. And we're trying to figure out, are these persistent inflation shocks? Are they one and done and they're going to go away? And the law, as you know, the Federal Reserve Act, lays out a simple sounding criteria of what's supposed to drive monetary policy. It's just two things. You're supposed to stabilize prices and maximize employment. And that's the whole job by law. Sometimes both of those things are not conflicting.

• 8:05Speaker 02

  So at the same time, you're trying to maximize employment, you're not worried that you're overheating the inflation side. But when you start getting things that are stagflationary, that is, they're making both sides worse at the same time. So now you've got to make some trade-offs. Inflation's in and out of control. Well, the only tools we have to slow inflation involve driving up the unemployment rate. In a world like that, it gets more tenuous and more difficult.

• 8:37Bob Safian?

  These tariff wars that have erupted with Canada, did this catch you off guard? And like, how big a deal is it? I mean, with tariffs, in some ways, we could say, we've seen this movie before with this administration.

• 8:49Speaker 02

  A little of both. I mean, I should say at the outset, tariffs is a fiscal policy. That's the administration and the Congress can decide whatever they want. And I always say, all right, look, we're in Chicago. Our motto is, there's no bad weather, there's only bad clothing. And you tell us the conditions and we'll go figure out what's a jacket and hat combination to deal with that. But the thing is, tariffs are supposed to be a one and done impact on prices. They drive up prices, but they're not supposed to keep driving up prices. It's supposed to just be a one-time thing. But that's only true if it's one and done, not if you keep adding new ones.

• 9:34Speaker 02

  And so we're in this environment where we've had a tariff and the prices went up and then another tariff and the prices go up and then another tariff. Then the court unwound some of the tariffs. So it was like, hey, maybe the price come back down. No, but now we got some new ones. So that's complicated environment because you're trying to figure out, is this actually a temporary thing or is this a permanent thing? If people become convinced that inflation is going to be with them for an extended period, the job of the Fed becomes 100 times harder. That's what in our language.

• 10:15Bob Safian?

  Because it becomes self fulfilling, right?

• 10:16Speaker 02

  It becomes self fulfilling.

• 10:17Bob Safian?

  Yeah.

• 10:17Speaker 02

  We call that the unanchoring of inflation expectations where everybody says, if prices are rising 5% a year, I need wages of 6% increase. And the employers are like, wow, if wages are going up 6% a year and our costs are rising up, we're going to have to raise prices 7%. That kind of dynamic is extremely difficult to get out of. But it's probably impossible to get out of without a deep recession. So we absolutely don't want that to happen. It's what I said was also the danger. If you're going to have tariffs and then the war in the Middle East begins, so the price of oil goes up before the tariff shock went away.

• 11:00Speaker 02

  Now, again, you gotta keep a very close eye on how the inflation is, is gonna transpire. And part of that is a failure on the Fed's part too, which is we're now coming on six years that we've been above the official 2% inflation target.

• 11:21Bob Safian?

  It's business as usual. It doesn't say.

• 11:23Speaker 02

  Business as usual, but that we've been making progress at various points along those six years. I wasn't there the whole time, so I'm not going to accept blame for the, for the beginning part. But in an environment where we've been struggling, struggling to get the inflation rate down and it's sometimes it's been coming down, but it's still for almost, you know, five and a half years been above where we wanted it to be. Now, if you start adding tariffs, wars, oil prices, computer chip shortages, competition with AI data center build out, things that are driving up the price, people, it's so,

• 12:07Speaker 02

  so much more salient. Everywhere you go, I'm here in the seventh district of Chicago is kind of heart of the Midwest. I go around the, the number one thing that I hear is about affordability, is about costs. If I talk to businesses, they say, ah, our input costs are way up. If you talk to the farmers, they're, we're getting squeezed on both sides. We can't sell the stuff for very much, but the costs are jamming us, you know, and so our margins are lower. So in an environment where everybody's attuned to that, then getting shocks is even more dangerous that, that it could lead to the self fulfilling prophecy.

• 12:45Bob Safian?

  I mean, it's just such a confusing moment because those feelings that you're tapping into, people worried about affordability, it's totally real, right? And at the same time, the economy is relatively strong.

• 12:58Speaker 02

  Still strong.

• 12:59Bob Safian?

  The job market is relatively strong.

• 13:01Speaker 02

  Look, this is a conundrum.

• 13:02Bob Safian?

