Faster, Please! — The Podcast

✈ 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! — The Podcast, Sharma and I discuss the American addiction to “pain management” — unnecessary economic intervention aimed at dulling the effects of the natural ups and downs of a free market, and how it crippled American capitalism.Sharma is chairman of Rockefeller International and the founder and chief investment officer of Breakout Capital. He previously served as head of emerging markets and chief global strategist at Morgan Stanley.In This Episode* Disillusionment (1:20)* Economic booms (6:12)* Pain management (8:49)* Populist policy (14:38)* Catalyzing change (17:32)Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversationDisillusionment (1:20)Pethokoukis: In the book, you write with some concern about the declining faith in capitalism, really among all Americans, especially Democrats and the young. It may be worrisome, but is it really surprising, given we had a financial crisis . . . hard to believe it was, what, 14 years ago? 15? Well, I guess 16, 2008 . . . Financial crisis, slow recovery. So, for a lot of people, there's a pretty good chunk of their lives where the economy didn't seem to be really zipping along very quickly and making a big change in their lives, so if people are skeptical of capitalism, can you really blame them?Sharma: Well, as I argue in the book, Jim, that the current system we have in place is very far from capitalism. It's a very distorted form of capitalism that we have in place, and the surprise, I think, has to be the fact that, at the headline level, the numbers from the American economy look pretty good, which are the fact that the economy is growing at above two percent, the stock market is booming, America is seen as the center of all the tech innovation, AI, and, compared to its major rivals such as Europe, America seems to be in a much better place. And I think that a lot of people in the Biden administration try to put that out, which is that, “What's the problem, given how well the American economy is doing?”And I think that the polling data is obviously very different. It shows a persistent and consistent decline in faith in the American economy, that the voters and people have, and, as you pointed out at the outset, that a lot of young people, in fact, say that now they prefer socialism to capitalism. So I guess that's the surprise, which is the fact that, at the headline level, the numbers look fine, and especially when you compare it to other countries, and yet, if you look beneath the hood, both the numbers, in terms of polling numbers and then a deeper look at capitalism, which is what I've done in the book, reveal that something is wrong with the system. The general feeling that the average American has, that the system is almost rigged against them, and rigged in favor of Big Business.Clearly one reason people are sort of unhappy is because we had a big surge of inflation, and, even though the rate of inflation has come down, prices are still a lot higher than they remember. But that seems to me to be a temporary aberration. As every day, and month, and year goes by, we'll be a little further from this inflation surge. And then you mentioned all those positive things: in every sort of emerging technology, America seems to be the leader. Is there really a deep problem that will be more or less solved on its own the further we get away from the pandemic and that pandemic-era economy?Well, anything can happen, but I wouldn't bet on that because, as you said, that the decline in the faith in America's brand of capitalism and the number of people who feel that the country's moving in the wrong direction, all that data predates the pandemic. So it's not as if there was a surge in inflation and that suddenly changed people's thinking about the economy and they're feeling much worse off because their real wages got wiped out by inflation. This happened even before that. Through the last 10 or 20 years, you've seen a consistent decline in American faith in the economy, in American faith in government. So this is not just about the near-term inflation data, or even in terms of what's happened in the post-pandemic world, and to bet, therefore, that, with the passage of time, as the pandemic sort of becomes more and more of a distant memory that this is going to change. I think the problems are much deeper, and it shows up in the fact that, as I argue in the book, that economic and social mobility in America today is close to record lows. Only 35 percent of Americans feel today that they're going to be better off than their parents, and when the American Dream was really flowering, that number used to be 70 to 80 percent of people felt that they'd be better off than their parents. So there's a whole host of data to show here that the problem and the disaffection with the economic system is much deeper than just the pandemic-driven surge in inflation.Economic booms (6:12)Is there anything about this economy that four or five years of above-average economic growth won't solve? I sort of recall that in the early ’90s, you could have made a very similar case that we had a nasty recession in the early ’90s. Some people have forgotten about it, but it was a bad recession. And then we had the Gulf War, and there were a lot of newspaper articles saying that the era of fast growth was over, America just couldn't grow fast anymore, and just as people were convinced that the good days were over, the economy took over, internet boom, tech boom, and we had very rapid growth—and, interestingly, it was also a period of high inequality, but people didn't seem to care so much because the economy was cooking and real wages were rising. So is there anything wrong that a little bit of faster growth couldn't solve?In terms of the fact that I remember living through that era, and I think that if you compare the polling data, it shows the fact that the problems are much deeper now, and the disaffection is much deeper than what was there, in terms of the fact that what solved it back then — even back then, the basic faith in American capitalism was never lost. I think that what's happened now is a feeling that we don't have an equality of opportunity anymore, and that inequality levels now have risen much further than back then. So I think that it's always possible for some hopeful turn to take place, but I'd say that the problems this time are much deeper, and that's what I try and say: Why has this happened? The book is a deep investigation of why has this happened systematically over time. We've gotten to a point now where, across the Western world, leaders are universally, almost, unpopular, and they are also struggling to get reelected. This is happening in Europe, and I argue in the book that capitalism is in worse shape in Europe: much more statist, much more bureaucratic, much more intrusive, and Europe's an even greater regulatory hegemon than America is. So something which is going on across Western societies for this disaffection and feeling that the American government is more pro-business than it is pro-competition, which should be the essence of capitalism.Pain management (8:49)But where do you think it all went wrong?That’s the crux of the argument. As the tagline of the book goes, that capitalism did not fail, it was ruined. What ruined it? As I show, that it is the suite of government habits, that how the government's role in American society has come to resemble that of pain management, which is the fact that every time there is the slightest hint of pain, we administer opiates. That's one of the reasons we have the opiate crisis, where people are just hooked to opiates, because at the slightest pain, you give them opiate to relieve the pain without quite solving the underlying cause of the problem. I think, in a similar way, what's happened with American capitalism is the fact that the government has been trying to socialize risk and take risk out of the system to try and mitigate pain, and in doing so, it's got the economy hooked to constant stimulus, constant government intervention, which is leading to a lot of perverse consequences.What are those purpose consequences? One of them, as I've argued in the book, is that productivity has declined. Now remember, capitalism is supposed to generate lots of competition, lead to more creative destruction, lead to an increase in productivity, and productivity is the key to economic growth. But in the last 30 to 40 years, we have seen a big decline in productivity growth across the western world, including in the United States.On the other hand, we have seen a lot of deadwood being kept alive due to all these interventions. The culture of bailouts, the culture of regulation, has kept a lot of deadwood alive in the system, which is not only dampening productivity growth, but it's preventing the entry of new businesses and new firms to come. As a result, the pace of startups in this country today has gone down significantly. It's picked up a bit after the pandemic, but for the last 30 to 40 years, the rate of new startups in this country has declined.So I think that the systematic increase in the government's involvement in the economy has led to these perverse consequences, and those changes are quite recent. The American government was never this involved at a very basic level. The share of government spending in the economy was just three percent a hundred years ago. It has gone up over time, now we're closing in on 40 percent, the government spending, the share of the economy.But it's not just that. The culture of bailouts: America never believ

✈ 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). Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I talk to Dr. Mike Goff about the state of US nuclear power, the developing advancements in nuclear technology, and what it will take to reach our vast potential.Goff is the acting assistant secretary and the principal deputy assistant secretary for the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy. He previously spent over 30 years at Idaho National Laboratory, including a major advisory and management role. He has written over 70 publications on the nuclear fuel cycle.In This Episode* Atomic Age 2.0 (1:31)* Major concerns (7:37)* Out of practice (11:04)* Next-generation policy (17:38)* Human capital (21:48)* Fusion forecast (23:12)Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversationAtomic Age 2.0 (1:31)The Energy Secretary recently spoke about adding a lot more nuclear capacity, tripling it, I think, by 2050 or so. And before we get into whether that's possible, I wanted to ask you: As you understand it, what is the current consensus explanation for why the Nuclear and Atomic Age of the ’50s and ’60s, why that kind of ended? Because when the secretary spoke about building more capacity, I thought about the — and this is something maybe a lot of people are unaware of, that President Nixon had a plan to build a lot of more nuclear reactors in this country back in the ’70s during the oil crisis; that didn't happen, and we all know about Three Mile Island. But is there a consensus as to why Atomic Age 1.0 came to an end? Obviously we still get a lot of energy from nuclear, but not what people had imagined 40 years ago.There are a variety of reasons. We did build a lot at one point, and we were building 10 plants a year, pretty extensive builds out there. We did then have Three Mile Island in the late ’70s, and then we got costs started going up, and schedules started increasing on the builds, and we ended up not having a lot of energy growth, in fact, we went for a long period where we weren't having a lot of energy growth, and we had a lot of other energy sources, natural gas, coal, and all. We had a lot of other energy sources out there as well. So yeah, we became pretty stagnated around 20 percent of the electricity. But now, like you say, yeah, there's been a big change in what we think the needs are for nuclear going forward, for a variety of reasons.My background is journalism, and as a journalist I’ve written, I know, multiple stories in my life about a Nuclear Renaissance. So I'm wondering why this time looks to be different. You suggested in your previous answer that there might be some reasons. What are those reasons that we may be entering a new age where we will see an expansion in the nuclear sector?I do think we will see that expansion, and, in fact, I think we have to see that expansion, and it's because of a lot of the positive attributes of nuclear right now. Obviously there's a lot of focus on trying to get more clean energy out there, and nuclear is a large base load source of clean energy. And it's not just CO2 emission, but it doesn't emit particulates and all, as well, so it's good air, good quality of life. So it has those key attributes. But there are other clean energy sources as well: renewables, hydro, and all that. But I think the recognition that, if you are going to go toward decarbonization, you need still base load electricity too. You need base load electricity to help intermittent sources like renewables to be able to expand more as well. So nuclear is very good at enabling decarbonization, not just by adding clean electricity to the grid, but enabling you to expand out other renewables like wind and solar and all, as well.Additionally, nuclear is very reliable. Of the energy sources, it has the highest capacity factor of any of the energy sources. In the United States, we run 93 percent of the time, so the existing fleet that we have out there of 94 plants, they're producing a 100 percent of the power 93 percent of the time, which dwarfs what any other energy source does out there as well.Nuclear is safe. At times people are concerned about safety, but, in reality, it's actually one of the safest energy sources out there and continues to demonstrate that.It's resilient for different weather-related events. It can still produce electricity out there as well. It also has a lot of energy security. And as we've learned, unfortunately, from Russia's unprovoked and unjustified invasion of Ukraine, we recognize energy security is national security, so nuclear really does help us on that national security front. It provides an energy source that we can largely on-source from us and our allies. We’ve got assured fuel supplies, and provides that long-term power. You can put fuel in it and it can last for two years or so.And I guess one other thing I'll add out there as well, is it's a job creator. Of the different energy sources, the amount of jobs associated with nuclear are some of the highest on the amount of electricity produced. And when you actually start building nuclear, like we saw in Vogtle in Georgia where they were building the two plants, it creates huge amounts of jobs. In fact, I heard a stat recently that 35,000 union workers were trained as part of the construction of the Vogtle power plant, so it's a good job creator in all, as well. And again, the power density is great, it doesn't take up a lot of space, and with the advanced technologies that we've developed in the United States, you've continued to increase in the safety, you can have plants of a variety of different sizes that can be easily deployed to, say, retiring coal plants. It just has a lot of flexibility that it hasn't had in the past, but also it's that key recognition of its clean energy attributes, but its energy security attributes as well.Major concerns (7:37)I did not major in nuclear science, I majored in history and political science, but I remember I took a class as an undergraduate at Northwestern University on the nuclear fuel cycle, and I remember to this day that my professor — of course, this was obviously a while ago, and I think what most of the students knew about nuclear energy was probably Three Mile Island — and I remember to this day distinctly the professor saying, “If they wanted to build a nuclear reactor in my backyard, I would be totally fine with it.” He had zero fear on the safety issue. Now when you give that rap that you just gave me about the wonders of nuclear energy before regular people, what is their response? Do they worry about the nuclear waste? Do they worry about safety? Are they immediately sold, or what are the concerns that typically get raised to you?You brought them up. I mean, safety is brought up because you do see these high profile accidents like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima, which were accidents. They weren't good things that you want to have happen, but the industry's also a very learning industry. The improvements that come out of those events have just made the industry even safer and safer. And again, it's still safer than most any other electricity-producing industry out there as well.Waste does get brought up. We have not implemented a final disposal solution for the spent fuel from our reactors, but we have safely stored and managed the spent fuel over the last six decades, and the amount of fuel that's generated, I think the stat that gets tossed around, you could fit it all in a Walmart parking lot. This is not a lot of material because it's a high energy-density fuel. It's not a lot of material, and again, we safely manage that and store that. We have countries now that are moving forward with geological repositories, which we need to be doing in the United States. In fact, just last week, I went and visited the repository that hopefully will be operating next year in Finland for disposing of their spent fuel. We can do that, it’s not a technical issue, so we can safely manage the spent fuel.The other issue that always comes up is still cost. We do have to demonstrate now that we can build these plants safely, and efficiently, and at a reasonable cost. On the Vogtle plant there were cost overruns and schedule overruns, but between Vogtle Unit 3 and Unit 4, there was about a 30 percent reduction in costs between those plants, so we are starting to get to where we can be deploying nth-of-a-kind cost plants out there as well. And hopefully with some of the small modular reactor designs and all that are going to rely more on modular construction, we can even get to nth-of-a-kind cost even quicker. It still takes some pushing and understanding to make sure that people do understand the advancements that have been made on nuclear technology, that it's not our parents' nuclear technology, there's a new round of technology out there.Out of practice (11:04)You raised two good points there. The cost issue, and that's a great stat about the Vogtle plant and the reduction between the two reactors. Is it your sense that the fact that we haven't been consistently building reactors and learning from the previous build, and having trained people who've worked on multiple reactors, that each one has become like this bespoke mega project? It’s my sense, and it seems logical, at least to me, that that has been a cost driver, that we haven't been able to churn these out like 10 a year, every year, decade after decade, because clearly, if that was the case, I don't see how we don't learn how to build them better, faster, and more efficiently. But that's not what we've been doing, obviously.That's right. It's not. Even wh

