Episode Details

Lt Gen (Ret.) Steven L. Kwast welcomes Ashe in America to a conversation he calls the culture of space, and it earns the title. Technology is the last thing downstream. Upstream sit policies, values, beliefs, and ultimately worldview. Get those wrong and the most beautiful technology becomes the cruelest weapon.

Ashe brings twenty years of corporate change management to the mic, asking the questions other people are afraid to. Are the ethics of Neuralink an afterthought, the same way Dolly the sheep just quietly went into the shadows? Can a nation as big and diverse as ours actually share a moral foundation? Why did the federal government just claim sole authority over AI regulation?

Kwast answers from his Geography of Innovation study, which found no correlation between where invention happens and the moral climate around it. The takeaway: free markets and good people will figure out useful applications, but only if our interior life is in order. Along the way they unpack progressives as the true opposites of conservatives, USEIP as a model of free association, and why the most exciting thing about the coming age is that evil can no longer hide in the dark like a cockroach.