  The stock market is like crazy.

• 13:03Speaker 02

  It's confusing, but I'm, I don't want to be the guy who says, this is a once in a hundred year flood every year. It's possible that it's a once in a hundred year flood every year, but it's like, the flood's got to be getting bigger and bigger.

• 13:18Bob Safian?

  Your job is to try to help avoid, as you say, you know, deep recessions. But like, you also know the way cycles work, they're gonna happen.

• 13:27Speaker 02

  Who was that as the message? You know, and it's like with inflation too. If I tell you, when the Fed looks at inflation, we tend to look at core inflation because energy and food prices are extremely variable. So we have convinced ourselves that doesn't tell you what the underlying inflation is. So we exclude it. And then, as I say, my mom is like, what do you mean you exclude it? Yeah, yeah, we don't think about gasoline prices and we don't think about grocery prices when we're thinking about inflation. She'd be like, that's the only thing I think about.

• 14:06Speaker 02

  Like when I first started at the Fed in 2023, I went and looked up the polling. A large majority of Americans say they are familiar with the Federal Reserve, but they do not know what it does. And an even bigger majority say that they may not know what the Federal Reserve does, but they think they're doing a bad job.

• 14:30Bob Safian?

  There is all this armchair discussion about will the Fed raise rates or lower rates? It's like you're sort of in the middle of the action in some ways in this job, which in some ways I guess could be fun, but it's also kind of torturous because you can't always say exactly what you think and, you know, not everyone's going to interpret what you're doing, maybe the way you, you would ideally have them wish they would.

• 14:52Speaker 02

  You have two sophisticated logics in that question, which are, there's a tension between wanting to be clear to the public, to the markets, to the world about how do you see the economy transpiring and what you're going to do. There's a tension between that clarity and being so dependent that you, and Chairman Warsh has been impatient before he was the chairman. He kind of thought there's a little too much forward guidance.

• 15:32Speaker 02

  That's what the, that's what the, the, the central banks and the economists call giving explicit, here's where we think interest rates are going to go. If X happens, then we will cut the rate. If this happens, we will raise the rate. That's forward guidance. The chairman doesn't like forward guidance. Let's do less explicit promises. Let's not tie our hands. Now, the, the other tension is if you don't give some explanation about how you react or what, what you're seeing in the economy, then people are going to fill in whatever they want it to be.

• 16:17Speaker 02

  Now you can add more volatility and so we gotta balance those off.

• 16:22Bob Safian?

  You and, and Kevin Warsh, the new Fed chair, you were foxhole buddies, I think is the term you used during the, during the global financial crisis. Are there things that you expect to shift with his leadership that we haven't necessarily seen all of yet?

• 16:39Speaker 02

  I, I do expect it to shift, but I don't know what that's going to be yet. When he first came in, the world knew he didn't like forward guidance. You saw reflected a change to the statement. Whenever the Fed makes a decision, they put out a little statement, here's what we did and here's why we did it. And the statement got a lot shorter and had a lot less expressions of the committee's forward guidance. He also set up these five task forces, one of which is about inflation, one of which is about AI and productivity, one of which is about the balance sheet and named very

• 17:21Speaker 02

  high profile, smart people, many of whom are close friends of mine, to be the heads of these task forces. And we're still waiting to get the output from those task forces. I think they're going to give us suggestions, recommendations. I have no doubt that once we get those five reports, we will have a big discussion about should we change our behavior? And if we do, I do think these would be kind of signature things for the chairman.

• 17:56Bob Safian?

  He's exploring different tools and different kinds of information that you've, that those of you in the Fed would use in making the decisions you make about interest rates.

• 18:08Speaker 02

  It seems like that.

• 18:10Bob Safian?

  You mentioned earlier that, you know, the Fed is constructed to sort of avoid political pressure. And in the last few years, you know, you faced more overt political pressure than ever. I mean, charges from the White House about specific Fed figures, you know, Jerome Powell, Lisa Cook, like, does that make everyone more cautious?

• 18:32Speaker 02

  It puts me on edge. There's two components of it. One are the tacking of individuals, criminal investigations of the, of Chair Powell to attempted firings, et cetera. The other is explicit brow beating, saying you need to lower the interest rate. That's in the space of the traditional Fed independence. It's a very narrow type of independence that all economists, before I was ever at the Fed, I joined the virtual unanimity of economists saying central bank independence is really important. It is independence from political interference when setting the interest rate.

