the amount of bipartisanship in DC is highly underrated in the news you will hear both sides shipping at each other being very antagonistic and conflictual but then if you look beneath the surface and think about what has Congress actually gotten done they far surpassed
even my expectations going into the B administration of how much bipartisanship could happen I love that idea about allowing non-government people to cycle in instead of joining one side and pulling harder in that direction hoping to win a lateral tug of
war what you should actually do is grab the rope in the middle and pull sideways to actually make things happen you have to be meeting privately with folks with staff in Congress if you as a think tank are able to influence what the subject matter experts and Elite decision makers
view about a topic you can have real real change well hello everyone it's Jim oasy with yet another episode of infinite Loops you know know if you listen to this podcast at all that I'm very much in favor of progress and Innovation and all these great things and it seems odd that we
need to have institutions to be in favor of this but I'm delighted that we do my guest today is Alex step the co-founder and co-ceo of the institute for progress in Washington DC and essentially Alec you guys are advocating policy prescriptions and uh help with members of Congress and
other uh organizations uh running these regulations and laws to accelerate Scientific Technology industrial progress you add something though that I find interesting well safeguarding Humanity's future welcome Alec thanks having me Jim excited to be here so
let's get right into it tell us about the Institute what made you decide you know what we need to have a policy Institute to convince these Congress crits to do the right thing yeah so my co-founder Caleb Watney and I we decided to start the institute for Progress um a
little more than two years ago now um quit our jobs at a previous Think Tank two and a half years ago launched publicly almost exactly two years ago and both of us have been in DC for a good number of years now Caleb my co-founders been here for almost a
decade working in policy we both worked at a handful of think tanks across the ideological Spectrum both Center left and center right um primarily on technology policy and Innovation policy and we had great experiences at every organization we worked at but we were
increasingly of the belief going into 2021 um that time period that it was time for new institutions and there was really a hunger and an appetite for it and the existing Paradigm in the think tank ecosystem had kind of become outdated uh a lot of the
major institutions you hear about in terms of the Brookings institution AI Heritage they all have some great people working at them but they are creatures of a different era especially a different information ecosystem and so we thought while we had a great experience working at other
organizations um across the political spectrum that if you could start from a clean slate um select new issue areas that were neglected important and ideally tractable as well you can make much more progress uh you could hire superstars from day one remain a small
and Nimble team um Outsource a lot of the back office work um at think tanks it's traditionally done by a large operational staff and if you can just maintain a laser focus on what are the core policy areas you're working on with an amazing group of policy experts um
and really keeping the Northstar of counterfactual policy impact we as a think tank exist to change the policy in DC in the areas we work on and a lot lot of other think tanks though they do great work they're often focused on delivering tangible outputs for their donors because the donors themselves
have a principal age of problem where for any person making a decision on do I donate $100,000 to this Think Tank whether it's a foundation or a corporation they often want a white paper or an event or some other kind of publicly legible thing they can say ah
for for our money we got this and we had a three-year program on food stamps or something um um but maybe during that period of Time food stamps weren't even in the over to window for being reformed in DC but they got a donation from a foundation years ago to work on this and
they have to work on it um by contrast our approach is we have a small number of donors who give us General support and Trust our mission and theory of change to work on Innovation policy broadly and find out the most tractable ways of actually changing things on the
ground and so that was just really exciting prospect and decided to quit our jobs and have a go of it I love the fact that uh it's one of the uh parts of our theme of the great reshuffle that a lot of our old institutions uh are getting very creaky
and that oftentimes the best thing to do is do what you did in other words just say let's let's reimagine this let's take advantage of the tools and Technologies of today um and and not be bound by either the Antiquated method or methodologies or systems or what ever and all of as
you mentioned the inherent uh drag of all of the old donors wanting their uh ideas addressed as well did you think about trying to reform the institutions that you were within before deciding no we're we're just going to go and have a laser focus on what we want to and what
we believe is absolutely critical at this stage of our society's development yeah so we definitely uh tried to do some change from within the system uh and had again good experiences and learned a lot about how the policy process works uh how you can theoretically make change happen and
just learned a lot about um the technology and Innovation policy ecosystem in Washington DC but the thing we increasingly were kind of buting up against was the idea of at multi-issue think tanks that cover a wide array of issues that have been around for
multiple decades the leadership of those organizations this is true across a majority of the think tanks in DC not just the ones that Caleb and I worked at is that you know they had these these leaders engaged in policy fights in the 90s and 2000s that they still have skin
in the game and so if you come in as the the new person saying hey let's reverse our position on this and and you know come out in favor of something drastically different well they they bled for that previous position they're not willing to do so and and
understandably so and also if you think well these other issue areas that AR aren't Innovation and Tech policy um Healthcare policy tax policy other areas of policy if those make it harder to do your job it's harder to focus on a narrow issue when a think tank covers a
broad array of of topics harder to make allies and coalitional partners and so by starting from a clean slate we could do our own set of policy positions from day one and stay laser focused on how do we drive Innovation policy forward DC is obviously a very partisan place these
days but there are certain neglected areas or underrated areas that do have a lot of bipartisanship and we think science and Innovation policy um is one of those areas and so by avoiding we don't do anything on the culture War topics we completely stay out of those
fights um we trying to focus on one of the positive sum issues that really can advance through Congress in a bipartisan fashion or should be higher priorities for the administration if it's an executive branch action we think there's a lot of latitude to actually make real
progress in policy in those areas but Legacy institutions due to both sclerosis like you were talking about but also due to they've just taken positions over decades that are hard to reverse and we thought a new institution wouldn't have those same
issues yeah and one of the things you say is that progress is a policy Choice uh I I found that sentence very very interesting so help uh Me by elaborating on that idea for our listeners and our viewers yeah and this is kind of I think part of our fitting with our can do
Spirit optimism about the potential for change in Washington DC but you see in in so many areas uh especially this is why as an institution we focus on US federal policy um we think local and state policy can matter but in general federal policy is more important we
think there's great people doing work on International policy but if you want the biggest bang for your buck as a policy wonk as someone who's working in this field US federal policy is the largest lever you possibly can have and so if you think about if you care about basic
