Faster, Please! — The Podcast

Hosted by James Pethokoukis

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Aug 2026

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Welcome to Faster, Please! — The Podcast. Several times a month, host Jim Pethokoukis will feature a lively conversation with a fascinating and provocative guest about how to make the world a better place by accelerating scientific discovery, technological innovation, and economic growth. fasterplease.substack.com

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August 18, 202630 min

🏁 The Great AI Race as a clash over compute: my interview with analyst Ryan Fedasiuk

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world: The AI race between America and China isn’t just about whose AI models are at the frontier or get adopted most widely. Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast , I am joined by Ryan Fedasiuk , a fellow at AEI and the author of the Substack Choosing Victory , where he focuses on US-China relations, technology, and national power. He’s also an adjunct assistant professor at Georgetown University. Recently, Fedasiuk has written about the US-China AI race, and while much of the debate has focused on the models themselves, Fedasiuk is focused on the role of compute in shaping the global balance of power, which is also the subject of a new report, Voltcraft: Industrial Competition in the Age of AI . We discuss the speed at which AI capabilities are improving, the dimensions of the US-China AI race, and why Fedasiuk thinks compute will be central to that competition. We also discuss a global US strategy and, as AI abilities increase, what role the American government could play in ensuring safety. In This Episode: * How Fast Is AI Moving? (0:54) * The US-China AI Race (7:08) * The Future of the AI Industry (12:42) * The Compute Race (17:04) * Expanding US AI Infrastructure Abroad (22:05) * Geopolitics and National Security (25:10) A lightly edited transcript of our conversation will appear in my Week in Review issue on Saturday. (Another option is using the Substack auto transcript function.) But here are some edited highlights from the chat: On the pace of AI progress… At least according to definitions circa the late 2010s, we’re living through what I would describe as a fast takeoff. We have, as far as I am concerned, artificial general intelligence capable of meeting the performance of human beings or exceeding it at most tasks. And I think that things are only likely to improve from here. On the US-China AI race… We are obviously living through this uncertainty. When Mythos was unveiled on April 6, I think it sent a real tremor through the Chinese national security apparatus and kind of a moment of, “What is this? What do the Americans have? What is this system capable of achieving? When can we produce our own?” On why compute is critical… The fact is that to make the most out of frontier AI and to run it at scale, you still need tons of devices that turn electricity into tokens. You still need tons of compute. And really, I think the name of the game is going to be who can build and install computational power around the world. On why America needs to export its compute… If compute is the substrate of the global intelligence economy, we want to make sure that it’s US-designed compute that other countries are choosing to buy and install rather than compute manufactured in China. On who should get access to American compute… If we can expect the developer ecosystem in Singapore is going to take off like wildfire and start building and using a lot of AI applications, maybe we want to make sure that Singaporeans are building on American compute ASAP before China’s compute becomes a viable alternative that could serve that market. Maybe we want to make sure that that market is served even before certain constituencies in Des Moines. On government intervention in frontier AI labs… I think that we are already seeing some shadow of this, even if it isn’t declared. I think we will likely see a continued molding and merging of private sector capability with the resources and infrastructure of the national security enterprise. On sale everywhere: The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

