Two Think Minimum

Jamie Susskind is the Vice President of Policy and Regulatory Affairs for the Consumer Technology Association. In that role, she coordinates CTA’s advocacy strategy and represents the association before Federal agencies and the Administration for policies to encourage the growth of innovative consumer technologies. Susskind oversees a portfolio of regulatory issues, including cybersecurity, the Internet of Things, content moderation, equipment authorizations and standard setting, consumer protection, spectrum, and broadband and infrastructure deployment.

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 tech development, and policy and regulatory engagements. He is also a board member of the Libra Association.

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 developments in cloud tools. Phillipe is a leading voice on Google's cloud computing products.

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 and Commerce, which oversees America's internet policies. Michael is also active in the DC angel investing community where he's invested in several startups. This interview with Michael Beckerman was recorded on Monday, July 27th. A lot has changed for TikTok since, with the President’s threat to ban the app if TikTok doesn’t divest it’s US opererations from it’s parent company before September 15th. The contents of the interview are still release and so we’re bringing it to you now on August 5th.

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 world with a particular emphasis on the health and wellbeing of vulnerable populations. His peer reviewed research has been published in economic, statistics, legal, medical, public health, and health policy journals. He holds an MD and PhD in economics from Stanford University.

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 developed legislative and oversight strategy on matters, including patent reform, federal trade secrets legislation, net neutrality, First Amendment issues surrounding online speech, access to medicines, and oversight of mergers and antitrust policy. She began her career as a litigator at Cravath, Swaine, and Moore in New York City and taught for five years as an adjunct professor at Columbia University School of Law. She holds a B.A. from Yale and a J.D. from Columbia. She serves on the board of the Christopher and Dana Reeve foundation and is a mayoral appointee on DC's Innovation and Technology Inclusion Council.

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 raised by online content, Section 230, and content moderation. Professor Goldman is a leading thinker on the ways in which technology transforms our democracy.

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.