technology-policy
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Tom Freedman and the Politics of Getting Something Done
A Clinton campaign strategist built a second career helping institutions work together. The revealing part is how often Tom Freedman has gone looking for a useful partner on the other side of the room.
Bosun Tijani and the problem of the missing connections
He helped give Lagos’s startup community a place to gather. Now Nigeria’s digital minister is working on the cables, skills and public systems that let more people join in.
Clarissa Cerda Learned to Navigate the Gray. Now the Gray Can Talk Back.
The former White House lawyer has spent three decades where technology outruns the rulebook. At Pindrop, she is helping decide what trust should mean when a familiar voice may be synthetic.
George Parks Found a Million-Dollar Tollbooth in Government Software. So He Started Taking It Apart.
A Georgia Tech coder went to the State Department, met the bureaucracy from the inside, and came back with Archon - a bet that the dullest obstacle in software may be one of the most valuable to remove.
Aaron Ginn Is Building the Refinery for AI’s Token Economy
Before AI became a race for models, Aaron Ginn went looking beneath the interface. His answer is Hydra Host: software, markets and a global data-center network designed to turn stranded megawatts into useful compute.
Alec Stapp
Alec Stapp is the co-founder and co-CEO of the Institute for Progress (IFP), a nonpartisan Washington, D.C. think tank he launched in 2022 with Caleb Watney to turn progress studies into concrete policy. He works at the intersection of metascience, high-skilled immigration, biosecurity, and infrastructure permitting, arguing that America's biggest obstacle to progress is not a shortage of ideas but a surplus of veto points. A George Mason economist by training, he became one of the most-followed voices of the abundance movement, translating dense regulatory questions into widely shared arguments for building more.
Eli Dourado
Eli Dourado is an economist and head of strategic investments at the Astera Institute, where he deploys capital to push frontier technologies in energy, aerospace, and other capital-intensive, heavily regulated sectors. He describes his work as a 'sacred quest to increase the pace of American economic growth,' which he argues has stagnated since around 1973. A former regulatory hacker at Boom Supersonic and director of the technology policy program at the Mercatus Center, he is known for influential essays on geothermal energy, supersonic flight, cargo airships, and ending the Great Stagnation.
James Pethokoukis
James Pethokoukis is a Washington D.C.-based economist, journalist, and author who holds the DeWitt Wallace Chair at the American Enterprise Institute. He writes the 'Faster, Please!' Substack newsletter - one of the leading voices in techno-optimism and pro-progress policy - hosts the 'Political Economy with Jim Pethokoukis' podcast, and authored 'The Conservative Futurist: How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised' (2023). A longtime CNBC contributor, he argues that culture - not capital - is the real barrier to the abundant, innovative future humanity could build.