PODCAST · technology
Faster, Please! — The Podcast
by James Pethokoukis
Welcome to Faster, Please! — The Podcast. Several times a month, host Jim Pethokoukis will feature a lively conversation with a fascinating and provocative guest about how to make the world a better place by accelerating scientific discovery, technological innovation, and economic growth. fasterplease.substack.com
Episodes
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The AI state of play: My interview with Ramez Naam
My guest this episode is Ramez Naam. Ramez has spent years thinking, writing, and investing around technological progress in energy and artificial intelligence. He is the founder and managing partner of Planetary VC, where he invests in emerging technologies across areas including clean energy,...
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An update on AI’s economic impact: My interview with Scott Strand of Google’s AI & Economy program
My guest this episode is Scott Strand. Scott is Head of Strategy, Operations, and Special Projects at Google, where he founded the Google AI Economy program as well as Google ATLAS. Recently, Scott co-authored two papers, “Mapping Gemini’s Usage in the Economy” and “AI in Science: Early…
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📈 How economic growth can defeat authoritarianism: My interview with Dalibor Rohac, author of ‘Unshackled’
On this episode of Faster Please!—The Podcast, I am joined by Dalibor Rohac. Dalibor is the director of global research at GLOBSEC and a longtime senior research fellow in international relations at the University of Buckingham. Recently, he wrote the book Unshackled, which focuses on how…
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✨ Why verification is AI's real bottleneck: My interview with economist Christian Catalini
On this episode of Faster Please!—The Podcast, I am joined by Christian Catalini. Christian is a research scientist and the founder of the MIT Cryptoeconomics Lab. Recently, Christian co-authored “Some Simple Economics of AGI” In our conversation, we focus on the AI bottleneck of verification,...
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✨ My interview with economist Tyler Cowen on the Age of AI (and more)
On this episode of Faster Please!—The Podcast, I am joined (again) by Tyler Cowen. Tyler is an economics professor at George Mason University and co-founder of the economics blog Marginal Revolution. He is an opinion writer for The Free Press and the author of several books, including The Great...
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🚀 The New Space Age meets the Age of AI: My interview with Phil Metzger
Thanks in large part to the massive drop in the cost of getting a pound or kilogram of stuff into orbit and beyond, many of the boldest Space Age dreams are now possible. The business of space makes economic sense like never before. And here comes the AI Revolution to really give the sector a...
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🏁 The Great AI Race as a clash over compute: my interview with analyst Ryan Fedasiuk
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world: The AI race between America and China isn’t just about whose AI models are at the frontier or get adopted most widely. Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I am joined by Ryan Fedasiuk, a fellow at AEI and the...
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💧⚡🖥️ A deep-dive on data centers: My interview with AI researcher Andy Masley
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world: With the massive buildout of data centers has come an equally massive backlash. They’ve been blamed for higher electricity bills, taking up too much water, and pushing out farmland. All this has led to a public...
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📈 The business of AI: My interview with technology analyst and investor Azeem Azhar
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world: Artificial intelligence is expected to transform the economy, but what about the AI industry itself? Companies across the AI supply chain are now valued in the trillions of dollars. But do the data and current...
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✨ Data center distortions: My interview with energy policy analyst Shuting Pomerleau
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world: What problem does a data-center moratorium solve, exactly? As these warehouse-sized supercomputers face growing public backlash, they’re blamed for higher electricity bills and strains on the power grid—all while...
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✨ My interview with Sebastian Mallaby, author of 'The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence'
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world: If my podcast guest today is correct, the emergence of generative artificial intelligence "heralds a transformation more profound than anything since Homo sapiens acquired the capacity for abstract thought."…
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✨💪 AI, jobs, and productivity: My chat with economist Erik Brynjolfsson
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world: Will artificial intelligence displace workers or make them more valuable? Probably plenty of both. But how much in either direction, and how fast will all this change happen? Today on Faster, Please!—The Podcast…
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✨💪 The future of work in an age of AI: My chat with economist Daniel Rock
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world: Artificial intelligence is undoubtedly poised to change the workplace—the question is, by how much? Key voices in Silicon Valley warn that white-collar jobs will soon be a thing of the past, while others predict...