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 podcast today with Guy Ben-Ishai.Ben-Ishai is the head of economic policy research at Google. He previously served as a principal at the Brattle Group and as chief economist in the office of the attorney general of the state of New York. He is also a co-author of the paper “AI and the Opportunity for Shared Prosperity: Lessons from the History of Technology and the Economy.”In This Episode* Is gen AI a general purpose tech? (1:22)* Risks and benefits (7:46)* Barriers to a boom (14:27)* Investing in employees (19:16)* Human-complimenting AI (25:29)Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversationIs GenAI a general purpose tech? (1:22)Pethokoukis: Do you have any doubt that generative AI, and perhaps machine learning more broadly, is an important general purpose technology that will eventually make a substantial and measurable impact in the economic statistics and productivity and economic growth? Ben-Ishai; The immediate response is absolutely, but let me unpack that: Do I have doubts about the immense potential of the technology? No, and I'm saying that very confidently, which is uncommon for an economist. We put together the paper that you've initially cited at Google to look exactly at that question: When we say that AI marks a pivotal moment in human history, what does that actually mean for an economist? And I think the conclusion there that we're looking not in an ordinary technology, but rather at a general purpose technology, that is immense. That means that we're probably looking at the most transformative economic development of our generation. And to think, Jim, that the two of us are having a conversation about that today, that is historic. I feel incredibly privileged and lucky to think and work of these issues in our day and age.But the second part of your question alluded to not the potential, but actually the actual impact. And if there's one takeaway from that exercise from the paper that we put together and from my conversation with so many academics and policymakers around the world, is that this is not just a watershed moment, it's not just a pivotal moment in human history, it's a fragile moment as well. This story can easily be a story of missed opportunity. I think that we so easily take for granted the fact that, yes, we will of course develop AI and deploy it and apply it very successfully. And it's so easy to get caught in the moment, particularly as the nation that advanced the science, I think somewhere in the back of the minds of all of us, there's that presumption that we will be the global leaders in deployment of AI. I am actually worried about that. To ensure that we are, it’s a tumultuous, fragile, and careful process that we’ve got to be really thoughtful about, with a lot of deliberate action about what we do, how do we proceed, and how do we ensure that we are indeed the ones that capitalize on the potential?It's remarkable how quickly the narrative around American tech has shifted. Not long ago, Silicon Valley faced criticism for focusing on social media rather than groundbreaking innovations like the Apollo program or cancer cures. Now, they've unveiled generative AI, potentially the most significant technology of our era.Regarding fragility, it's worth considering why AI might need special handling. Unlike the seamless diffusion of technologies like the internal combustion engine or electricity, AI seems more akin to nuclear power - a technology that was stifled by regulation. Do we need a proactive agenda to prevent AI's potential from being similarly constrained?That's a great question, Jim. I'm so tempted to go back to your first part of the question about the importance of digital technologies, and economists get a really bad rap, but try to be a librarian these days. We tend to overlook the tremendous importance of information as a driver of economic growth in our economies. And even if you look just at small businesses and the tremendous opportunities that digital technologies have provided them. To think that a mom and shop store today can actually run a marketing campaign, analyze its customer base on large databases, export products to far markets, those are things that used to be the exclusive domain of just a few large companies that today are actually available broadly and widely through digital technologies. And maybe it's the fault of economists that we are not shouting off the tops of mountains frequently enough about the tremendous power of information and digital technologies and the accumulation of knowledge as a driver of economic growth.The application of knowledge and intelligence — that seems to me to be pretty important.I cannot agree more! And I think, to a great degree, it explains some of the tremendous optimism around AI as a technology that really reduces the barriers to interact with technology and democratizes its use in a way that we haven't seen before.Risks and benefits (7:46)We quickly shifted from marveling at AI's potential to fixating on its risks — existential threats, job losses, and disinformation. But let's step back for a moment. Can you elaborate on why you see this as an exciting technology with significant benefits? It seems many people aren't fully aware of its upside potential.That's a great question, this is really the reason why we at Google, too, we paused for a minute and kind of wanted to think about this. We're at a sector where enthusiasm is in no short supply, so what does it actually mean when we say that this is a pivotal moment in human history? What does it mean for economists? I think it really boils down to this question of: Is AI an ordinary technology, or is it really a general purpose technology? That is the term of art that economists use, and I think it's actually important to pause for a minute and think about that, because it's critical. A general purpose technology is not just pervasive in use, it is a technology that enables productivity-enhancing applications to be applied across all segments and entire economies in ways that are not just advancing and accelerating economic growth, but are also expanding the frontier of innovation and technology. It's a source of ongoing and continual innovations.And if you think about it for a minute, if you think about the prior general purpose technologies that we've had, if it's electricity, if it's personal computers, or it's the steam engine, their impact was tremendous. And at the time that they were launched, I think nobody had the perfect vision of where . . . we of course knew where we started, in the very same way that we do today about AI, but it's really difficult, if not impossible, to know where we will end. The compounding nature of these technologies is immense, particularly when you're looking at a general use technology and multi-domain technology that can lead to applications on such a broad basis. I don't think that today we can envision what new occupations, new applications, new sectors will emerge as a result of AI. And I think the fact that it's not an ordinary technology, but rather a general purpose technology, that is important, that does imply that we're probably looking at the most profound economic transformation in our generation. That is huge.It's relatively straightforward to assess AI's ability to replicate current human tasks. But predicting the new possibilities it might unlock, like accelerating scientific discovery, is far more challenging. These potential upsides are difficult to quantify or model economically.While we can more easily grasp potential downsides like job automation (which isn't necessarily negative), the upsides are less tangible. They depend on entrepreneurs creating new businesses and scientists leveraging AI for breakthroughs. This makes it harder to definitively argue that the benefits will outweigh any drawbacks.Oh my God, Jim, I cannot agree more, and I think that there's two issues, and you have written about this just recently, and I think that there's really two issues that come up, at least in my mind, as a reaction to some of the studies that really focus on the measurement. We're trying to really drill this question of, “What will be the productivity gain from AI over the next five or 10 years?” I don't want to dismiss that question —And can you give it to me within three decimal points, right?Exactly! But we're doing such a huge disservice as economists when we focus on that. I think it really pertains to two reasons that you brought up. The first one relates to measurement. We are really looking, these studies are primarily based on occupational exposure of existing work streams. Little do we know today about what new work streams, occupations, tasks, creativity, or human endeavors will actually be triggered by this new technology. In a way, we're really just looking under a flashlight rather than thinking about the broader issue, the broader economic benefits that will emerge, kind of like the unknown unknowns that we know today about this technology.Just to put it in perspective, think about the printing press that led to a scientific revolution. Think about the steam engine that led to an industrial revolution, to an electronic circuit that led to the digital age. We are at that point with AI today, and to think that we're looking at SOC, standard occupational codes, to look at the future impact on productivity, I think minimizes the value of our profession.The other point that you touched on, which I think is so incredibly important: We're missing the point. It's really not about the third decimal poi

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 hate them, it’s worth asking why we build skyscrapers and what their role will be in future cities. Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I sit down with Jason Barr, author of Cities in the Sky: The Quest to Build the World’s Tallest Skyscrapers.Barr is a professor of economics at Rutgers University – Newark, and is a member of the Rutgers Global Urban Systems PhD program. He is also the author of Building the Skyline: The Birth and Growth of Manhattan’s Skyscrapers.In This Episode* Demand for the skyscraper (1:35)* The end of the skyscraper (9:00)* Pillars of commerce (14:05)* The sky’s the limit (18:36)* Manhattan extension (23:04)* Trends and styles (24:23)Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversationThe 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 hate them, it’s worth asking why we build skyscrapers and what their role will be in future cities. Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I sit down with Jason Barr, author of Cities in the Sky: The Quest to Build the World’s Tallest Skyscrapers.Barr is a professor of economics at Rutgers University – Newark, and is a member of the Rutgers Global Urban Systems PhD program. He is also the author of Building the Skyline: The Birth and Growth of Manhattan’s Skyscrapers.Demand for the skyscraper (1:35)Pethokoukis: You obviously love skyscrapers, you're fascinated by them. You wrote a whole book on them. So I want to just start the very basic question: Why do skyscrapers fascinate you, and the people who aren't fascinated by them, what are they missing?Barr: Great questions. Well, I grew up on Long Island, and so I was always really fascinated with Manhattan. I grew up in the ’70s, and so New York back then was a very dark, mysterious place for a youngster. So when I grew up, actually when I was in college, I started hanging out in the city. So to me, the skyline of Manhattan and New York City, they're just two sides of the same coin. I really developed an interest in tall buildings through my interest and fascination with Manhattan’s and New York City's history.So when I came to Rutgers Newark, I just started doing research on tall buildings, especially in New York City: what was driving the heights of these buildings; there's all these interesting height cycles over the last 150 years. So I wrote my first book on the Manhattan skyline, that was called Building the Skyline, and then after that I thought, let's see what's happening around the rest of the world. So to me, the tall building is an interesting thing because it's part and parcel with urbanization, and I just personally don't think you could have one without the other.I think some people might think that skyscrapers are, at least for rich countries, that they're kind of a 20th-century thing that we did as we were growing, and cities were getting bigger, and skyscrapers are a part of that, but now they're for other parts of the world, parts of the world which are still urbanizing, which are still getting richer. Are skyscrapers are still a thing for America?The short answer is yes, but, given how dense cities are, tall buildings are just being added a lot more slowly. In New York, the population's kind of slowly growing, and so tall buildings are either replacing old buildings that are wearing out, or there's always this push by big global corporations to be in the newest and latest tall building. And obviously there's this international demand from people abroad to have an apartment — or national demand — global demand to have some kind of residential presence in New York. But the thing is, people in other countries: cities, planners, residents in other countries, they look to New York, they look to Chicago, and I think, for many of them, they see New York as something they want to emulate, and New York is, on just about almost any metric, it's probably the top global city. And so I think cities today, especially in China, and Asia more broadly, they're trying to kind of replicate that, what you might call “the Manhattan magic,” and I don't really think people in this country realize how much tall building construction is going on in other cities around the world. People in this country are a little bit more cynical about the role of the tall building in urban growth and in housing affordability and stuff like this, but other cities are basically going gangbusters, is a way to put it.Is that driven by fundamental economic forces? Is it kind of a “national greatness” kinds of signaling projects? Are there fundamental reasons, not just to build skyscrapers, but to build very, very tall skyscrapers?“All of the above” is the answer. Fundamentally, if there's many, many people who want to be working, living, playing in the center, the only way to accommodate the demand to be in the center is to make more land in the center, so the skyscraper, at its heart, is what I would say is “land in the sky.” You just go vertical because there's constraints on how much land there is in the center.Having said that, definitely the skyscraper is seen as a kind of way to advertise, a way to increase confidence in the place, and so you boost foreign direct investment. Observatories are huge money makers, there’s a big tourism component. A lot of critics will say, “Oh, it's all about spectacle and ego.” But really, for the book, and just more broadly my research, when you drill down on the economics of these super tall buildings, not all of them are profitable or profit-maximizing, but they all have a strong economic rationale.Now, I just also want to say, China has its own thing going on, which sort of compounds the skyscraper construction-building there because of their unique governance structure and land ownership structure, but China is building tall buildings because, at the end of the day, there's a kind of, what I call, a “tall building bling.” There's just something that says, “This city is growing, this city is drawing population.” So we build a tall building and we boost confidence in the city. And it works, really.The pictures don't have to be too old, if you look at a picture of Shanghai, it looks a lot different not too long ago. It's almost as if a whole other city just kind of fell from the sky, a city of skyscrapers, and where there were once goats or something grazing, there's now a bunch of massive skyscrapers.Yeah, absolutely, and there's a few reasons for this. One is, I think Chinese residents more broadly see tall building as a natural way to live. I've talked to many Chinese residents, whether it's Shanghai or other cities, and to them, to own an apartment in the sky is like the greatest thing. It's their equivalent of the single family home in the United States. Living in the clouds is something many people aspire to. The other aspect of it is, Shanghai, and the Pudong neighborhood in Shanghai, was chosen basically to become a financial hub. Basically, the leaders were looking at Hong Kong and they thought it was a, to quote, I forgot the author, but to quote him in the book, the Shanghai officials and the National Party officials saw Hong Kong as that frustratingly free city, and so they wanted to create a kind of a financial hub in Shanghai. And so the Shanghai Tower, for example, is part of that plan to really draw people's attention to Shanghai, itself. So it was part of a master plan.The end of the skyscraper (9:00)I certainly remember that, after 9/11, I heard about “the end of the skyscraper,” and then during the pandemic, I heard about “the end of the city.” Now I'm guessing that cities will continue to exist and we're going to continue to build tall buildings.Absolutely. What 9/11 did was just make sure that we make our building safer with fire protection measures. In many Asian countries, every 20 floors, let's say, are mechanical floors, so you have the electric equipment, and the heating, and the cooling, and water tanks. They can also surround these in concrete, and so if something's on fire, if a floor is on fire, they can go to this hermetically sealed floor, a refuge floor, and stay there and be protected. And the elevator cores, they're made of concrete, and so you wouldn't have something like what happened on 9/11. So it didn't really impact the demand; 9/11 didn't impact the demand for the tall building, it just made us make tall buildings safer. And of course the downside is if you want to go into an office building, you have to have a swipe and you have to have an entry, so the negative of 9/11 was more about heightened security and increasing protections in a way that engenders a little bit more mistrust of us. But the demand didn't go away.Same thing with Covid. For big cities like New York and San Francisco, I'm sure the empty-office problem is going to dissipate. It'll take a while. This may be an overly broad statement, but the truth is, our present and future is in cities. The funny thing about the internet and social media and all that, it was supposed to allow us to suburbanize more, or run away from these big, overcrowded cities, but the truth is, social media and internet technology has just made cities even more important. So, as long as cities are growing, there'll be a demand for tall buildingsOf the tallest, I don't know, ha

