Faster, Please! — The Podcast

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 included, are looking for a backup planet to Earth. For others, like Robert Zubrin , Mars is an opportunity...

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 of uncertainty. Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast , I talk with Skanda Amarnath about trade policy...

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 next-gen satellites to improved lunar missions. Today on Faster, Please — The Podcast , I’m talking with...

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 20...

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 evolution...

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...

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 strategie...

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...

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...

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 see...

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 Huma...

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...

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 th...

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...

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 s...

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 spir...

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...

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, a...

✈ 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! — T...

✈ 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)....

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 podc...

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 hat...

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...

While AI doomers proselytize their catastrophic message, many politicians are recognizing that the loss of America’s competitive edge poses a much more real threat than the supposed “existential risk” of AI. Today on Faster, Please!—The Podcast , I talk with Adam Thierer about the current state of the AI policy landscape and the accompanying fierce regulatory debate. Thierer is a senior fellow at...

Project Apollo was a feat of human achievement akin to, and arguably greater than, the discovery of the New World. From 1962 to 1972, NASA conducted 17 crewed missions, six of which placed men on the surface of the moon. Since the Nixon administration put an end to Project Apollo, our extraterrestrial ambitions seem to have stalled along with our sense of national optimism. But is the American spi...