Episodes

Michael Shellenberger is a Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment” and the Founder and President of Environmental Progress. He's been a climate and environmental activist for over 30 years. He's helped save nuclear reactors around the world, and I'll leave it for him to explain why when we talk. And he's a leading environmental journalist and has written many books on the environment and given several Ted talks.

Dr. Nancy Potok served as the Chief Statistician of the United States until January of this year, 2020. She has over 30 years of leadership experience in the public, nonprofit, and private sectors. Nancy also served as a commissioner on the US Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking, where I had the privilege of making her acquaintance. She's also a contributing editor to the Harvard Data Science Review, and you can see her bio online.

Christian Catalini is Chief Economist of the Libra Association, on leave from MIT, and a Faculty Research Fellow at NBER. Dante Disparte is vice chairman and Head of Policy and Communications at the Libra Association, and currently serves as an appointee on the FEMA National Advisory Counsel. Matthew Davie is the Chief Strategy Officer at Kiva, a non-profit organization dedicated to financial inclusion for the world's most vulnerable populations, where he oversees corporate strategy, emerging te...

Felipe Hoffa, developer advocate, and software engineer at Google. Felipe is originally from Chile and is now based in San Francisco and around the world. If you're involved in big data and data science, you may recognize him as a familiar name and face answering thousands of developer questions on stack overflow and Reddit, which are read by millions of programmers. For Google, he also records tutorial videos on YouTube, gives conference talks on big data, and writes blog posts on the latest de...

Michael Beckerman currently serves as Vice President and head of US public policy at TikTok, a position he has held since March. He previously was the founding President and CEO of the Internet Association, a Washington, DC based trade association, representing global internet companies. Prior to that, he served for 12 years in increasingly responsible staff positions on Capitol Hill, ending as the Deputy Staff Director and Chief Policy Advisor to the Chairman of the US House Committee on Energy...

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...

Alexandra Givens is President and CEO of the Center for Democracy and Technology. Prior to CDT, Alexandra taught at Georgetown Law School where she founded the Institute for Technology Law and Policy and led Georgetown's Tech Scholars Program. She was also a founding leader of Georgetown's Initiative on Tech and Society. She previously served as Chief Counsel for IP and Antitrust on the Senate Judiciary Committee working for its then Chairman and Ranking Member, Senator Patrick Leahy. She develo...

Eric Goldman is a professor of law at Santa Clara University School of Law. He co-directs the High Tech Law Institute. He's on a short list of North American IP thought leaders and has been named an IP Vanguard by the California State Bar's IP section. His research and teaching focuses on internet, IP and advertising law topics. And he has been blogging on these topics for many years. This past fall, the Knight Foundation granted his research center funds to continue his work on legal issues rai...

Robert Shea served as a commissioner on the Evidence Based Policy Commission. Prior to that, he chaired the National Academy of Public Administration, which puts out a lot of great publications on public administration, of all things. He did some distinguished service at OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, and he worked for several years, probably more than he cares to admit, on the Hill. He's currently a principal at Grant Thornton.

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...

Carl Shapiro is Professor of the Graduate School at the Haas School of Business and the Department of Economics at UC Berkeley. He's also the Transamerica Professor of Business Strategy Emeritus at the Haas School of Business. Carl was a member of the President's Council of Economic Advisors during 2011-12. And prior to that, he was Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Economics at the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice, a position he also held during 1995-96. Josh Wright is a univ...

Amy Davine Kim is the chief policy officer for the Chamber of Digital Commerce. Prior to joining the chamber, she advised financial institutions, blockchain based companies, marketplace lenders, investors and innovators regarding compliance obligations under financial services laws. In particular, she has advised on the Bank Secrecy Act and anti-money laundering requirements and the regulations and sanctions programs administered by the Office of Foreign Assets control. During her career, Amy ha...

Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser was sworn in as the state's 39th Attorney General on January 8th, 2019. Before running for office, he served as the Hatfield Professor of Law and Dean of the University of Colorado Law School where he founded the Silicon Flatiron Center for Law, Technology and Entrepreneurship and co-chaired the Colorado Innovation Council. He's also served as a Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the US Department of Justice and Senior Advisor for Technology and Innovation...

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 ...

Cat Zakrzewski is a technology policy reporter for the Washington Post and authors the technology 202 newsletter. She previously reported for the Wall Street Journal, Pro Venture Capital. Her work has been published in Tech Crunch, the Boston Globe, USA Today and the Chicago Sun Times.

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

Blair Levin is currently a nonresident fellow with the Brookings Institution and a policy advisor at New Street. Blair’s worked for the past 25 years at a high level at the intersection of broadband policy and capital markets. And most importantly for the purpose of this conversation, he led the FCC’s national broadband plan back in 2009 to 2010.

Kelcee Griffis is a Washington, D.C.-based reporter covering the telecommunications industry for Law360, a legal trade wire read by some of the most powerful law firms and government agencies. Her reporting takes her to the Federal Communications Commission, K Street law firms, Capitol Hill, the Pentagon and even the White House as she writes about policy and legislation affecting the media industry. She’s worked on stories on the fight over net neutrality regulations, telecommunication lobbying...

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.

Ambassador Koh is U.S. Representative and Head of Delegation to the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) World Radio Communication (WRC) Conference 2019. She's also Special Advisor for International Communications and Information Policy in the Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs. If you think that's not enough, before joining the State Department in 2019, she was a partner in DLA Piper’s telecommunications groups, served as Special Assistant to the President for Technology, Telecom a...

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 ...