Bob Wachter

speaker

553 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 24 Apr

Bob Wachter’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.

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Freakonomics Radio · 661. Can A.I. Save Your Life? · 30 Jan 2026 podcast

I'm curious if you're seeing that, how you feel about that trend generally?

Seeing a ton of it.

I mean, they were doing a version of this with Google, but these tools are better.

And so the answers they're getting are better.

I think it's net positive.

I think anything that democratizes health care is going to be good, assuming the answers are reasonable and correct and assuming that patients, when they need to see a doctor, still see a doctor.

And I think that's the open question here.

Okay, Bob, here's what you've said that you hope AI can do.

Produce better outcomes for patients, lower costs, and add some relief for beleaguered doctors and nurses.

Then you say, however, that the success of all this will depend on history, politics, economics, pride, regulations, leadership, lawsuits, guilds, culture, workflows, inertia, greed, hubris, vibes, and zeitgeist, as much as biographical processing units, diffusion models, and neural networks.

In other words, the tech can work, but then we get those layers of people who may feel that their realms are being infringed upon.

So...

The way you describe it there, it sounds like what some people like to call a wicked problem, which is basically unsolvable because there are so many constituencies and so many of those constituencies have incentives that are cross-purpose with the other constituencies.

So when you take a look at the big picture, how much optimism do you have?

Do you think that the upsides of this technology will be able to be successfully integrated into healthcare delivery itself?

Or do you think that AI becomes yet another piece of the mess that is the U.S.

healthcare system?

I would interpret that very, very, very long sentence as saying it's not just about the power of the incumbents, although it's a very real part of it.

It's about the complexity of medicine.

It's about the regulatory environment, which, for important reasons—

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