Podcast Episodes

🤖 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 …

Published on 5 months ago

🗽 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…

Published on 5 months ago

🌾 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 …

Published on 5 months, 3 weeks ago

🚀 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 . . …

Published on 6 months, 2 weeks ago

📈 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 optim…

Published on 6 months, 3 weeks ago

🚀 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…

Published on 7 months ago

🌍 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. …

Published on 8 months, 1 week ago

🤖 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 …

Published on 8 months, 2 weeks ago

⚡ 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 impl…

Published on 8 months, 3 weeks ago

🌐 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…

Published on 9 months, 2 weeks ago