Policy Punchline

Sunita Satyapal is the Director of the U.S. Department of Energy's Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies Office within the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE). She is one of the most knowledgeable experts and policymakers on the topic of hydrogen – an ever more important topic in the energy world. While usually hydrogen is overshadowed by its solar and wind peers, it is the most...

Bill Dudley is a senior research scholar at Princeton University’s Griswold Center for Economic Policy Studies. He served as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York from 2009 to 2018, and as vice chairman of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). He was previously chief U.S. economist at Goldman Sachs. He previously came on our show on April 2nd, 2019 to reflect on his career, and he...

William Gale is the Arjay and Frances Miller Chair in Federal Economic Policy and a senior fellow in the Economic Studies Program at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of "Fiscal Therapy: Curing America’s Debt Addiction and Investing in the Future." He is also the Co-Director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center and served as senior economist for the White House Council of Economic Ad...

Robinson Meyer is a staff writer and climate reporter at The Atlantic. After covering working on environmental policy and climate change for the last four years of his six years at the publication, Rob and a few of his colleagues at The Atlantic started the COVID Tracking Project in the early days of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, accumulating case counts and death tolls when information on the vi...

Robert Barnes is a lawyer who prides himself on defending the underdog. His clients include Alex Jones and the Covington kids, and he was recently invited by President Trump to be part of the President’s legal team suiting to contend the 2020 election results. In this interview, Mr. Barnes explains why Alex Jones shouldn’t have been deplatformed, what the “Gated Institutional Narratives” and the I...

Michael Hüther is the director of the German Economic Institute (Institut der deutschen Wirtschaft), one of the most important think tanks in Germany based in Cologne. He previously served on the German Council of Economic Experts and was the chief economist of DekaBank. In this interview, Dr. Hüther discusses Covid’s shock on the German economy, why globalization has become “exhausted,” Germany’s...

Rebecca Henderson is the John and Natty McArthur University Professor at Harvard, where she specializes in innovation and organizational change. Her newest book "Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire" examines how capitalism might be reworked so as to strive for a greener, more equitable future. "Reimagining Capitalism" was named to the shortlist of the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Bo...

This interview marks the 100th episode of Policy Punchline. We’re truly grateful for all the support you’ve given us over the last two years and sincerely hope that we may continue to explore more exciting ideas on our journey forward! Jim VandeHei is the co-founder and CEO of Axios and the former executive editor and co-founder of Politico. In this interview, Jim and Tiger discuss the struggles a...

Since the race towards high-powered, destructive bombs during World War II, nuclear technologies have captured the public’s imagination in the discourse over energy and society. Large-scale nuclear fission, which involves the splitting of an atom, has been particularly crucial in the energy mix and electricity production in many Western countries over the past few decades. Nuclear fusion – where t...

Liam Vaughan’s newest book explores the “Flash Crash” that took place on May 6, 2010. In the span of five minutes, S&P fell 5% and a trillion dollars of valuation was wiped out. Within around 20 minutes, the markets picked back up and resumed to normalcy. The crash was later attributed to Navinder Sarao, or Nav, a London day trader who lives with his parents and trades from his bedroom. In this in...

How did the Indian-Americans vote in the 2020 Presidential Elections? Was the nomination of Kamala Harris a decisive factor? How different will India-US ties be in a Biden administration? How did the Narendra Modi administration in India handle the COVID-19 pandemic? What are some of the most grave challenges being confronted by the Indian democractic system? In this episode, we explore all these...

A seasoned entrepreneur and financier, Tom Leyden is well versed in every aspect of the solar world. In this episode, Tom speaks about his start in the solar space, how it has evolved over the years, and what he sees as the future of the technology. Tom narrates his experiences in Africa and Southeast Asia advising companies and governments on solar projects. He explains how solar is not only as a...

Nate Silver, widely considered as the preeminent election forecaster, uses Bayesian methods in his models. What is Bayesian statistics? It just happens that some of our team members have been studying Bayesian concepts, so we hope this explanation could be somewhat helpful in informing you of the foundational methodology that Silver uses to forecast. The questions we discuss include: - Was Nate Si...