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 made obsolete. When all of our problems have been solved in an AI utopia . . . well, what’s next for us humans?Bostrom is a philosopher and was founding director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University. He is currently the founder and director of research at the Macrostrategy Research Initiative. He also wrote the much-discussed 2014 book, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.In This Episode* Our dystopian predisposition (1:29)* A utopian thought experiment (5:16)* The plausibility of a solved world (12:53)* Weighing the risks (20:17)Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversationOur dystopian predisposition (1:29)Pethokoukis: The Dutch futurist, Frederik Polak famously put it that any culture without a positive vision of the future has no future. It's a light paraphrase. And I kind of think that's where we are right now, that despite the title of your book, I feel like right now people can only imagine dystopia. Is that what you think? Do I have that wrong?Bostrom: It's easier to imagine dystopia. I think we are all familiar with a bunch of dystopian works of fiction. The average person could rattle off Brave New World, 1984, The Handmaid's Tale. Most people couldn't probably name a single utopian work, and even the attempts that have been made, if you look closely at them, you probably wouldn't actually want to live there. It is an interesting fact that it seems easier for us to imagine ways in which things could be worse than ways in which things could be better. Maybe some culture that doesn't have a positive vision has no future but, then again, cultures that have had positive visions also often have ended in tears. A lot of the times utopian blueprints have been used as excuses for imposing coercively some highly destructive vision on society. So you could argue either way whether it is actually beneficial for societies to have a super clear, long-term vision that they are staring towards.I think if we were to ask people to give a dystopian vision, we would get probably some very picturesque, highly detailed visions from having sort of marinated in science fiction for decades. But then if you asked people about utopia, I wonder if all their visions would be almost alike: Kind of this clean, green world, with maybe some tall skyscrapers or something, and people generally getting along. I think it'd be a fairly bland, unimaginative vision.That would be the idea of “all happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own unique way.” I think it's easy enough to enable ways in which the world could be slightly better than it is. So imagine a world exactly like the one we have, except minus childhood leukemia. So everybody would agree that definitely seems better. The problem is if you start to add these improvements and you stack on enough of them, then eventually you face a much more philosophically challenging proposition, which is, if you remove all the difficulties and all the shadows of human life, all forms of suffering and inconvenience, and all injustice and everything, then you risk ending up in this rather bland future where there is no challenge, no purpose, no meaning for us humans, and it then almost becomes utopian again, but in a different way. Maybe all our basic needs are catered to, but there seems to be then some other part missing that is important for humans to have flourishing lives.A utopian thought experiment (5:16)Is your book a forecast or is it a thought experiment?It's much more a thought experiment. As it happens, I think there is a non-trivial chance we will actually end up in this condition, I call it a “solved world,” particularly with the impending transition to the machine intelligence era, which I think will be accompanied by significant risks, including existential risk. In my previous book, Superintelligence, which came out in 2014, focused on what could go wrong when we are developing machine super intelligence, but if things go right—and this could unfold within the lifetime of a lot of us who are alive on this planet today—if things go right, they could go very right, and, in particular, all kinds of problems that could be solved with better technology could be solved in this future where you have superintelligent AIs doing the technological development. And we might then actually confront the situation where these questions we can now explore as a thought experiment would become pressing practical questions where we would actually have to make decisions on what kinds of lives we want to live, what kind of future we want to create for ourselves if all these instrumental limitations were removed that currently constrain the choices set that we face.I imagine the book would seem almost purely a thought experiment before November 2022 when ChatGPT was rolled out by OpenAI, and now, to some people, it seems like these are questions certainly worth pondering. You talked about the impending machine superintelligence—how impending do you think, and what is your confidence level? Certainly we have technologists all over the map speaking about the likelihood of reaching that maybe through large language models, other people think they can't quite get us there, so how much work is “impending” doing in that sentence?I don't think we are in a position any longer to rule out even extremely short timelines. We can't be super confident that we might not have an intelligence explosion next year. It could take longer, it could take several years, it could take a decade or longer. We have to think in terms of smeared out probability distributions here, but we don't really know what capabilities will be unlocked as you scale up even the current architectures one more order of magnitude like GPT-5-level or GPT-6-level. It might be that, just as the previous steps from GPT-2 to GPT-3 and 3 to 4 sort of unlocked almost qualitatively new capabilities, the same might hold as we keep going up this ladder of just scaling up the current architectures, and so we are now in a condition where it could happen at any time, basically. It doesn't mean it will happen very soon, but we can't be confident that it won't.I do think it is slightly easier for people maybe now, even just with looking at the current AI systems, we have to take these questions seriously, and I think it will become a lot easier as the penny starts to drop that we're about to see this big transition to the machine intelligence era. The previous book, Superintelligence, back in 2014 when that was published—and it was in the works for six years prior—at that time, what was completely outside the Overton window was even the idea that one day we would have machine superintelligence, and, in particular, the idea that there would then be an alignment problem, a technical difficulty of steering these superintelligent intellects so that they would actually do what we want. It was completely neglected by academia. People thought, that’s just science fiction or idle futurism. There were maybe a handful of people on the internet who were starting to think about that. In the intervening 10 years, that has changed, and so now all the frontier AI labs have research teams specifically trying to work on scalable methods for AI alignment, and it's much more widely recognized over the last couple of years that this will be a transformative thing. You have statements coming out from leading policy makers from the White House, the UK had this global summit on AI, and so this alignment problem and the risks related to AI have sort of entered the Overton window, and I think some of these other issues as to what the world will look like if we succeed, similarly, will have to come inside the Overton window, and probably will do so over the next few years.So we have an Overton window, we have this technological advance with machine intelligence. Are you as confident about one of the other pillars of your thought experiment, which is an equally, what might seem science-futuristic advance in our ability to edit ourselves, to modify ourselves and our brains and our emotions. That seems to hand-in-hand with the thought experiment.I think once we develop machine superintelligence, then we will soon thereafter have tremendous advances in other technological areas as well because we would then not be restricted to humans trying to develop new technologies with our biological brains. But this research and development would be done by superintelligences on digital timescales rather than biological timescales. So the transition to superintelligence would, I think, mean a kind of telescoping of the future.So there are all these technologies we can see are, in principle, possible. They don't violate the law of physics. In the fullness of time, probably human civilization would reach them if we had 10,000 years to work on it, all these science fiction like space colonies, or cures for aging, or perfect virtual reality uploading into computers, we could see how we might eventually . . . They're unrealistic given the current state of technology, but there's no (in principle) barriers, so we could imagine developing those if we had thousands of years to work on them. But all those technologies might become available quite soon after you have superintelligence doing the research and development. So I think we will then start to approximate the condition of technological maturity, like a condition where we have already developed most of those general purpose technologies that are physically possible, and for which there exists

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 the R Street Institute, where he promotes greater freedom for innovation and entrepreneurship. Prior to R Street, he worked as a senior fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, president of the Progress and Freedom Foundation, and at the Adam Smith Institute, Heritage Foundation, and Cato Institute.In This Episode* A changing approach (1:09)* The global AI race (7:26)* The political economy of AI (10:24)* Regulatory risk (16:10)* AI policy under Trump (22:29)Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversationA changing approach (1:09)Pethokoukis: Let's start out with just trying to figure out the state of play when it comes to AI regulation. Now I remember we had people calling for the AI Pause, and then we had a Biden executive order. They're passing some sort of act in Europe on AI, and now recently a senate working group in AI put out a list of guidelines or recommendations on AI. Given where we started, which was “shut it down,” to where we're at now, has that path been what you might've expected, given where we were when we were at full panic?Thierer: No, I think we've moved into a better place, I think. Let's look back just one year ago this week: In the Senate Judiciary Committee, there was a hearing where Sam Altman of OpenAI testified along with Gary Marcus, who's a well-known AI worrywart, and the lawmakers were falling all over themselves to praise Sam and Gary for basically calling for a variety of really extreme forms of AI regulation and controls, including not just national but international regulatory bodies, new general purpose licensing systems for AI, a variety of different types of liability schemes, transparency mandates, disclosure as so-called “AI nutritional labels,” I could go on down the list of all the types of regulations that were being proposed that day. And of course this followed, as you said, Jim, a call for an AI Pause, without any details about exactly how that would work, but it got a lot of signatories, including people like Elon Musk, which is very strange considering he was at the same time deploying one of the biggest AI systems in history. But enough about Elon.The bottom line is that those were dark days, and I think the tenor of the debate and the proposals on the table today, one year after that hearing, have improved significantly. That's the good news. The bad news is that there's still a lot of problematic regulatory proposals percolating throughout the United States. As of this morning, as we're taping the show, we are looking at 738 different AI bills pending in the United States according to multistate.ai, an AI tracking service. One hundred and—I think—eleven of those are federal bills. The vast majority of it is state. But that count does not include all of the municipal regulatory proposals that are pending for AI systems, including some that have already passed in cities like New York City that already has a very important AI regulation governing algorithmic hiring practices. So the bottom line, Jim, is it's the best of times, it's the worst of times. Things have both gotten better and worse.Well—just because the most recent thing that happened—I know with this the senate working group, and they were having all kinds of technologists and economists come in and testify. So that report, is it really calling for anything specific to happen? What's in there other than just kicking it back to all the committees? If you just read that report, what does it want to happen?A crucial thing about this report, and let's be clear what this is, because it was an important report because senator Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer was in charge of this, along with a bipartisan group of other major senators, and this started the idea of, so-called “AI insight forums” last year, and it seemed to be pulling some authority away from committees and taking it to the highest levels of the Senate to say, “Hey, we're going to dictate AI policy and we're really scared.” And so that did not look good. I think in the process, just politically speaking—That, in itself, is a good example. That really represents the level of concern that was going around, that we need to do something different and special to address this existential risk.And this was the leader of the Senate doing it and taking away power, in theory, from his committee members—which did not go over well with said committee members, I should add. And so a whole bunch of hearings took place, but they were not really formal hearings, they were just these AI insight forum working groups where a lot of people sat around and said the same things they always say on a daily basis, and positive and negatives of AI. And the bottom line is, just last week, a report came out from this AI senate bipartisan AI working group that was important because, again, it did not adopt the recommendations that were on the table a year ago when the process got started last June. It did not have overarching general-purpose licensing of artificial intelligence, no new call for a brand new Federal Computer Commission for America, no sweeping calls for liability schemes like some senators want, or other sorts of mandates.Instead, it recommended a variety of more generic policy reforms and then kicked a lot of the authority back to those committee members to say, “You fill out the details, for better for worse.” And it also included a lot of spending. One thing that seemingly everybody agrees on in this debate is that, well, the government should spend a lot more money and so another $30 billion was on the table of sort of high-tech pork for AI-related stuff, but it really did signal a pretty important shift in approach, enough that it agitated the groups on the more pro-regulatory side of this debate who said, “Oh, this isn't enough! We were expecting Schumer to go for broke and swing for the fences with really aggressive regulation, and he's really let us down!” To which I can only say, “Well, thank God he did,” because we're in a better place right now because we're taking a more wait-and-see approach on at least some of these issues.A big, big part of the change in this narrative is an acknowledgement of what I like to call the realpolitik of AI policy and specifically the realpolitik of geopoliticsThe global AI race (7:26)I'm going to ask you in a minute what stuff in those recommendations worries you, but before I do, what happened? How did we get from where we were a year ago to where we've landed today?A big, big part of the change in this narrative is an acknowledgement of what I like to call the realpolitik of AI policy and specifically the realpolitik of geopolitics. We face major adversaries, but specifically China, who has said in documents that the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] has published that they want to be the global leader in algorithmic and computational technologies by 2030, and they're spending a lot of money putting a lot of state resources into it. Now, I don't necessarily believe that means they're going to automatically win, of course, but they're taking it seriously. But it's not just China. We have seen in the past year massive state investments and important innovations take place across the globe.I'm always reminding people that people talk a big game about America's foundational models are large scale systems, including things like Meta’s Llama, which was the biggest open source system in the world a year ago, and then two months after Meta launched Llama, their open source platform, the government of the UAE came out with Falcon 180B, an open source AI model that was two-and-a-half times larger than Facebook's model. That meant America's AI supremacy and open source foundational models lasted for two months. And that's not China, that's the government of the UAE, which has piled massive resources into being a global leader in computation. Meanwhile, China's launched their biggest super—I'm sorry, Russia's launched their biggest supercomputer system ever; you've got Europe applying a lot of resources into it, and so on and so forth. A lot of folks in the Senate have come to realize that problem is real: that if we shoot ourselves in the foot as a nation, they could race ahead and gain competitive advantage in geopolitical strategic advantages over the United States if it hobbles our technology base. I think that's the first fundamental thing that's changed.I think the other thing that changed, Jim, is just a little bit of existential-risk exhaustion. The rhetoric in this debate, as you've written about eloquently in your columns, has just been crazy. I mean, I've never really seen anything like it in all the years we've been covering technology and economic policy. You and I have both written, this is really an unprecedented level of hysteria. And I think, at some point, the Chicken-Littleism just got to be too much, and I think some saner minds prevailed and said, “Okay, well wait a minute. We don't really need to pause the entire history of computation to address these hypothetical worst-case scenarios. Maybe there's a better plan than that.” And so we're starting to pull back from the abyss, if you will, a little bit, and the adults are reentering the conversation—a little bit, at least. So I think those are the two things that really changed more, although there were other things, but those were two big ones.The political economy of AI (10:24)To what extent do you think we saw the retreat from the more apocalyptic thinking—how much that was due from what businesses were saying, venture capitalists, m

