Faster, Please! — The Podcast

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world: Will artificial intelligence displace workers or make them more valuable? Probably plenty of both. But how much in either direction, and how fast will all this change happen? Today on Faster, Please!—The Podcas t, I am joined by Erik Brynjolfsson , one of the world’s top economists studying how AI is reshaping prod...

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world: Artificial intelligence is undoubtedly poised to change the workplace—the question is, by how much? Key voices in Silicon Valley warn that white-collar jobs will soon be a thing of the past, while others predict more modest economic gains as firms struggle to reorganize workflows. When it comes to the future of wor...

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world: As a college sophomore, Josh Farahzad assembled a group of students from around the country in an attempt to launch a homemade rocket into space. From there, he ditched the traditional route and scoured the country for the perfect place to build a uniquely American mega-project . Disillusioned with the entrepreneur...

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world: Anxiety is running rampant about the future of artificial intelligence and its place in society. When technology CEOs warn of an impending white-collar jobpocalypse (or jobageddon, if you prefer), it’s no wonder public pessimism is so widespread. Today on Faster, Please!—The Podcast , I chat with tech policy analys...

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world: Headlines portend rising seas, raging storms, and a planet in crisis. It’s easy to feel like the future is something to fear; however, the key to cooling things down isn’t scaling civilization back. If the world wants to cut back on carbon emissions without sacrificing growth, the answer lies in bold innovation. A...

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world: Since humanity’s beginning, we’ve been pondering about our end. From war, to disease, to divine reckoning, the means of our destruction seem endless. The advent of the atomic bomb, concerns around climate change, and now AI have prompted many to wonder whether our demise will be random, or if it will come as the re...

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world: The human pursuit of progress stems from our desire for security and a higher quality of life. Yet, even as today’s advanced economies are the richest and most comfortable they’ve ever been, something is amiss. What explains the decline in R&D growth, mental health, and birth rates, just to name a few challenges? I...

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world: Headlines abound with news of the coming nuclear renaissance — a long-awaited era of clean, abundant energy to power our future. But this is hardly the first time the media has heralded the dawn of the atomic age. Still, this round of nuclear optimism is seeing unprecedented corporate investment, more cost-effectiv...

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world: NASA is attempting the difficult task of juggling highly ambitious goals, but also possibly intense budget cuts. Despite personnel losses and unclear leadership, the administration is racing to put humans on the Moon — ideally ahead of China — and then Mars. Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast , I’m chatting wit...

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world: What really gets AI optimists excited isn’t the prospect of automating customer service departments or human resources. Imagine, rather, what might happen to the pace of scientific progress if AI becomes a super research assistant. Tom Davidson ’s new paper, How Quick and Big Would a Software Intelligence Explosion...

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers, China’s spacefaring ambitions pose tough competition for America. With a focused, centralized program, Beijing seems likely to land taikonauts on the moon before another American flag is planted. Meanwhile, NASA faces budget cuts, leadership gaps, and technical setbacks. In his new book, journalist Christian Davenport chronicles the fierce rivalr...

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers, Some Faster, Please! readers have told me I spend too little time on the downsides of AI. If you’re one of those folks, today is your day. On this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast , I talk with self-described “free-market AI doomer” James Miller . Miller and I talk about the risks inherent with super-smart AI, some possible outcomes of a...

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers, For most of history, stagnation — not growth — was the rule. To explain why prosperity so often stalls, economist Carl Benedikt Frey offers a sweeping tour through a millennium of innovation and upheaval, showing how societies either harness — or are undone by — waves of technological change. His message is sobering: an AI revolution is no guaran...

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers, Artificial intelligence may prove to be one of the most transformative technologies in history, but like any tool, its immense power for good comes with a unique array of risks, both large and small. Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast , I chat with Miles Brundage about extracting the most out of AI’s potential while mitigating harms. We discu...

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers, In 1976, America celebrated 200 years of independence, democracy, and progress. Part of that celebration was the release of To Fly! , a short but powerful docudrama on the history of American flight. With To Fly! , Greg MacGillivray and his co-director Jim Freeman created one of the earliest IMAX films, bringing cinematography to new heights. Aft...

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers, Global population growth is slowing, and it’s not showing any signs of recovery. To the environmentalists of the 1970s, this may have seemed like a movement in the right direction. The drawbacks to population decline, however, are severe and numerous, and they’re not all obvious. Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast , I talk with economist and...

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers, Nuclear fission is a safe, powerful, and reliable means of generating nearly limitless clean energy to power the modern world. A few public safety scares and a lot of bad press over the half-century has greatly delayed our nuclear future. But with climate change and energy-hungry AI making daily headlines, the time — finally — for a nuclear renai...

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers, The innovation landscape is facing a difficult paradox: Even as R&D investment has increased, productivity per dollar invested is in decline. In his recent co-authored paper , The next innovation revolution—powered by AI , Michael Chui explores AI as a possible solution to this dilemma. Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast , Chui and I explore...

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers, With tariff and immigration policies uncertain, and the emerging AI revolution continuing to emerge, there’s plenty to speculate about when it comes to the US economy. Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast , I invite Joseph Politano to help us try and make sense of it all. He is the author of the popular Apricitas Economics Substack newsletter....

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers, The 1990s and the dawn of the internet were a pivotal time for America and the wider world. The history of human progress is a series of such pivotal moments. As Peter Leyden points out, it seems we’re facing another defining era as society wrestles with three new key technologies: artificial intelligence, clean energy, and bioengineering. Today...

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers, Once-science-fiction advancements like AI, gene editing, and advanced biotechnology have finally arrived, and they’re here to stay. These technologies have seemingly set us on a course towards a brand new future for humanity, one we can hardly even picture today. But progress doesn’t happen overnight, and it isn’t the result of any one breakthrou...

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers, America is embarking upon a New Space Age, with companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin ready to partner with NASA to take Americans to a new frontier — possibly as far as Mars. Lately, however, the world is witnessing uncertainty surrounding NASA leadership and even an odd feud between SpaceX boss Elon Musk and the White House. At a critical time...

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 be incurring some serious geopolitical risks. In the paper Superintelligence Strategy , his joint project with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Alexandr Wang , Dan Hendrycks introduces the idea of M...

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 immigration. Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast , I talk with Alex Nowrasteh about the ideology beneath this severe skepticism, as well as what Americans lose economically if we shut our doors to...

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 Club of Rome, were just two publications warning of impending starvation due to simply too many humans on the earth. As the population ballooned year by year, it would simply be impossible to feed...