• 19:16Speaker 02

  If you just look at countries where they don't have that, or you look at times in the United States even, where we relatively did not have that, where the sitting administration can interfere and tell the Fed, here's what we want you to do with the interest rate. Inflation comes roaring back. Their incentives and their timetable is totally different than the central bank and the economic timetable. So that's why they have designed the system at, in the United States of the Fed to be as separated from the political sphere as is possible in a democracy. My experience at the FOMC.

• 20:02Speaker 02

  Is that the 19 people sitting around the table, some are economists, some are market people, some are business people. They have a lot of different backgrounds. They take the job really seriously. You're out of the elections business when you went to the Fed.

• 20:17Bob Safian?

  You were part of the Obama administration. You chaired the Council of Economic Advisers. I mean,

• 20:21Speaker 02

  Back in 2009, 2010.

• 20:24Bob Safian?

  You're not a Trump guy.

• 20:25Speaker 02

  I started as a Democrat, but like I say, when you're at the Fed, you're out of the elections business.

• 20:32Bob Safian?

  I just want to be clear about it for folks, you know, because Trump has been particularly aggressive, Powell and Lisa Cook being directly challenged.

• 20:46Speaker 02

  Look, in the environment, if a sitting administration is trying to remove Fed officials to get interest rates down or to influence interest rate decisions, that's a problematic circumstance. And I think any economist would would say that's problematic circumstance.

• 21:09Bob Safian?

  I appreciate Austin's willingness to be candid about the pressures on the Fed, even if he can't always be quite as explicit as he'd like. So what's real and what's mirage about AI's impact on the economy right now? And are we headed toward a dot com era like market bubble? We'll talk about that and more after the break. Stay with us.

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• 23:29Bob Safian?

  Before the break, the Fed's Austin Goolsbee talked about the US trade war with Canada, inflation risks and what new Fed Chair Kevin Warsh is changing. Now he talks about AI's impact on the economy and why it might be different than a lot of news reports suggest. Plus, the risk of a dot com like stock market bubble and the metrics that matter most for business leaders to track. Let's dive back in. I'm curious what you're hearing about AI's actual impact, whether it matches what we read in the financial press.

• 24:04Speaker 02

  People are all over the map. And partly it depends what sector you're in. I talked to the head of a major arbitration agency who said AI is already as good or better than arbitrators. They can feed all the reports in and all the facts of the case. That's one that it sounds like high productivity, immediate with the technology we have. We have the most manufacturing of all the districts in the Fed. In manufacturing, there's still a little more. If this turns into robotics or some kind of automation,

• 24:49Speaker 02

  it would have a bigger impact. Right now, they're still looking for the use cases, one of the best use cases. And you do hear some blowback a little that says, we've invested heavily in this. The tokens are expensive now and we're not yet seeing it. It's kind of like, we want people to use it. We want to find the productivity application, but so far, we're not seeing it. You've seen over the last two and a half years, an uptick of the productivity growth rate, which maybe was tied a bit to the use of technology, machine learning first, AI.

• 25:31Speaker 02

  But now we've had six months or so, the productivity growth rate hasn't been that impressive. So you got some people saying, maybe that argument was a blip. And then just back to what's the day job of the Fed? Is to try to prevent overheating, stop inflation. It's not exactly like, if we come back in 20 years, will this have revolutionized society? This aspect that the more hype there is, the more chance there is that it overheats things today,

• 26:12Speaker 02

  that everybody says, I'm going to go massively build data centers today. I'm going to go massively spend out of this newfound wealth from my IPO that's premised on future productivity bounties. You could easily overheat the economy in the short run. And so in the day job sense of the central bank, it could actually drive up the interest rate in the short run, not not drive it down. I'm not saying that nobody has any use cases that work. There are many use cases. The question is, are there going to be? How long is it going to take before? We have so many examples that it's

• 26:54Speaker 02

  rising tide lifting productivity growth for all the boats. And thus far, it's been more hyped than what it has delivered in a lot of sectors. Your intuition, I think, should tell you, if if a group of companies are spending trillions of dollars to build out data centers, they can't think that they're going to be giving that away free. So either it's going to be real expensive or the valuations that they're premised on are way too high.

• 27:32Bob Safian?

  You did extensive research about the dot com era and bubble, as I recall. Is that research that you kind of call on yourself when you look at today's AI era?