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 spirit of adventure, heroism, and willingness to take extraordinary risk a thing of the pastToday on the podcast, I talk with Charles Murray about what made Apollo extraordinary and whether we in the 21st century have the will to do extraordinary things. Murray is the co-author with Catherine Bly Cox of Apollo: The Race to the Moon, first published in 1989 and republished in 2004. He is also my colleague here at AEI.In This Episode* Going to the moon (1:35)* Support for the program (7:40)* Gene Kranz (9:31)* An Apollo 12 story (12:06)* An Apollo 11 story (17:58)* Apollo in the media (21:36)* Perspectives on space flight (24:50)Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversationGoing to the moon (1:35)Pethokoukis: When I look at the delays with the new NASA go-to-the-moon rocket, and even if you look at the history of SpaceX and their current Starship project, these are not easy machines for mankind to build. And it seems to me that, going back to the 1960s, Apollo must have been at absolutely the far frontier of what humanity was capable of back then, and sometimes I cannot almost believe it worked. Were the Apollo people—the engineers—were they surprised it worked?Murray: There were a lot of people who, they first heard the Kennedy speech saying, “We want to go to the moon and bring a man safely back by the end of the decade,” they were aghast. I mean, come on! In 1961, when Kennedy made that speech, we had a grand total of 15 minutes of manned space flight under our belt with a red stone rocket with 78,000 pounds of thrust. Eight years and eight weeks later, about the same amount of time since Donald Trump was elected to now, we had landed on the moon with a rocket that had 7.6 million pounds of thrust, compared to the 78,000, and using technology that had had to be invented essentially from scratch, all in eight years. All of Cape Canaveral, those huge buildings down there, all that goes up during that time.Well, I'm not going to go through the whole list of things, but if you want to realize how incredibly hard to believe it is now that we did it, consider the computer system that we used to go to the moon. Jerry Bostick, who was one of the flight dynamics officers, was telling me a few months ago about how excited they were just before the first landing when they got an upgrade to their computer system for the whole Houston Center. It had one megabyte of memory, and this was, to them, all the memory they could ever possibly want. One megabyte.We'll never use it all! We'll never use all this, it’s a luxury!So Jim, I guess I'm saying a couple of things. One is, to the young’ins out there today, you have no idea what we used to be able to do. We used to be able to work miracles, and it was those guys who did it.Was the Kennedy speech, was it at Rice University?No, “go to the moon” was before Congress.He gave another speech at Rice where he was started to list all the things that they needed to do to get to the moon. And it wasn't just, “We have these rockets and we need to make a bigger one,” but there was so many technologies that needed to be developed over the course of the decade, I can't help but think a president today saying, “We're going to do this and we have a laundry list of things we don't know how to do, but we're going to figure them out…” It would've been called pie-in-the-sky, or something like that.By the way, in order to do this, we did things which today would be unthinkable. You would have contracts for important equipment; the whole cycle for the contract acquisition process would be a matter of weeks. The request for proposals would go out; six weeks later, they would've gotten the proposals in, they would've made a decision, and they'd be spending the money on what they were going to do. That kind of thing doesn't get done.But I'll tell you though, the ballsiest thing that happened in the program, among the people on the ground — I mean the ballsiest thing of all was getting on top of that rocket and being blasted into space — but on the ground it was called the “all up” decision. “All up” refers to the testing of the Saturn V, the launch vehicle, this monstrous thing, which basically is standing a Navy destroyer on end and blasting it into space. And usually, historically, when you test those things, you test Stage One, and if that works, then you add the second stage and then you add the third stage. And the man who was running the Apollo program at that time, a guy named Miller, made the decision they were going to do All Up on the first test. They were going to have all three stages, and they were going to go with it, and it worked, which nobody believed was possible. And then after only a few more launches, they put a man on that thing and it went. Decisions were made during that program that were like wartime decisions in terms of the risk that people were willing to take.One thing that surprises me is just how much that Kennedy timeline seemed to drive things. Apollo seven, I think it was October ’68, and that was the first manned flight? And then like two months later, Apollo 8, we are whipping those guys around the moon! That seems like a rather accelerated timeline to me!The decision to go to the moon on Apollo 8 was very scary to the people who first heard about it. And, by the way, if they'd had the same problem on Apollo 8 that they'd had on Apollo 13, the astronauts would've died, because on Apollo 8 you did not have the lunar module with them, which is how they got back. So they pulled it off, but it was genuinely, authentically risky. But, on the other hand, if they wanted to get to the moon by the end of 1969, that's the kind of chance you had to take.Support for the Program (7:40)How enthusiastic was the public that the program could have withstood another accident? Another accident before 11 that would've cost lives, or even been as scary as Apollo 13 — would we have said, let's not do it, or we're rushing this too much? I think about that a lot now because we talk about this new space age, I'm wondering how people today would react.In January, 1967, three astronauts were killed on the pad at Cape Canaveral when the spacecraft burned up on the ground. And the support for the program continued. But what's astonishing there is that they were flying again with manned vehicles in September 1967. . . No, it was a year and 10 months, basically, between this fire, this devastating fire, a complete redesign of the spacecraft, and they got up again.I think that it's fair to say that, through Apollo 11, the public was enthusiastic about the program. It's amazingly how quickly the interest fell off after the successful landing; so that by the time Apollo 13 was launched, the news programs were no longer covering it very carefully, until the accident occurred. And by the time of Apollo 16, 17, everybody was bored with the program.Speaking of Apollo 13, to what extent did that play a role in Nixon's decision to basically end the Apollo program, to cut its budget, to treat it like it was another program, ultimately, which led to its end? Did that affect Nixon's decision making, that close call, do you think?No. The public support for the program had waned, political support had waned. The Apollo 13 story energized people for a while in terms of interest, but it didn't play a role. Gene Kranz (9:31)500 years after Columbus discovering the New World, we talk about Columbus. And I would think that 500 years from now, we'll talk about Neil Armstrong. But will we also talk about Gene Kranz? Who is Gene Kranz and why should we talk about him 500 years from now?Gene Kranz, also known as General Savage within NASA, was a flight director and he was the man who was on the flight director's console when the accident on 13 occurred, by the way. But his main claim to fame is that he was one of — well, he was also on the flight director's desk when we landed. And what you have to understand, Jim, is the astronauts did not run these missions. I'm not dissing the astronauts, but all of the decisions . . . they couldn't make those decisions because they didn't have the information to make the decisions. These life-and-death decisions had to be made on the ground, and the flight director was the autocrat of the mission control, and not just the autocrat in terms of his power, he was also the guy who was going to get stuck with all the responsibility if there was a mistake. If they made a mistake that killed the astronauts, that flight director could count on testifying before Congressional committees and going down in history as an idiot.Somebody like Gene Kranz, and the other flight director, Glynn Lunney during that era, who was also on the controls during the Apollo 13 problems, they were in their mid-thirties, and they were running the show for one of the historic events in human civilization. They deserve to be remembered, and they have a chance to be, because I have written one thing in my life that people will still be reading 500 years from now — not very many people, but some will — and that's the book about Apollo that Catherine, my wife, and I wrote. And the reason I'm absolutely confident that they're going to be reading about it is because — historians, anyway, historians will — because of what you just said. There are wars that get forgotten, there are all sorts of events that get forgotten, but we remember the Trojan War, we remember Hastings, we remember Columbus discovering America. . . We will remember for a thousand years to come, let alone 500, the century in which we first left Eart

As I often remind subscribers to Faster, Please!, predictions are hard, especially about the future. The economic boom of the 1990s came as a surprise to most economists. Equally surprising was that it ended so soon. Neither of these events caught Ed Yardeni off-guard. Some forecasters, Yardeni included, anticipated a new Roaring ’20s for this century… only to be interrupted by the pandemic. But is it too late for this prediction to become a reality? According to Yardeni, not at all.Ed Yardeni is president of Yardeni Research, and he previously served as chief investment strategist at a number of investment companies, including Deutche Bank.  He has additionally held positions at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Federal Reserve Board of Governors, and US Treasury Department. For more economic insights and investment guidance, visit yardeni.com.In This Episode* The ’90s Internet boom (1:25)* The Digital Revolution (5:01)* The new Roaring ’20s (9:00)* A cautious Federal Reserve (14:24)* Speedbumps to progress (18:18)Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversationThe ’90s Internet boom (1:25)Pethokoukis: Statistically speaking, the PC Internet boom that you first started writing about back in the early ’90s ended in 2004, 2005. How surprising was that to economists, investors, policy makers? I, to this day, have a report, a 2000 report, from Lehman Brothers that predicted, as far as the eye could see, we would have rapid growth, rapid productivity growth for at least another decade. Now, of course, Lehman didn't make it another decade. Was that a surprise to people that we didn't have an endless productivity boom coming out of the ’90s?Yardeni: I think it definitely was a surprise. I mean, it was surprising both ways. Not too many people expected to see a productivity boom in the second half of the 1990s, which is what we had. I did, as an economist on Wall Street. More importantly, Alan Greenspan was a big promoter of the idea that the technology revolution would in fact lead to better productivity growth and that that might mean better economic growth and lower inflation. And it didn't look that way for a while; then suddenly the Bureau of Economic Analysis went back and revised the data for the late 1990s and, lo and behold, it turned out that there was a productivity boom. And then it all kind of fizzled out, and it raises the question, why did that happen? Why was it such a short lived productivity boom? And the answer is—well, let me give you a personal anecdote.I worked at Deutsche Bank in New York in the late 1990s, and I had to be very careful walking down the corridors of Deutsche Bank in midtown Manhattan not to trip over Dell boxes. Everybody was getting a Dell box, everybody was getting the Dell boxes loaded up with the Windows Office. And when you think back on what that was able to do in terms of productivity, if you had a lot of secretaries on Selectric typewriters, Word could obviously increase productivity. If you had a lot of bookkeepers doing spreadsheets, Excel could obviously increase productivity. But other than that, there wasn't really that much productivity to be had from the technology at the time. So again, where did that productivity boom come from? It couldn't have been just secretaries and bookkeepers. Now the answer is that the boxes themselves were measured as output, and so output per man hour increased dramatically. It doesn't take that many workers to produce Dell boxes and Windows Office and Windows software. So as a result of that, we had this big boom in the technology output that created its own productivity boom, but it didn't really have the widespread application to all sorts of business model the way today's evolution of the technology boom is, in fact, capable of doing.What you've just described, I think, is the explanation by, for instance, Robert Gordon, Northwestern University, that we saw a revolution, but it was a narrow revolution.It was the beginning! It was the beginning of a revolution. It was the Technology Revolution. It started in the 1990s and it's evolved, it's not over, it's ongoing. I think a big development in that revolution was the cloud. What the cloud allowed you to do was really increase productivity in technology itself, because you didn't need to have several hundred people in the IT department. Now, with the cloud, one person can upgrade the software on hundreds of computers, and now we're renting software so that it automatically upgrades, so that's been a big contribution to productivity.The Digital Revolution (5:01)So perhaps I spoke too soon. I talked about that boom—that ’90s boom—ending. Perhaps I should have said it was more of a pause, because it seems what we're seeing now, as you've described it, is a new phase of the Digital Revolution—perhaps a broader phase—and, to be clear, if I understand what you've been speaking about and writing about, this isn't an AI story, this predates what we're seeing in the data now, it predates ChatGPT, when do you date this new phase beginning—and you mentioned one catalyst perhaps being the cloud, so—when did it begin and, again, what are the data markers that you've been looking at?I don't remember the exact date, but I think it was 2011 where my little investment advisory got ourselves on the Amazon cloud, and that's been a tremendous source of productivity for us, it saves us a lot of money. We used to have a couple of servers on a server farm in the old days, and every now and then it would go down and we'd have to reach somebody on the server farm and say, “Would you mind turning it on and off?” Remember the word “reboot?” I don't remember the word “reboot” being used in quite some time. Amazon's never gone down, as far as I can recall. I think they've always had their systems in Virginia, and they had a backup somewhere overseas, but it's always worked quite well for us.But now we're finding with some of the other software that's available now, we can actually cut back on our Amazon costs and use some of these other technologies. There's lots of technologies that are very user-friendly, very powerful, and they apply themselves to all sorts of different businesses, and, as you said, it's not just AI. I think the cloud—let's put it around 2011 or so—was a huge development because it did allow companies to do information processing in a much more efficient way, and the software gets automatically updated, and with what it used to take hundreds of people in an IT department to do, now you can do it with just one, which is what we, in fact, have, just one person doing it all for us. But I would say that's as good a point as any. But along the way here, what's really changed is the power of the software that's available, and how cheap it is, and how you can rent it now instead of having to own it.That's a fantastic example, and, of course, we want to see these sort of examples at some point reflected in the data. And going through some of your writings, one period that you were very focused on was, we may have seen a bottom, maybe at the end of 2015, before the pandemic, where we saw the slowest, I think 20-quarter average… annual average growth rate of productivity.0.5 annual rate.But by 2019, leading into the pandemic, it tripled. Is the story of that tripling, is it the cloud? And that certainly has to be one reason why you, among other people, thought that we might see a new Roaring ’20s, right into the teeth of the pandemic, unfortunately.Well, it's not so unfortunate, I mean, clearly nobody saw the pandemic coming, but we weathered the storm very, very well, and I don't think we can come to any conclusion about productivity during the pandemic, it was all over the place. At first, when we were on lockdown, it actually soared because we were still producing a lot with fewer workers, and then it took a dive, but we're now back up to two percent. We had a really, really good year last year in productivity. The final three quarters of last year, we saw above-trend growth in productivity. And so we're already now back up to two percent, which, again, compared to 0.5, is certainly moving in the right direction, and I don't see any particular reason why that number couldn't go to three-and-a-half, four-and-a-half percent per year kind of growth—which sounds delusional unless you look back at the chart of productivity and see that that's actually what productivity booms do: They get up to something like three-and-a-half to four-and-a-half percent growth, not just on a one-quarter basis, but on a 20-quarter trailing basis at an annual rate.The new Roaring ’20s (9:00)This forecast predates the word “generative AI,” predates ChatGPT, and, in fact, if I understand your view, it's even broader than information technology. So tell me a bit about your broader Roaring ’20s thesis and the technological underpinnings of that.One of the developments we've seen here, which has been somewhat disconcerting, is the challenge to globalization. I'm a big believer in free trade, and the free trade creates more economic growth, but, on the other hand, we have to be realistic and realize that China hasn't been playing by the rules of the game. And so now, as a result, we're seeing a lot of production moving out of China to other countries, and we're seeing a lot of on-shoring in the United States, so we're building state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities that are full of robots and automation that I think are going to bring manufacturing productivity back quite significantly.Everybody seems to be of the opinion that the reason productivity is weak is because of services. It's actually manufacturing. What happened is, when China joined the World Trade Organization back at the end of 2001—December 11th, 2001, to be exact—manufacturers said hasta la vista to the United States, and we've had absolutely no increase in industrial production capacity since that time, since 2001. And so companies basically gave u