August 6, 202635 min

💧⚡🖥️ A deep-dive on data centers: My interview with AI researcher Andy Masley

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world: With the massive buildout of data centers has come an equally massive backlash. They’ve been blamed for higher electricity bills, taking up too much water, and pushing out farmland. All this has led to a public outcry and efforts against their construction. But how much of the criticism is warranted? Has one of America’s fastest-growing industries become a political scapegoat? Today on Faster, Please!—The Podcast , I am joined by Andy Masley , an independent writer supported by Coefficient Giving who deep dives into AI research. Recently, he has focused on data centers at his great newsletter and separating facts from myths surrounding them. We discuss what the evidence actually says about data centers’ impact on water, land, and electricity prices—and where Andy thinks people get the facts wrong. We also discuss AI art, Waymo, and America’s willingness to embrace technological change. In This Episode: * AI Art as Curation (0:37) * Waymo and Technological Disruption (4:43) * The Case for Data Centers (9:14) * Water and Land (15:41) * Data Centers and Electricity (21:41) * The Data Center Backlash (28:50) A lightly edited transcript of our conversation will appear in my Week in Review issue on Saturday. (Another option is using the Substack auto transcript function.) But here are some edited highlights from the chat: On AI Art… As you see someone using Midjourney to create images that you are actually much more interested in, and find more subtle or pleasant than the kinds of AI-generated images most people are typically exposed to on their timelines, it can really open people up and make them realize that these tools are much more powerful than they might expect. On Waymo Entering Cities… While there are many industries that I might worry about completely disrupting, the number of deaths caused by driving, and the difficulty people face getting around very dense cities, are such important problems that I am willing to hand the robots this one before we march forward elsewhere. On this issue, I am entirely gung ho: “Let the Waymos have it.” On misconceptions about data centers… If you somehow hid the words “data center” but included all the other information and asked, “Would you accept these specific trade-offs in your community, such as using a certain amount of water and land, in exchange for this amount of tax revenue?” I think that, in most places, with a few exceptions, people would say yes. On the “lack” of land… This has really blown up in the past few months in a way I really didn’t expect. Willie Nelson actually just posted this thing that got like a hundred thousand likes on Twitter about, “Don’t give them an inch of our farmland.” My basic finding is that data centers themselves, the physical buildings, will take up something like one-fifteenth of the land that we currently dedicate to Christmas trees in America, which isn’t nothing, but it’s also incredibly small. On data centers driving up electricity prices… Electricity markets are very complicated and don’t always work in a simple, you increase demand, and the price just immediately goes up for everyone. That’s not really how it works. They have had to slightly raise household electricity prices because of the data center. They’ve reported data centers as being one of several causes, but that’s usually not a significant percentage. On the growing data center backlash It’s hard not to feel like a lot of the anti-data center stuff is also this collective, “I can find this deep meaning in this local struggle against these people who I perceive to be bad.” The general idea that we can all band together as this ragtag team of everyday people and prevent this thing from destroying our local community is a very compelling narrative to people, regardless of the actual specific harms that are expected. I do think general anti-tech sentiment is definitely playing into this. On sale everywhere: The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

July 30, 202634 min

📈 The business of AI: My interview with technology analyst and investor Azeem Azhar

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world: Artificial intelligence is expected to transform the economy, but what about the AI industry itself? Companies across the AI supply chain are now valued in the trillions of dollars. But do the data and current demand justify such lofty expectations, or are investors getting ahead of reality? And when will the AI economy finally begin to live up to the hype? Today on Faster, Please!—The Podcast , I am joined by Azeem Azhar , a Digital Fellow at Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab , the founder of Exponential View , a research platform focused on helping leaders understand emerging technologies and their impact on society. He is also the author of The Exponential Age and the co-author of The State of the AI Economy , one of the first serious attempts to measure the size and trajectory of the AI economy from the demand side and know what customers are actually paying for. We discuss where the AI economy stands today, why businesses are still struggling to realize AI’s full potential, who stands to capture the greatest gains from the technology, and the roles different countries could play in the “AI Race” between the United States and China. In This Episode: * The AI Economy (0:44) * AI’s Return on Investment (6:40) * Will AI Bring an Entrepreneurial Wave? (12:41) * When AI Hits the Bottom Line (17:53) * Who Wins the AI Economy? (23:48) * Europe in the AI Race (30:20) A lightly edited transcript of our conversation will appear in my Week in Review issue on Saturday. (Another option is using the Substack auto transcript function.) But here are some edited highlights from the chat: On AI’s creation of abundance… It may look like abundance when you’re on the other side before the inflection, but when you’re in it, it really looks like a day-to-day grind where you still have to fight for the things that you care about. The notion of abundance in general, I think, defies the realities of physics. You always need energy to get something done. On why AI adoption has been slower than expected… Companies are going through the similar type of process that Paul David describes around electrification, which is that you can put the light bulbs in the workshop—that is the copilot. But to move to the moving assembly line requires a lot more work and a lot more expertise. On AI’s challenge for businesses… No business was ever about, “Can we summarize an email quicker than before?” The question is: At what point do AI tools meaningfully come in to make those decisions happen more effectively—either at higher quality, at lower cost, or at higher speed? On why AI may not lead to immediate job losses… Companies realize that there was so much tacit knowledge in their workforce that they just let walk out the door. I think CEOs will start to want to understand: What are we losing when we cut an entire function for an LLM? On whether we know who will win the AI race… If you’d asked me two years ago, the winner was OpenAI, and Anthropic was really just playing around doing God knows what. So I don’t think we necessarily know who the biggest winners are. Does Anthropic or OpenAI have a significant role to play in several years time? I’m absolutely sure that will be the case. That doesn’t preclude there being other, bigger winners. On Europe’s AI opportunity… There’s things that states can do, even if they’re smaller states like the UK, because they can clear paths, they can help vertical integration, they can get access to the best specific talent. And this is not all about large language models. It’s also about models that can stimulate physics or models that can discover new materials. On sale everywhere: The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

