Miscellaneous Episodes

On our first completely internal podcast! Today, we're just going to take stock of the tech policy landscape. We'll talk mostly about the $1.9 trillion stimulus and a little bit of antitrust, and we'll figure out what we know and don't know. Hopefully, we'll have more of the know than don't know, but I don't know what the over-under is on those odds.

Joe Lonsdale is a graduate of Stanford, a co-founder of Palantir, and many other companies, and a founding partner at 8VC, a technology investment firm. He also plays leading roles in companies and nonprofits aimed at improving government efficiency, including OpenGov and Esper. He’s also a public intellectual and philanthropist.

Jay Bhattacharya is a professor of medicine at Stanford University. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research, a Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research and at the Stanford Freeman Spogli Institute. He holds courtesy appointments as professor in economics and in health research and policy. He directs the Stanford Center on the Demography of Health and Aging. Dr. Bhattacharya’s research focuses on the economics of healthcare around the wo...

Samm Sacks is the Cyber Policy Fellow at New America and a Senior Fellow at the Yale Law School Paul Tsai China Center. Her research focuses on emerging information and communication technology policies globally, particularly in China. Her work covers issues ranging from the US-China technology relationship, the Chinese government's tech ambitions, China's cybersecurity regulatory environment, and the global expansion of Chinese tech companies. In fact, she has worked on Chinese technology polic...

Yasheng Huang is the Epic Foundation professor of international management and faculty director of action learning at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His previous appointments include faculty positions at the University of Michigan and Harvard Business School. Yasheng is currently involved in a number of research projects which sound fascinating in four broad areas. A book project titled the Nature of the Chinese State. Second, creating a complete database on historical technological inventi...

Kip Viscusi is University distinguished professor at Vanderbilt with appointments in the economics department, the management school and the law school. He previously was Kogan professor of law and economics and director of the program on empirical studies at Harvard Law School and has held professorships at Northwestern and Duke. He is the author of more than 30 books and 370 articles and his most recent book is Pricing Lives: Guideposts for a Safer Society from Princeton University Press. Kip ...

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. Seth is an author, data scientist and speaker who studies what we can learn about people from new internet data sources. His 2017 book, Everybody Lies, was a New York Times best seller and an Economist book of the year. Seth is a contributing op-ed writer for the New York Times and has worked as a visiting lecturer at the Wharton school and a data scientist at Google. He received his BA in philosophy from Stanford where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa and his PhD in economi...

Ina Fried is the chief technology correspondent for Axios, and before that she was a senior editor or writer at some of the most important tech journalism sites there are: Recode, All Things Digital, CNET and others.

Rob Pegoraro on Tech and the Coronavirus by Technology Policy Institute

Bruce Mehlman is the founder of Mehlman, Castagnetti, Rosen and Thomas, a government relations firm here in DC. Prior to that he was assistant secretary of commerce for technology policy in the George W. Bush administration and he's kind of an all around smart guy. He has very smart things to say about technology, technology trends, technology policy, the interplay with politics and a lot of it in a global context.

Brent Skorup is a lawyer and Senior Research Fellow with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. His research areas include telecommunications, transportation, technology regulation, and wireless policy. He serves on the FCC’s Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee and is the Vice Chair of the Competitive Access subcommittee. He has authored pieces in a wide variety of outlets and has appeared on different news outlets as well. Eli Dourado is an economist and recently served as Head of ...

Today we have with us Rob Pegoraro, who is a tech journalist of long standing in the DC area and has been covering technology and the intersection of technology and politics, for close to about 20 years now, if not longer. We're happy to have him with us, given that he's one of Washingtonian’s Tech Titans from 2015 to 2017. He would be the perfect guest to have in to talk about the evolution of tech in DC over the past 10 years because TPI is also celebrating its 10th anniversary this year.