As private and government interest in nuclear fusion technology grows, an array of startups have arisen to take on the challenge, each with their own unique approach. Among them: LaserFusionX. Today on Faster, Please!—The Podcast, I talk with CEO Stephen Obenschain about the viability of fusion energy, and what sets his approach apart.Obenschain is the president of LaserFusionX. He was formerly head of the Plasma Physics Division branch at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.In This Episode* Viability of commercial fusion (0:58)* The LaserFusionX approach (7:54)* Funding the project (10:28)* The vision (12:52)Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversationViability of commercial fusion (0:58)Pethokoukis: Steve, welcome to the podcast.Obenschain: Okay, I'm glad to talk with you. I understand you're very interested in high-tech future power sources, not so high tech right now are windmills…Well, I guess they're trying to make those more high tech, as well. I recall that when the Energy Department, the National Ignition Laboratory [NIF], they had the—I guess that's over about maybe 15 months ago—and they said they had achieved a net gain nuclear fusion, using lasers, and the energy secretary made an announcement and it was a big deal because we had never done that before by any means. But I remember very specifically people were saying, “Listen, it's a great achievement that we've done this, but using lasers is not a path to creating a commercial nuclear reactor.” I remember that seemed to be on the news all the time. But yet you are running a company that wants to use lasers to create a commercial fusion reactor. One, did I get that right, and what are you doing to get lasers to be able to do that?I don't know why people would come to that conclusion. I think we are competitive with the other approaches, which is magnetic fusion, where you use magnetic fields to confine a plasma and get to fusion temperatures. The federal government has supported laser fusion since about 1972, starting with the AEC [Atomic Energy Commission]. Originally it was an energy program, but it has migrated to being in support stockpiled stewardship because, with laser fusion, you can reach physics parameters similar to what occur in thermonuclear weapons.Yeah. So that facility is about nuclear weapons testing research, not creating a reactor—a fusion reactor.Yeah. All that being said, it does advance the physics of laser fusion energy, and what the National Ignition Facility did is got so-called ignition, where the fuel started a self-sustaining reaction where it was heating itself and increasing the amount of fusion energy. However, the gain was about three, and one of the reasons for that is they use so-called indirect drive, where the laser comes in, heats a small gold can, and the X-rays from that then that drive the pellet implosion, which means you lose about a factor of five in the efficiency. So it's limited gain you get that way.Your way is different. It sort of cuts out the middleman.Okay. The better way to go—which, we're not the only ones to do this—is direct drive, where the laser uniformly illuminates the target at the time that Livermore got started with indirect drive, we didn't have the technologies to uniformly illuminate a pellet. First at NRL [Naval Research Laboratories], and then later at University of Rochester in Japan, they developed techniques to uniformly illuminate the pellets. The second thing we're doing is using the argon fluoride laser. The argon fluoride laser has been used in lithography for many years because it's deep UV.The unique thing we have been trying to do—this was when I was supervising the program at the Naval Research Laboratory—was to take it up to high energy. We started years ago with a similar Krypton fluoride laser, built the largest operating target shooter with that technology, demonstrated the high repetition rate operation that you need for energy and NIF will shoot a few times a day—you need five to 10 shots per second to do a power plant—demonstrated that on a krypton fluoride laser, and, more recently, we switched to the focus to argon fluoride, which is deeper UV and more efficient than the Krypton  fluoride. And that basically—at NRL when I was supervising it—reached the energy record for that technology. But we've got a long ways to go to get it to the high energy needed for a power plant.Now, what the immediate goal of my company is to get the funds and to build a beam line of argon fluoride that would have the energy and performance needed for a power plant. One of the advantages to laser fusion: you want have a situation where I'm building more than one of something, so for an implosion facility, you have many beam lines, so you build one and then you have the advantage of building more, and a learning curve as you go toward a power plant. We developed a phase program where first we build the beamline, then we build a NIF-like implosion facility only operating with the argon fluoride, demonstrate the high gain—which is a hundred plus for a power plant—and then, after doing that, do the physics in parallel, develop the other technology you need, like low-cost targets. (They can't be expensive. The NIF targets are probably tens of thousands. We can't spend that.) We're going 10 shots per second. All the technologies required for a pilot power plant build a pilot power plant, which, in my view could be maybe 400 megawatts electricity. However, its main function would be to develop the procedures, test the components, and so forth for the follow-on, mass-produced power plants. So one, when you build a pilot power plant, you want to operate it for a few years to get the kinks out before going to mass production. The vision is to go from the beginning of that to the end in about 16 years.So the challenges are you have to generate enough heat, and you have to be able to do this over, and over, and over again.Right. That's right. It has to be high reliability. For an implosion facility, a hundred-thousand-shot reliability is okay. For a power plant, it's got to be in the billion-shot class.And at this point, the reason you think this is doable is what?I think we have confidence in the pellet designs. I have a lot, and I have colleagues that have a lot of experience with building large excimer systems: KrF [Krypton Fluoride Excimer Laser], ArF [Argon Fluoride Excimer Laser]…Those are lasers?Yes. And we have credible conceptual designs for the facility.There’s a lot of companies right now, and startups, with different approaches. I would assume you think this is the most viable approach, or has some other advantages over some of the other things we're seeing with Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which gets mentioned a lot, which is using a different approach. So is the advantage you think it's easier to get to a reactor? What are the advantages of this path?The LaserFusionX approach (7:54)Well, for one, it's different. It's different challenges from the Commonwealth Fusion Systems. There is overlap, and there should be collaboration. For example, you have to, theirs is also deuterium-tritium. However, the physics challenges are different. I think we're farther along in laser fusion to be able—it's a simpler situation than you have. It's very complex interactions in tokamak, and you also have things… have you ever heard of a disruption? Basically it's where all of the magnetic energy all of a sudden goes to the wall, and if you have something like what Commonwealth Fusion Systems—they’ve got to be careful they don't get that. If they do, it would blow a hole in the wall. We don't have that problem with laser fusion. I think we're further along in understanding the physics. Actually, the National Ignition Facility is ahead of the highest fusion gains they've gotten in facilities. I think that they're somewhere just below one or so with the jet. They're up at one and a half. To what extent are the challenges of physics and science, and to what extent are the challenges engineering?Well, the physics has to guide the precision you have on the laser. And I won't say we're 100 percent done in the physics, but we're far enough along to say, okay. That's one reason where I envision building an implosion facility before the pilot power plant so we can test the codes and get all the kinks out of that. Nothing's easy. You have to get the cost of the targets down. The laser, okay, we've demonstrated, for example, at NRL—And NRL is…?Naval Research Laboratory.Naval Research Lab, right.A hundred-shot operation of the KrF laser. We use spark gap for that. We need to go to solid state pulse power, got up to 10 million shots. We need to get from there to a billion shots. And some of that is just simply improving the components. It's straightforward, but you've got to put time into it. I think you need really smart people doing this, that are creative—not too creative, but where you need to be creative, you are creative, and I think if, basically, if you can get the support, for example, to build (a beam line is somewhere around a hundred million dollars). To build the implosion facility and pilot power plant, you're getting into the billion shot, billion dollar class and you have to get those resources and be sure enough that, okay, if the investors put this money in, they're going to get a return on it.Funding the project (10:28)I think people who are investing in this sector, I would assume they may be more familiar with some of the other approaches, so what is the level of investor interest and what is the level of Department of Energy interest?Well, one of the challenges is that, historically, the Department of Energy has put money into two pots. One, laser fusion for stockpile stewardship, and magnetic fusion for energy. That's starting to change, but they don't have a lot of money involved yet, to put money into laser fusion or inertial fusion energy. And one of my challenges is not that the