• 27:44Speaker 02

  There are interesting parallels between now and and the origin of the dot com era. But it also, the internet did change the whole world. It just took far longer than the biggest proponents thought it would. And that's that's another lesson we should think about.

• 28:06Bob Safian?

  There's a CEO that I spoke with who said, you know, either the valuations of these tech companies make sense, in which case there's going to be so much efficiency that we're going to lose so many jobs that it's going to be, you know, catastrophic, or they're wildly overvalued, in which case we're in for like a big stock market correction, which is going to lead to other problems and other job, you know, implications. It's like, it's bad news either way.

• 28:37Speaker 02

  Business type. That is kind of funny. It's kind of funny. Not actually, it's not funny at all. It's kind of, it's kind of interesting.

• 28:46Speaker 02

  I guess in that that executives got it split, the world split into two parts. And one is there's overvaluation and the bubble is going to pop. If the bubble is justified, then everyone will lose their job. I think even in the world where it's not a bubble and they are justified. I just can't get past the lump of labor fallacy, we call it, which is all of labor is just a lump that can't move. And as soon as AI is better than this lump, those people will be out of jobs and they won't be able to find any new jobs.

• 29:27Speaker 02

  I think that's, that's been wrong every time it's been claimed. And the AI people should before, they just, just learn a little Bay's rule, which is if you're going to say that the lump of labor argument is true this time, I just want you to acknowledge there've been a lot of people who have said that in the past and been proven wrong. Now, it's possible that it could be true this time.

• 29:59Bob Safian?

  This time is different.

• 30:00Speaker 02

  This time is different, but I'll take the under on the chance that we come back in 20 years and the unemployment rate is 95%. And the, there are like six people who own the AI companies that, that have all the, the wealth in the United States. That's unlikely.

• 30:20Bob Safian?

  You almost sound optimistic, Austin. You know, they call economics the dismal science, which always sounds downbeat.

• 30:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, look, I guess I'm a grim optimist. Look, I'm not, I'm not to make light of, there are many episodes of general purpose technologies that have been disruptive. And it's traumatic as people transition. But the overall for the economy, I don't see how you can look at the last 150 year history of per capita income in the United States and look at all the technological disruptions and job replacements that happened over that period and truly be a pessimist and think that these human beings will not figure out a way to continue

• 31:12Speaker 02

  this upward march of, of incomes. I kind of think that's rooted in productivity growth. It's worth at least remembering that something like that is going to make us rich by current standards, you know, that a high productivity is going to, going to turn into high income. That's how we got to be the, the richest major economy in the world. So I think I'm kind of a grim optimist with some disruptions.

• 31:39Bob Safian?

  As you look at the economy overall right now, how concerned are you?

• 31:44Speaker 02

  Just in the immediate term concerned, but I, I do think mostly I would characterize the economy is it's been stable, but it hasn't necessarily been good, but it has been stable. And back to your original formulation, there's a lot that's confusing. Okay. So the job market, it's been stable by almost every measure. But several of the measures are pointing in different directions. So when people throw around this phrase, it's a low hiring, low firing environment. It's worth just taking a beat and recognizing low hiring, low firing is extremely unusual environment.

• 32:27Speaker 02

  Okay. So normally the business cycle goes, you either have a great deal of hiring and very low layoffs, or you have a lot of layoffs and very low hiring. If you have that, you're kind of in a recession or the other end a boom. What we've got is very low layoffs, like it was a boom, and very low hiring, like it was a recession. So then you say, well, what does that mean? Does that mean we're going down or we're going up? We got war in Ukraine, we got war in the Middle East. The price of oil was elevated by recent historical standards.

• 33:11Speaker 02

  And every three months or some, something happens that it could go up again. In an environment like that, I'm already going to be on edge. Everybody should be on edge. And I would say my biggest fear in the short run continues to be that inflation is not under control. And so we hear a lot about affordability and we better be mindful because if inflation starts going up again, it's very hard to get rid of it.

• 33:42Bob Safian?

  The immigration environment has reduced the number of people coming into the country so that there are fewer people to be working. Like is that, does that come into when you're calculating?