R&D the two largest funders of R&D in the world are here in Washington DC the NIH and NSF um they collectively fund tens of billions of dollars of basic R&D and the incentives they create for scientists academics research in institutions dramatically shape what
gets worked on and what kinds of Innovations we get and what the top of the funnel looks like more commercialization that's happening by startups and other private entities um further down the funnel and so we think it's the largest leverage Point um the US is also a world leader in innovation
that happen in the United States spill over to other countries uh a lot of other countries copy policy decisions that the United States makes they copy the FDA in terms of drug regulation uh they cop copy lots of different areas where they see the us as a world leader
and so progress as a policy Choice means the policy decisions made in Washington DC dramatically affect the pace of progress around the world and so we think as a small team with about 15 people now this is the the larg lever we have in the world to make change happen
one of the things that I've seen kind of happening to my dismay is the ideological camps are hardening it seems to me um and so you mentioned that you're trying to work across the aisle which I applaud I think you uh if you can get both sides of the aisle excited
about something that's going to be probably a better chance of actually having a change in policy but for example um when talking about things like uh re-engaging on nuclear power or elemental power as some are rebranding it uh and or the MRNA uh vaccines I
personally um used to be just like everyone else anti-nuclear until I started actually looking into the facts and I thought oh my God uh I've been wrong for quite a while here um and and I was very much in favor of the MRNA now now the reason I picked those two is the
left leaning side might still be very anti-nuclear the right leaning side from what I've seen on social media and elsewhere could be very suspicious and anti-rna platform type Technologies how how do you thread that needle yeah so first I'll preface my answer by saying I
think the amount of bipartisanship in DC is highly underrated especially in the last few years um in the news you will hear both sides shipping at each other being very antagonistic and conflictual so there definitely is an element of extreme partisanship but then if you
look beneath the surface and think about what has Congress actually gotten done they far surpassed even my expectations going into the Biden administration of how much bipartisanship could happen especially the bipartisan infrastructure law um the chips and science act you
know $50 billion in subsidies to reshore Advanced chip Manufacturing in the United States uh recently just this week we a um$ 80 billion bipartisan tax deal just passed the house by overwhelming margin trading an expanded child tax credit for Full Art full expensing for
R&D um at by private companies that's a win-win in my book and likely has a good chance of passing the Senate that's in an election year so I think a lot of this stuff doesn't make the news in the same way the culture War issues do but there is still major legislation going
through Congress and then in terms of you mentioned nuclear and mRNA vaccines I think obviously yeah there's a there's a partisan balance to those two topics but one thing I'll will say is this is where technocracy and having an elite theory of change really matters which we
do which is that the median voters view on nuclear power is very abstract they have a general Vibes based approach of do I think nuclear feels safe or does it feel exciting or then I'll kind of roughly be Pro or anti more regulation on nuclear but the more you learn about
each policy area in DC you realize that they're incredibly complex and have thousands of different dimensions on which to set policy and no one has the time energy or expertise to follow these things very closely and so there's so much room for maneuvering so for nuclear
for example uh the nuclear Regulatory Commission the the minute decisions they make on a day-to-day basis add up to a lot but the average voter I think isn't following that it doesn't really influence their decision- making and so if you as a think tank are able to
influence what the subject matter experts and Elite decision makers view about a topic you can have real real change without actually you know needing to worry too much about the partisanship on a given topic uh and then similarly with mRNA vaccines I think uh that's a
topic where I think the most controversial thing about vaccines is actually the vaccine mandates but if you just take a step back and say what we want to do is accelerate development of safe and effective vaccines that are made available to as many people who
want them as possible we ifp is a think tank and lots of our partners have no opinion on whether a mandate is good or not people can yell and argue about that but the positive sum abundance mindset that is relatively uncontroversial is that it's better to have more treatments
and medicines available to people who want them if you just stay at that level I think it's much um easier to make progress and then to you help uh uh the uh various legislators and and Regulators with h reframing issues because ultimately uh at least the on
the people who get elected side they're going to have to uh win the hearts and minds of their uh constituents uh do you do you offer helpful ways that they can reframe something that is like again nuclear it is getting reframed right um and it's and it's happening slowly but
like our our are do you ever face a situation where you're sitting with a congress person and they're like yes I'm totally in favor of this but no my constituents will like throw me out of office how how do you respond to that kind of challenge yeah you hear that
kind of thing all the time especially because often times elected officials understand what the quotequote right policy is or the policy that least will grow the pie the most or lead to the most Innovation but due to political reasons are hesitant to take a certain position
I think the majority of Our advice and we do much more behind the scenes than the average thing K and DC that's Again part of our theory of change is that to actually make things happen you have to be meeting privately with folks with staff in congress with people in the
federal agencies identify Champions who already agree with you but are underresourced and need more technical expertise more help need potentially cover publicly to take the kind of decisions they already want to take um so that's our general theory of change
is to stay very close to them and try to be as helpful as possible when we have a a CH champion who agrees with us but in terms of if they're worried about the politics and the Optics the main way we try to frame things is focus on outcomes so when it comes to nuclear power the
average voter is much more concerned about the cost of electricity in their home like actual cost of living kitchen table type issues um what are what are you know what's the what are grocery prices what is uh what are you know fuel costs things like that they really make
them feel like things are going in a better or worse Direction really and so I'd say again nuclear is not the type of issue that animates many voters is like their number one priority but cost of living is usually in the top three when you pull voters and so we would
emphasize to policy makers focus on the outcome nuclear is an instr nuclear energy is an instrument to cheaper abundant energy that increases um standards of living across the United States including for people in your jurisdiction and your District or your
State uh and that usually helps them think about okay actually this could help me you know we make those Investments today those policy reforms today in two years or six years when I'm up for re-election I could actually have something tangible to deliver to voters
great reframe um H how does a smaller organization like yours how how how do you even go up against the lobbyists who like as you know many of the so-called bills uh that are written I'm doing air quotes for our uh listeners here uh by members of Congress are fact written almost
entirely by the lobby uh that wants that particular legislation passed it's kind of a David and Goliath like do you have anything other than the Rock and the slingshot yeah uh I'll borrow a a quote here from Robin Hansen I believe is where you can think about policy fights
