Building Tomorrow

Over the past several years, conservative complaints about social media bias have grown. Some conservatives allege that platforms like Facebook, Google, and Twitter have tweaked their algorithms in ways that effectively downgrade conservative content or that they have “shadow-banned” conservative voices. In this episode, Paul and Will are joined by Zach Graves and Ryan Radia, both from the Lincoln...

Building Tomorrow isn’t in the business of encouraging government bloat, but in this episode we consider whether, sometimes, eliminating a government agency might be a penny wise, pound foolish decision. In particular, Paul and Will are joined by Zach Graves and Daniel Schuman as they discuss proposals to resurrect the Office for Technology Assessment, which had advised Congress on tech policy unt...

The theme that connects both of the interviews in today’s episode is the value of planning for the future. That can be as simple as thinking about the ways that driverless cars will affect the car insurance industry, as Ian Adams from TechFreedom discusses. Or it can be as big as Dr. Mark Lutter, Founder of the Center for Innovative Governance Research, advocating for charter cities, a place where...

This week’s interview is with Robert Zubrin, astronautics engineer and President of the Mars Society, who also introduced Elon Musk to Jim Cantrell at the founding of SpaceX. Dr. Zubrin was in Washington, DC at the Lincoln Network ’s “Reboot American Innovation” conference to contrast the successes of the private sector space industry over the past few years with the excess and stagnation of NASA’...

Facial recognition software will transform our lives for good or for ill. On the one hand, it will be used to make retail transactions more seamless, to replace keyed entry into houses and cars, and to provide other benefits that we can’t yet even imagine. However, it could also be used for corporate and governmental surveillance in ways that undermine civil liberties and reduce privacy. Caleb Wat...

Devin Nunes is a US Congressman and former dairy farmer from California. Imagine his surprise when a member of his cow herd started a twitter account that focused on Nunes’s failings as a politician. That account was quickly joined by several other parody accounts, including one purporting to be his mother. Nunes responded by filing multiple lawsuits against the offending accounts, against Twitter...

If you’ve ever lived in a city like NYC or San Francisco you’re all too familiar with the incredible cost of housing. A studio apartment might cost as much to rent as a single family home out in the suburbs or a smaller town. While some of that additional cost is just the price we pay for living in desirable locations with abundant job opportunities, a surprising amount of that cost is entirely un...

One of the things that folks in the 22nd century will find bizarre about their ancestors in the early 21st century will be that we were arguing about immigration when a global depopulation crisis loomed on the horizon. Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson argue that by the middle of this century the world population will start to decline as the final major developing nations have their birth-rates fa...

Tech companies are often accused of acting without first thinking through all the ramifications of what they’re doing on the principle that it is easier to ask forgiveness than permission. Adam Thierer joins the show to talk about a good habit, something he calls evasive entrepreneurialism. If innovators always waited for regulatory approval first, it would delay consumer access to transformative...

The fact of the Christchurch shooting is, unfortunately, unsurprising given the global rise of political extremism and ethno-nationalism. But it anticipates the future in that it was the first ever livestreamed mass shooting; given that mass shooters are hungry for attention, it’s almost certain to become a trend. But that raises questions about the complicity of social media in livestreamed atroc...

Jim Cantrell’s career in the space industry spans thirty years and multiple countries, from NASA to the French and Russian space agencies. Now, after co-founding SpaceX with Elon Musk, Cantrell is the CEO of Vector, a micro-satellite launching company. The private sector space industry is booming; cheap, small satellites will transform the global economy and lead to fascinating knock-on innovation...

Dog ownership is on the rise around the world, correlating to the decline in age of marriage and delays in childbearing. Given the slowing (and eventual reversal) of the global population birth rate, that means pets will demand an growing share of personal income, emotional investment, and technological innovation. Will and Paul are joined by Natalie Dowzicky (flatmate of the fabulous Corgi pup Pi...