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🏗️ A hub for hard-tech startups: My chat with 'American Shenzhen' builder Joshua Farahzad
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world: As a college sophomore, Josh Farahzad assembled a group of students from around the country in an attempt to launch a homemade rocket into space. From there, he ditched the traditional route and scoured the…
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✨ The Age of AI, an update: My chat with policy analyst Dean Ball
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world: Anxiety is running rampant about the future of artificial intelligence and its place in society. When technology CEOs warn of an impending white-collar jobpocalypse (or jobageddon, if you prefer), it’s no wonder...
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🌎 Storm watch: My chat with climate policy expert Roger Pielke Jr.
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world: Headlines portend rising seas, raging storms, and a planet in crisis. It’s easy to feel like the future is something to fear; however, the key to cooling things down isn’t scaling civilization back. If the world...
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☄️Awaiting apocalypse: My chat with journalist and author Dorian Lynskey
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world: Since humanity’s beginning, we’ve been pondering about our end. From war, to disease, to divine reckoning, the means of our destruction seem endless. The advent of the atomic bomb, concerns around climate change,...
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⤴️ Beyond Abundance: My chat with Brink Lindsey about his new book, 'The Permanent Problem'
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world: The human pursuit of progress stems from our desire for security and a higher quality of life. Yet, even as today’s advanced economies are the richest and most comfortable they’ve ever been, something is amiss.…
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⚛️ A final (and lasting?) nuclear revival: My chat with nuclear energy advocate Jessica Lovering
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world: Headlines abound with news of the coming nuclear renaissance — a long-awaited era of clean, abundant energy to power our future. But this is hardly the first time the media has heralded the dawn of the atomic age....
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🪐 NASA and beyond: My chat with space policy analyst Casey Dreier
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world: NASA is attempting the difficult task of juggling highly ambitious goals, but also possibly intense budget cuts. Despite personnel losses and unclear leadership, the administration is racing to put humans on the...
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✨🔬 Acceleration though AI-automated R&D: My chat (+transcript) with researcher Tom Davidson
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world: What really gets AI optimists excited isn’t the prospect of automating customer service departments or human resources. Imagine, rather, what might happen to the pace of scientific progress if AI becomes a super...
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🚀 The trillion-dollar space race: My chat (+transcript) with journalist Christian Davenport
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers, China’s spacefaring ambitions pose tough competition for America. With a focused, centralized program, Beijing seems likely to land taikonauts on the moon before another American flag is planted. Meanwhile, NASA faces budget cuts, leadership…
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🤖 Thoughts of a (rare) free-market AI doomer: My chat (+transcript) with economist James Miller
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers, Some Faster, Please! readers have told me I spend too little time on the downsides of AI. If you’re one of those folks, today is your day. On this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I talk with self-described “free-market AI doomer” James...
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🛑 Why progress stops : My chat (+transcript) with economist Carl Benedikt Frey
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers, For most of history, stagnation — not growth — was the rule. To explain why prosperity so often stalls, economist Carl Benedikt Frey offers a sweeping tour through a millennium of innovation and upheaval, showing how societies either harness —…
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🤖 AI risks and rewards: My chat (+transcript) with AI researcher Miles Brundage
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers, Artificial intelligence may prove to be one of the most transformative technologies in history, but like any tool, its immense power for good comes with a unique array of risks, both large and small. Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I…
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🛩️ Human aspiration and the legacy of 'To Fly!': My chat (+transcript) with filmmaker Greg MacGillivray
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers, In 1976, America celebrated 200 years of independence, democracy, and progress. Part of that celebration was the release of To Fly!, a short but powerful docudrama on the history of American flight. With To Fly!, Greg MacGillivray and his...