as tug of war between two sides and instead of joining one side and pulling harder in that direction hoping to win a lateral tug of war what you should actually do is grab the rope in the middle and pull sideways so if you are working you know kind of in an
orthogonal fashion to the current policy debates or at least working on topics that are neglected and there aren't many people currently fighting about them you have a much greater chance of success and so I'll give you a couple examples here one is I mentioned the tax deal
that's going through Congress the $80 billion tax deal for an expanded child tax credit exchange for um full expensing for R&D r&d's investment is obviously an an innovation policy ISS area so it's relevant to ifp but we're not actually actively working on that
topic because there is such a clear business interest so all the relevant business lobbying groups are highly engaged in that topic the marginal impact of ifp joining those conversations is not very large it's not the best use of our our limited resources as a a small But Mighty team
um by contrast if you look at science funding and so our meta science team does a lot of work with NIH and NSF and there are lobbying groups around those topics and usually it's you know the university lobbying groups that are arguing for just more funding just
increase the Topline budgets for NIH and NSF and in general we basically agree with that and then there are small um small government you know libertarian conservatives who want to just like kind of this the starve the Beast approach of just like let's cut this funding this is
a weight this is wasteful maybe it's funding ideological groups that I disagree with but they're wanting to cut those budgets the sideways approach that we take on that topic is we don't engage on the what should their funding levels be it's whatever given level of funding
they have that Congress sets for them they have an almost infinite number of different ways to spend that money and we want to work with them and provide technical expertise to ensure that we're getting the most bang for our bucks whatever fixed budget ni or NSF have um
what are the reforms they could be doing to incentivize breakthrough research instead of incremental research how do we get the contrarian ideas that will actually meaningfully improve productivity improve living standards and there so much low hanging fruit that
that can be much more important than whether they get a two or 3% total budget increase um and there's almost no groups working on that you have no lobbyists against you you're really just fighting the status quo at that point and they're very excited to work with
you because you're trying to help them solve problems um and they really need a lot of help and so that kind of expertise to the agencies is is usually well received yeah you also advocate for so-called moonshot projects which I agree with uh but how how would you
answer a Critic who is like you know what about the as you just mentioned what about these smaller grants what about all of the things that might lead to incremental sort of slower change are they going to get crowded out if you guys are really successful with your
advocacy for the moonshot projects yes I think this is a case where it's not necessarily Zero Sum and so I think you take an example the recent moonshot operation warp speed right that was not a traditional budget line line item that was you know we funded operation or
speed at the expense of other scientific and technological projects it was during a crisis moment we spent in the end $18 billion to fund this program that delivered multiple safe and effective vaccines in less than a year way faster than almost any expert predicted so we
had this moonshot project that helped us into the pandemic earlier amazing success I don't think that really came the cost of other incremental reforms it obviously built on Decades of investment by NIH and other um Research funders into mRNA as a potential platform
technology so it built on that but I don't think it took away from it in any um kind of meaningful sense and then I would say we can kind of walk and Che gum at the same time so if you could think about um some of the reforms we're looking to do we are partnered with NSF
and the National Science Foundation is looking to reform how they allocate GR grants and the current system is basically a peer review committee uh reviewers score grants on a scale roughly you know kind one to 10 they average those scores and the highest
average scores get funded up to a certain threshold and they spend all the money per year now that's a decent way to fund fund scientific Grant ideas proposals but you know we have some evidence from the scientific literature that breakthrough ideas are by their
nature contrarian they're the kind of things that some people are very excited about but the average person most people would say that sounds weird that seems unlikely to succeed it's novel and just I'm not familiar with it and so novel ideas and there's evidence on this that
they get scored lower on average because people aren't familiar with them and so we're currently working with the National Science Foundation to Pilot um what elsewhere is called the golden ticket system where reviewers are given a small number of golden tickets kind of
an anti veto to fund scientific grants if they have high conviction this is kind of how Venture Capital works you think about it like you don't need an average of all venture capitalists to support your startup company your your big risky idea you only need a small
handful with high conviction uh to fund you and so we think we think this kind of approach a Golden Ticket approach to Public Funding of R&D could lead to more breakthrough research better you know social Returns on you know Returns on investment in public money um but we're
not 100% sure and so the the approach we take is let's follow the evidence let's run an experiment let's work close with the agency run a pilot program run it as closely to a randomized control trial as possible evaluate the results and those results will help us build momentum for
change because it's hard to change these big public agencies but if you have a strong evidence base showing the EUR form actually improves outcomes you have a much better chance of achieving durable policy change I love that idea um and uh I wonder though uh how many uh
people within those institutions uh do they see it as uh sort of career risk uh by handing out you know golden tickets you know some amazing things might be way in the deep end of the tail and for like neurotypicals that's going to raise a lot of eyebrows if you hand a golden
ticket to somebody other people are kind of like oh that guy's crazy yeah um do you find that and if you how do you help them overcome that yeah I think there is definitely some of that involved I think that's part of how we got to where we are today is because
there is a real political economy constraint that the agencies face of they're in an iterated game with Congress right and so if they are funding things that fail at a high rate they look embarrassing you know in front of a congressional hearing they could
get their funding cut over time and so they are trying to advance the scientific Enterprise subject to this constraint and so I think um there are ways you can work with them to say like you know this is a high preference ticket so it's not like we're giving ultimate
authority to the person but we're going to shift it in that direction a lot more so if there's high high preference for a certain Grant we'll take a a much harder look at it and then there's still some kind of guardrail or constraint around a truly embarrassing idea that just due to
political constraints um won't actually uh move the needle but I think at the end of the day the scientific agencies they want to take more risks on the margin or at least they realize that they're not happy with the status quo I think this is how Tyler Cowan talks about the
metascience Enterprise as the current system is so broken that's basically indefensible and even people inside the system will not defend it they might be skeptical of Any Given reform of like will that work or is that a good idea but if you ask them like does the current
equilibrium we face in our scientific ecosystem is it optimal or is it good almost no one will defend it and so that's a you can think that in terms of pessimism of oh man it's so broken so bad how do we fix this at ifp we take an optimistic lens which is if things are
