It’s time for American industry’s Lazarus moment. At least, that’s what a growing coalition of contrarian builders, investors, technologists, and policymakers have asserted over the past several years. American might was built on our industrial base. As scholars like Arthur Herman detail in Freedom’s Forge , the United States won World War 2 with industrial acumen and might. We built the broadest middle class in the history of the world, put men on the moon, and midwifed the jet age, the Interne...
Jul 09, 2024•1 hr 10 min•Ep 71•Transcript available on Metacast For this special edition episode, FAI Senior Fellow Jon Askonas flew down to Palm Bay, FL to mix and mingle with the brightest minds in aerospace, manufacturing, and defense at the Space Coast Hard Tech Hackathon , organized by stealth founder Spencer Macdonald (also an FAI advisor). Jon sits down with a friend of the show and Hyperstition founder Andrew Côté for a wide-ranging conversation on the space tech revolution, the “vibe shift” towards open dialogue, AI’s role in shaping reality, and th...
Jul 02, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Ep 70•Transcript available on Metacast Silicon Valley was once idolized for creating innovations that seemed like modern miracles. But the reputations of tech entrepreneurs have been trending downward of late, as Big Tech companies are blamed for any number of societal ills, from violating users’ privacy and eroding teenagers’ mental health, to spreading misinformation and undermining democracy. As the media and lawmakers focus on modern gripes with Big Tech, the origin stories of companies like Meta and Google feel like ancient hist...
Jun 25, 2024•55 min•Ep 69•Transcript available on Metacast This is how many assume the tech economy is supposed to work. Big, established companies are at risk of getting disrupted as they get set in their ways; the internal bureaucracies grow too large and they lose their nimbleness and take fewer risks. The pressure from upstarts forces larger firms to innovate – otherwise, they lose market share and may even fold. But is that how it works in practice? An increasing share of policymakers believe Big Tech giants don’t face meaningful competition becaus...
Jun 18, 2024•53 min•Ep 68•Transcript available on Metacast Tornado Cash is a decentralized cryptocurrency mixing service built on Ethereum. Its open-source protocol allows users to obscure the trail of their cryptocurrency transactions by pooling funds together, making it difficult to trace the origin and destination of any given transfer. In August 2022, the U.S. Treasury Department took the unprecedented step of sanctioning Tornado Cash, effectively criminalizing its use by American citizens and businesses. Authorities accused the service of facilitat...
Jun 11, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Ep 67•Transcript available on Metacast Social media undermines democracy. Small businesses are more innovative than big ones. Corporate profits are at all-time highs. America’s secret weapon is laissez-faire capitalism. These are widely held beliefs, but are they true? Our guest today argues that these statements aren’t just wrong, but that they’re holding America back—discouraging talented people from entering the technology field and making companies too cautious and wary of regulators. Is America losing its faith in innovation? If...
Jun 04, 2024•54 min•Ep 66•Transcript available on Metacast Is American ready for the next pandemic? The answer is a resounding “no,” according to a recent Washington Post editorial . When the U.S. was caught flat-footed and unprepared to deal with COVID-19, many lawmakers vowed to address pandemic preparedness. Yet, according to many experts, these efforts are inadequate and interest among lawmakers in preparedness has waned as focus has shifted to wars around the world and other geopolitical conflicts. With bio threats emerging at an accelerating pace,...
May 29, 2024•43 min•Ep 65•Transcript available on Metacast When it comes to AI regulation, states are moving faster than the federal government. While California is the hub of American AI innovation (Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta are all headquartered in the Valley), the state is also poised to enact some of the strictest state regulations on frontier AI development. Introduced on February 8, the Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Systems Act (SB 1047) is a sweeping bill that would include a new regulatory division and...
May 21, 2024•1 hr•Ep 64•Transcript available on Metacast Is America in a new Cold War with China? If so, who is winning? One of the defining features of the 21st century has been the intensifying competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party. As the two superpowers jockey for global influence, China threatens to dislodge America’s longstanding role atop the international order. At the heart of this struggle lies the Belt and Road Initiative, or BRI, a massive infrastructure and investment project that has become the centerpiece...
May 14, 2024•57 min•Ep 63•Transcript available on Metacast Should we accelerate into the AI future or proceed with caution? Do we even have a choice? From deep-tech disruptors to policymaking under time pressure, a battle over the fate of human civilization is now being waged on multiple fronts: Closed vs. Open, Hardware vs. Software, Safety vs. Ethics: in sum, Order vs. Chaos. Foundation for American Innovation and 8VC hosted a live recording of a conversation with Andrew Côté (Hyperstition founder, a16z scout) and Guillaume Verdon ( Extropic founder,...