July 21, 202631 min

✨ Data center distortions: My interview with energy policy analyst Shuting Pomerleau

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world: What problem does a data-center moratorium solve, exactly? As these warehouse-sized supercomputers face growing public backlash, they’re blamed for higher electricity bills and strains on the power grid—all while failing to provide enough jobs or tax revenue. But are they actually the problem, or are they exposing problems that have existed for years in America’s electrical grid? Today on Faster, Please!—The Podcast , I am joined by Shuting Pomerleau , the director of energy and environmental policy at the American Action Forum, where she studies electricity markets and energy policy. We discuss New York’s controversial decision to pause construction of large data centers, whether AI is really driving up electricity prices, the economic benefits of data centers, who should pay for expanding the grid, and how states should respond to growing demand for power. In This Episode: * New York’s Data Center Slowdown (0:16) * Dealing with Demand (7:09) * What is the Right Step Forward? (14:24) * Who is Paying Up? (19:27) * Can Regulation Fend Off Data Center Growth? (23:39) * Where Do Data Centers Go from Here (27:44) A lightly edited transcript of our conversation will appear in my Week in Review issue on Saturday. (Another option is using the Substack auto transcript function.) But here are some edited highlights from the chat: On New York’s data center moratorium… My concern is that pausing this will send a very strong signal to investors, data centers and developers, a very chilling signal saying, “you’re not really welcome here.” This is such a fast-moving space. One year is actually a lot of time. On what’s really driving electricity price increases… What has been really driving the electricity increases mostly in the residential sector is the local distribution system—the maintenance, repairs, upgrades that cost a lot of money. It was almost like a coincidence with the AI data center boom and the sentiment against AI. We see that in electricity prices, but if you look into the real price level changes, it’s still quite flat both at the state level and across the country. On the policy challenge of funding AI infrastructure… What is a fair share? That is a question that has always been on my mind. The data centers are not all sitting there across the country doing their own thing separate from the remaining population. They’re providing digital services and great services for us, you and me, using AI. So, what is a fair share? How can they pay exactly how much they use? On the economic benefits of data centers… The opposition to AI data centers is probably one of the biggest pieces of misinformation out there. The right way to look at it is these are businesses that are paying taxes; they’re paying property taxes. If you look at Loudoun County, about 90% of the county’s operating budget comes from data centers. On whether regulation can slow the AI data center boom… I think of the AI data center boom in the United States as a fast-moving train. It’s going to move; it’s going to happen. I think the New York States moratorium, some of the local opposition across the countries may slow down some of the application of development, but not very significantly. I think what will have a material impact on the pace of AI data center development is all the discussion about who’s paying for it. On what needs to happen with data centers… First, permitting reform. It will alleviate the burden off of a lot of people’s minds, and a lot of stakeholders’ minds. Two is, we really need some reform in our grid, in terms of interconnection. I would say interconnection is your keyword, both on the generation side, connecting to generation sources and to large load customers. On sale everywhere: The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