so bad you most change is is going to be for the better and so we can find the lowest hanging fruit work closely with the agencies build lium over time and also hopefully and this is you know folks that I know you've had on your podcast like Jason Crawford and others
working at the higher level of ideas and culture I think we need to to a point where we feel more comfortable with risk and with failure because and that's a we do a lot of work on the DARPA model having other agencies helping them de their own in-house arpa um to hopefully
mimic the success of of DARPA and those that kind of it's built into their DNA that's high-risk High reward and that there's going to be a high failure rate and because it's in the defense department I think they've been able to get away with more than other other
agencies um but yeah I think this kind of like got you at Congressional hearings of you funded the under water shrimp treadmill thing um at the societal culture level we need at the end of day need to work past that and realize that um every venture capitalist
is not their worst investment or their best investment you know it's a portfolio approach I love that answer and but I wonder because it brings up all sorts of questions like are are the individuals who populate these various uh institutes like NIH or or the the whole alphabet of
them I are do we have enough uh let's say um I I don't want to use the term controversial but um nonintuitive type thinking and acting you brought up DARPA DARPA was one of the first things I thought of when I came across you guys I'm like would it be great if we could
have a DARPA model for all of these agencies um and and what do you think is it is it uh press uh happens one funeral at a time or can can these agencies and the people within them are they sufficiently switched on that they're open to these types of approaches that
you're advocating yes I think there is a lot of latent energy and potential uh in a lot of these agencies and this is where really it's a search process for us because again our theory of change is that it's much easier to find your Champions and Empower them inside
government than it is to persuade a large number of people to your position and so there are a large number of people for example arpa H so Health and Human Serv Department of Health and Human Services they just got funding for their own arpa called arpa Ag and a lot
of those folks it's a new institution so they have the opportunity to start fresh and take risks they have the explicit mandate to have a higher failure rate than other kind of um Health funding organizations within government uh and their leadership is very strong as well
and so working closely with them is is something that we've seen a lot of success with and identifying other leaders of relatively new programs or new offices uh has a much higher success rate one other example uh the chips and science act funded something called the
tip directorate at NSF tip stands for um technology uh Innovation and Partnerships and the leader there uh Irwin Gian chani is excellent high-risk uh higher reward thinker would agree with a lot of what we're saying here and he needs more resources he needs help he
needs connections he needs political cover and support for what he's already trying to do and so we try to work closely with people like that uh and help them get more done and I think under the current system you know they have limited resources they're all
overworked so they're looking for help and there are some creative ways to get better people in government one thing I'll flag here is um the intergovernmental Personnel act allows people outside of government to cycle in on a temporary basis and outside groups fund their positions so they're not
subject to the GS scale so you can pay people closer to Market salaries to kind of do a tour of Duty within government and this is I think a critical hiring Authority that we need much more of um which is the ability for federal agencies to flexibly hire the best
person for a position and then Empower them to actually go and make change happen and also work with groups like us and so I think there are ways to make change happen it's just it can be difficult but it's possible yeah I love that idea about owing uh non-government
uh people to cycle in and and the ability to pay them at a higher rate yep um that that's going to I think lead to uh a lot more success on that part but what what about the idea like for example I was reading recently uh a book talking about the the uh burden of all
of the the morass of regulations and rules s that have built up to such a point where they are there's such viscosity that people literally can't get anything done an example um the the teachers manual for um uh teachers in the New York City public school system
uh if you're if you're old enough you'll remember what phone books look like it it's about this thick and and do do we reach a point where they where where we have to like I'm in favor of the idea of sunset laws right where you pass a piece of legislation and it
sunsets 10 years later and if they don't renew it it goes away are there other are there other methodologies or or uh tactics and strategies that could help well well not throwing the baby out with the bath water but in some way allow more agency at the individual level and not having to be swamped by
you know this bogon word salot uh that just is meent to paralyze people yeah I think there's definitely a lot of opportunity here I'll just make two recommendations for your listeners on works that have really influenced my thinking in this topic the first one is
recoding America by Jen paa um she has worked in multiple administrations at both the state level in California and in the US federal government on implementing technology platforms within government so she worked um on a lot of different technology challenges worked
uh during covid on the unemployment insurance systems in California to manage all the claims when Co spiked unemployment um so really has been in the trenches on these topics and her book recoding America Chronicles a lot of these cases Chronicles um the
recovery of um Obamacare after the first exchange collapse they had to bring in a whole new team and build a new website for processing um Affordable Care Act uh applications and Paul's main takeaway in that book is that uh government civil servants need more discretion and the
ability of course elected officials will always be the ones to set values goals outcomes they want to see but too much of kind of theocracy sclerosis we see in government is due to proceduralism and this kind of you know the top level sets a checklist um for everything that needs to happen
for a given government Service delivery and then that leads to terrible outcomes terrible products kind of the um DMV experience of of interfacing with the government and what Jim paa says is let's bring more of a silic and Valley Tech approach this let's have agile
workflows of of teams working within government let's have product managers not just project managers um who actually think about the end user what it's like to use government services um and then what are the ways you should design these programs to maximize
outcomes not fulfilling some checklist um and the second recommendation I have for your listeners is Nick baggley who's a law professor at the University of Michigan wrote a piece called um the proceduralist uh fetish and it's really this kind of like a look at American
culture and legal systems that a lot of the incentives are towards proceduralism and just following a stepbystep approach that ignores outcomes or ignores end users and how it affects people on individual level and I think that kind of culture change will take a while but
there's definitely momentum and excitement around these ideas I talked to lots of people in government here who read these works and are influenced by them and they go into government um trying to have a different mentality uh but I think I think on the side of the
American voter and people who are engaged with the political system with discretion comes the risk for failure and so we have to think about if you actually want to empower um people who work in government to have more discretion we have to be cognizant of the trade-off there and and not the more
we publicly lash them and criticize them for every single misstep um less likely you are to get get great people who can deliver great outcomes one of the things that uh we notic through our Venture arm is that for example we are invested in a venture uh Fund in