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👶 Bracing for depopulation: My chat (+transcript) with 'After the Spike' coauthor Dean Spears
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers, Global population growth is slowing, and it’s not showing any signs of recovery. To the environmentalists of the 1970s, this may have seemed like a movement in the right direction. The drawbacks to population decline, however, are severe and...
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⚛️ Our fission-powered future: My chat (+transcript) with nuclear scientist and author Tim Gregory
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers, Nuclear fission is a safe, powerful, and reliable means of generating nearly limitless clean energy to power the modern world. A few public safety scares and a lot of bad press over the half-century has greatly delayed our nuclear future. But…
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✨ AI and the future of R&D: My chat (+transcript) with McKinsey's Michael Chui
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers, The innovation landscape is facing a difficult paradox: Even as R&D investment has increased, productivity per dollar invested is in decline. In his recent co-authored paper, The next innovation revolution—powered by AI, Michael Chui explores AI...
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📊 The US economy at midyear: My chat (+transcript) with economic analyst Joey Politano
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers, With tariff and immigration policies uncertain, and the emerging AI revolution continuing to emerge, there’s plenty to speculate about when it comes to the US economy. Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I invite Joseph Politano to help us…
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🎇 An age of transformation: My chat (+transcript) with techno-futurist Peter Leyden
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers, The 1990s and the dawn of the internet were a pivotal time for America and the wider world. The history of human progress is a series of such pivotal moments. As Peter Leyden points out, it seems we’re facing another defining era as society...
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✨ 🧬 When AI meets biotechnology: My chat (+transcript) with techno-futurist Jamie Metzl
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers, Once-science-fiction advancements like AI, gene editing, and advanced biotechnology have finally arrived, and they’re here to stay. These technologies have seemingly set us on a course towards a brand new future for humanity, one we can hardly...
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🚀 NASA and the New Space Age: My chat (+transcript) with James Meigs
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers, America is embarking upon a New Space Age, with companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin ready to partner with NASA to take Americans to a new frontier — possibly as far as Mars. Lately, however, the world is witnessing uncertainty surrounding NASA...
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🤖 Superintelligence and national security: My chat (+transcript) with AI expert Dan Hendrycks
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers, As we seemingly grow closer to achieving artificial general intelligence — machines that are smarter than humans at basically everything — we might be incurring some serious geopolitical risks. In the paper Superintelligence Strategy, his joint...
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🗽 America's immigration edge: My chat (+transcript) with policy expert Alex Nowrasteh
My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers, With the rise of American populist nationalism has come the rise of nativism: a belief in the concept of “heritage Americans” and a deep distrust of immigration. Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I talk with Alex Nowrasteh about the…
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🌾 Land of plenty: My chat (+transcript) with science journalist Charles C. Mann on the agricultural history you never learned
In the 1960s, a deep anxiety set in as one thing became seemingly clear: We were headed toward population catastrophe. Paul Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb” and “The Limits to Growth,” written by the Club of Rome, were just two publications warning of impending starvation due to simply too many...
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🚀 Mars or bust! My chat (+transcript) with aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin
In his famous 1962 address to Rice University, President Kennedy declared, We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard . . . The current administration has chosen, among other things, to go to Mars. Some, Elon Musk...
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📈 Back to the Nineties? My chat (+transcript) with economist Skanda Amarnath on the 2020s productivity outlook
The American economy is growing, and, in many ways, it’s looking a lot like the 1990s. Upward trends in productivity growth and employment paired with downward trends in inflation are cause for optimism. The question is whether we will maintain this trajectory or be derailed by this emerging era…
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🚀 My chat (+transcript) with economist Matt Weinzierl on the growing business of space
The space business landscape is changing. Companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin are moving at breakneck speed toward goals Americans have dreamed of since the 1960s. At the same time, a whole host of smaller startups are arriving on the scene, ready to tackle everything from asteroid mining to...