In a world facing climate change and clean energy challenges, it’s starting to look like a nuclear energy renaissance is starting to happen. That is, if we can overcome our irrational fear of nuclear. In this episode of Faster, Please! - The Podcast, I talk with Dr. Spencer Weart about the cultural influences that shaped generations of anxiety around nuclear power, and how that tide may be turning.Weart holds advanced degrees in both Astrophysics and History. For over three decades, he served as Director of the Center for History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics. He is the author of two children’s science books and has written or co-edited seven other books. Among his most recent is The Rise of Nuclear Fear, published in 2012.In This Episode* A history of radiation (1:05)* The rise of nuclear fear (7:01)* Anti-bomb to anti-nuclear (11:52)* Today’s anti-nuclear voices (20:21)* Changing generational attitudes (24:01)* Nuclear fear in today’s media (28:58)Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversationA history of radiation (1:05)Pethokoukis: To what extent, when radiation was discovered at the turn of the century—and then, of course, the discovery of nuclear fission—to what extent were we already as a society primed by our cultural history to worry about radiation and nuclear power?Weart: Totally. Because you say radiation was discovered, presumably you're referring first to the discovery of X-rays and then, shortly after that, the discovery of what they called “atomic radiation,” we now call it “nuclear radiation.” But, of course, before that, there was the very exciting discovery of infrared radiation. And before that, people have always known about radiation: the rays, the heat from the sun; and they've always had a very powerful cultural significance. You think of the halos of rays of light going out from holy figures in Buddhism and Christian iconography, or you think of the ancient Egyptians with the life-giving rays of the sun bestowing life on things because actually, of course, radiation of the sun is life-giving, it does contain a vital life force. So it's not a mistake to think of radiation as some kind of super magical, powerful thing.And then of course there's also death rays. Death rays actually did become very popular in the literature after the discovery of X-rays because X-rays could, in fact, cause great damage to people, and then so could atomic rays, so, already by the early 20th century there were lots of kids' books and exciting adventure fiction featuring death rays. But you go back before that, there's the evil eye. There's rays radiating out from the evil eye could cause harm. Then there's astrology, the rays from the stars could influence human destiny. So as soon as you mention radiation, there's an enormous complex of things that come out, which was very easily linked to atomic radiation because of all the other characteristics of atomic discoveries.And yet, certainly in the first half or first third of the 20th century, there was, people saw radiation as having great promise, even to create a Golden Age. Tell me a bit about that.It came out as soon as radiation was discovered. Whenever there's a new physics discovery, almost the first thing that people think about is medical applications. And that happened with electricity and with X-rays—of course, x-rays do have great medical applications—and nuclear radiation (I'll call it “nuclear,” even though they called it “atomic” back then). Nuclear radiation did turn out to be radon and radium and so forth that Curie discovered did turn out to be useful for curing certain types of skin cancers and so forth.But people went much beyond that because there was all this magical stuff associated with it. We have to remember that very early on it was discovered that nuclear radiation is the product of the transmutation of elements: uranium and radium and so forth and even other elements.Like alchemy.Yeah, transmutation was alchemy. It was immediately recognized that, oh, the nuclear physicists were the new alchemist and they were happy to talk of themselves as that. But of course, as soon as you have something powerful, as I said, the first thing, when you have a new discovery, that you think about is medicine. The second thing you think about 10 seconds later is weapons, so nuclear death rates were very early imagined. And the atomic bomb—the first atomic bomb actually was sort of a device carried by a terrorist in the 1901 novel. And then in 1915, H.G. Wells conceived of the idea of an atomic warfare weapon that civilization destroyed, but then followed by transmutation and of course humans destroy civilization, then we’ll rise again in atomic powered cars. We love utopia powered by nuclear energy. So all these things were there together, the good side and the bad side. On one side you had people saying that this is the 1930s mind. This is before nuclear fission was discovered. This was entirely science fiction.Would you call that a period of general sort of pro-progress science and technology enthusiasm?Well, it was, except… this was certainly the case in the 1900s. People thought that radium could cure all ills. Nuclear energy was seen as the elixir of life, talking about the old alchemists and so forth. There were all these wonderful things it could do and by the time it got to the First World War and the Great Depression, people were a little less happy about technology. So in addition to the wonders of atomic power plants and so forth, there were also things like… my favorite is a movie in which Boris Karloff doesn't play the mad scientist’s monster, he plays the mad scientist who discovers a new kind of radium rays, and of course he means to use it for good and he uses it… always using it to irradiate the young women to cure them, because, of course, radiation carries not only life force, but if you dig down deep into the radium side that has this sort of sexual thing. So these 1930s science fiction images of nuclear or mad scientists irradiating young women having a definite violation aspect. In this movie Boris Karloff gets too big a dose of radiation and goes mad and it turns him into a monster and goes around glowing in the dark—maybe the origin of the glowing in the dark idea—and then killing people with the touch of his radioactive hand. So it was all there together, both magical good and magical evil. Very, very strongly mythologized and Freudenized. The writers at the time read their Freud and they were happy to put in all these ideas of bad parents. And the mad scientist is the bad parent out to rape… well, I probably shouldn't go too far with this because… You have to see the pictures to really appreciate how deep this stuff goes.Would you say that, overall, pre-Hiroshima, that the general public attitude was sort of positive about the potential of radiation and, eventually, atomic fission? Was it overall positive?Yes, I would say it was generally positive, but with very deep roots. The positivity was mingled, when you go down deep enough, with all sorts of negative or ambiguous things: ideas of mad scientists as sort of the bad parent or the authority figure, the mean, merciless dictator, all of these things and the evil eye death ray kind of thing. They're all there sort of broiling around at a very deep level, a very deep psychological level and a very deep cultural level. And on the surface side, I would say it was generally positive and the overall idea was positive.The rise of nuclear fear (7:01)So if those things were sort of bubbling around, was it the atomic bombings of Japan that brought that stuff to a boil? Was that the key moment, or did that happen afterward? Was that the key inflection point?It came afterwards. When Hiroshima happened, all the commentators from President Truman on down, the feeling was, “Oh, oh, it's actually real!” All the stuff that we thought was things that teenage boys read in their pulp fiction or in horror movies, all this stuff is actually real, so that was a shock.And so it went two ways. One of course was the actual image of Hiroshima. And then when atomic bombs started to proliferate, when the Russians got the atomic bombs and we worried about them bombing our homes, then all this stuff that was sort of underground and seemed mythological—atomic war and the end of the world, and so forth—all became a scientific reality.But at the same time, the other side also was coming out very strongly, and this was partly done deliberately. The government—well, the American government, the British government, the French government, the Soviet government—all got very worried about how upset their publics were and how frightened they were by atomic bombs. So they made a very strong effort to promote what they called “Atoms for Peace:” nuclear reactors, nuclear-powered ships, nuclear-powered everything. We use radiation. Radiation has a life force, right? So we'll radiate seeds and we'll get these new kinds of petunias and better crops.Both of these things came out and there was a strong mixture of positivity and negativity, mostly connected with nuclear war, originally. It originally was connected with atomic explosions. And then this phase ended, this sort of 1950s Atoms for Peace thing ended with the hydrogen bomb, all of a sudden, there was a very big shift.Is that just because it was just obviously a much more powerful explosive, or was it the Bravo incident which you write about in the book?Yeah. There's two things going on here. First place is the hydrogen bomb is a thousand times more powerful than an atomic bomb. So this whole business of “duck and cover,” which, I was born in 1942, I did the “duck and cover” in school and so forth, that made sense with an atomic bomb. Okay, oh, the atomic bomb goes off in New York City, I'm in the suburbs, I duck under the desk. In a hydrogen bomb, you're inside the fireball. The whole idea of hiding from it is useless. So there's that

Education was among the first victims of AI panic. Concerns over cheating quickly made the news. But AI optimists like John Bailey are taking a whole different approach. Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I talk with Bailey about what it would mean to raise kids with a personalized AI coach — one that could elevate the efficacy of teachers, tutors, and career advisors to new heights.John Bailey is a colleague and senior fellow at AEI. He formerly served as special assistant to the president for domestic policy at the White house, as well as deputy policy director to the US secretary of commerce. He has additionally acted as the Director of Educational Technology for the Pennsylvania Department of Education, and subsequently as Director of Educational Technology for the US Department of Education.In This Episode* An opportunity for educators (1:27)* Does AI mean fewer teachers, or better teachers? (5:59)* A solution to COVID learning loss (9:31)* The personalized educational assistant (12:31)* The issue of cheating (17:49)* Adoption by teachers (21:02)Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversationEducation was among the first victims of AI panic. Concerns over cheating quickly made the news. But AI optimists like John Bailey are taking a whole different approach. Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I talk with Bailey about what it would mean to raise kids with a personalized AI coach — one that could elevate the efficacy of teachers, tutors, and career advisors to new heights.John Bailey is a colleague and senior fellow at AEI. He formerly served as special assistant to the president for domestic policy at the White house, as well as deputy policy director to the US secretary of commerce. He has additionally acted as the Director of Educational Technology for the Pennsylvania Department of Education, and subsequently as Director of Educational Technology for the US Department of Education.An opportunity for educators (1:27)Pethokoukis: John, welcome to the podcast.Bailey: Oh my gosh, it's so great to be with you.We’d actually chatted last summer a bit on a panel about AI and education, and this is a fast moving, evolving technology. People are constantly thinking of new things to do with it. They're gauging its strengths and weaknesses. As you're thinking about any downsides of AI in education, has that changed since last summer? Are you more or less enthusiastic? How would you gauge your evolving views?I think I grow more excited and enthusiastic by the day, and I say that with a little humility because I do think the education space, especially for the last 20 years or so, has been riddled with a lot of promises around personalized learning, how technology was going to change your revolutionize education and teaching and learning, and it rarely did. It was over promise and under-delivered. This, though, feels like it might be one of the first times we're underestimating some of the AI capabilities and I think I'm excited for a couple different reasons.I just see this as it is developing its potential to develop tutoring and, just in time, professional development for teachers, and being an assistant to just make teaching more joyful again and remove some of the drudgery. I think that's untapped area and it seems to be coming alive more and more every day. But then, also, I'm very excited about some of the ways these new tools are analyzing data and you just think about school leaders, you think about principals and superintendents, and state policy makers, and the ability of being able to just have conversations with data, not running pivot tables or Excel formulas and looking for patterns and helping to understand trends. I think the bar for that has just been dramatically lowered and that's great. That's great for decision-making and it's great for having a more informed conversation.You're right. You talked about the promise of technology, and I know that when my kids were in high school, if there were certain classes which were supposedly more tech adept, they would bring out a cart with iPads. And I think as parents we are supposed to be like, “Wow, every kid's going to have an iPad that's going to be absolutely amazing!” And I'm not sure if that made the teachers more productive, I'm not sure, in the end, if the kids learned any better.This technology, as you just said, could be different. And the one area I want to first focus on is, it would be awesome if we had a top-10-percent teacher in every classroom. And I know that, at least some of the early studies, not education studies, but looking at studies of using generative AI in, perhaps, customer service. One effect they notice is kind of raising the lower-performing group and having them do better. And so I immediately think about the ability to raise… boy, if we could just have the lowest-performing teachers do as well as the middle-performing teachers, that would seem to be an amazing improvement.I totally agree with you. Yeah, I think that was the BCG study that found when consultants used gen AI—I think, in that case, it was ChatGPT—everyone improved, but the folks that had the most dramatic improvement were the lowest performers in the consulting world. And here you could imagine something very similar for teachers that are teaching out of field—that happens a lot in science and mathematics. It's with new teachers, and the ability of helping them perform better… also, the ability, I think, of combining what they know with also what science and research is saying is the best practice. That's been very difficult.One of the examples I give is the Department of Ed has these guides called the What Works Clearinghouse Practice Guides, and this is what evaluation of research, and studies, and evaluation has to say, “This is the best way of teaching math, or the best way of teaching reading,” but these are dense documents, they're like 137 PDF pages. If you're asking a new teacher teaching out of field to read 137 pages of a PDF and apply it to their lesson that day, that's incredibly difficult. But it can happen in a matter of seconds now with an AI assistant that can read that practice guide, read your lesson, and make sure that you're getting just-in-time professional development, you're getting an assistant with your worksheets, with your class activities and everything. And so I totally agree with you, I think this is a way of helping to make sure that teachers are able to perform better and to really be an assistant to teachers no matter where they are in terms of their skill level.Does AI mean fewer teachers, or better teachers? (5:59)I recall a story, and I forget which sort of tech CEO was talking to a bunch of teachers, and he said, “The good news: in the future, all teachers will make a million dollars a year… bad news is we're only going to need like 10 percent of you” because each teacher would be so empowered by—this was pre-AI—by technology that they would just be so much more productive.The future you're talking about isn't necessarily a future of fewer teachers, it's just sort of the good part of it, which is more productive teachers, and any field where there's a huge human element is always tough to make more productive. Is the future you're talking about just… it's not necessarily fewer teachers, it's just more productive teachers?I think that's exactly right. I don't think this is about technology replacing teachers, I think it's about complimenting them. We see numerous studies that ask teachers how they spend their time and, on average, teachers are spending less than half of their time on instruction. A lot of it is on planning, a lot of it is on paperwork. I mean, even if we had AI that could take away some of that drudgery and free up teachers' times, so they could be more thoughtful about their planning or spend more time with students, that would be a gift.But also I think the best analog on this is a little bit in the healthcare space. If you think of teachers as a doctor, doctors are your most precious commodity in a healthcare system, you want to maximize their time, and what you're seeing is that now, especially because of technology and because of some tools, you can push a lot of decisions to be more subclinical. And so initially that was with nurses and nurse practitioners so that could free up doctor's time. Now you're seeing a whole new category, too, where AI can help provide some initial feedback or responses, and then if you need more help and assistance, you’d go up to that nurse practitioner, and if you need more help and assistance, then you go and you get the doctor. And I bet we're going to see a bunch of subclinical tools and assistance that come out in education, too. Some cases it's going to be an AI tutor, but then kids are going to need a human tutor. That's great. And in some cases they're going to need more time with their teacher, and that's great, too. I think this is about maximizing time and giving kids exactly what they need when they need it.This just sort of popped in my head when you mentioned the medical example. Might we see a future where you have a real job with a career path called “teacher assistant,” where you might have a teacher in charge, like a doctor, of, maybe, multiple classes, and you have sort of an AI-empowered teaching assistant as sort of a new middle-worker, much like a nurse or a physician's assistant?I think you could, I mean, already we're seeing you have teacher assistants, especially in higher education, but I think we're going to see more of those in K-12. We have some K-12 systems that have master teachers and then teachers that are a little bit less-skilled or newer that are learning on the job. I think you have paraprofessionals, folks that don't necessarily have a certification that are helping. This can make a paraprofessional much more effective. We see this in tutoring that not every single tutor is a licensed teacher, but how do you make su

