Policy Prompt

Policy Prompt

Policy Prompt is a podcast featuring long-form interviews — going in depth to find nuances in the conversation — with leading global scholars, writers, policy makers, business leaders and technologists working at the intersection of technology, society and public policy. The focus of the podcast will be to advance constructive policy remedies for urgent global problems.

Episodes

May 5, 2025 56 mins

In episode 16, hosts Vass and Paul talk to Marc Levinson — economist, historian and author of The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, published in 2016, and the follow-up, Outside the Box: How Globalization Changed from Moving Stuff to Spreading Ideas (both Princeton University Press)

Marc brings to life a topic freighted with importance but often out of mind: how an innovation invo...

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How do you discover music? College radio, word of mouth, serendipity — or your very own AI DJ? In 2006, Spotify’s founders discovered music as “a traffic source” for an advertising model, and have since transformed the music industry. But what are their goals or values when it comes to music and culture beyond the pursuit of profit, and what does it mean for musicians and music lovers? And why aren’t policy makers more concerned ab...

  • What does innovation actually mean, and how should we be thinking about it?

    In this episode, Vass and Paul welcome Joel Blit, an expert in innovation and innovation policy. Joel is a senior fellow at CIGI, and an associate professor of economics at the University of Waterloo, where he chairs the Council for Innovation Policy and Strategy. They discuss the mix of art and science that comprises innovation, the tensions surrounding it,...

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    AI is going to affect us all and everyone has opinions about it. But what does the data say?

    In this episode of Policy Prompt, Vass and Paul welcome Nestor Maslej from Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, where he is the research manager of the AI Index and the Global AI Vibrancy Tool. In developing tools that track the advancement of AI, Nestor hopes to make the AI space more accessible to pol...

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    In episode 12, artist and thinker Amanda Wasielewski joins hosts Vass and Paul to discuss the crossover and interplay between digital and capital-A art.

    Amanda, an associate senior lecturer of digital humanities and associate professor (docent) of art history in the Department of Archives, Libraries, and Museums at Uppsala University in Sweden, has exhibited her artwork internationally and recently published the monograph Computatio...

  • Warren Buffett once said he would rather trust his money to monkeys throwing darts than financial advisers. So how do the monkeys’ chances of hitting the target stack up against those of, say, pollsters, Magic 8 Balls or star charts? Maybe the monkeys have practised.

    Meet Robert de Neufville, who is super at forecasting: someone whose predictions have proved far more accurate than regular forecasting and regularly outperform intelli...

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    Join hosts Vass and Paul for their fascinating conversation with Michael Richardson, associate professor of media and culture at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, about the ideas in his book Nonhuman Witnessing: War, Data, and Ecology after the End of the World (Duke University Press, 2024). Michael explores the ethical and political implications of witnessing in an age of profound instability, and how our way...

  • Copyright has become a tool for privatizing everything — the opposite of what it was designed to do when it was invented in the eighteenth century to protect published works. In their book Who Owns This Sentence? A History of Copyrights and Wrongs (Penguin Random House, 2024), Princeton professors David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu provide a lively account of that turnaround, to the point where “the bulk of American culture is in c...

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    Join the Policy Prompt crew for a different kind of episode: recorded with a live audience at Perfect Books in Ottawa, host Paul Samson interviews Denise Hearn (resident senior fellow at the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment, author, applied researcher and adviser) and Vass Bednar (CIGI senior fellow, Public Policy Forum fellow and executive director of the Master of Public Policy in Digital Society program at McMaster Univ...

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    Is refrigeration really that revolutionary? In this episode of Policy Prompt, the hosts are joined by Nicola Twilley, author of Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves (Penguin Press, 2024) and co-host of the award-winning Gastropod podcast. They explore the “modern marvel” of enjoying fresh foods from around the globe year-round, and the science that makes it all possible.

    Mentioned:

    • Nicola Twill...
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    Before Google and Meta dominated the digital landscape, the news agencies and technologies of the early twentieth century captured unprecedented influence. Join hosts Vass Bednar and Paul Samson in conversation with Heidi Tworek, a leading expert in international history and public policy from the University of British Columbia, as she explains the historic prevalence, power and manipulation of media and wireless technology. Her la...

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     Amid the geopolitical tensions of the Cold War, the Chinese computer emerged. Despite the complexity of formatting tens of thousands of characters for digital use, the race for ingenuity resulted in the revolutionary computing of non-Latin script and unprecedented typing speeds — feats that continue to shape the devices we use today. Join Policy Prompt hosts for a deep dive into the history of digital technology in China with Thom...

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    In this episode, Policy Prompt hosts chat with CIGI Senior Fellow and international human rights lawyer Susie Alegre, to unpack her latest book, Human Rights, Robot Wrongs: Being Human in the Age of AI (Atlantic Books, 2024). Listen to find out if Susie has ever been fooled by artificial intelligence, what the challenges and the tensions of rights for machines are, and why there is a palpable lack of urgency around the adoption of ...

  • Do emerging technologies inherently serve the greater good? Join Policy Prompt hosts Vass and Paul in a discussion with world-renowned economist Daron Acemoglu, on his recent book Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity, co-authored with Simon Johnson (PublicAffairs, 2023). Following the launch of this episode, the announcement was made that Acemoglu, Johnson and James Robinson share this year’...

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    In this episode, the Policy Prompt hosts are joined by Grant Bollmer and Katherine Guinness, authors of The Influencer Factory: A Marxist Theory of Corporate Personhood on YouTube (Stanford University Press, 2024), to discuss the evolving landscape of influencer culture. The episode touches on the growing phenomenon of “uncancelability” among influencers, the rise of artificial intelligence–powered avatars and the impact of fluctua...

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    Marietje Schaake joins the hosts to discuss her book The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley (Princeton University Press, 2024). Informed by Marietje’s experience working at the forefront of tech governance, the conversation explores strategies for effective government regulation and ways citizens can counterbalance the immense power wielded by today’s tech giants, to promote a more democratic digital landscape.

    Men...

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    September 5, 2024 1 min

    Welcome to Policy Prompt, a new podcast from the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI). Hosted by Vass Bednar and Paul Samson, Policy Prompt will keep you abreast of the most pressing policy challenges in the digital era. Discussions with today’s thought leaders will cover the latest developments in tech and governance and their impact on communities worldwide. Join us biweekly for new episodes, available on all maj...

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