Bangladesh and uh because they were so far behind in so many things in certain circumstances they've left frog us and uh I'm thinking specifically of a state-of-the-art uh medical facility that is literally better than anything you can get here in New York City which
like blows my mind yeah I is there any way that we could kind of look to those other uh Innovations in other countries I think also of former uh Eastern European companies that were under the thumb of Communism and and suddenly um that they're like the most modern forms
of government any any way to borrow technique ideas from from them from them yeah I think to your example there I think Estonia is often cited as like the world leader in digital democracy digital tools um making it very easy to access and use government services I think
there's a lot to be learned there uh obviously each country has its own institutional context and so you have to make sure that you're learning from those lessons and then modifying them and adjusting them to the American context the federal system of government
how to a lot of these services are either granted by the federal government the money comes from the federal government and then it's implemented at the state and local level to keep that all in mind creates a lot of problems but I do think there's there's large
potential and one thing I would flag here is that this is actually an area where I'm very optimistic about artificial intelligence I think what you see with AI is that uh it's very good at interacting with Messy data and you know apis that aren't well documented uh it's
good at trying something if you have it uh set as an an agent it can iterate and try again until it succeeds um I think AI tools could make interfacing with government especially if adopted by government agencies themselves much easier to manage a lot of these processes and so instead of trying to
rebuild the entire platform or website for a given government agency if we just create an AI tool that can interact with the underlying databases with the you know browser interface and you just set the goal and it's a kind of an aid towards um interacting with government
services I think you could make a lot of improvements there and so I'm pretty optimistic that um if AI tools are adopted we could get much more efficient government services yeah I agree we're also big investors in AI in its various use cases um and you know one use case
we thought of uh a member by team suggested what you know most researchers don't want to go after funding Andor grant money to find something they know is a null set right so uh you know but via negativ there's a lot of information in there that we
don't know about so what about simply program programming an AI to generate hypothesis after hypothesis that is essentially a net but then going through in silico going through all of that and Publishing it to some huge database that scientists can make use of I I I think
that uh the the the number and breadth and and depth of AI use cases is really staggering H how that that's s that's kind of the platonic idea how do how do we in the real world messing world how how do we make sure that something like that type of interface actually gets
pursued you see what I'm saying because like it in industry is going to be using it for sure um but government that's a whole different kettle of fish do you have a position on how that could happen yes I think in terms of AI adoption uh in these areas I agree there's there's a
very large potential here and again I think AI is very good at ingesting large quantities of information even unstructured data um and taking action based on that and making it legible when it seemingly illegible and so I think for government to adopt these tools uh
one there needs to be just familiari so again it's about it's a talent question do we have the top people in government who understand what the best tools are to use and how to implement them uh and it's there's a potential process for making this much more efficient but the
the two caveats I would put here the real bottlenecks that will be constraints in the long run are where does AI interface with the real world and so you mentioned terms of scientific progress in a lot of these areas eventually you'll need to like now you
can't do everything in silico you'll have to actually operate a lab okay so how much of the lab environment can be automated and once you have a human bottleneck how do you unlock that bottleneck or automate more of the process I think that will be a constraint uh as you try to do more
things and then more from the policy L angle I think the real bottleneck is often legal it's risk of litigation and we do a lot of stuff on permitting reform at ifp um permitting for building infrastructure in the real world and really the risk the main challenges you
see there are around litigation it's not only did you file your paperwork correctly and you know these multi- thousand page environmental reviews um did you consider every alternative uh options do you consider every significant impact to the environment
but there are groups that are adversarial to you doing something they are trying to use the court system to stop you from what you're doing and I think this is where I kind of uh encourage people to have an AI skepticism of can't solve everything because even if the AI takes the
paperwork part of this from four years to one year um and it can produce the multipage report much quicker than any human can at the end of the day if the laws and the books um create a lot of tools for people who are anti-growth people who um want to be nimes about
building things in the real world they still have the legal system which is very slow and our courts will not be adopting AI anytime soon um and so that's still a real bottleneck so I think on the policy side litigation and how these AI applications interface with
our court system and then on the scientific Enterprise side it's the the real world you know physical lab type issues I think will also be a bottleneck but lots of potential regardless yeah actually another use case that we have for AI at osv is we should set it on
every single law currently on the books and find all of the Antiquated out ofd uh senseless uh you know laws that were passed for a reason keeping chesterton's fence in mind right they might have been passed for a good reason back then but you know we don't go around on horses
anymore and and then sort of putting up the list and and uh kind of I I I don't know I don't want to you well shaming them into saying okay this this is a really dumb law and we should take it off the books but you bring up a really good point that think about a lot and
that is the the um pessimistic purveyors of the precautionary principle the nimes they are not a tiny minority yeah and and so first off I always try to understand things from other people's point of view this is one that's hard for me to understand from other people's
point of view especially those that are actively against what what we look at as progress and and advancement do do you do you have a do you have a skill set for interacting with those types of groups and at least getting them to consider the uh your position yes I
think I can this in two parts one first setting aside like can you persuade them uh argument I think just really important to always remember that the effectiveness of opponents to growth and opponents to progress and change and dynamism uh their success rate is highly
contingent on the institutional context in which they operate and live and so in a lot of other countries that don't share the US common law system they don't have what Scholars have called a um adversarial legalism approach to the law which means it's an open process led
by um plaintiffs who can bring claims from any direction uh they fund their own lawsuits and you know there's a jury system that can be highly uncertain in terms of outcomes and how the law be applied in different cases the US legal institutions create massive uncertainty
and collectively the local state and federal level lead to essentially a vrac and so a loud minority and I agree it's not zero they are a significant minority but they're very loud and passionate minority um given current US institutions have an effective veto
where in other countries through the Democratic process through any kind of public hearing or open input process they would be heard and then the majority or the large group that wants you know the benefits of growth and the benefits of dynamism and um building new