Readers and listeners of Faster, Please! know how incredible the untapped potential of nuclear power truly is. As our society (hopefully) begins to warm to the idea of nuclear as an abundant, sustainable, and safe source of energy, a new generation of engineers and entrepreneurs is developing a whole new model of nuclear power: the microreactor.Here on this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I talk with James Walker, a nuclear physicist and CEO of NANO Nuclear Energy about the countless applications of his company’s under-development, mobile, and easily-deployable nuclear reactors.In This Episode* Why the microreactor? (1:14)* The NANO design plan (7:11)* The industry environment (11:42)* The future of the microreactor (13:45Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversationWhy the microreactor? (1:14)Pethokoukis : James, welcome to the podcast.Walker: I would say the way NANO got going is probably of interest, then. When we first entered the nuclear space, and my background is a nuclear physicist, nuclear engineer, so I knew that there's a very high bar to entry in nuclear and there's a lot of well-established players in the space. But, really, when we actually took a look at the whole landscape, most of the development was in the SMR space, the Kairos, the Terra Powers, the NuScales, and we could see what they were doing: They were aiming for a much more manufactural reactor that could deploy a lot faster. It was going to be a lot smaller, fewer mechanical components, smaller operating staff to bring down costs. So that all made a lot of sense, but what I think was missing in the market—and there are a few companies involved in this—was that the microreactor space looked to be the larger potential market. And I say that because microreactors are more readily deployable to places like remote mining sites, remote habitation, disaster relief areas, military bases, island communities… you put them on maritime vessels to replace bunk fuel, charging stations for EV vehicles... Essentially hundreds of thousands of potential locations competing against diesel generators, which, up until now, up until microreactors, had no competition. So the big transformative change here is—obviously SMRs are going to contribute that, but—micro reactors can completely reshape the energy landscape and that's why it's exciting. That's the big change.You gave some examples, so I want you to give me a couple more examples, but I'll say that I was thinking the other day about the expansion, partially due to AI, of these big data centers around the country. Is that the kind of thing—and you can give me other examples, as well—of where a much smaller microreactor might be a good fit for it, and also tell me, just how big are these reactors?AI centers and data centers are particularly a big focus of tech at the moment. Microsoft even have people deliberately going out and speaking to nuclear companies about being able to charge these new stations because they want these things to be green, but they also want them in locations which aren't readily accessible to the grid. And a lot of the time, some of the power requirements of these things might be bigger than the town next to them where they've got these things. So their own microreactor or SMR system is actually a really good way of solving this where it's zero carbon-emitting energy, you can put it anywhere, and it is the most consistent form of energy. Now you can out-compete diesel in that front, it can go outcompete, wind or solar. It really has no competitors. So they are leaning in that direction and a lot of the big drive in nuclear at the moment is coming from industry. So that's the big change, I think. It's not strictly now a government-pushed initiative.What's the difference between these and the SMR reactors, which my listeners and readers might be a little bit more familiar with?SMRs, the small modular reactors, obviously if you think of a large conventional nuclear power station, you're thinking dozens and dozens of acres of land being occupied by essentially a big facility. An SMR brings that down by an order of magnitude. You still need to probably have an area about 10 city blocks, but the reactor itself is much, much smaller, occupied by a much smaller footprint than that.Microreactors are much smaller, again, so if you take our design as an example, the whole system, the core and the turbine that produces the electricity, all fits within an ISO container. If you think of the standard shipping container you see on the back of a ship or you see on the back of a truck or a train, that's where you're really looking at. And the reason for that is that we're trying to make it as deployable and as mobile as possible. So conventional transportation—infrastructure, trucks, trains, ships—get these things anywhere in the world. Helicopter them in, if you really want. And once they're down there you've got 10, 15, 20 years of power consistently without that constant need to import fuel like you would with the diesel generator. That's the real big advantage of these things. Obviously SMRs don't have that ability, but they are more powerful machines. So you're powering cities, or bit towns, and that kind of thing. They are catering to different markets. They're not exactly competitors, they're very complimentary.But even for big grid systems, micro reactors could play a big part because they could be intermittently placed within a grid system so that you have backup power systems all the time that's not reliant on one major area to produce power for the entire grid system. It can always draw power from wherever it needs. And there's a big advantage to micro correctors there.Other examples of where microreactors could be used: We know that the military is very interested because they have an obligation to be able to self-power for at least two weeks. And obviously micros can take you well beyond that for, like, 50 years, so that easily meets their requirements. They're looking to get rid of diesel and replace them with microreactors and they're putting money in that space.I would say a big market is going to be things like island communities that predominantly run on diesel at the moment, and that means it's expensive and it's polluting, and they're constantly bringing in diesel on a daily basis.  Countries like the Philippines, Indonesia, where they have the majority of their population on these island communities that all run on diesel, you would essentially be taking hundreds of millions of people off diesel generator and putting them onto nuclear if you could bring in that technology to these areas.And the US actually has an enormous population on island communities that run on diesel, too, that could be replaced with microreactors, and you could then have a zero carbon-emitting solution to energy requirements and less energy insecurity.  The NANO design plan (7:11)Would they need to be refueled and how many people would it take? How many technical people would you need to operate one of them?The idea here with our reactors is that we don't want to refuel at-site. What we would likely do is just decommission that reactor and remove it and we would just bring in a replacement. It's this less messy, there's no refueling process, it's easier to license that way. The interesting part about this is that we actually would probably only need a couple people on site while the reactor is running, and the reason for that is because obviously we need someone for physical security and maybe a mechanic on site who can just do some sort of physical intervention to modify the mechanical equipment.The way these will likely work is that you'll have a central location where it monitors the behavior of dozens of reactors that are deployed at any one time. And you have all your nuclear engineers and your operators in that space and they monitor everything.So you don't need a nuclear engineer at each site. And that way these things are very deployable and, to be honest, everybody who's going to work on these things are going to be quite bored. There's not going to be a lot to do because reactors are mostly self-regulating systems, and the intervention that's needed on a daily basis is very minimal. So even for the hub, it's mostly just an observation exercise to check on transient behavior as it's operating and then maybe some tweaks here and there, and that's essentially all that would need to be done for these things. And then you can bring down your OpEx costs very considerably.So just a bit about the technology itself: You're working on two different reactors? Can you explain the differences in reactors and where they are in the development-deployment stage?We have two expert technical teams working on two different reactor designs, and that's partly so we can de-risk our own operations. So we know that even if one meets critical problems, the other one will be able to go on, so we're just doubling our chances of success. The MO we gave to both of them was the same: It has to be modular, it needs to be passively cooling, it needs to be able to be shipped anywhere in the world, so it needs to be fit within an ISO container. And we gave both teams that MO. They both came up with very innovative and novel solutions to that problem.So the Zeus reactor, which draws from the scientists and engineers down in California, their solution was just completely remove the coolants and use a thermal conduction. And if you do that, you can remove all the mechanical systems in the reactor. You reduce the size, you reduce the pumps, and then you have something that's very, very simple and size shrinks right down and you can get it in that ISO container system. That's very innovative, that's the Zeus reactor.The Odin team, their solution was, “Well if you could introduce some initial heat into the system for a salt-based system and the uranium is providing that natural heat, and you create a natural ci

The US Space Force, the newest branch of the American military, takes national defense to a new frontier. Here on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I sit down with AEI senior fellow Todd Harrison to discuss the state of the Space Force and its evolving mission.Harrison has served as senior vice president and head of research at Metrea, a defense consulting firm, been a senior fellow for defense budget strategies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, directed the Defense Budget Analysis and Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and served as a captain in the US Air Force Reserve.In This Episode* Creating the Space Force (0:53)* A New Kind of Warfare (9:15)* Defining the Mission (11:40)* Conflict and Competition in Space (15:34)* The Danger of Space Debris (20:11)Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversationCreating the Space Force (0:53)Pethokoukis: I was recently looking at an image that showed the increase in the number of satellites around the earth, and it's been a massive increase; I imagine a lot of it has to do with SpaceX putting up satellites, and it's really almost like—I think to an extent that most people don't understand; between  government, military, and a lot of commercial satellites—it's really like the earth is surrounded by this information shell. And when looking at that, I couldn't help but think, “Yeah, it kind of seems like we would need a Space Force or something to keep an eye on that and protect that.” And I know there was a lot of controversy, if I'm not mistaken, like, “Why do we need this extra branch of government?” Is that controversy about why we need a Space Force, is that still an active issue and what are your thoughts?Harrison: To start with where you started, yes. The number of satellites in space has been growing literally exponentially in the past few years. I'll just throw a few numbers out there:  In 2023 alone, about 2,800 new satellites were launched, and in that one year it increased the total number of satellites on the orbit by 22 percent, just in one year. And all the projections are that the number of satellites, number of launches, are going to keep growing at a pace like that for the foreseeable future, for the next several years. A lot is going into space, and we know from all other domains that where commerce goes conflict will follow. And we are seeing that in space as well.Like the Navy protecting the shipping lanes. Yeah, exactly. So we know that to a certain extent that's inevitable. There will be points of contention, points of conflict, but we've already seen that in space just with the military dimension of our space. Back in 2007, I think a lot of the world woke up to the fact that space is a contested environment when the Chinese tested an anti-satellite weapon, which, by the way, produced thousands of pieces of space debris that are still in orbit today. More than 2,600 pieces of debris are still in orbit from that one Chinese ASAT test. And, of course, that was just one demonstration of counter-space capabilities. Space has been a contested war fighting domain, really, since the beginning of the Space Age. The first anti-satellite test was in 1959, and so it has become increasingly important for economic reasons, but also for military reasons. Now, when the Space Force debate kicked into high gear, I think it took a lot of people who weren't involved in military space, I think it took a lot of people by surprise that we were having this debate.Yeah, it really seemed like it came out of nowhere, I think probably for 99 percent of people who aren't professionals tracking the issue.In reality, that debate, it started in the 1990s, and there was a senator from up in New Hampshire who had written a journal article basically talking about, “Hey, we need to separate space into its own military service.” You had the Air Force chief of staff at the time in the mid-1990s, General Ron Fogleman. He said that the Air Force should eventually become an Air and Space Force, and then one day a Space and Air Force. So you had the seeds of it happening in the ’90s. Then you had Congress wanting to look at, “Okay, how do we do this? How do we reorganize military space?” They created a commission that was led by Donald Rumsfeld before he became Secretary of Defense for the second time. That commission issued its report in 2001, and it recommended a bunch of reforms, but it said in the midterm, in five to 10 years we should create a separate military service for space, something like a Space Corps.Nothing happened, even though Rumsfeld then became Secretary of Defense. We kind of took our focus off of it for a while, there were a few other studies that went on, and then in 2016, two members of Congress, a Republican and a Democrat, Mike Rogers and Jim Cooper, who were on the House Armed Services Committee, they took this issue up. They got so fed up with the oversight of looking at how the Air Force was shortchanging space in many ways in terms of personnel and training and funding and modernization, that they then put a provision into the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act that would've created a Space Corps, they called it: a separate military service for space. And that bill actually passed the full House of Representatives.The Senate did not have a similar provision in their bill, so it died. It didn't make it into law—but then, all of a sudden, a couple of years later, President Trump, pretty much out of the blue floats this idea of creating a Space Force, and he did it at a rally that was at a Marine Corps base out in California, and, for some reason, it caught on with Trump. And then you already had the votes, a bipartisan group in the House of Representatives who had already pushed this, and so it started to gain momentum.It was very controversial at the time. The secretary of the Air Force at that time was adamantly opposed to it. Eventually, Trump forced it on the civilian establishment at DoD, and Congress ultimately enacted it, and the Space Force became a military service in December… I think December 20th, 2019. Now, there was some question, will the Biden administration keep it?Is this here to stay?It is written into law, so a president cannot unilaterally take it away, and, at this point, it's got its own roots in the ground and the Space Force is not going anywhere.A little bit off topic, but was there a similar debate when they separated the Air Force out of the Army?There was, yeah, and it lasted for a long time. So you had folks like Billy Mitchell who were in the Army Air Corps way back before World War II—I think in the late ’20s, early ’30s—they were advocating for a separate military service for Air. And I believe Billy Mitchell actually got court marshaled because he disobeyed orders from a superior about advocating for this with Congress.And so the idea of a separate service for Air pretty much died out until World War II hit. And, of course, that was a war that we were brought into it by an attack that came from the air, and that really brought air power into full effect in terms of a major component of military power. So then, at the end of World War II, the Air Power advocates got together, they created the Air Force Association to advocate for a separate military service and they got it in the National Security Reform Act in 1947, I think the Air Force actually stood up in 1948.It took longer, I would argue, a lot more advocacy and it took a World War, a crisis, to show us how important Air was to the military in order for us to actually create an Air Force. Now, I think, thankfully, we did that in advance of a crisis in terms of creating the Space Force.Right now, what the Space Force does, is it tracking satellites, tracking and space debris, is it a monitoring and tracking service? It's not a fighting service yet?Well, yes and no. A lot of what the Space Force does on a day-to-day basis is they provide space-enabling capabilities to the other military services. So if you want to get intelligence, reconnaissance, surveillance from space, you can go to the Space Force. Separately, we have intel space that's run through the National Reconnaissance Office—that has not changed its organization. If you want to get GPS, the Space Force runs our GPS constellation of satellites, and they're responsible for defending it against all forms of attack, which it is attacked daily. If you want satellite communications, the Space Force delivers that. If you want missile warning… So the Space Force delivers lots of enabling capabilities for other parts of the military. At the same time, it is tasked with defending those capabilities, and it's not just against kinetic forms of attack where an adversary is literally trying to shoot a satellite out of the sky.A New Kind of Warfare (9:15)I guess that's the first thing that popped in my mind. Too much science fiction maybe, but…Well, that is real, that's a real threat. The truth is there's not a lot you can do to actively protect against that—at least, we don't have a lot of capabilities right now—but the forms of attack we see on a daily basis are cyber, electromagnetic, and other forms of non-kinetic attack like lazing the sensors on a satellite. You could temporarily, or even permanently, blind the sensors on a satellite with a laser from an aircraft or from a ground station.I'll give you an example: When Russia invaded Ukraine, at the very beginning of the invasion, one of the first attacks they launched was a space attack. It was cyber, and it was against a commercial space capability. What they did is they exploited a vulnerability, previously unknown, in ViaSat modems. ViaSat's, a commercial satellite communications company, they had some sort of a vulnerability in their modems. The Russians, through a cyber attack, basically bricked all those modems. They locked them out. The Ukrainian military relied on ViaSat for satellite comm