May 10, 2024•59 min•Transcript available on Metacast The number of internet-connected devices in the world has skyrocketed. According to one estimate, there are currently 17 billion connected devices in the world. This doesn’t just include well known electronics like laptops and smartphones. These devices span every sector of the global economy—from agriculture and manufacturing to healthcare and science. The average American household now has 17 connected devices. While this growth has been a boon for jobs and the tech sector, it has also dramati...
May 07, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Ep 62•Transcript available on Metacast This week, President Biden signed into law a bill that would require TikTok to divest itself from Chinese parent company ByteDance or else face a ban in the United States. The legislation was part of a package of bills that included foreign aid to Israel, Taiwan, and Ukraine. Over the past few years, TikTok has exploded in popularity. Today over 170 million Americans are monthly users of the platform, and seven million businesses rely on it for either part or all their income. With that growth i...
Apr 26, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Ep 61•Transcript available on Metacast In the U.S., there is supposed to be some division between domestic and foreign police activities. The CIA handles overseas activities, while the FBI and local police agencies handle domestic law enforcement. Because as the Internet is inherently borderless, Americans’ emails, texts, and phone calls are inevitably captured in overseas intelligence activities, which is legal under Section 702 of the the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). With FISA set to expire on April 19 without Cong...
Apr 09, 2024•51 min•Ep 59•Transcript available on Metacast In the digital world, there is an enduring tension between privacy and security. What is our right to privacy from the government or the companies whose services we use? What rights does our government have to surveil us in the name of national security? Most of us have a general understanding of the basic tradeoff in the Internet era—you give up some data in exchange for free or freemium services like Gmail or social media apps like Instagram. But the data marketplace goes well beyond the Big T...
Apr 03, 2024•45 min•Ep 58•Transcript available on Metacast Is the Internet broken? The original promise of this great invention is that it would offer a platform for free information exchange, empowering individual users worldwide. It would spread democracy and knowledge. It would surface the best and brightest from around the world. It would empower individuals over elites. Many, including our guest, argue that is not the Internet we have today. It seems everyone has gripes about Big Tech—from concerns around misinformation and censorship to the impact...
Mar 26, 2024•52 min•Ep 57•Transcript available on Metacast On March 13, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 352 to 65 on the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act. This bill is aimed at forcing ByteDance, a Chinese tech company, to divest its subsidiary TikTok or face a ban of the popular social media app in the U.S. In practical terms, if a suitable divestiture doesn’t happen, the bill would require Apple and Google to remove it from their app stores—and web hosting companies, advertisers, and others wouldn’t be ab...
Mar 15, 2024•54 min•Ep 56•Transcript available on Metacast Are you an Android user? Have you been ridiculed for the dreaded green text bubble, or been accused of “messing up the group chat?” In December, the tech company Beeper tried to bridge the Android-iPhone divide. They launched Beeper Mini, an app that gave Android users access to iMessage functionality. The app immediately took off, gaining over a hundred thousand downloads in the first few days and reaching the top-20 app chart on the Google Play Store. But just a couple of days later, Apple shu...
Mar 12, 2024•54 min•Ep 55•Transcript available on Metacast Many conservatives lament a decades-long stagnation of innovation. As Peter Thiel once quipped, “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” The rise of AI and other transformative technologies may augur an end to this stagnation, according to thinkers like Marc Andreessen, who joined The Dynamist recently to discuss techno-optimism. Others, of course, are more pessimistic. Will we end the Great Stagnation? Will we build the sci-fi future of our dreams? And where does the hurly-burly ...
Feb 29, 2024•56 min•Ep 54•Transcript available on Metacast In our inaugural live recording of The Dynamist , FAI hosted a debate on two upcoming Supreme Court cases, Moody v. NetChoice and NetChoice v. Paxton . These cases could have major implications for online free speech and whether states can regulate the practices of Big Tech platforms. Over the past ten years, the debate over how companies and governments deal with online speech has only intensified. Whether you call it content moderation or censorship, people have very strong opinions about how ...
Feb 22, 2024•1 hr 8 min•Ep 60•Transcript available on Metacast One of the ways the Chinese government looks to exert influence is by changing the behavior of businesses and individuals who operate in China. Remember the firestorm that occurred when Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey sent a tweet in support of the Hong Kong protests? NBA games were taken off the air in China, and a series of profuse apologies on the part of the NBA and its partners followed. As tensions rise between the U.S. and China, so do the tensions for businesses trying to ope...
