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PODCAST

Faster, Please! — The Podcast

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

technology

All Episodes

24:54

🌍 My chat (+transcript) with researcher Toby Ord on...

Faster, Please! — The Podcast ·

2025/01/31

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 figure out just how close we are to catastrophe — and maybe not close at all!Ord is the author of the 2020 book, The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity. Back then, I interviewed Ord on the

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28:08

🤖 My chat (+transcript) with journalist Nicole Kobie...

Faster, Please! — The Podcast ·

2025/01/24

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, The Long History of the Future: Why tomorrow’s technology still isn’t here. She explores the evolutionary history of past technologies and why we just can’t seem to arrive at the future we’ve all been waiting

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29:45

⚡ My chat (+transcript) with Virginia Postrel on...

Faster, Please! — The Podcast ·

2025/01/16

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 pitfalls of taking a top-down approach to innovation, versus allowing a bottom-up style of dynamism to flourish.Postrel is an author, columnist, and speaker whose scholarly interests range from emerging

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26:39

🌐 My chat (+transcript) with chaos theorist Doyne...

Faster, Please! — The Podcast ·

2024/12/19

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 break from academia to run a successful quantitative trading firm using statistical arbitrage strategies.Farmer has been a pioneer in chaos theory and complexity economics, including the development of

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26:58

🎨 My chat (+transcript) with innovation expert Duncan...

Faster, Please! — The Podcast ·

2024/12/13

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 the limits.While many of us might not consider ourselves creative people, Duncan Wardle assures us that we can take our ideas and brainstorms to the next level, no matter who we are or what we do. Today on

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27:47

✨ My chat (+transcript) with tech policy expert Neil...

Faster, Please! — The Podcast ·

2024/11/26

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 federal vs. state regulation in this brave new world of artificial intelligence.Chilson is the head of AI policy at the Abundance Institute. He is a lawyer, computer scientist, and former chief technologist

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28:21

🏘️ My chat (+transcript) with economist Bryan Caplan...

Faster, Please! — The Podcast ·

2024/11/15

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 retirement-readiness, just to name a few.Today on Faster, Please — The Podcast, I talk to Bryan Caplan about the seemingly obvious culprit, government regulation, and the growing movement to combat it.Caplan is a professor

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26:57

✨⏩ My chat (+transcript) with ... economist Robin...

Faster, Please! — The Podcast ·

2024/10/31

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 professor of economics at George Mason University. He was formerly a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, and is the author of the Overcoming Bias Substack. In addition, he is the author

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27:19

🚀 My chat (+transcript) with space journalist Eric...

Faster, Please! — The Podcast ·

2024/10/23

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 booster was ever caught in mid-air.The achievement is a mind-blowing feat of human engineering — one that hasn’t gotten nearly the recognition that it deserves. Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I talk

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38:21

💥 My chat (+transcript) with economist Eli Dourado on...

Faster, Please! — The Podcast ·

2024/10/10

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 and deserved skepticism, we’re going to have to accept some creative destruction.Dourado believes that the courage to embrace major change is key to meeting our potential. Today on Faster, Please! — The

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32:27

☀️ My chat (+transcript) with economist Noah Smith on...

Faster, Please! — The Podcast ·

2024/09/26

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 progressed, that our lives have not improved, and that a tech-optimist outlook is even naïve.Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I talk with economist Noah Smith about pushing the limits in areas like

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22:40

📖 My chat (+transcript) with Mentava founder Niels...

Faster, Please! — The Podcast ·

2024/09/12

When it comes to sports, everybody is basically aligned that the goal here is helping every kid reach their potential. We celebrate talent, we give athletes the resources and personalized support they each need to develop their skills. We have varsity leagues, we have junior varsity leagues. We make sure that kids are challenged at the appropriate level for their current level abilities. And for some reason, when it comes to academics, we throw all of that out the window.Our progress as a society

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27:01

⚡ My chat (+transcript) with venture capitalist...