What if there were a way to generate massive amounts of affordable, carbon-free energy with minimal environmental or safety risk? Sounds too good to be true, but nuclear fusion just might be the kind of energy source that America—and the world—has been waiting for.Michl Binderbauer is the CEO of California-based TAE Technologies, a company trying to develop an aneutronic commercial fusion reactor. Michl joins us on this episode of Faster Please! — The Podcast to explain how his team is trying to make fusion power a real thing.In This Episode* Fusion’s Moment (1:11)* The Technical Challenge (12:11)* The Economic Challenge (15:33)* The Role of Government (22:20)Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.Pethokoukis: What is sort of the current state of your company's technology, and in describing that, could you tell me how it sort of differs from other approaches in the field, keeping in mind I am not a nuclear physicist?Binderbauer: Understood. Alright, well it's a great introductory question. So TAE has been around, as you probably have read, for a good two decades plus, but the 25 year anniversary was just this past April, actually. We're at the stage now, it’s really exciting, where the machine we're under construction on now, which we call Copernicus, which is our generation six, is actually intended to get us to a point to demonstrate that we can harvest more energy than we have to feed it. And this is on a really engineering comparison, how much energy comes into the site and deploys on the machine versus how much can you harvest. To be fair, this is not a full power plant, so we're going to measure the heat output, the collective heat output on it. Now that's where we're going, and that's really enabled by 20 plus years of a journey of, interestingly enough, a lot of scientific nuance discoveries, but mostly technology development.What you learn is that the journey that we were on was mostly one of underestimating the complexity of power supplies, vacuum systems, heating systems in the form of us, this means energetic particle beams, and the technological tool chest around those things and making that work as a symphony, as a nice orchestra to do what we need it to do, and that's really where we spend most of the time, and now we're at the point where there's a confluence in understanding the science, understanding or having full practice capability, mastery of the tools, bringing these two things together in the sixth generation machine to drive net energy output. That's the goal. The other thing you asked me was how do we differ and to kind of contrast that a little bit?Because this is a very interesting moment for fusion, broadly, which are a number of startups, of course some of my listeners might be familiar with the breakthrough from the National Ignition Facility, which isn't really meant to create a nuclear power plant, but it was a great proof of concept that we can do some sort of fusion here. So I guess in a somewhat understandable way, given my own personal limitations, what are you doing that's sort of different than maybe some of the other companies such as, I mean I've written about Commonwealth Fusion and a few others, as well.Of course. Let me start by saying that, for most of that I should give credit to my brilliant PhD mentor who was a technical co-founder and co-founder in general of TAE. Norman Rostoker was his name, and Norman had an illustrious career in the field of fusion science and, in fact, accelerators and a few other areas of physics. He was a sort of polymath and really broad guy, which probably was a critical ingredient to get to where we are today. And so while he was very instrumental in the early days of the field in putting together a lot of the fundamental theory and things that I always joke and say, “You can't get a PhD in this field without suffering through a lot of the stuff he discovered.” But he also was very critical at the later stage in his career and he looked at this and said, “If we want to build something that caters to power production in a civilian way with good economics and the right kind of maintainability and practicality, then maybe what we're doing as a field today on the large sort of federal or national program-funded research was sort of missing the mark a little bit because it was building towards the Tokamaks, which some of your readers may know, those  donut-shaped machines, the biggest of which is under construction in the south of France right now, it’s a big international project. And Norman looked at that and said, “That can get us to maybe net energy but not necessarily practical net energy or economic net energy.”In the end it's about an applied end product that we're going after, not textbook knowledge, in a sense, or a proof point for a laboratory experiment. With that in mind, when the company, before it even started—this is in the early ’90s when I became a student—he had a very delineated philosophy of end in mind: Let's look what this needs to look like. And that's pretty trivial to define, right? If I ask you, what do you think a good power plant should look like, you could probably tell me. If we can make it non-polluting, great, we want to make sure that it doesn't have maintenance every day. It's up most of the time and it can compete with what the grid needs today in terms of economics, who else makes power with from coal, the gas to whatever else. And that's kind of how we started, we said that would be the ideal reactor, and now how can we cater to that. And what is the gap if you reverse engineer from there to today that you have to fill? And that's really where we started and that led to a remarkably different trajectory.One of those, the first one, frankly, was fuel, right? When you think about tritium, which is the conventional goal set, and that's a fuel that's heavy hydrogen, when you “burn” that, quote-unquote, you get neutrons, which we know from fission, those are what propagates the fission process, and if you have a lot of neutrons, you get radioactivity. And tritium by itself is also used in our warheads. It's not the ideal material you loose in a civilian setting, it's typically classified, et cetera, so there's all these headaches and there's very little tritium, by the way, to go around. There's like 50 kilograms of free tritium in the world, and that's super expensive, something like $30,000 a gram or so is what's usually quoted. So there's a lot of handicap there if you want to turn that into an economic prosperous thing. And so we said, “Alright, well, what else is terrestrially possible?”And so not to be philosophical and say God gave us a very narrow bookshelf, but it kind of is. On one end you've got the neutronic fuel cycle with tritium, and then on the other end of this small bookshelf you have hydrogen and boron which are copiously available, both. There's no radioactivity to go in, and by the way, when they burn you get three helium particles, which is where our initial name came from, Tri Alpha Energy, we call helium particles in nuclear physics alpha particles. And so you look at it and you say, “Oh, that's pretty good!” I don't have radioactivity as a byproduct, I don't have to worry about shielding, I don't have high costs associated with those things. And by the way, if you look where boron is used today, it's dirt-cheap commodity products, it’s detergents and soaps and cleaning products and things like that. So, in a way, it fits the bill.Now its big handicap is it needs a higher burn temperature to cook.Very hot.Yeah. You look at tritium on one end, that's about a hundred million degrees, which already sounds insane, but keep in mind, as a physicist, we sort of define that as just the energy state in that material beyond the gas. We call these plasmas. This plasma is at a hundred million degrees for tritium. If you want to burn boron, you need about a billion degrees. Now that sounds absolutely crazy, but it's not the stove plate hot of a solid. It's a very few particles that get to zip around in the container at very high energy, and that gets you to that definition of eventually a billion degrees.By the way, for reference, the big Hadron Collider at CERN, the LHC, that actually makes charged particle clouds with temperatures up to five trillion degrees. So we can actually do this. Amazingly, humans have a technology base to actually do that. So we started with the idea of if we wanted that fuel cycle, we've got to find the container and the process that can hold that together and create those energetic states we need. And that led us ultimately to what is referred to as a “field reversed configuration,” and I won't bore everybody with the detail of that, it's a mouthful to begin with, but it's a very interesting magnetic container.I will say that much, that instead of, in the case of most other confinement systems where you have a lot of magnets on the outset—and by the way the magnets are a big cost component in a reactor, they're superconducting, they're large in scale, complex to manufacture—and in this case, in the FRC, most of the field is actually created by the plasma itself.So plasma is discharge particles, if they flow, they create a current and the current can make a magnetic field, and so the plasma can self-envelope with a magnetic field that it generates from its currents and that can help, believe it or not, hold it in place. It sounds kind of perverse, but it works. And the idea behind that was derived about 50 years ago—almost everything infusion had some origins back many, many decades ago—but it was always considered too finicky to make work because one thing you can appreciate, if there's anything wrong in the flow in the plasma, well then the fields start to deteriorate so it can very quickly get into negative feedback cycle unless you can keep it stable and well controlled.And that's what we developed now. So now we have this perfect incarnation of it

Science. Ownership. Speed. Openness.These are the four pillars of Andrew McAfee’s observed structure for successful companies. It is the “geeks,” the leaders at the forefront of cross-industry innovation, who embrace these norms and have the potential to redefine business as we know it. In order to break ground and create the kind of future we dream of, organizational leaders need to banish the fear of failure, embrace mistakes, and accept hard feedback with open arms.Andrew is a best-selling author, Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and co-founder of MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy. His books include More from Less and The Second Machine Age, co-authored with Erik Brynjolfsson. Today on the podcast, we discuss the ideas captured in his most recent book, The Geek Way: The Radical Mindset that Drives Extraordinary Results. In This Episode* The universal geek (1:35)* The four geek norms (8:29)* Tales of geeks and non-geeks (15:19)* Can big companies go geek? (18:33)* The geek way beyond tech (26:32)Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.The universal geek (1:35)Pethokoukis: Is The Geek Way really the Silicon Valley Way? Is this book saying, “Here's how to turn your company into a tech startup”?McAfee: You mentioned both Silicon Valley and tech, and this book is not about either of those—it's not about a region and it's not about an industry, it's about a set of practices. And I think a lot of the confusion comes because those practices were incubated and largely formulated in this region called “Silicon Valley” in this industry that we call “tech”. So I understand the confusion, but I'm not writing about the Valley. Plenty of people do that. I'm not writing about the tech industry. Plenty of people do that. The phenomenon that I don't think we are paying enough attention to is this set of practices and philosophies that, I believe, when bundled correctly, amounts to a flat old upgrade to the company, just a better way to do the thing a company is supposed to do. That needed a label, because it's new. “Geek” is the label that I latched onto.But there's a universal aspect to this, then.Yeah, I believe there is. I understand this sounds arrogant—I believe it's a flat better way to run a company. I don't care where in the world you are, I don't care what industry you are in, if you're making decisions based on evidence, if you're iterating more and planning less, if you're building a modular organization that really does give people authority and responsibility, and if you build an organization where people are actually comfortable speaking truth to power, I think you're going to do better.One reason I'm excited about this book is because, you as well, we think about technological progress, we think about economic growth and productivity and part of that is science and coming up with new ideas and a new technology, but all that stuff has to actually be turned into a commercial enterprise and there has to be well-run companies that take that idea and sell it. Maybe the economist’s word might be “diffusion” or something like that, but that's a pretty big part of the story, which I think maybe economists tend not to focus as much on, or policy people, but it's pretty darn important and that's what I think is so exciting about your book is that it addresses that: How to create companies that can do that process—invention-to-product—better. So how can they do it better?Let me quibble with you just a little bit. There are alternatives to this method of getting goods and services to people, called “the company.” That's what we do in capitalist societies. Jim, like you know all too well, over the course of the 20th century, we ran a couple of experiments trying it a different way: These collectivist, command-and-control, centrally planned economies, those were horrible failures! Let's just establish that right off the bat.So in most of the parts of the world—I think in all the parts of the world where you and I would actually want to live—I agree with you, we've settled on this method of getting most goods and services to people, most of what they consume, via these entities called companies, and I don't care if you're in a Nordic social democracy, or in the US of A, or in Southeast Asia, companies are the things getting you most of what you consume. I think in the United States, about 85 percent of what you and I consume, by some estimates, comes from companies. So, like them or hate them, they're incredibly important, and if a doohickey comes along that lets them their work X percent better, we should applaud that like crazy because that's an X percent increase in our affluence, our standard of living, the things that we care about, and the reason I got excited and decided to write this book is I think there's an upgrade to the company going on that's at the same level as the stuff that [Alfred] Chandler wrote about a century ago when we invented the large, professionally managed, pretty big company. Those dominated the corporate landscape throughout the 20th century. I think that model is being upgraded by the geeks.It's funny because, I suppose maybe the geeks 50 years ago, maybe a lot of them worked at IBM. And your sort-of geek norms are not what I think of the old Big Blue from IBM in the 1960s. That has changed. Before we get into the norms, how did they develop? Why do we even have examples of this working in the real corporate world?The short answer is, I don't know exactly. That's a pretty detailed piece of corporate history and economic history to work on. The longer answer is, what I think happened is, a lot of computer nerds, who had spent a lot of time at universities and were pretty steeped in that style of learning things and building things, went off and started companies and, in lots of cases, they ran into the classic difficulties that occur to companies and the dysfunctions that creep in as companies grow and age and scale. And instead of accepting them, my definition of a geek is somebody who's tenacious about a problem and is willing to embrace unconventional solutions. I think a lot of these geeks—and I'm talking about people like Reed Hastings, who's really articulate about what he did at Netflix and at his previous company, which he says he ran into mediocrity—a lot of these geeks like Hastings sat around and said, “Wait a minute, if I wanted to not repeat these mistakes, what would I do differently?” They noodled that hard problem for a long time, and I think via some conversation among the geeks, but via these fairly independent vectors in a lot of cases, they have settled on these practices, these norms that they believe—and I believe—help them get past the classic dysfunctions of the Industrial Era that you and I know all too well: their bureaucratization, their sclerosis, their cultures of silence. They are just endless stifling meetings and turf wars and factions and things like that. We know those things exist. What I think is interesting is that the geeks are aware of them and I think they've come up with ways to do better.The four geek norms (8:29)It's funny that once you've looked at your book, it is impossible to read any other sort of business biography of a company or a CEO and not keep these ideas in your head because I just finished up the Elon Musk biography by Walter Isaacson, and boy, I just kept on thinking of speed and science and the questioning of everything: Why are we doing this? Why are we building this rocket engine like this? Who told us to do that? Somebody in legal told us to do that?Exactly.So certainly those two pop to mind: the speed and the constant iteration. But rather than have me describe them, why don't you describe those norms in probably a much better way than I can.There's a deep part of the Isaacson Musk biography that made my geek eyes light up, and it's when Isaacson describes Musk's Algorithm—I think it's capitalized, too, it's capital “The,” capital “Algorithm,”—which is all about taking stuff out. I think that is profound because we humans have a very strong status quo bias. We're reluctant to take things out. It's one of the best-documented human biases. So we just add stuff, we just layer stuff on, and before you know it, for a couple different flavors of reason, you wind up with this kind of overbuilt, encrusted, process-heavy, bureaucracy-heavy, can't get anything done [corporation]. You feel like you're pushing on a giant piece of Jell-O or something to try to get any work done. And I think part of Musk's brilliance as a builder and an organization designer is to come up with The Algorithm that says, “No, no, a big part of your job is to figure out what doesn't need to be there and make it go away.” I adore that. It's closest to my great geek norm of ownership, which is really the opposite of this processification of the enterprise of the company that we were super fond of starting in the ’90s and going forward.So now to answer your question, my four great geek norms, which are epitomized by Musk in a lot of ways, but not always, are:Science. Just make decisions based on evidence and argue a lot about that evidence. Science is an argument with a ground rule. Evidence rules.Ownership. We were just talking about this. Devolve authority downward, stop all the cross-communication, coordination, collaboration, process, all that. Build a modular organization.Speed. Do the minimum amount of planning and then start iterating. You learn, you get feedback, you see where you're keeping up to schedule and where you're not by doing stuff and getting feedback, not by sitting around asking everybody if they're on schedule and doing a lot of upfront planning.Finally, openness, this willingness to speak truth to power. In some ways, a good synonym for it is “psychological safety” and a good antonym for it is “defensiveness.”If anything, from what I understand about Musk, the last one is where he might ru