July 14, 202634 min

✨ My interview with Sebastian Mallaby, author of 'The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence'

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world: If my podcast guest today is correct, the emergence of generative artificial intelligence "heralds a transformation more profound than anything since Homo sapiens acquired the capacity for abstract thought." That's about as pure a distillation of the San Francisco Consensus view on the importance of this technology as it gets. Today on Faster, Please!—The Podcast , I am joined by Sebastian Mallaby , the Paul A. Volcker Senior Fellow for International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations and a widely read columnist for The Washington Post . He is also the author of the new best-selling book The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence . (Spoiler: It’s tremendous book about the man, the company, and the technological revolution. I really liked it.) We discuss The Infinity Machine and the life of Demis Hassabis , including how his original vision for artificial superintelligence compares with the propulsive race unfolding today. We also explore how that competitive acceleration has affected the focus on safety, what role government regulation should play, and why many people may still be underestimating how transformative AI will become. The Quest for “Success” (0:27) Inside the Mind of Hassabis (8:29) The Race for Monopoly (12:31) The Economics of AI Anxiety (17:05) Governing the AI Race (24:17) The Biggest Leap Since Abstract Thought (30:13) A lightly edited transcript of our conversation will appear in my Week in Review issue on Saturday. (Another option is using the Substack auto transcript function.) But here are some edited highlights from the chat: On where AI is heading… You look backwards; you see how fast the progress has been. To merely extrapolate forwards is probably to undersell the speed at which we’ll accelerate in the future because there’s an accelerating phenomenon here where the more advanced you are, the easier it is to get to the next level. On Hassabis’s belief that AI development would look more like the Manhattan Project than a multi-country, multi-company competition … In retrospect, it’s crazy. All one can say is that ex ante, the atmosphere in the community of AI builders when Demis began his company in 2010 was that this was a thing that simply didn’t work. AI could not recognize the photograph of a cat. AI could do nothing. It was deep AI winter. And so, under those conditions, you could assemble the entirety of the world’s strong AI believers in one conference in San Francisco, and it felt like a single community. So, this sort of Singleton scenario where you just have one lab, it was a natural outgrowth of that moment in time. How AI competition has overwhelmed that vision… Before 2022, Demis had the freedom because he was clearly the leader to define what the next project should be. He chose at one point to go and do this protein folding project. …This is kind of AI with a smiley face painted on it. Whereas once the chatbot went viral at the end of 2022, ChatGPT, then everybody had to pile in and build a competitor and there’s a lot less leeway to define your own path. So, I think the agency of the individual was quite strong until 2022 and thereafter the power of the race dynamic takes over. What skeptics, such as many economists, have gotten wrong and right… The number of improvements before even we talk about Mythos and the cyber capabilities of that one, I mean, it’s been an extraordinary ride in what is actually less than four years. So, I don’t take back anything I say about the speed of the advance of the frontier. Now that’s different to the speed of the deployment. There I have a lot of sympathy with the economist. On the difficulty of AI regulation… I’m actually quite optimistic in terms of the ability of a government agency to regulate… People often think of AI as a bunch of code that flies around cyberspace and you really can’t control it. But actually, it’s also a bunch of data centers which are huge physical installations. The government knows precisely where they are. They can’t be moved or hidden. On his superintelligence timeline… To be honest, I would say it’s already true. I mean, you try using Fable and if people are listening and they’re inclined not to agree with me, I just ask you, spend a couple of hours with Claude Fable and then see if you disagree with me…I think it is smarter than me by quite a long shot on any topic I ask it about. On sale everywhere The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