infrastructure and things like that and housing they would win out and the projects would be built even if there was a loud vocal minority um so potential for institutional change to make it harder for them to win then in terms of actually addressing their
concerns I am somewhat sympathetic in a lot of cases that uh building things and change does impose impose very large large localized negative effects on certain people um and so you know taking their concerns to heart and trying to address them as much as possible with
policy or Technology Solutions I think is is a Way Forward here so for example and just use housing as an example when when new housing is built when multif family you know dense housing is built in an area with single family homes or just an area that hasn't
undergone a lot of change recently the primary concerns you have here here are around noise and part um parking there are literal you know loow hanging Solutions you could have here you can allocate parking you know on street parking permits to incumbent residents and homeowners and say the new
people will not get parking permits you get them because you are an incumbent and that's a win-win because we'd rather have the big apartment building built and new people allowed to live there and maybe if you give them parking permits they will not yell so much at the local
Town council meeting and then in terms of noise I think this is where we're looking did do more research on this is noise reducing Innovations is a real thing so noise is a real negative externality that bothers a lot of people construction is very loud by nature but
it doesn't have to be for example um loud beeping when large trucks back up there are other ways to ensure trucks don't crush people rear view cameras um white noise that is like less disruptive but still audible there are just different ways to approach this that
technology allows you to totally avoid the trade off and so we're constantly trying to act in good faith take people's concerns at face value and actually address them either with technology or with policy Solutions and I think that also gets you a long way in
terms of reducing nism another thing that I find fascinating about you is that you call yourself a Twitter first or social media Think Tank uh what was the idea that sparked uh that as kind of a a watch word or a catchphrase for for your organization yeah this kind of goes back
to the beginning of our conversation talking about what we viewed was kind of outdated archaic about how DC think tanks were have been operating which is that we think the internet and social media is an information revolution and is disrupting a lot of Industries and um
areas of life but had left think tanks relatively untouched a lot of think tanks in DC still operate on like a there's a researcher who's a quasa academic who's in a room by themselves typing up very long white papers they publish once a quarter or once a year
and they print them out and they maybe at best walk around and drop them off in offices on Capital Hill and no one reads them and that's kind of the end of the story um and they have like a press team that does comms but they're like weirdly not very good at it because they're not
actually subject matter experts um and they have like a separate government Affairs team that is like in a usually hamfisted way trying to make connections and handoff um relationships to the subject matter experts but like because they' have their relationship who knows
where the trust goes or how effective will be and a big theory that we have when we started ifp which I think has mostly been borne out is that in the modern information ecosystem what people want is these things to be bundled into a single person on a narrow and to do
that feasibly has to be on a narrow issue topic so you want the the subject matter expert to be the one you have the relationship with when you're actually advocating in front of government um so they have to do their own government Affairs their own research and because
they're the subject matter expert they have to be able to do their own coms that's on social media that's writing you know off beds for Publications that's communicating with journalists talking to them behind the scenes uh and so when you bundle all those things
together I think you get much more effective kind of Superstar policy wonks um they're rarer and harder to find but those are the the kind of people we try to only hire ifp and I think that is just a total disruption to the old way of doing things and then lastly I'll
just add why why Twitter first why social media first we realized that we want a barbell approach to policy where most of the discourse and policy action in public is discussed on Twitter um and sometimes in a neglected topic area a white paper can be a Difference
Maker it can explain to the 10 people you need in government who actually do read things and actually are making decisions um what we should do on AI or what we should do in biotech uh those things sometimes are necessary but usually it's either they're following
the conversation on Twitter and that's where the Overton window is and that's where you can affect kind a theory of change or it's like the Deep research that sometimes is actually needed but all the middle stuff of like an oped and an outlet that no one reads like those
are just kind of shouting into a void and it's kind of scary when you look at DC policy think tanks there's a lot of that middle stuff where they're just like talking to no one and we try to focus on like where is the conversation actually happening who's paying
attention to what and like how do we influence that yeah I think Twitter is definitely a shelling Point uh in terms of all of the things uh but but then of course you also have the Twitter isation of things right like so you've got eak you've got effective altruism you know
do people confuse you with eak or effective altruism or or are they pretty clear yeah I think uh it's a point of Pride that we don't fit easily into any Camp I think um and I havep we want to be thought of as The Innovation policy think tank in Washington DC uh that is
you know in favor of progress and also understands that some technologies are riskier than others and so I think that puts us in a are they Center left are they center right are they with eak or are they with EA I think um we feel very comfortable you know having connections
to all those communities and trying to help them communicate with each other to find reasonable compromises and and steps forward and so um that also I think helps us um be more effective in Washington DC is um kind of sitting in the middle on those things and helping
folks talk to each other so can you give me like maybe three examples I'm putting you on the spot here a little bit uh about how you have to communicate differently in Washington as opposed to say Silicon Valley or New York City yeah so I think um maybe a couple examples so in Washington DC uh a
lot of they're very skeptical of technos solutionism of you know let Silicon Valley rip we're we got this handled uh they're very skeptical of that they also it's very National Security mindset is very strong in Washington DC um much more so than other countries because of
the scale of our military Global Leadership of the US uh and so I think in terms of technology and Innovation issues there's often a security mindset component in Washington DC conversations that is not really happening uh in Silicon Valley or it's much lower of a
priority and so I think way we try to approach it is helping both sides recognize how they can benefit each other and so helping people in Washington DC recognize that the us being a global leader in technology and Innovation is an asset and this is not an industry to be
strangled it's an industry to work with and partner with uh you know us soft power comes through being the global R&D lab and the more we can do of that the better we can benefit the entire world and so helping those two sides talk to each other and recognize and then
conversely I think for silon Valley and for New York City there's often kind of a a Libertarian aspect to their approach of just like leave us alone and we'll figure this out and I think if more of those folks recognize the pervas of um pervasiveness of of market failures they
would do a lot better of you know operation warp speed for example mRNA vaccines there really was an extremely strong case for government to be the purchaser and guarant guarantor of demand in that moment because we've had previous pandemic mics and epidemics