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🌍 My chat (+transcript) with researcher Toby Ord on existential risk
The 2020s have so far been marked by pandemic, war, and startling technological breakthroughs. Conversations around climate disaster, great-power conflict, and malicious AI are seemingly everywhere. It’s enough to make anyone feel like the end might be near. Toby Ord has made it his mission to...
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🤖 My chat (+transcript) with journalist Nicole Kobie on why the future of tech still hasn’t arrived
My 2023 book, The Conservative Futurist, is based on the idea that we, as a society, are failing to meet our potential: Inefficiency, overregulation, and an overabundance of caution is robbing us of the world we might be living in. Nicole Kobie shares some of my frustrations in her recent book…
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⚡ My chat (+transcript) with Virginia Postrel on promoting a culture of dynamism
Big changes are happening: space; energy; and, of course, artificial intelligence. The difference between sustainable, pro-growth change, versus a retreat back into stagnation, may lie in how we implement that change. Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I talk with Virginia Postrel about the...
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🌐 My chat (+transcript) with chaos theorist Doyne Farmer on our interconnected economy
Farmer is the Baillie Gifford Professor of Complex Systems at Oxford's Institute for New Economic Thinking. Before joining Oxford in 2012, he worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Santa Fe Institute, where he studied complex systems and economic dynamics. During the 1990s, he took a...
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🎨 My chat (+transcript) with innovation expert Duncan Wardle on practical tips for corporate creativity
The future will be built on the big ideas we dare to conjure up today. We know that the most groundbreaking ideas often seemed ludicrous or simply impossible when first dreamed up, from the telephone, to human flight, to artificial intelligence. The key was a willingness to be creative and test…
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✨ My chat (+transcript) with tech policy expert Neil Chilson on regulating GenAI
Washington’s initial thinking about AI regulation has evolved from a knee-jerk fear response to a more nuanced appreciation of its capabilities and potential risks. Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I talk with technology policy expert Neil Chilson about national competition, defense, and...
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🏘️ My chat (+transcript) with economist Bryan Caplan on density and housing deregulation
Housing in the United States has come to be known as a panacea problem. Gone are the days when tossing the graduation cap meant picking up the keys to a front door, and the ripple effects of unaffordable housing stretch across society: poor social mobility, smaller families, worse...
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✨⏩ My chat (+transcript) with ... economist Robin Hanson on AI, innovation, and economic reality
In this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I talk with economist Robin Hanson about a) how much technological change our society will undergo in the foreseeable future, b) what form we want that change to take, and c) how much we can ever reasonably predict. Hanson is an associate…
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🚀 My chat (+transcript) with space journalist Eric Berger on SpaceX and America's New Space Age
On October 13, SpaceX and Elon Musk successfully launched their Starship rocket into low-Earth orbit. Then, in a milestone moment for space technology, they successfully captured the rocket’s Super Heavy booster with “chopstick” arms on the launch tower upon reentry, marking the first time a...
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💥 My chat (+transcript) with economist Eli Dourado on creating a fantastic future
Eli Dourado is on a mission to end the Great Stagnation, that half-century period of economic and technological disappointment that began in the 1970s (what I refer to in my 2023 book, The Conservative Futurist, as the Great Downshift). If we want to turn the page on this chapter of slow progress...
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☀️ My chat (+transcript) with economist Noah Smith on technological progress
Some signs of tech progress are obvious: the moon landing, the internet, the smartphone, and now generative AI. For most of us who live in rich countries, improvements to our day-to-day lives seem to come gradually. We might (might), then, forgive some of those who claim that our society has not...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Welcome to Faster, Please! — The Podcast. Several times a month, host Jim Pethokoukis will feature a lively conversation with a fascinating and provocative guest about how to make the world a better place by accelerating scientific discovery, technological innovation, and economic growth.
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Faster, Please! — The Podcast currently has 107 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
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Welcome to Faster, Please! — The Podcast. Several times a month, host Jim Pethokoukis will feature a lively conversation with a fascinating and provocative guest about how to make the world a better place by accelerating scientific discovery, technological innovation, and economic growth....
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