Faster, Please! — The Podcast ·

2024/09/05

American global leadership is due in great part to its innovators — visionaries who drive society beyond the preconceived limits. Historically, government-led initiatives like the Manhattan Project or the Apollo Project pushed boundaries. Today, too often, government lags behind technologically.Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I talk with Katherine Boyle about American Dynamism, the spirit of pro-progress innovation, and how a new generation of Silicon Valley startups is spurring government

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29:29

⚠ My chat (+transcript) with BCG economist Philipp...

Faster, Please! — The Podcast ·

2024/08/15

In our highly globalized economy, exogenous shocks and unsettling headlines are everywhere. It makes sense that market forecasters should be biting their nails, but so often their prophecies of doom prove completely false. Philipp Carlsson-Szlezak is a proponent of “rational optimism.” He believes there’s a calmer, more measured way of going about financial and economic analysis that sets us up to be more flexible to the highs and lows of the economic events. Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast,

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23:33

🤖🧠 My chat (+transcript) with Google DeepMind's Séb...

Faster, Please! — The Podcast ·

2024/08/09

In a world of Artificial General Intelligence, machines would be able to match, and even exceed, human cognitive abilities. AGI might still be science fiction, but Séb Krier sees this technology as not only possible, but inevitable. Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I chat with Krier about how our public policy should facilitate AGI’s arrival and flourishing.Krier is an AI policy expert, adviser, and attorney. He currently works in policy development and strategy at Google DeepMind. He

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23:27

⤵ My chat (+transcript) with investor Ruchir Sharma...

Faster, Please! — The Podcast ·

2024/07/19

✈ A quick note: I will be traveling through the middle of the month and will be posting a bit less than usual and perhaps a bit shorter than usual.These days, it seems that critics of capitalism are more prevalent and more vocal than ever. But Ruchir Sharma, author of What Went Wrong with Capitalism, argues that the free market never let us down; our government did. Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, Sharma and I discuss the American addiction to “pain management” — unnecessary economic

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25:46

⚛ My chat (+transcript) with the US Energy...

Faster, Please! — The Podcast ·

2024/07/11

✈ A quick note: I will be traveling through the middle of the month and will be posting a bit less than usual and perhaps a bit shorter than usual.After decades of resistance to nuclear power, growing concern over climate change, rising electricity needs, and a desire for greater energy independence are spurring renewed public interest in a future powered by atomic fission (perhaps fusion, too). Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I talk to Dr. Mike Goff about the state of US nuclear power, the

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31:32

🤖 My chat (+transcript) with Google economist Guy...

Faster, Please! — The Podcast ·

2024/06/28

Artificial intelligence may revolutionize the American economy, but whether we see that potential actualized depends on a few key factors: whether generative AI is a general purpose technology, whether the labor force makes a smooth pivot, how employers prioritize their resources, and whether the US chooses to take the lead in AI’s deployment. These are just a few of the topics I cover on the podcast today with Guy Ben-Ishai.Ben-Ishai is the head of economic policy research at Google. He previously

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29:43

🏙 My chat (+transcript) with ... economist Jason Barr...

Faster, Please! — The Podcast ·

2024/06/14

The image of the skyscraper is the hallmark of the modern city. Futuristic depictions of urban landscapes nearly always feature towering structures high above the clouds. Today, however, developing countries seem to be putting the greatest effort into building the most impressive skyscrapers, from the Burj Khalifa in the UAE, to the future Jeddah Tower in Saudi Arabia. Whether you love them or hate them, it’s worth asking why we build skyscrapers and what their role will be in future cities. Today

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30:17

🤖🌈 My chat (+transcript) with Nick Bostrom on life in...

Faster, Please! — The Podcast ·

2024/06/06

The media is full of dystopian depictions of artificial intelligence, such as The Terminator and The Matrix, yet few have dared to dream up the image of an AI utopia. Nick Bostrom’s most recent book, Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World attempts to do exactly that. Bostrom explores what it would mean to live in a post-work world, where human labor is vastly outperformed by AI, or even made obsolete. When all of our problems have been solved in an AI utopia . . . well, what’s next for us

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