over the last few decades that you know now looking back we're like we know that it lasted three years but if you were a biotech Pharma company in Spring 2020 thinking about how much capex should I outlay as a company in terms of building
factories and how many scientists should I employ to work on a covid vaccine if the if the if the you know a variant occurred and the pandemic actually kind of sputtered out on its own in less than a year you could have lost billions of dollars and there would be no demand for
your product if you know the pandemic kind of just um resolved itself and so in those situations there are extremely large market failures and an extremely large role for government and this is where we talk a lot about public private Partnerships and if each side
understands its role you can get an amazing outcome like operate SHP speed should the government have had government employees be the ones designing the vaccine building the factories you know doing all this Innovation work we don't think that's the proper role for government we that's
the proper role for the private sector um and these risk Tak Akers but also recognizing that market failures are a very real thing um especially with high uncertainty and long timelines and so the government through the demand channel can shape what kind of Innovations we get and how socially
beneficial they are because ending the pandemic early um literally operation or speed paid for itself if it had shortened the pandemic by 12 hours I think arguably shortened it by months if not years and so the ROI on that kind of investment from the government
and the way it changed the incentives of the private sector I think is undeniably an amazing success yeah and uh the existence of the Eternal existence of externalities uh really needs to be taken into account because I love your example there if if you are the CEO of a
biotech uh company and you're being held to a very different standard by your board of directors shareholders you probably not going to make that huge investment uh so I I think that's an excellent example uh what are you most excited about right now what what what do you think uh
through your work um is is maybe gonna come about that wasn't going to come about before you guys came on the scene yeah I think I'm extremely excited I think we're in the midst of multiple arguably revolutions and technology and Innovation right now so obviously AI is
potentially the most important technological change in history uh we're in the midst of a biotech Revolution a lot of these Technologies we're seeing from crisper to mRNA they're they're platform Technologies and can be applied to a wider a wide array of issues and of
course arguably the largest priority of The Bu Administration in terms of policy has been climate change and decarbonization and subsidizing and investing in clean technology and so I would say the clean energy Revolution uh the biotech Revolution and the AI
Revolution are things that obviously are dramatically impacted by policy and something we're really excited to work on and so for clean energy it's all about pering reform how do we make it easier and faster to build infrastructure in the real world um in terms of Biotech we want much more
certainty and shorter review times from the FDA making it easier to actually bring drugs to Market um and also incentivizing companies to work on technologies that are highly defensive in nature things that in a future pandemic or a future crisis we would
want to have invested in years before and not you know start fresh each time um and then in terms of ai ai is a dual use technology there's amazing potential for it to revolutionize every aspect of Our Lives to end diseases as you mentioned in terms of finding novel
hypothesis and Drug Discovery in increasing worker productivity uh economic growth but also intelligence is extremely powerful as a tool intelligence is the reason that humans dominate the Earth um and so we should be wary of just having this completely
unchecked new technology as well and so we often think about both accelerating scientific technological industrial progress but also shaping those Technologies if they're dual use um and have both defensive and offensive applications and so that's something that we're really excited to work on
you've mentioned several times and I agree with the notion that we in the United States are the world's are D Center um what would you say to critics who say well you know China seems to be doing a much better job at XY or Z and and gosh look at Singapore there for
such a tiny country um but how do you how do you compare us to the efforts made by more authoritarian uh systems like China and to a lesser extent Singapore or you just look and think oh there's some good ideas there let's borrow yeah so we definitely think that
we should and we learning from countries that are very successful so for example um the UK uh has made dramatic reforms to their High skilled immigration policy uh anyone who graduates from a top tier Global University gets an automatic visa to the UK we think that is a
pro-innovation policy that the US should be adopting as soon as possible we do a lot of work behind the scenes both in Congress and the executive branch to help ideas like that happen we should be learning from other countries on what works and doesn't work to accelerate
Innovation but at the end of the day we also shouldn't be too humble about the status of the US and the importance of the US in the in the world uh I think we have no peer and that is something that we should take pride in and and not be complacent about it should be something
we double down on and view as a source of strength so for example you mention Singapore you also me people mention Israel maybe even Norway sometimes in terms of innovation per capita um scientific research per capita but in this case scale really matters and
quantity has equ quality all of its own and I think if you look at a lot of innovation is cluster-based it's you have to be an ecosystem with both large universities large research universities and large public inter sorry large startups and private Capital um and
that's what you see in the Bay Area uh in New York in Austin increasingly uh um other parts of the Northwest those unique factors all come together where you have public support for Innovation large sources of private Capital the most talented people in the world who are incentivized to take risk and
rewarded for taking risk and you don't see that combination in any other country in the world and so China is very good at manufacturing uh but they still cannot produce uh Cutting Edge sem conductor chips they still cannot produce widebody aircraft uh they they cannot produce a
lot of really cuttingedge technology that extremely complex um and takes a long time to master and so there's a potential little catch up um but in the meantime they're still not at the frontier in most places and like we see with AI I think that's maybe the most
telling thing is I'm sure some of your listeners remember the conversation even just two or three years ago was is China at parody with the United States in terms of AI uh BYU is poaching Google's AI head to come lead the The Bu AI team um how good are the machine learning
models are we you know in an ARS race and now I hear no one saying that they're anywhere close um in terms of Frontier models and especially when paired with export controls um they don't have access to Cutting Edge ships uh they have different incentives by not
being an open democratic system so the authoritarian leadership in China uh is very skeptical of a large language model that is very difficult to put guard rails on and if you put any in input through a probalistic function produces some output uh that is very fuzzy uh
that does not sound like something that is controllable in a top- down sense and they're very skeptical of and so I think for inherent institutional reasons um and for reasons like tsmc is in Taiwan and asml is in Europe uh China is going to be very hard to to catch up to the
United States in that in that field I think that applies to a lot of different areas of the frontier yeah and uh obviously noting that that confirms all of my priors I I I I I definitely think that uh open systems be closed and that uh cognitive
diversity uh and uh the ability to draw on Minds with very different ways of looking at the world is what you know how much uh is the internet driven by open source software it's like some huge percentage and and then like if you want to take a a stab at like oh could we