June 25, 202637 min

✨💪 AI, jobs, and productivity: My chat with economist Erik Brynjolfsson

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 productivity, jobs, and the American economy. Brynjolfsson is the Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Professor and Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI , and Director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab . He is also the co-author, along with Andrew McAfee, of Machine, Platform, Crowd , The Second Machine Age , and the classic Race Against the Machine . He is a co-founder of Workhelix , which helps large companies measure, track, and maximize the return of their AI investments. We explore what the next decade of AI could mean for workers, businesses, and the broader economy, and what the relationship between humans and intelligent machines may look like. We discuss why views from Silicon Valley and the East Coast differ so sharply on AI’s impact, why the technology has produced dramatically different results across companies, and why some firms and departments are already seeing meaningful productivity gains while others have yet to unlock AI’s full potential. In This Episode: * What AI brings to the table (0:35) * Does AI bring too much? (6:49) * Moving away from the Valley view (10:55) * How perspectives are formed (16:05) * Companies and productivity (23:01) * AI in the foreseeable future (29:21) A lightly edited transcript of our conversation will be appear in my Week in Review issue on Saturday. (Another option is using the Substack auto transcript function.) But here are some edited highlights from the chat: What’s the positive case for workers in an AI future that currently sounds like it only benefits CEOs, tech firms, and data-center builders This is, I think, the best time to be alive if you’re somebody who's got agency and ambition and intention and wants to do something, create new things for themselves and for the world. But that's not the story that's out there. …There's going to be a lot of new jobs created. You got to tell both parts of that story. Of course, you want to lean into the second part of the story about the new stuff that's being created [and not just job disruption and loss], because that's where people should be focusing. There's no point staring at the things that are disappearing… My company, Workhelix, is all about doing that. So I'm doing what I can for my part. I would love to see more people lean into that part of the story. Can someone coherently believe both that AI may become extremely powerful—possibly AGI or superintelligence—and that the future labor market can still be broad, humane, and full of useful work? I think we're going to have several decades worth of humans and machines working together. I'd like to extend that window where we can still have an important role for humans to contribute and for us to expand that pie, not simply automate what's already existing. We should probably be preparing for some further time in the future when there's less of a role for people. But most of my friends here in Silicon Valley, I think their timelines are way too short for when humans no longer have a role. If AI eventually becomes capable of doing almost all economically valuable work, would that actually be a desirable future for humanity, and what would make it a good society rather than a dystopia? We should start preparing for a period where AI can do almost everything and we need to come up with mechanisms so that we still have freedom and power in that kind of world. I don't think that's automatic. And one of my biggest concerns, to be frank, is not that we don't have abundance, I think we will, but it's that we don't have freedom and autonomy. That's something that's not to be taken for granted, and we need to put in place ways that we not only have the wealth, but we also have widely shared prosperity and widely shared decision making rights. Is AI already delivering real business value and productivity gains, or are the impressive lab results still mostly failing to show up in the economy? The returns (AI productivity gains) have been somewhat disappointing. To me, that’s totally natural. That’s totally understandable. As you know, I’ve done a lot of work, we call it the Productivity J Curve on the need for complementary investments for intangible investments in new business process design and new skills for the workforce, even new products and services. Those take time. With past general purpose technologies like the steam engine and electricity, it took literally decades before you got those returns. How should we think about AI’s usefulness when some high-profile business uses have produced embarrassing hallucinations? They (AI) can also do wondrous things that are incredibly valuable. My advice is to keep a human in the loop. Ultimately, you, the person, is responsible for the output. You can identify where the good things are and not the bad things. Can AI progress happen so quickly that society can’t adapt, and should policymakers worry about the speed of change, not just the destination? How fast do we want to go with this? It's not infinitely fast. We want to be able to digest and manage it. Now, the way I would handle that is I would put more resources into speeding up our ability to understand and adapt, and we're not doing enough of that. And that means, for instance, instead of cutting the budget for economic statistics, I would be massively boosting it so we get more visibility. On sale everywhere The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