Join Paul, Joe Verruni, and Peter Van Doren as they discuss why the Green New Deal is neither particularly “green,” all that “new,” nor all that great of a “deal.” However, there is a libertarian response to the Green New Deal that doesn’t just consist of “bah humbug.” There are market-based solutions that can more effectively and sustainably address carbon emissions and other environmental pollut...

If you live in a city, your relationship with the new scooter startups like Lime and Bird probably ranges somewhere between frustration at the sidewalk clutter or enthusiastic adoption for when you need to reach the Metro stop nearest your apartment. In this episode, Paul and Will talk with Jennifer Skees about whether scooters are a true transformational transportation technology or if they are o...

As the cultural economy (music, movies, television, and books) digitized around the turn of the 21st century, many critics worried about severe negative consequences, including declining creative output because of piracy and decreased aesthetic quality. Joel Waldfogel joins Paul and Aaron to discuss why those fears were wrong. Digitization has actually stimulated a renaissance in the cultural econ...

Today, more than a third of long-term relationships are started through online dating apps like Tinder and eHarmony. (And the percentage is even higher for LGBQT communities.) During the early years of online dating, critics suggested that the apps would lead to either sexual hedonism or the formation of shallow, unstable long-term relationships. Well, some of the first major longitudinal studies...

Every new entertainment medium—from the 17th century novel to 21st century video games—has had its share of scolds who panic about the social implications. Those moral panics are always misguided, but entertainment can indeed shape its consumers. This week, Aaron, Paul, and Will debate the ways that video games, by engaging players with compelling narratives and giving them a feeling of player age...

Wearable tech includes everything from wearable thermometers to robotic exoskeletons. It’s a hot investment area for Silicon Valley venture capital funds. But most startups in the wearable industry are very careful to avoid claiming that they are producing “medical devices.” Yet the divide between these wearables and medical devices seems incredibly arbitrary. After all, how is a traditional therm...

Cryptocurrency advocates often praise its decentralized nature, which promises to strip out intermediaries that both slow and function as a tax on private exchanges of goods and services. But even the most decentralized cryptocurrency still needs go-betweens in order to function for a mass consumer audience. Simply put, most consumers are willing to give a little on transparency and privacy in ord...

Politicians want their constituents to feel a sense of personal connection to them. Mass media makes those perceptions of intimacy and authenticity possible on a large scale, like FDR’s radio fireside chats, Ronald Reagan’s TV appearances, and Donald Trump’s tweets. But we are on the cusp of the political adoption of a new media form; it’s the age of livestreaming as an exercise in political brand...

After the “blue wave” that propelled Democrats to a majority in the US House of Representatives, Paul and Matthew invited tech policy expert Will Rinehart to join them as they suss out the implications for new legislation of emerging tech. While a split Congress often struggles to find bi-partisan agreement on major policy initiatives, there is a growing sense of unease in Congress in regards to i...

Tired of voting for a political candidate you don’t particularly like who represents a major political party you don’t particularly like so that another candidate who you dislike a little bit more won’t win office? If so, then ranked choice voting might be the electoral reform for you. Ranked choice voting is a system in which voters don’t just vote for a single candidate for each listed office on...

If you have kids, you know how alluring smartphones and social media can be for a generation raised with (and, at times, seemingly by) the technology. But researchers are starting to worry that engagement with this technology is rewiring peoples’ brains by design. Tech companies have invented mechanisms like the “infinite scroll” and notification systems which trigger chemical releases in the brai...

Flying car prototypes are being tested right now, but they exist in a strange legal limbo in the United States. The Federal Aviation Administration has strict rules for the altitudes at which aircraft of various sizes as well as drones are allowed to fly at, but a new category of Vertical Take-Off and Landing aircraft needs a defined airspace before the technology can be rolled out for a mass cons...

If you live in NYC, Washington DC, or Nashville, TN, Amazon is coming to town. But unlike Santa Claus, Amazon’s new headquarters locations are arriving on a raft of subsidies instead of a sleigh. State and local governments offered billions of dollars in tax rebates and cash grants in order to woo the company. If everything goes according to plan, Amazon HQ2 might generate a budget surplus for DC...