come up with a fictional treatment where large language models literally are the downfall of all the authoritarian societies I me I'd watch that um well Alec this has been amazingly fun I love the work that you're doing I do have one last question
in terms before we get to the ultimate last question I I agree with you wholeheartedly that we are sort of the epicenter and um what can we do to hasten government waking up to the back like the UK why are we not why are we not stapling green cards to every Advanced degree in in
let's just limit it to stem in every Advanced uh degree given from the institutions here it seems to me to be the height of Madness to allow people to come to our great universities from all around the world learn the get the greatest education in the world and then
throw them out that makes no sense to me how do we figure that out yeah I 100% agree with you I think this is a really important I think um message that I want to share because I think that I think this has changed in recent years the reason why this policy has not passed uh
you know more than three or four years ago the answer to this was true for multiple decades was that Democrats were not interested in having just High skilled immigration reform that was targeted at stem immigrants or um people with Advanced degrees because they
wanted comprehensive immigration reform they wanted to tie low skilled and high skilled together and so Republicans would say we just want to focus on employment based immigration and skilled based skill-based immigration and Democrats would say let's fix family
based let's fix low skilled let's do all of it together and so I think they were the effective veto Point uh on immigration reform up until recent years uh a very telling thing happened uh during the debate on the chips and science act in the first uh two years of
the the Biden Administration uh the house passed their version of chips and science was called the America competes act and in that bill that passed the Democratic house because was on the first two years of the Biden Administration uh that bill included a green card cap exemption for anyone with
an advanced stem degree either Master's or PhD uh and that was a Artisan bill that passed the Democratic house with almost exclusively Democratic votes so we have now an existence proof that Democrats will vote for in in the context of a chips and science Bill how
do we make the US strong on Technology Innovation and science Democrats voted for just a high-skilled immigration reform and Senate Republicans were the veto point a few Senate Republicans were the veto point on that topic and that's why did not was not included in the
final chips and science act that was signed into law so I think a lot of folks who might have blamed Democrats in the past um for not making progress on this obvious low hanging fruit how are we not doing this as you as you described it um now it's a it's a primary issue for
Republicans by by that I mean like their election primaries like a republican given that how controversial the broad topic of immigration is within the Republican party they are worried about taking any vote that increases any amount of immigration um entally the
United States because they are worried they're going to get primary by far right Republic can and they'll lose their seat in office and so um you hear things like research security concerns of if we open up immigration will China send spies to the United States and
steal our intellectual property um we think there are key whole solutions to address many of these like what if we opened up stem immigration to anywhere but China you know you can then then are how how are your concerns now about um research security or you can think of
things like let them immigrate to the United States but they can't work in sensitive sectors they can't obviously get security clearances that should address a lot of concerns are we doing rigorous uh Security checks and background screenings um on these people
let's do all of that so there are ways to address the direct concerns they have but also in a certain sense um given the Republican party's feelings on immigration today uh legislative progress is very difficult I think if we get a border security bill that could change over time depending on the
outcome of the election in November the Republican Party could change again and then maybe to end this one on a note of optimism the executive branch outside of the number of green cards has a lot of discretion on uncapped temporary visas in terms of the number of people we
bring to the United States and how much certainty we can give them of like what are your odds of getting one of these temporary visas how easy is it to renew that temporary visa do you need to fly home and go to the consulate there or can you renew it online or from
somewhere within the United States all of those things really matter on the margin and totally neglected basically uncontroversial because there are process reforms um but that does still directly lead to having some of the smartest people in the world in the
United States for longer and so we also do a lot of work on that and see a lot of potential and progress there great stuff Alec uh where can everyone find you yeah so our website isp. org um if you search Institute for progress or ifp you'll find our Twitter account uh our website and yeah we
publish a lot uh I have a great list of experts on every topic from meta science high-skilled immigration infrastructure AI biotechnology and so we love to have folks interact with our work and and happy to chat with anyone terrific stuff uh I I I will take a look and see what I
can do to help support you I I think anything that uh is working towards uh what I think can be an amazing era coming up uh should be supported uh fully well if you've seen or listened to the cop podcast before you know that that our final question is uh a
speculation really we we are going to wave a wand and we're going to make you the emperor of the world you can't kill anyone you can't put you can't put anyone in a re-education c but what you can do is we're going to hand you a magical microphone and you can speak two
things into it that will incept all eight odd billion people in the world when they wake up whenever their morning is the next day the two things that you've incepted in them they're going to think I just had the two best ideas I've ever had in my life and I'm going to act
on them from right now going forward what what what two things are you going to incept in the world I think the first one I would incept in the world is that openness to new people and new experiences is a positive I think a lot of that we talked about this
conversation where does nism come from where does xenophobia come from um it's mostly fear of change and I think in most cases unmar uh fear of change and as you see change happen you realize that there are much larger benefits that outweigh the costs and uh a dynamic
Society is much more interesting and fulfilling to live in than a stagnant sclerotic society and so I'd say um in terms you think of like the the big five traits you know the ocean test of like uh openness to new experiences I would just ratchet everybody up of like I feel
more open to new people new experiences new things I think that's an essential part of living Dynamic Society uh and then I would say the the secondary thing and I'll use this one just because uh I believe in the housing Theory of Everything our friends at Works in
progress magazine have a a central piece of reading that housing policy is critical and Upstream of almost everything we care about because if you have abundant affordable housing it allows people to live where they want to live uh access new labor markets uh
cluster in different ways that lead to more Innovation growth and dynamism and so the idea of it incept in people's brains is that uh dense multif family housing is uh good for this neighborhood and good for this country and so um if every major area of high opportunity
built a lot more housing uh around the world all major cities cities are the most productive um Geographic areas in our world and so have more people move to opportunity and be afford to live there and not spend the third their paycheck I think that would be uh a
great idea if everyone supported more dense housing Amen to both of those you can't build a human Colossus if people don't have anywhere to live exactly well Alec thank you so much for coming on uh best of luck and uh we love what you're doing awesome thanks for having me Jim it's great