• 33:55Speaker 02

  It does, in, in an important way. There was a time when if you said, you can only pick one number, what number do you want to pick as the most informative? There'd be a decent case, some people would say, take the monthly job created number. That, that might be your best number. Okay. But that's not your best number at a time when they're having an immigration crackdown. We saw that number go way down. Monthly job creation has fallen dramatically. And that led some people, most of last year to say, whoa, this is what a recession looks like. This is how recession starts. I said, let's stop looking at that number as a primary indicator

• 34:39Speaker 02

  when we don't know what's happening to population and labor supply. Let's look at the rate based numbers, the unemployment rate, the vacancy rate, the hiring rate, termination, the variety of rates. And those ones show stability. I think they're, they're better measures.

• 34:59Bob Safian?

  For the business leaders who are listening to this show, they're making real time decisions in part based on the Fed's direction and choices. What can you tell them about the, the rate environment over the next 12 months?

• 35:12Speaker 02

  My read, and I'm only allowed to say for me, when I'm looking at the inflation picture and I see some that is disturbing, like we've been above the target for five and a half years. And we went through this period where we stopped making progress. And then for the last year, it's actually been going the wrong way. That was driving my thinking about what Fed policy reaction needs to be. If you look at the three month inflation, it doesn't look terrible. We've seen a little bit back toward improving.

• 35:58Speaker 02

  And from my perspective, if you could give me evidence that we're on path back to 2% inflation, I'm perfectly comfortable and have been since I got to the Fed. If we're on path to 2% inflation, then I, I think we should be heading more to, in, in our language, what we call R star, where rates are going to settle, where we think they're going to settle down. And I loosely think a 3% interest rate with 2% inflation, 1% real. To me, that's, that's kind of a loose target of where things are headed.

• 36:38Speaker 02

  But all of that hinges on inflation's got to be heading back to 2%. So if you're a very interest rate sensitive industry, I would tell you, watch the data. Look, you get a sense of where do you think inflation is going? Because that's going to be heavily influential on, on the thinking of people like me, we're sitting around the table. Don't get so hyped up about what the market says. Cause that's not in the law to the, the, when we're in there sitting around the table, we're thinking about the real economy and the inflation. What the stock market says is a, is a kind of a secondary consideration.

• 37:23Speaker 02

  So don't, don't overweight on that.

• 37:26Bob Safian?

  Well, Austin, this was great. Thanks for sharing what you could.

• 37:30Speaker 02

  That's a fun anytime.

• 37:34Bob Safian?

  Austin was never going to openly read the tea leaves on upcoming rate changes, but he did give us some pretty specific insights. The contradictory signals in the economy are real and that's confusing even for the smartest, most informed economists. But there's also stability despite all the changes. And even if he is a grim optimist, as Austin puts it, he's still optimistic. I keep coming back to his comments about AI and how much narrower the on the ground business impact has been so far outside of the AI ecosystem itself. It's a reminder that our attention often follows the most intense action.

• 38:14Bob Safian?

  And we may miss that the broadest, deepest impacts may still be a bit farther off. That doesn't mean today's changes aren't a watershed, but taking a pause every now and then to orient ourselves is both grounding and prudent. I'm reminded that for those running the Federal Reserve, their ideal is to actually do nothing, to have the economy stable enough that rates don't need to shift at all. So what moves are we making out of reflex rather than consideration? Staying calm amid a storm, of course, that's what leadership is all about.

• 38:51Bob Safian?

  I'm Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.

• 39:02Speaker 00

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• 39:42Bob Safian?

  Hey listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show because every Friday we release a second Rapid Response exclusively in the Rapid Response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely. From Ford CEO to NASA's administrator, to the lessons from the devil wears Prada. It takes about 10 seconds to find. Just search Rapid Response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode. I hope to see you there.

• 40:18Speaker 04

  Humans will never be more intelligent than AI.

• 40:22Speaker 02

  There's going to be two types of companies. Those are great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't.

• 40:27Speaker 05

  How do we build a future that is human centered?

• 40:32Speaker 06

  I'm Rana Elkhayubi. And on my podcast, Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more. As an AI scientist, entrepreneur and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone. Every week I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future and we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives. Find Pioneers of AI wherever you tune in.

• 41:03Bob Safian?

  Rapid Response is a Wait What original. I'm Bob Safian, our executive producer is Eve Trow. Our senior producer is Alex Morris and our associate producer is Masha Makutonina. Mixing and mastering by Aaron Bastinelli and Brian Pugh. Our theme music is by Ryan Holiday. For more, visit rapidresponseshow.com.