We react to the election outcome so far and discuss why it’s an indictment on the Democratic Party and a victory for Trump. Does the failed expectations of polling consensus represent an error in election predictions or a cognitive dissonance about the true political feelings of Americans? Have the democrats failed to put forward policy that appeals to Americans, or are they simply losing the mess...

Trey Gowdy is a former federal prosecutor and Congressman from Greenville, South Carolina. Known for his ability to persuade, question, and debate in courtrooms and Congressional hearings, Mr. Gowdy rose to fame within the Repubican Party. He resigned in 2018 when he could no longer tolerate the hyper-partisanship and polarization of political discourse. In this interview, Mr. Gowdy discusses the...

Dan Kammen is the Class of 1935 Distinguished Professor of Energy at the UC Berkeley. Well-rounded in issues across the entire energy sphere, Prof. Kammen has also served in both the Obama and Trump administrations among other public facing duties, in addition to being a founder of and advisor to several private companies.  In this interview, Prof. Kammen discusses his views on the American energy...

Katharina Pistor is Edwin B. Parker Professor of Comparative Law and the director of the Center on Global Legal Transformation at Columbia University. Her most recent book, "The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality," examines how assets such as land, private debt, business organizations, or knowledge are transformed into capital through contract law, property rights, collater...

In his 2019 book "Islam, Authoritarianism, and Underdevelopment: A Global and Historical Comparison," Prof. Ahmet Kuru tackles the question of why Muslim-majority countries have historically exhibited high levels of authoritarianism and low levels of socio-economic development in comparison with the rest of the world. He rejects the two mainstream views of essentialism, which says that Islam is th...

"Seeking Virtue in Finance: Contributing to Society in a Conflicted Industry" is the newest book by JC de Swaan, a lecturer in the economics department at Princeton University, where he is affiliated with the Bendheim Center for Finance, and a partner at Cornwall Capital, a New York-based investment fund that the movie "The Big Short" portrayed. At Princeton, Prof. de Swaan teaches classes in Fina...

David Pakman hosts The David Pakman Show, an internationally syndicated television, radio, and Internet political program. In 2005, at the age of 21, Pakman began hosting a local radio station as a "hobby", and by 2011 the show aired on 100 stations and outlets. He was for some time the youngest nationally syndicated political host. In this interview, David and Tiger talk about the state of politi...

Arvind Panagariya is Jagdish N. Bhagwati Professor of Indian Political Economy at Columbia University and the former and first Vice Chairman of the National Institution for Transforming India (NITI Aayog). Previously, he was the Chief Economist of the Asian Development Bank. In this interview recorded in the spring of 2019, Prof. Panagariya discusses India’s economic reforms and future outlook. As...

What does it mean to pursue an intellectual life? What are the preconditions for intellectual pursuit, and is it available to everyone? In this long interview, Zena and Tiger go through some of the most contentious debates in academia and beyond – from whether solitude and suffering are required to live out an intellectual life, to whether liberal arts educations are worthy or effective in educati...

Dan Berkovitz is one of the five Commissioners at the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). This interview touches on a wide range of matters in financial regulation. We first discuss the functions of the CTFC – how it regulates commodities, futures, and swaps which all play an important role in our markets despite sounding like abstract financial terms that are so distant to people’s...

What are the SEC enforcement stories behind major cases of fraud such as the Fyre Festival and Elizabeth Holmes’s Theranos, or famous settlements such as with Elon Musk and Wells Fargo? Stephanie Avakian is the Co-Director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement. She has worked on some of the most complex and intriguing investigations, settlements, and financial regulations in recent years. 
In this...

Kruskaia Sierra-Escalante is a Senior Manager of Blended Finance at the International Finance Corporation (IFC), which is the private arm of the World Bank. The blended finance unit manages more than $1 billion in donor-contributions for climate-smart co-investments in IFC projects. In this interview, we talk about what blended finance is, and how it generally supports high-impact projects in frag...