Feb 13, 2024•48 min•Ep 53•Transcript available on Metacast Last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee brought the CEOs of major tech companies like Meta and TikTok to answer questions about the impact of social media on children—from concerns about bullying and mental health to sexual exploitation. Lawmakers around the country and the world have been increasingly focused on this and other issues under the broader umbrella of digital privacy. Europe has led the Western world in enacting regulations that privacy advocates herald while critics warn they sti...
Feb 06, 2024•49 min•Ep 52•Transcript available on Metacast Our government agencies are hopelessly out of date. Public documents are stored in backroom file cabinets, instead of being digitized and posted online. As FAI Senior Economist Samuel Hammond has noted , “We validate people’s identity with a nine-digit numbering system created in 1936. The IRS Master File runs on assembly from the 1960s.” The deliberations of the government and its agencies are often inaccessible to the general public. And without this information, nearly everything becomes hard...
Jan 30, 2024•44 min•Ep 51•Transcript available on Metacast The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging the tech companies violated the newspaper’s copyrights by training ChatGPT on millions of Times articles. The decision in this case could have enormous implications for journalism and AI tools like large language models, and the lawsuit could go to the Supreme Court. While OpenAI says such training is “fair use,” the Times says the companies “seek to free-ride” on its journalism. How will the case be decided, and how will the outcome aff...
Jan 23, 2024•50 min•Ep 50•Transcript available on Metacast In examining international competition between the U.S. and rivals like China, we tend to think of two types of power—military and economic. How large and advanced is our military compared to others? Are we overly reliant on other countries for resources like oil and microchips? But there’s a third, less commonly thought of type of power that is crucial to America’s role in the world order. We might call it our reputation or our cultural dominance. The Chinese government calls it “discourse powe...
Jan 16, 2024•46 min•Ep 49•Transcript available on Metacast With the benefit of hindsight, there’s a lot that people wish they could have done differently after a pandemic, wildfire, or other disasters. That’s why governments, militaries, public health entities, and first responders spend significant time and resources “wargaming” potential scenarios and how best to respond. But while technologies like flight simulators have long played a role in disaster preparedness, AI could dramatically change how wargaming is done and help overcome human “failures o...
Dec 26, 2023•41 min•Ep 48•Transcript available on Metacast A San Francisco jury recently ruled that Google's Android app store is a monopoly, siding with Epic Games in a lawsuit initiated in 2020. The verdict focuses on Google's practices, such as mandating app customers and developers use its billing system and taking a 30% commission on app subscriptions. Google intends to appeal, citing cybersecurity and other concerns. This ruling raises questions about Apple's App Store, with Epic's similar case against Apple possibly going to the Supreme Court. Th...
Dec 19, 2023•48 min•Ep 47•Transcript available on Metacast The worlds of tech and policy are increasingly integrated, for good or ill. Tech professionals are recognizing government service as a vital way to contribute to the national interest, at the same time that politicos and policy experts have realized that they need the tech industry’s experience and insight. Ten years after the Foundation for American Innovation was formed to serve as a bridge between Silicon Valley and DC, the fusion of technology and public policy is greater than ever. But can ...
Dec 12, 2023•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast A recent New York Times editorial painted a damning portrait of learning loss from COVID-19 school closures, arguing it “may prove to be the most damaging disruption in the history of American education” setting “student progress in math and reading back by two decades.” The Institute for Education Sciences is a federal agency within the Department of Education with a modest budget and a daunting mandate—figure out what works and what doesn’t, including how to reverse and mitigate learning loss....
Dec 05, 2023•46 min•Ep 46•Transcript available on Metacast Over the last few years, a small but influential group of right-of-center Twitter/X users have begun outlining a vision for what they half-jokingly refer to as Bison Nationalism. In a lot of ways, it’s hard to fully understand all of the relevant context unless you spend too much time online. Is the idea of repopulating the American prairie with buffalo just a meme? A longing for tradition? Or is it a real policy goal? Why might certain communities find this issue compelling, and how does this f...
Nov 28, 2023•45 min•Ep 45•Transcript available on Metacast The human fascination with creating life dates back centuries. From the ancient myth of Pygmalion, who carved the statue that came to life, to the Jewish legend of the golem, and now to our modern-day marvels in AI, humans remain captivated by questions surrounding consciousness, creation, and the Divine. In a prior episode, we discussed AI’s practical impact on the day-to-day practice of religion. Today, we explore AI’s interaction with religion at a more fundamental level. What are the central...
Nov 21, 2023•42 min•Ep 44•Transcript available on Metacast 