April 28, 202628 min

✨💪 The future of work in an age of AI: My chat with economist Daniel Rock

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 work and American business, contradictory forecasts can be difficult to interpret and reconcile. Today on Faster, Please!—The Podcast , Daniel Rock and I attempt to sift through the often-confusing current AI conversation. We cover the distinction between “AI-exposed” fields and those destined for automation, explore the bottlenecks that could slow adoption among businesses, and offer a more realistic outlook for growth. Rock is an assistant professor of operations, information, and decisions at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. There, his research dives into the economics of AI and digital technologies, as well as the future of work. His paper, The Productivity J-Curve: How Intangibles Complement General Purpose Technologies , is worth a read. In This Episode * The trouble with forecasting (1:40) * The economist’s evaluation (8:09) * The productivity J-curve (11:49) * Exposure vs. automation (18:53) * Growth projection (23:04) (A lightly edited transcript of our conversation will be appear in my Week in Review issue on Saturday. Another option is using the Substack auto transcript function.) On sale everywhere The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

April 10, 202619 min

🏗️ A hub for hard-tech startups: My chat with 'American Shenzhen' builder Joshua Farahzad

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 entrepreneurial atmosphere of the Bay Area, he has since broken ground in central Texas. Caldwell County is now home to Proto-Town —a place Farahzad hopes businesses will have the space to engineer and build world-changing hardware. Today on Faster, Please—The Podcast , I chat with Farahzad about his quest to build America’s premier manufacturing town from scratch. In This Episode * Welcome to Proto-Town (1:20) * The Limits of California (5:18) * From the Ground Up (10:46) * The Vision (17:35) (A lightly edited transcript of our conversation will be appear in my Week in Review issue on Saturday. Another option is using the Substack auto transcript function.) On sale everywhere The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

March 24, 202642 min

✨ The Age of AI, an update: My chat with policy analyst Dean Ball

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 analyst Dean Ball to help us sift through some of the uncertainty. We talk about recursive self-improvement, the role of AI in everything from medicine to defense, and what to think about the possible growing risk of AI company nationalization. (FYI: Our chat occurred just before the White House released new guidelines for AI federal legislation, about which Ball opined on X/Twitter: “The White House’s proposal for a nationwide AI law is a thoughtful document that will serve as an excellent foundation for the legislative work ahead. I would be happy to see these principles, if translated well into statute, become law.”) Ball is a senior fellow at FAI , the Foundation for American Innovation. He recently served as senior policy advisor for Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy , as well as strategic advisor for AI at the National Science Foundation . He was previously a research fellow at the Mercatus Center and a policy fellow at Fathom . He’s also the author of the excellent Hyperdimensional Substack newsletter. In This Episode * Public pessimism (1:37) * Differing narratives (4:21) * The nationalization risk (16:15) * Accountability via audit (25:55) * Productivity projection (34:18) (A lightly edited transcript of our conversation will be appear in my Week in Review issue on Saturday. Another option is using the Substack auto transcript function.) On sale everywhere The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

February 19, 202634 min

🌎 Storm watch: My chat with climate policy expert Roger Pielke Jr.

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 sustainable tomorrow requires smart energy investment and long-term thinking today. On this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast , I chat with Roger Pielke Jr. about the ever-evolving discussion around climate change. We talk about the benefits of embracing new energy technology and identifying some easy wins. Pielke is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute where his research focuses on science and technology policy. He is also a professor emeritus at University of Colorado Boulder , a distinguished fellow at Japan’s Institute of Energy Economics , a research associate with Risk Frontiers in Australia, and an honorary professor at University College London . Pielke has authored and edited several books, including The Climate Fix: What Scientists and Politicians Won’t Tell You About Global Warming . He also writes The Honest Broker Substack. In This Episode * The Shale Story (1:42) * Unknown Unknowns (7:42) * The Weather Forecast (14:19) * Alternate History (25:23) * The Path Forward (28:25) (A lightly edited transcript of our conversation will be appear in my Week in Review issue on Saturday. Another option is using the Substack auto transcript function.) On sale everywhere The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe