Alec Stapp is the co-founder and co-CEO of the Institute for Progress. The IFP is dedicated to to accelerating scientific, technological, and industrial progress while safeguarding humanity’s future. Alec and co-founder Caleb Watney are supported by prominent progress thinkers such as Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collinson. The mission statement essay is here. His twitter is here.
An excerpt:
How non-profits should be run and conceived differently, why, and why the world has been so slow to adjust. Why are there so few "internet first" non-profits?
“... a lot of it's just inertia and institutional momentum. So the reason that all the biggest names in think tanks in DC have been around for decades is because once you get a core donor base, it's very hard to lose them or you reach a certain equilibrium where as long as you're doing a decent job, you'll keep getting the same donors to give you more money a year by year and the brand awareness is worth it in the DC community - people know what Brookings is. Brookings will be here. Brookings was here 10 years ago. They'll be here 10 years from now. Right. So that kind of stability has its own value, but we looked at it and we said, this is highly inefficient. The way a lot of these organizations are structured we think there are probably two main components to why think tanks need to change. One's on the personnel side and one is on the information distribution side.
So, since the advent of the internet since become extremely mainstream in the way that most of us consume most of our information and spend tons of our time, think tanks are still weirdly, mostly oriented around long white papers that are PDFs on the internet. We're often even printed out and handed to staffers on Capitol hill or they do in- person events or during COVID they're doing webinars that have very dubious value in terms of actually influencing the policy debate. So, one of our things is being an internet first and a Twitter first think tank. And so it's thinking like, where is the policy conversation actually happening in the US? It's on Twitter with media professionals in New York and DC and policy makers in DC spending tons of time on there. So making sure that your content is formatted and distributed in a way that can be consumed by those internet native users and then on the personnel side, it's really understanding that there's a lot of bloat in think tank organizations and being very careful about how you hire full-time employees. And so we think that the modern policy wonk or policy professional is really like a multi tool athlete, meaning they're really good at a variety of areas. They're really good at research. They're really good at policy communications. They're really good at outreach if they can talk to staffers directly and explain their ideas and fit their idea to be helpful in the context of piece of legislation or particular rule making. And one, those are very rare skill sets. And so, we're looking for all stars who we had to pay them more than they might have made previously and they're hard to find, but when you do find them, really hold onto them and then recognize that the internet has dis-intermediated a lot of the communications shops.
So, a lot of the big old think tanks have dozens of professionals who work in communications, who are supposed to help promote your ideas, but the best people like Caleb and I found this on our own work, the best people to promote your work is - you - the person who wrote it. And if you don't have that skill set, it's really hard to teach or have another person come in to do that for you and similarly with government affairs and government outreach staffers are in their twenties and maybe thirties, they like talking to people who are in their twenties and thirties who have done the research and are experts on the issue. They don't want another person intermediating that process for them, who's another voice in the room. That's how a lot of older think tanks handle this. And so we think by structuring a think tank around the policy experts who again are these multi tool athletes and prioritizing the internet for distribution, you can run a much leaner, much more effective organization. And so we've cultivated a donor base for our organization. Those donors care about policy impact. And so they said, Hey, do what's most effective? Don't worry about cranking out a 40 page white paper if it's not necessary to the process, don't worry about holding a webinar if the webinar is just a deliverable with no value add. … if it doesn't actually help move the needle on policy, don't do it. And so we're highly aligned from top to bottom for that…”
We discuss the competing interests that prevent physical infrastructure such as power lines, or cafe “parklet” structures from being easily built.
Alec explains how using a framework borrowed from Effective Altruism: impact (will it be impactful), tractability (is it possible?), under-researched (are many other people working on the challenge?) - is a useful framing.
Alec discusses why biosecurity (pandemic preparedness), meta-science (understanding how science progresses) and immigration (in particular high skilled) are the initial areas of interest and what other areas, like climate, might be next.
We speculate on what intractable bluesky policies we would potentially pursue.
We play over-rated/under-rated (in honour of Tyler Cowen):
Carbon tax
Planning laws
Crypto
Rogue AI
Animal welfare
Charter cities
Innovation agencies
Remote working
Alec ends with his life advice for others in thinking about a career on how to have the most impact in your life.
Transcipt below, you can listen below or where you get podcasts.
PODCAST INFO
Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3gJTSuo
Spotify: https://sptfy.com/benyeoh
Anchor: https://anchor.fm/benjamin-yeoh
Transcript (only lightly edited)
Ben (00:39): First, congratulations in building something new. One criticism I hear is that we are not creating enough new institutions or new big things like new types of cities or new types of university and building things has become hard, but your Institute, I guess, is a form of rebuttal to that even while you are concerned about potentially slowing progress. So, on the worry and risk side are we really stagnating? There are some challenges in productivity growth, but there still seems to be lots of progress too, for instance, in software and biotech. So starting, what are you most worried about and what's your diagnosis of the problem?
Alec (01:19): Yeah, so again, thanks for having me. Those are good questions. Start off, I would say, well, one, you mentioned there's definitely been a lot of innovation in software for the last 50 years and especially the last 30 years since the advent of the internet has really exploded. And so that's the one, I would say, exception of our economy where you definitely are seeing tons of progress and innovation at a really rapid clip. Biotech seems more recent to me. So obviously the mRNA vaccines promising stuff with CRISPR or genetic sequencing. We're really at the advent of that and I think we're on the cusp of a biotech revolution and we're seeing some of the fruits of that. That's really more prospective than retrospective in terms of a potential revolution there. And then where are we seeing just still stagnation with not much hope in sight and hopefully it will change, it's really building things in the real world, in the us context at least, but this is true in many developed countries around the world. Construction productivity has been stagnant or following philosophical years in terms of are we actually building more with a given set of inputs in terms of physical structures? In the US context it is often a couple of the main candidates that are blocking new construction are actually environmental laws and often they're not substantive in nature, they're just about process oriented.
Alec (02:40): So for example, the national environmental policy act requires really long and costly environmental impact statements and environmental impact reviews. And again, it's not substantive, like if they find this they definitely won't allow you to build. It's just that you have to, in detail, lay out all the potential impacts and then bad actors often, so NIMBY, not environmentalists, but NIMBY who don't want building near them, or want to block a project for another reason, exploit and leverage these environmental process protection laws to slow down projects or veto them in the long run. And so, that's slowing down innovation in green tech. We can't build large solar farms, wind farms. We are not close to building any nuclear sites, but nuclear has often hit the same problems. No one wants the waste or even the power plant near them. So, I think in the physical realm, and this is why it's cool that we're building a new think tank, but also it's much easier for us, it's currently a four person team without an office, a shared space in DC. We're not encountering many of these same really hard problems of like, if you want to build a large structure in the physical environment how do you get past all the veto points that could stop you from doing that? And that's the part that I'm really most concerned about.
Ben (03:53): So that brings to mind a couple of recent examples, particularly in the US context, but we see it all around Europe and the developed world and even in some parts of the developing world as well. So I read an article-- I think Ezra Klein talked about it, but it's essentially these outside cafe restaurant structures, I think in San Francisco and California and during the pandemic they popped up quite quickly and people were allowed to build them. And generally everyone was quite happy cause you had somewhere to sit outside and restaurants got more income. And then they said, well, let's not make this temporary. Let's try and make this permanent cause everyone thinks it's a good idea and then they went round and got a stakeholder exercise cause you want to have input and because everyone was defending their input, you got kind of in specific, quite a reasonable proposal, say from the fire department saying, wow, if there's a fire on the second floor of this building, then you only need it to be a certain height and therefore this is what we would propose fire regulations. And as you went round each kind of stakeholder, you got more and more of these veto points or these pain such that when the legislation came round, they were so onerous that most restaurant owners said, well, either we can't do that or our current structure is not suitable or it costs us so much that the whole idea falls apart. And that seems to be like a little tiny example of this type of thing. Well, apart from the better understanding of the holistic tradeoffs in that, where could policy or where could we really unpick something like that, which actually has broad support from most of the stakeholders involved? It's just a question of trying to get it through.
Alec (05:35): Yeah and I think that's a great example. These little parklets I think they're called, at least in DC. I've been to these restaurants, they are very pleasant, especially during COVID when you needed-- Indoor dining was much more dangerous. Yeah, it seems like this is again the kind of low hanging fruit. Most people like this stuff, why can't we get this built or get this done? And I think the key thing here and this applies to housing as well and in many types of construction is do we have the wrong level of decision making for the particular project. So, I'll use housing as an example, but a lot of this would apply to these outdoor restaurant spaces as well. In the US, most housing decisions in terms of zoning regulations are made at the municipal level and often even neighborhood level. And the key problem there is that when you have the zoning meeting with the local council members, people who come to those meetings to voice their opinion on a new project are a tiny fraction of the community, like less than 1%. And there's a kind of selection effect here where it's like, what kind of people have the time and resources to attend these meetings? Often it's retirees. People are very old and have a lot of free time on their hands and it's people who are highly invested incumbent t homeowners. It's not a renter from a neighboring town who might move to that new multifamily housing complex if it were to be built.
Alec (06:56): And so there's an incumbent t bias effect. There's a person who has free time on their hands. And then it's just who's the most vocal and the loudest and it's people who are very afraid of change and don't want the noise from new construction. They don't want to lose their parking spot on the street. They don't want more traffic just in general. And they just want things to be the way they were when they bought their house 10, 20 years ago. And I think that really distorts the process. And so people say like, oh, what's more democratic? What's a better example of participatory democracy than a local town council meeting, where individuals come and voice their opinions. And I think that's a highly distorted view of democracy because it's ignoring the interests of the vast majority of people in that area or in other areas who might want to move there and participate in that community. And so the two options here I think are moving the decision to a much higher level of government or to a much lower level of government. And then by lower level government, I mean like the block level for an individual town block. This is the streets folks ideas from our friends in the UK, John Myers, some of you who are listening might be familiar with this. But the idea there is basically if you let each individual city block vote on how they're being zoned, you get this nice game theory situation where people realize I like the way my house is and where I'm living, but if we up zone our individual city block, we could all make a lot of money for the first block in this area to up zone. And so then you change the incentive effect of, the people who do vote to up zone would make a lot of money by doing so. And so you get a lot more increases in zoning.
Alec (08:30): Alternatively, you can raise the decision in the US context, at least, from the city level or neighborhood level up to the state level. So at the state level, policy makers have different incentives. They're thinking about aggregate growth. They're thinking about spillovers. They're thinking about if there's a housing cost problem in one city, but not in others, how do we collectively at the state level balance those incentives and balance those costs and benefits. And so you get much more rational or cost benefit oriented policy at a higher level because the elected officials at that level need to consider more stakeholders and more tradeoffs than a local town council member who is being yelled at by a 75 year old person who's been a homeowner for 20 years in the neighborhood. So that applies to these parklets as your client writes about as well, if people show up to those meetings are also upset about things changing in their neighborhood but it doesn't consider all the diffuse benefits that new projects like that can bring.
Ben (09:26): Sure. And there's been quite a lot of interest in this street plan idea here in the UK and similar, and I think Ben Southwood has written about this and actually it riffs on some early ideas and planning about having sort of street level code. So if everyone agrees that a block can look like this and you can have several kinds of code plans, then if it looks similar to this and the block votes on it, then maybe we can get something through, although there's also been push back on whether it really works or not. And I can see that on the housing level, but it's interesting that you also talk about potentially going up a level, either a state or a more centralized idea in some ways. And I was reading today I think Alex Tabarrok has mentioned this wall street journal article, which is essentially the story of trying to get this power cable, I think from Quebec to Boston. And Quebec's very rich in hydro power. Boston could do with this power cable and it's taken 17 years and they haven't got very far and some of it is this environmental law. I think there's rare butterflies and rare fish and things like that. Which again, looking at the tradeoffs you could call them bad actors, but acting in their own self-interest. So it's no good for them for there to be.
Ben (10:49): So I think there was something like another power plant, maybe it was a nuclear power plant there, or other business interests where it wasn't going to be very good for them, even though it could be better for that. And I wonder then in that case, going down to a local level, probably wouldn't really solve that. Also this is sort of transnational but do you think going to a higher level and saying, well, actually look, someone can kind of cut through all of that to do it and would you need to repeal quite a lot of laws? How could you actually work around such a problem?
Alec (11:20): Yeah, I agree. One, it's taking on these kinds of transnational issues. It's taking it to the policy decision making, it's taking it to the national level and saying, this is in our national strategic interest. We have national goals and global goals around climate change and getting more clean energy transmitted across the country. And so, this is why we kind of need to consider tradeoffs across local jurisdictions. And in a sense it's almost like picking winners and losers. It's saying that, this is going to benefit the entire country in a more diffuse way. And so some local interests need to be overruled by a higher level of government. But I think you can think here that as you were describing this question, I think I vaguely heard of this project. You were talking about the hydroelectric transmission lines. I often think of Power Broker [Inaudible:00:12:09], a pretty formative book for me and think about these types of issues describing Robert Moses in the earlier part of the 20th century in New York, all the things he built. Like you wanted to return to an era of building in the United States. Robert Moses would kind of be your guy of actually building roads, bridges, tunnels, all sorts of massive infrastructure projects. But in that book, it's a mix of a hopeful tale and also a cautionary tale because Robert Moses steamrolled minority groups. Most of these bridges and stuff were put through black and brown communities without their input. And it was much more rarely done in rich affluent white communities in New York at the time.
Alec (12:50): And so, that was, again, a more of an anti-democratic approach. He's not going to need the input of the world or lower classes. And I think what we're seeing here is the US policy competition has kind of overshot the mark. So now we're as a much richer society and a much more egalitarian society than maybe 80 years ago, we become too concerned about respecting every single minority interest in any particular area. Minority, I mean like the smallest group and now everyone's terrified and we've implemented all these process safeguards to make sure that we're hearing every element of the community's input but then they're being exploited by incumbent t interests, by concierges and others who have economic interests in keeping things the way they are and are biased against change to exploit those processes. And so I think, before maybe 80 years ago, we weren't listening enough to community input and we were kind of steamrolling people in an inappropriate way, but now we're so scared and we built so many quote unquote safeguards into the process, we don't end up building anything. And so we need to kind of roll it back a bit and find that nice middle ground of can we still do big projects? Can we try to minimize harms to certain communities, but still recognize the big problems we need to solve and big problems involve building big things?
Ben (14:07): And do you think that is tractable as you would put it in your framework called feasible because whatever you are, whether you are a minority group, groups are very reluctant. Any group is very reluctant to give up power and it seems if you look at legislation in Europe or in the US, it's been very hard to roll back and actually you've had some governments who've said, oh, let's try and roll back some of these rules and laws and they actually haven't got very far.
Alec (14:37): Yeah, this is definitely one of the tougher issues and you'll notice that for our think tank, we try to work on issues that are important, tractable and neglected. So you mentioned tractability here. For our first three issues for our think tank, we picked meta science. So, how do we get more breakthrough research, more diversification and experimentation in research for science, policy immigration with a particular focus on high school immigration and biosecurity. So how do we stop future pandemics? And so the reason we didn't start with something like urbanism or housing and transportation is because we do believe it's a bit of a harder problem. And so eventually we'll branch out into that, but we think that it's extremely important. We don't yet have a clear path on tractability. And so that's why we didn't pick it as one of our first three areas, but we will eventually work on it as we find more solutions that we think might be trackable.
Ben (15:27): That makes a lot of sense. And so rolling back one, your sort of founding mission statement essay cites this framework influenced by the effective ultras movement, which I paraphrase as looking at very impactful areas, but also areas that are unresearched and tractable as in politically feasible or actually potentially possible to do. So with that in case, maybe of these three areas that you highlight perhaps you want to talk about why you are looking at those areas, maybe meta science, science of science, or an understanding of how we make progress. And I think in the essay, you've suggested that potentially the incentives are not working as well as they could, and that organizations are perhaps not in the best structures or at least there haven't been any more new structures within the institutions or organizations looking at it. So, maybe what's your diagnosis of the problem here in terms of the science of science and how do you think we might make some progress?
Alec (16:29): Yeah, I think this is a case of a classic-- Through science funding institutions, they just become quite sclerotic. And so it's hard for any institution that's been around for decades and decades and decades to maintain a similar level of output or impact, especially in areas like science that often naturally have diminishing returns. And so, you have to get very creative and experimental to get bigger breakthroughs. And so, I'm thinking of obviously like NIH, NSF, I mean, collectively the US federal government is the largest funder of basic R and D in the world and the military also funds lots of basic R and D. And so, I think the key problem here is that funders, again, through processes, through these long application process, through committees determining who wins grants for certain projects and a crazy statistic is that primary investigators in the United States researchers spend about 45% of their time on documentation like this and preparing applications, which is not doing science per se. And so, that's a huge waste of some of our most talented scientists and researchers, it's a waste of their time. And two, I would say that anytime you have this level of process and bureaucratization set up, there's a chance that it's worth it. There's a chance that this actually helps us pick better projects and you need to spend the time to sort through them to make sure you're funding the right stuff, but we don't actually have evidence that that's true. And this is what meta science is all about. It's about saying let's study the process. Let's make sure that if we're spending almost half of our time on how we pick certain projects and how we fund them, that we're doing that optimally or that actually the juice is worth the squeeze.
Alec (18:03): And so for example, one piece of legislation; a provision we're trying to put into forthcoming legislation is about a scientific lottery. And the idea would be a second chance lottery if you've applied to get a grant with the NSF, for example, and you get denied. Well, you take all the denied applications, put them in a pot, run a lottery, fund a certain small portion of them and then over a longer time horizon compare how impactful that research was versus the research that you picked through your process in the first round of funding. And if it turns out, and this has happened in New Zealand and other countries that have tried this, that the impact is roughly similar for the second chance lottery winners and the first round process winners, then you have to ask yourself what was the process getting us that a lottery couldn't by picking by random chance if they clear some certain minimum threshold of quality. So, that's kind of what we're advocating here is that we need much more experimentation, we need many more new institutions. For example, we think the DARPA model is much more effective than traditional NSF or NIH models where you have program managers that are temporary. I believe they serve five years and then they all leave and they have a lot of control over a small portfolio of ideas, and they can take big bets and make big risks in a way that a committee picking what to fund often wouldn't. And so we think having new institutions with more control and more experimentation is the path forward for science because we're not seeing the breakthroughs that we were 50 years ago, and there are a lot of different reasons for that but I think institutions are a big part of it.
Ben (19:39): Yeah. And I think your point about the lottery is we don't really know whether lotteries might be equal, worse or better, and the evidence might suggest they're about the same. But I suspect when I've looked at it, you get a little bit more of tail bets within lotteries, because if you have an off mainstream idea, by its very nature committees are quite hard to back those ideas. Even if you have one or two backers, it's quite hard to get a majority cause they will be off mainstream and therefore likely higher risk where there's a more even chance in a lottery that you get them and if the chances are you've met the minimum standard, there might be something here. So this is a good segue. I have a question here from Tyler that he suggested and he asks, "How should a nonprofit be run and conceived differently? Why is the world so slow to adjust from that?" So for instance, why there's so few internet first nonprofits, for instance, but essentially why have nonprofits or the structure of organizations really not seemingly evolved as much as where technology and other things have gone?
Alec (20:42): Yeah, that's a fun question and I'll talk about nonprofit think tanks just cause that space I know better and lots of different types of nonprofits that I can't really speak to but it goes into decision making of why Caleb, my co-founder and I decided to start her own think tank is it did seem like there hadn't been updates to the way that think tanks in DC had been run. I think a lot of it's just inertia and institutional momentum. So the reason that all the biggest names in think tanks in DC have been around most of them for decades is because once you get a core donor base, it's very hard to lose them or it's like you reach a certain equilibrium where as long as you're doing a decent job, you'll keep getting the same donors to give you more money a year by year and the brand awareness is worth it in the DC community of like people know what Brookings is. Brookings will be here. Brookings was here 10 years ago. They'll be here 10 years from now. Right. So that kind of stability has its own value, but we looked at it and we said, this is highly inefficient. The way a lot of these organizations are structured we think there are probably two main components to why think tanks need to change. One's on the personnel side and one is on the information distribution side.
Alec (21:52): So, since the advent of the internet since become extremely mainstream in the way that most of us consume most of our information and spend tons of our time, think tanks are still weirdly, mostly oriented around long white papers that are PDFs on the internet. We're often even printed out and handed to staffers on Capitol hill or they do in- person events or during COVID they're doing webinars that have very dubious value in terms of actually influencing the policy debate. So, one of our things is being an internet first and a Twitter first think tank. And so it's thinking like, where is the policy conversation actually happening in the US? It's on Twitter with media professionals in New York and DC and policy makers in DC spending tons of time on there. So making sure that your content is formatted and distributed in a way that can be consumed by those internet native users and then on the personnel side, it's really understanding that there's a lot of bloat in think tank organizations and being very careful about how you hire full-time employees. And so we think that the modern policy wonk or policy professional is really like a multi tool athlete, meaning they're really good at a variety of areas. They're really good at research. They're really good at policy communications. They're really good at outreach if they can talk to staffers directly and explain their ideas and fit their idea to be helpful in the context of piece of legislation or particular rule making. And one, those are very rare skill sets. And so, we're looking for like all stars who we had to pay them more than they might have made previously and they're hard to find, but when you do find them, really hold onto them and then recognize that the internet has dis-intermediated a lot of the communications shops.
Alec (23:29): So, a lot of the big old think tanks have dozens of professionals who work in communications, who are supposed to help promote your ideas, but the best people like Caleb and I found this on our own work, the best people to promote your work is you the person who wrote it. And if you don't have that skill set, it's really hard to teach or have another person come in to do that for you and similarly with government affairs and government outreach staffers are in their twenties and maybe thirties, they like talking to people who are in their twenties and thirties who have done the research and are experts on the issue. They don't want another person intermediating that process for them, who's another voice in the room. That's how a lot of older think tanks handle this. And so we think by structuring a think tank around the policy experts who again are these multi tool athletes and prioritizing the internet for distribution, you can run a much leaner, much more effective organization. And so we've cultivated a donor base for our organization. It cares about policy impact. And so they said, Hey, do what's most effective? Don't worry about cranking out a 40 page white paper if it's not necessary to the process, don't worry about holding a webinar if the webinar is just a deliverable for an external state. It's like, if it doesn't actually help move the needle on policy, don't do it. And so we're highly aligned from top to bottom for that.
Ben (24:42): That's really interesting because it's one of the small theories about why I do the podcast and why I think the podcast is important because people prefer to listen to people directly about their ideas. And perhaps this is sort of slightly one light as in, cause we might not go into the exact details of legislation wording, but they prefer to people hear the ideas out loud and transmit the knowledge of what would be a 40 page white paper, but in five or 10 minutes or speak and then have the more involved discussions and those conversations can actually go around and make more impact in a very resource light type of way, but in a very high impact return, particularly if the idea is really sound and you can express it really well and if you can't do those two things, then you're not likely going to be able to convince the legislator in any case, maybe that picks up on the second area that you suggested of working on, which I guess is the immigration or talent management challenge. And although I think this is kind of US specific because again in the US you point out about liberal democracy, very large country, one of the most influential countries in the world and places like even the UK has a couple of elements of that, but is not as large on the world stage.
Ben (25:56): I do think it's a kind of almost general problem essentially about how do you get the most talented people or people with certain skill sets to the places or companies or organizations where they can most fulfill their potential and therefore systemic potential. And I think you'd argue this is the US for a lot of kinds of people but even interestingly, when you look at the US and some of where it has got immigration it is often tied to a company so you can get sponsored by a company and get there, but the company kind of slightly keeps you. So maybe that was good, but maybe actually you are not the most fulfilled at that type of company, but you kind of can't move company or move things to where you would have the most systemic difference. So in some levels that's like a kind of similar sort of challenge that we have with some of these other things about the systems level versus the individual level. I'm interested sort of why on the immigration or talent problem. What do you think are the kind of things that we should be looking at here?
Alec (26:56): Yeah. And I think you frame that nicely mentioning that a lot of our current high school immigration system is tying individual immigrants to particular companies. They really become indentured servants in that sense where their immigration status is dependent upon their continuing employment with this one company, which is a really perverse kind of a system if you think about it and when we talk about immigration and that framework of importance neglected intractability people often are a little skeptical of immigration and say like, that is not neglected. Lots of people talk about immigration in the US context, it's a very salient, prominent issue and I agree that the overall debate is quite salient and not neglected but there's a subset of high school of immigration we think is neglected. And so often in the US context, there's debate about what to do with Southern border and illegal immigration from central America and from Mexico and that's a whole different debate that we're not going to really focus on as an organization. We think that the high school debate has much more room for bipartisan cooperation. There's a significant number of Republicans who support high school immigration, most Democrats do and people would say, well, if it is good for companies, why aren't companies funding lobbyists to go work in DC on high school immigration? Is this actually a market failure?
Alec (28:22): And to your point, we are experience in Washington, DC is that for companies, for the Microsoft's and apples and Facebooks of the world, the current system doesn't feel that broken because they get to exploit the H1B process. And it's better for them if the immigrants who come to the US are tied to those individual companies. And so it's really a competitive advantage and startups can't afford to hire those lawyers to help potential workers navigate the H1B process. And so it's not clear to us that the current large incumbent t companies are dissatisfied with how immigration is run in the us. And so we think there is a role for organizations like ours to say, Hey, let's think about how do we get a startup visa in the United States for entrepreneurs to come and build their own companies in the United States like other countries like the UK have? How do we make sure that we are proactively recruiting the smartest minds in the world at cutting edge fields to come to the US. Again, the UK is an example here of going out and finding students from top universities to migrate to the US. One last example I'll do here is that in the US, we have the 01 visa for immigrants extraordinary ability but it's never been clearly defined. What does extraordinary ability mean? It's an uncap temporary visa program.
Alec (29:40): So, an administration could leverage that visa to bring a lot more talented individuals to the US but you need to have guidance for that. And so, the Biden administration just a few weeks ago released extra guidance for that. We hope to see them use it as a much stronger tool, because ,again, it's an uncapped temporary visa program and then simultaneously working behind the scenes to increase the number of permanent visa programs. Like how do we get an uncap green card visa program for for example, stem graduates and technical talent. So that's how we're thinking about it and we think there's a segment that's neglected that we believe has high potential.
Ben (30:18): Sure. And that's interesting from the UK perspective, essentially a high skill program has been, or is being established and there hasn't really been that much pushback. So you think immigration is a hot button topic and it is essentially being pushed through where people are like, okay, so that's actually been slightly surprised to some particularly actually on the UK, cause you look at some of these net migration figures and numbers and you go, oh, well actually it's not necessarily low skilled from places in Eastern Europe, but you were replacing that with high skilled from actually anywhere in the world. And so you're still getting the numbers in, but it's with a different system. And so if I heard you correctly, the three kinds of ideas you have in this type of area would be something easier for startups or smaller companies like startup visas or things like that. And then something a little bit more widely to help stem green cards or essentially something like that, which would be a little bit more diffuse. And the last one was just if you have got talent, however, defined again, making it easier to come to the US. Did I get those kinds of three ideas, right? Or is there anything you'd want to add?
Alec (31:28): Yeah, I think those are basically right. I mean, again for the US context, another way to bucket these ideas is like legislative reform and executive action reform and those had their own different tradeoffs, right? So legislative reform is harder to accomplish. It's a longer process but if you can pass it, it's a much more durable solution to the problem. And on executive action, you have more discretion and leeway in implementing new rules. But if, you know, Biden does something this year and he loses reelection in 2024, a Republican can come in and change those on the executive side. So, it's less durable in that sense but the one other specific idea I'll talk about is that currently, it's now called the make it in America act, it's going through Congress. It was previously called and started out as the endless frontier act, then became the United States innovation competition act. In the house, it was the America compete act. We're very bad at naming things. The names are changing a lot, but now it's called the make it an America act. And this is mostly about a science and industrial policy bill. There's a lot of stuff really to semiconductors and we can debate the merits of those things. There's some good stuff, some bad stuff. But the best part of this bill is actually related to immigration and it involves an uncap green card for stem graduates in critical industries and includes both master students and PhD students or PhD degree holders. And we think it'll be amazing. This is how you create the uncapped talent pipeline for international talent.
Alec (32:57): It's having a temporary visa like the 01 that you use much more aggressively And then it's having uncap green card spots for stem graduates. And so, that's the kind of like getting the executive part correct and the legislative part that really can unlock big results for the United States.
Ben (33:17): Great. And would you want to touch on why you think the United States, the US should be a kind of magnet for this? So you could argue that somewhere like the UK also has liberal democracy and high schooled immigration. I guess you could argue somewhere like India and China have population power resource and GDP power. But I think you make a specific argument that the US is still the country, which kind of has all three elements that you'd kind of want to see.
Alec (33:45): Yeah. I think, yeah, the key thing is it's great if immigrants move to Canada, the UK, Australia, some of our liberal democratic allies that we believe share our values and are on the cutting edge of a lot of different fields, but the US is really in the league of its own in terms of economic power and being immigrant friendly while being a liberal democracy. And we think that, especially in science and technology kind of glomeration effects are so strong and there's a lot of good economic research to back this up, that when you put a researcher or a scientist in the largest cluster of their field, it's much more productive and physical interaction still matters a lot even in the age of zoom and a lot of internet collaboration. And so putting that scientist in San Francisco, in New York in Boston is really, really important for increasing their productivity. And so, it's much better if the next genius from Nigeria moves from Nigeria to the UK, but it's even better if they move to the US rather than the UK. And so we view the US as the global provider of public goods in a lot of these areas. And so research is often hard to gate it or control it. And so once a big idea is discovered in the United States, it diffuses across the world. And a lot of these tools or platforms that are built in the US are used by people around the world.
Alec (35:14): And so, if we just care about global impact, having the smartest minds based in the US and working in the US, often is the way to achieve that and I would just say in terms of China, we think they're the most plausible alternative to the US being the global leader in science and technology and we believe there's a lot of path dependence in technology. And if a technology is birthed and developed in an authoritarian regime it's going to change how the technology develops, how other countries use it, what are the values that it promotes? And we were very concerned about what Chinese leadership in a lot of these areas would mean for the rest of the world.
Ben (35:53): Great. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense in terms of the impact, because we are seeing in an intangible world and a technology first world, the spillovers from that technology are massive. I think there's some suggestion that the inventors of some of these original technologies maybe make 1%, 2% or 5% of their overall value, and everyone else gets 90, 95 percent of a lot of these. So, maybe turning to your idea on biosecurity, I'm interested why you would choose biosecurity, which I think would be things like manmade, lab made viruses and the like over maybe some other existential risk factors that people talk about in terms of say nuclear war or some people are worried about AI, some other people are worried about climate. I could see that you could say, oh, climate, a lot of people are working on it. So maybe not as under researched, although there's a lot there. What made you think about biosecurity and how do you think about typical existential risk factors, which is a little bit within the mission statement that you have?
Alec (36:54): Yeah, it's definitely in our mission statement. That's definitely what we mean by safeguarding humanity's future. We're trying to accelerate technological and scientific progress, but we need to safeguard the future and not accidentally increase the odds of existential risk or catastrophic risk in these areas. So first one area I'll start which you mentioned is climate change. That's probably what we are expanding over time, that's the likeliest next candidate for us is a climate and energy person to hire. And we will weigh on those debates. And so Caleb and I are constantly reading in this area interested. We believe it's like you said, a little less neglected, but extremely important and it is tractable in the sense that Congress is often passing provisions that are relevant to climate issues. And so, maybe not a single climate change bill happens, but we are making slow more quiet progress on that topic and I'll also say that there's a lot of attention from the activist community on climate change, but there's an underrated element. Our thesis basically is that if we're going to mitigate the effects of climate change, it's going to be a technological solution. So, it's about making major advances in nuclear geothermal battery technology to make solar and wind more viable because they're intermittent sources of energy. It's about having huge breakthroughs in carbon capture technology to mitigate the effects of carbon that's already in the atmosphere and certain elements of the heavy industry are just going to be extremely difficult to decarbonize. And so maybe we can still use natural gas to power those small percentage of the economy, but then use carbon capture to make sure that we're actually hitting net zero emissions.
Alec (38:34): So, we think those technological solutions are the answer. We think that if we overshoot the mark and we actually fail in climate change, we need to have geoengineering backups. So again, more of a technological solution to the problem, and all this de-growth mindset of we'll just use less and consume less, we think those are basically doom strategies that a lot of the policy community is still promoting. We think it's a mistake. We think that carbon taxes while they're a perfectly economically sensible solution, and I would vote for a carbon tax tomorrow to help address the problem, we think that they're extremely unpopular in practice. Referendums in the US on carbon taxes always fail. In other countries where they're able to implement a carbon tax, they are often repealed later by a future government. So we just think that for the political economy of the question of climate change, a carbon tax is not going to happen and we're wasting energy on it to try to push that as a solution. And it's much better to subsidize and strategically invest in clean tech options. So as you can see, we're very excited about it. We're thinking about it a lot. It'll be an area for us to go back to biosecurity. We think that it has a tractable moment because of COVID where it's obviously important and it's been neglected for years but this is an opportunity where there is focus on it and an openness to investing in pandemic preparation efforts and new technologies.
Alec (39:53): And so, that's why we were investing in it heavily as a team and then for the other areas like AI, we just don't think that we have much to add to the bait and there is in the effect of [Inaudible 00:40:01] community, a lot of investment in that right now. If you talk to people who work in these [Inaudible 00:40:06], they don't have actionable next steps to reduce AI risk we should do X. They're often just like, if you did X, it might make the problem worse. And so therefore we can't even barely talk about it in public. It's like an info hazard to talk about it. So that makes it very difficult for us as the boots on the ground in DC trying to implement these ideas. It just doesn't seem like the AI alignment community has enough consensus on what the solution is for us to be helpful in that. So, we're waiting, we're watching and waiting on AI as a particular one and then on nuclear security again, and also very important. I don't think we as co-founders have unique insight into that area, we don't feel that we yet have a strategy of how to reduce the risk of nuclear conflict.
Ben (40:48): Sure. So that brings up two things, one on the carbon tax and another following up on the biosecurity. Carbon tax, so I recently spoke to Chris Stark, who's the leading policy thinker here in the UK. He's the CEO of the climate change committee and he agrees broadly with what you said that actually there's maybe an over focus on carbon tax to your point, essentially, it's not politically tractable, but you could get it via sector specific ways of doing it, innovation, subsidies and that one. So, the cleverest policy people that I tend to speak to or listen to do seem to be following that pathway. On biosecurity then, it's interesting. So you are talking really about pandemic preparedness for you is that things like having quick ability to scale up manufacturing and facilities and having the science and essentially having to call them agile organizational structures and institutions ready to go. So you've got that kind of institutional governance knowledge, or is it partly on the science and things or what are you thinking about the aspects of biosecurity that you think we should be investing in and we could do so.
Alec (41:58): Yeah, the manufacturing capacity is a big part of it. We're still talking internally and developing what we think is the optimal solution. But a big theme we talk about is the importance of effective medical countermeasures. So things like vaccines and therapeutics. In the US context at least-- other countries did a bit better than we did, but in the US context, non-pharmaceutical interventions just flat out failed, like getting people to comply with social distancing and masking and other improving just fighting respiratory how do you contain this respiratory diseases and not that effective of a solution. We can hardly get people to take vaccines. And so the framework I'm thinking about in my mind is we need our solutions for pandemic preparation to be less focused on things that depend on a high uptake among the general population. We need to give people tools to protect themselves from future pandemics. And so, what that means is things like vaccines and therapeutics, that if you opt into taking them as an individual, you can protect yourself and your family. It may means things like advanced PPE, where instead of masks, you know, cloth masks being less than 50% effective, and you really need everybody in the room to be wearing the same cloth mask, what if we had much more effective masks that were 99% effective, even better than the N 95 masks that were comfortable and easy to wear, you know, not just for medical professionals. That kind of advanced PPE, where again, if you are the only one wearing it and no one else is wearing it, you're still likely mostly protected.
Alec (43:29): Those are the kind of solutions that we think are much more likely to be implementable in the United States and not lead to this failure where if you don't get buy-in from greater than 80% of the population, then your total strategy is going to fail. And so, yeah, and for vaccines, that means having platforms and manufacturing capacity ready to go. We think the operation warp speed was the biggest success of the entire pandemic and not enough people in DC talk about to this day and that's about combining private sector risk taking and government purchasing power and saying we guarantee, and we know that pandemics are uncertain. How many more variants will there be in a year? How many cases will there be in the US and around the world? The private sector is rationally wary of making huge investments that might not pay off because the pandemic might end sooner than they thought, or people might not purchase what they want to sell. And so having government purchase guarantees of saying, if you create a safe and effective vaccine, we will buy a hundred million doses from your company. If you create an effective therapeutic, we will buy 200 million doses from your company of that antiviral. That is a, in our opinion, beautiful combination of government purchasing power to deliver public goods to the country and private sector risk taking and innovation to actually figure out what works to achieve those ends.
Ben (44:49): Sure. And I've heard Caleb talk about advanced purchased commitments to these ideas, and they have worked actually over time in many therapy areas. It even works for malaria today. Those organizations say, you know, you invented malaria treatment, whatever, we'll buy 2 billion worth because the huge return is more than that, I have to say on a global basis, so slightly disappointed that, again, if you could think about a global systemic return, which obviously we can't because we're nation states then actually purchasing a lot of this and distributing it to the world might have cost you a hundred billion, but you would've had a trillion return. So if you were the kind of rational economist for the world that you would do, but you couldn't gather together enough actors to get the hundred billion in order to see the kind of trillion, it's probably more than a trillion return globally. And so you might be right, like if it has to work at the level of a nation state, it has to be within the capacity for that nation state for people to protect it. And you can't rely on getting even 60%, 70%, 90%, even 50%, maybe of people to go to, cause people are going to have different political ideas on it.
Ben (45:58): So I guess putting that all together, there's a lot of talk about what I guess, a right leaning thinker might call state capacity, libertarianism, that type of thing. And what a left leaning thinker seems to be calling supply side progressiveness or things like that. But when you take the label away from it, it does seem to be kind of pointing at the same sort of thing. So it's kind of interesting that if you're kind of left leaning, right leaning, even sort of quite far within that you are merging on some of these ideas. And do you think potentially that they have more in common than what ideology would suggest then, is this the kind of bucket that you are aiming for being that actually you can get people on both sides to kind of agree because the game plan, the aim is what everyone wants and actually the kind of game plan shifts between the two, even though they might label it slightly differently. It still kind of walks like a duck, have I read that right? I don't know because the terminology seems relatively new on both sides to it having just been coined. What's your thoughts?
Alec (47:03): Yeah. I a hundred percent agree with that and this is really-- this is the community. We want to speak to you and represent you. We have friends, we're friends with Ezra Klein and people who read him as he coined the supply side, progressivism or liberalism and obviously Tyler Cowen is a longtime supporter of ours with his state capacity libertarianism. I really do think these are the same themes or same ideas and part of why we think this moment is coming together there's a lot of different reasons, but especially from the liberal and progressive side, I think we are finally experiencing an overheating or overshooting economy where, you know, in the US context again, but is true for a lot of other countries, in the 15 years since the great recession for the most of that time aggregate demand had seemed to be below aggregate supply in our economy and we seemed to be just undershooting the mark. A lot of economists were saying that the natural weight of unemployment was six and a half percent. No, it's five and a half percent. No, it's four and half. Like we just kept realizing like, oh, there was much more capacity in the economy to grow and absorb more demand. That's been the narrative for the last 15 years, and it's been surprising in that direction. And now we've kind of gone the other direction where we have 7% inflation. We have a rapidly following unemployment rate and an overheating economy with these supply chain issues and bottlenecks throughout the economy. And I think what Ezra Klein, especially on the liberal progressive side, but people across the spectrum are realizing is that this is the moment for targeted deregulation and investments in supply-side ideas.
Alec (48:38): And if we do that, we can achieve more progressive goals because right now just pouring more money into the problem, more subsidies will just lead to more inflation and higher costs, but actually won't get us more of the real goods and services that we desperately want. And so I think, you know, an analogy here is that part of what drove-- I mean, people think in the US context of Ronald Reagan as the great deregulator, if you look at the history, actually most of the most important deregulation moves were under Carter in the 1970s. And why was Jimmy Carter so open to the idea of deregulating as a Democrat? It was because they had a huge inflation problem and I think similarly, this inflation issue we're facing today of again, 7% inflation will lead people to realize that, okay, now is the time for deregulation in certain areas and cost cutting measures that make the economy more efficient and hopefully delivering a lot of these progressive ends that we care about achieving.
Ben (49:31): Sure. That makes a lot of sense, now's the time. I guess, on a systems wide level I read I guess maybe more left thinkers, although it is in the right as well, talk about a kind of worry on trust and also polarization. I heard some disputes as to exactly how that is, but the trusting comes up polarization perhaps a little bit more debated and then you have thinkers like Tyler Cowen and also others suggesting that culture is very upstream from a lot of these things. I guess that's a systems level thing, humans following their tribe or whatever the culture is. To what incense do you think this sort of trusting culture thing is a challenge and is it something that you think you can work on through policy or you just going to have to skip around the fact that these do seem to be challenges for getting things done?
Alec (50:23): Yeah, I think this is definitely one of the hardest issues to address because I agree, I believe trust and culture are more bottoms up phenomenon. You can't really be controlled in any direct way from a top down perspective. And so as a policy person it's a harder problem to solve. I would actually go back to immigration as one of the best opportunities we have here to influence culture in the long run and this is really the history of the United States. It's that as a country of immigrants, we get this nice selection affect where people who move from-- I was actually reading just recently about this is one interpretation of why the US became much more culturally individualistic and more oriented towards free markets than Europe is because the type of immigrants that left Europe to come to the United States are selecting themselves because they're risk taking, they're entrepreneurial, they're willing to start a new life. That's still true today. That's still true when we get immigrants from Africa and Asia and South America, like the kind of person who's able to make it through our terrible immigration system is highly motivated and highly open to taking risks. And so I think by bringing more of those kinds of people to the United States in the long run, they often have higher fertility rates than native born people in the US. And so I think a lot of that culture will continue to bubble up as we bring in new fresh voices and individuals to the US. So, that's one take on it, but in general, I would say that yeah, culture is a very hard phenomenon to influence directly and art and things like that are very important, but not necessarily our expertise.
Ben (52:01): [Inaudible:00:52:01] Also puts a lot of emphasis on the value of travel and I guess I have a question about why you're based in Washington, DC. In one way it's obvious because that's policy world, and you can take a little office there and in some ways you've made the argument that you are actually based on the internet rather than a particular place. So I'm interested, is there anything special about the cultural place of Washington DC and also hang on, do you think there's anything you've learned growing up in Arizona or your experience outside there that you'd add into the geographic question?
Alec (52:41): Yeah. I think the culture and place is really important. So, we felt like we had to be based in DC for a variety of reasons. One, we genuinely believe that US policy matters for the world and it's the most important place to be doing national level policy. And so, this is the place where a lot of people have taken or tried to influence policy in DC from afar. They're not necessarily based here. We think it's much more effective to be in DC because it's not just about the internet, it's the complementarities between having a recognizable presence on Twitter and on other places on the internet, on blogs, podcasts, et cetera, but then also being able to in person meet with people in DC and build trust and build relationships because that is the culture of DC. That's what was true 50 years ago, it's true today. Things happen in DC based on interpersonal relationships that are built over years and years of face to face communication. And so, you need to be able to-- if you want to actually influence the DC policy making process, you need to at the drop of a hat to grab coffee, grab a drink after work with someone, really share information. It's amazing how fractured and fragmented the information ecosystem is in DC. You get lots of stuff, not just from reading, you know, the latest newsletter from Politico or other sources, you get it from eating in person with someone and sharing live information about how a bill is going on Capitol Hill and what your odds of success for influencing that process are.
Alec (54:09): And so, you have to be here to have that in person communication, and that is the culture of DC for better and for worse and as a person from Arizona just real quick on that, I would say that it's helped me stay bubble a bit of, you know, people who grow up in New York or DC or Boston go to an Ivy league school and never really experience what the rest of America is like. It really is something about coming from a purple state, like Arizona that has Democrats Republicans, a little more conservative. I have friends and family back home who I can kind of test messaging with and be like, so how do you feel about this issue or does this makes sense for your community? It just kind of gets you out of the east coast bubble a bit that can help you remember what actually is feasible in politics and policy.
Ben (54:56): Yeah, I agree. I guess there's a glomeration effect essentially to policy spillover by being with lots of policy people. But I do think having traveled a bit around America and just traveled generally, that on the ground being outside your bubble is really helpful if you can get it. Well, I guess in honor of Tyler, I thought we'd play a little overrated/underrated if you want to. So you can also do--
Alec (55:17): Let's do it.
Ben (55:18): --Obviously Normal rated. We've actually covered a couple of these topics, but maybe you could clarify on some of them. So overrated, underrated, carbon tax,
Alec (55:31): Carbon tax, overrated. I'm trying to think if there is anything I want to add to that. I would just say that, yeah, we're extremely sympathetic that like as economists, this is the best idea. I wish I lived in a world where we could pass the carbon tax, if so, I would make our number one priority for climate change, but it is just not going to happen. If you look at the cross sectional and time series data on how people around the world view energy prices and food prices, the highest input on food prices is often energy prices. Like it's the most important thing, like why do banana Republic dictators often have price controls on gas prices and food prices? It's because it's so important in selling it to people. That's how they try to maintain public opinion. That's why they throw tons of subsidies at it. It's because people are extremely sensitive to the price of gasoline and heating for their homes and food on their table and it's unfortunate that there's not much room to impose a carbon tax that would increase the price of those things but we have to think realistically and pragmatically, and that means subsidizing, using more carrots than sticks and subsidizing the types of clean technology that create an abundant energy future that everyone kind of wants to move towards anyway.
Ben (56:47): Great. So zoning laws or planning laws.
Alec (56:52): Zoning laws or planning laws. I would say overrated. I'm trying to think about how to frame the perspective on this one, but they are overrated in the sense that like you don't need them as much as people might think, they're underrated as like-- In our circles, it sounds like we get to meet a lot of the same people. Everyone talks to them all the time, but it really is like at the end of the day, the most important thing-- Like there's the Sia Emery paper that famously shows [Inaudible:00:57:22] on construction over the last 50 years in the US, aggregate growth would've been 50% higher. This is just like the most important thing. And so relaxing zone regulations is probably the most important thing we could do, even if it's politically difficult.
Ben (57:39): Yeah. There's an interesting thing about the built environment, at least the outside facings, because there's a lot of debate as to whether that's better today than a hundred years ago and people are saying maybe not. But also we spend so much more on our interiors, right? So we have a lot more interior value. Then why are we so much more restrictable on what we let people build on the outside? It's kind of strange, but I can see that. Okay, overrated/ underrated crypto, maybe more specifically Bitcoin, but what do you think about crypto in general?
Alec (58:12): This is interesting. I would say that crypto is probably still overrated. For a long time, I was an extreme skeptic of crypto. I read too much Matt Levine. If any of your listeners read Matt Levine at Bloomberg Matt has had a long series, he writes a daily newsletter on all finance issues. Of course it touches on crypto and you did see it persuaded me for a long time. Crypto was just speed running the last 200 years of financial innovation regulation. They were just recreating a lot of the same utility, but also running the same problems of like, here's why you don't want self-custody of all your assets and then if it gets stolen from you, you have no recourse from reversing those transactions or combating fraud, et cetera. There's a reason we develop the systems we did, even if they have a lot of cost to them. So Matt basically convinced me of that, but as I learn from out the community sort of reading the [Inaudible:00:59:07] and blog more, looking into the potential of Ethereum. I read an amazing essay on medium. I forget who the author was just explaining why Bitcoin in particular is a better digital gold. And if you look at the properties of what gold promises to deliver, it's better than almost every single dimension. And then you just run the numbers and you're like, what's the total global market value of gold? What's the total global market value of Bitcoin. If it substitutes all that value and a bit more, because it's more useful, what would Bitcoin be worth?
Alec (59:36): And so, I think there are all these narrow use cases for Bitcoin and Ethereum that are compelling, that are going to stick around but if you ask me will this replace all big tech apps and they'll become decentralized crypto versions of those. I'm still a little bit skeptical because for developing complex UI, UX platforms, it seems like you do need a pretty hierarchical decision making process. You need a CEO. Who's like, this is what it's going to look like, here's what the team of a thousand engineers is going to build and trying to do that from a consensus based process. I don't yet see the path forward of how you would do that. There are too many little decisions that matter a lot for the end user experience that I don't understand how a consensus based process would work, but maybe, I'm still learning a lot.
Ben (01:00:21): And we like someone to blame. So I guess that's overrated by the crypto bros, but maybe a little bit underrated or at least your rating has gone up over time. And I agree, Matt Levine, Matt Levine's interesting. I think he's one of the most interesting financial commentators on crypto and he's also one of the most interesting commentators on what we call ESG environment, social governance and sustainability issues through, again, through a legal and finance lens, which is kind of incredible, which are two of the biggest kind of movements within investment there. Okay. So overrated, underrated, the concept of rogue AI?
Alec (01:01:01): I'll have to say it's overrated just because I don't fully understand it and, again, I'm still reading and learning about this, but people who are worried about rogue AI, they run the numbers and they're just like, this is the most important thing in the world for anyone to work on and it's almost like it's unimportant toward anything else and I'm not yet persuaded that's the case. I think at least through a lens of moral uncertainty, we should have a more diversified approach to some people should work on AI stuff, some people should work on pandemic stuff, some people should work on global public health and wellbeing issues. And so, the people who work on it, they're just so bought in, but they haven't persuaded me that it's likely enough or that there are solutions to this problem that are retractable or feasible that wouldn't make it worse than it's worth pursuing. And so, I have to say it's overrated because if it weren't overrated, we would have full-time staff members working on it, we would be spending more time on it but yeah, I'm just not yet sold even though I'm glad someone's working on it.
Ben (01:02:03): Yeah. Overrated, at least for you, otherwise you'd be working on it. Great. Animal welfare?
Alec (01:02:10): Super underrated and this is one where again, I think the political economy part of it is so important. The average American does not care at all about animal welfare. If it's not a dog, their personal dog, they do not care at all. But I think from a moral calculus perspective, it's super important. And so creating policy solutions that reduce animal suffering while being politically palatable is very important. And so I'm thinking of like fake meat, for example. Once artificial meat is tastier and cheaper and healthier than traditional meat, everyone will use it and not for animal welfare reasons, but just because it's tastier cheaper and healthier. And so investing in using [Inaudible:01:02:56] policy investment to accelerate those technologies and make them better, make them happen faster, I'm fully supportive of those. Those are the kind of solutions that work; moral scolding and shaming people and guilting them in my experience and based on the research I read does not seem to work be effective, especially for a very low priority issue for most people like animal welfare. So, I think it's extremely important and again from an EA utilitarian perspective, you run the numbers on how many billions and billions and billions of farm animals there are, not even to getting into wild animal welfare. There are huge gains to be had from minimizing suffering in our factory farm conditions. And so, I'm optimistic there.
Ben (01:03:36): Great. Charter cities or new cities in general?
Alec (01:03:41): Underrated, not enough people are trying them. This is a very fresh conversation for me cause I was chatting with Caleb about this yesterday. We have a friend who I can't name, but someone who's working in tech right now where their entire goal is to just make a ton of money in this software company to then go build their own charter city. And so, we were talking about his ideas for this and I think within the charter cities community, it's overrated to go to developing country and get an autonomous legal designation; like saying the rules of this country don't apply, we're going to write your entire own constitution and we have our own rule of law here. I think that's overrated because the reality on the ground is that as a charter city, you need to be under the security umbrella of someone. And so long as you depend on a foreign military to protect you, you are de facto subject to their laws or their whims. And so, I think charter cities like within the United States or within the UK or within Europe they have the same rule of law, but they're starting from scratch. They like you go to an uninhabited area and you build a university, you build a new town center you get the incentives right to attract venture capitalists and entrepreneurs. I think that starting from clean slate is very attractive. There are a lot of variables to get right. This person that Caleb was talking about thinks the university is the key, building a world class university first and then radiating out from there to build the entire city would be one of the breakthrough mechanisms. And so, I'm optimistic.
Alec (01:05:06): I think more people should try it. I think that the founder, Mark, I don't know if you've read about Mark Morey, he founded multiple e-commerce companies that got bought by Amazon and Walmart and now I think he's using all of his money to start something, I want to say it in Nevada or Texas. I think that's cool. It's an exciting way to use your billions of dollars that could have a huge impact and if someone got it right, then we could replicate it. This is an example of being experimental and testing the model and then once it works, you can scale it up to the rest of the world.
Ben (01:05:38): Yeah. I've flip flopped on this one. I'm currently learning a little bit more people first over place. Obviously, they intersect, but here in the UK, we've had a lot on trying to create these zones and things and the problem is you need sort of 27 or 11 billion different little ingredients to really spark it. So I think universities are a definite core ingredient and maybe foundational, but can you get the other 23 things which go alongside a university? I don't know, but if you give people the autonomy, say through immigration or however they seem to coalesce around the places which kind of need it and the cluster seems to emerge that way, where the preconditions are maybe already there. I'm slightly more optimistic about reinvigorating cities, which were definitely great beforehand because actually the remains of infrastructure are still potentially more valuable than we think cause it actually doesn't take that much to re kickstart particularly the physical infrastructure, which was built a 100, 150 years ago seemed to be planned. There's something about it, which is actually quite easy to restart that we've seen but yeah, I don't know. A couple more on overrated/underrated innovation agencies. You mentioned a couple already. We have one here in the UK, you have Aria - They all have these acronyms, which are really hard to remember but essentially innovation agencies of some form.
Alec (01:07:09): Yeah, I would say as of now they're overrated and this is part of you know, I think for individuals maybe shaming doesn't work, but hopefully for institutions it might work a little better. I think they need to be more self-critical and there needs to be more public criticism of them because they have slowed down or become more stagnant or sclerotic. I think this is the primary role of private science initiatives in the United States right now with the Arc Institute in the bay area that Patrick Collinson and others just started. There's the activate initiative, which is about filling the gap between someone getting their PhD, but not being ready to start a startup company. Can we give them a few years of funding in an academic lab to really take a shot there with their big idea. There are lots of these private sector science initiatives that are great and I hope they work, but they're not really at this scale to make global impact, I would say, across a wide variety of domains. And so, the real utility of those private science initiatives is to demonstrate to them a model that works. And then we view our job at the Institute of Progress in DC to help take those learnings from the private initiatives and apply them to federal innovation agencies and scale them up to the global level. And so, I'm excited about that. There are lots of principles and learnings that can happen from that do need to be scaled up and we'll see how they go.
Ben (01:08:34): Do you think it's easier to bring those learnings to agencies or organizations which already exist or would it be better or easier to create new agencies which don't have the hierarchy and culture that were already incumbent t, but also don't have resources and history which go along with that?
Alec (01:08:56): We're still testing out this idea, but we think it's actually a mix of the two, which is creating new offices within existing agencies. And so it's really hard to start a new agency, first of all. So, to get the funding for it and institutional buy, it's very, very hard to start a new agency. Less difficult to start a new office and then the goal is to get all the benefits of a new agency while keeping it within this office. So the idea is like, for example, the CDC has not done great during the pandemic. It'd be nice if we had-- cause it's more of a research academic agency than it is actually a public health controlling diseases kind of agency. So, CDC is based in Atlanta, Georgia in the United States. If they had a different office in a different city with its own leadership structure, its own incentives starting from scratch, it was about surveillance of new viruses and they were investing in wastewater surveillance and all sorts of ambient technology for monitoring new diseases and kickstarting the counteracting process once we've identified a new virus, that would be great. And then that small office could grow over time and then maybe in the longer run, maybe 25 years from now, that office is actually more important than the parent organization, and it's disrupted internally by the larger organization to where it matters more. But that's the model we think would actually work and not radically disrupt the current equilibrium because again, in DC, the status quo has a lot of stakeholders who don't want to see much change. And so, you need to be very subtle and careful with how you upset that equilibrium.
Ben (01:10:37): I haven't had that idea, but instinctively that I think could work and I see it reflected in private business. So Google alphabet creates Waymo for cars. It looks like it was easier to do that than necessarily start a whole new venture, so they can piggyback off that, but it's operating a lot. Or even, you think about Stripe, they have a lot of different ventures, but they have something like Stripe Press. I mean, essentially that's kind of publishing with a lot of different things in that, but it's within the kind of Stripe umbrella, so you can get a lot of benefits from that. So yeah, I do see that. Last one on overrated/underrated remote working.
Alec (01:11:17): Remote work I'm going to go overrated. I used to be even more skeptical of it. I would say that I've been surprised by the pandemic, how well it's gone. Someone pointed out recently that if you read quarterly earnings reports for the last two years of private sector companies, these are public companies, obviously none of them mention that we're doing really poorly this quarter because remote work has been harder than we expected. They're all mentioning supply chain issues and dealing with inflation and things like that but no one's saying our workforce is surprisingly unproductive based on remote work. We're trying our best to get them back in the office as soon as possible. If anything it's the other direction. We've constantly just been delaying, delaying, delaying return to office, which if it weren't going well, you wouldn't really see that, I don't think. And so, it's gone better than I thought, but I still think in the long run, I still think it's overrated because agglomeration effects matter so much. I think for running a scaled mature business it's possible to do remote work cause you're just implementing processes that are already in place, but for doing any kind of zero to one innovation, it really is about late nights in the office, team camaraderie, building that culture, sharing ideas, chance innovation, things like that that I think you just can't replicate over zoom.
Alec (01:12:34): And so, I'm very worried about like 10 years ago there would be a team of people at Google, a team of engineers working on an issue. They would realize, oh, this is a better idea for a startup. We should leave Google together. You need high trust to make that decision to leave an incumbent t and go do a startup. I don't think you can build that level of trust over zoom. The reason Caleb and I left our previous think tank and started our own think tank is because we've been friends for multiple years. We've been in the office every day together, spending hours a day, working on policy issues. We developed high trust with each other and we thought this is a person who could be a co-founder for a new institution with me. And so, I think that kind of thing is what we're losing with remote work and I don't see yet how the internet can replace that fully.
Ben (01:13:18): Yeah, there are these debates. So I think for instance, Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan's been on the record with this, that actually you can get some benefits, but he would still like some more people in the office and some of the more creative R and D type industries. For instance, I heard the CEO of [Roche] say similarly that you need some sort of office culture because of this creativity and the trust needed, albeit you can get some advantages from some of the remote work. So it'll be interesting to see how that goes. So, last couple of questions here. So, you talked about policy ideas, which are tractable and obviously in your areas of expertise but I was going to propose if you had maybe one, two or three or however many you might like policy idea. It could be in your area, but it could be outside your area, but is not necessarily tractable. So this is kind of your magic policy idea. What would be the one or two that you would suggest is like okay, I know this is kind of crazy impossible now because no one really likes it, or we don't really have the things for it and it might be a kind of tail ideas, it might not even really work or things, but this is the kind of left field one that I would want people to explore.
Alec (01:14:36): Hmm. I need to take a second to think about that; crazy idea, left fields, not tractable.
Ben (01:14:42): It doesn't have to be necessarily crazy, but it's just not necessarily tractable. So, you're working on these tractable ones. So I guess this has come from, you know, these are the lessons that science fiction can teach us, or these are the lessons that art and creativity can teach us because science fiction tells us, oh, well, that's sort of impossible or you think it's impossible, but there are lessons to be learned by imagining something which isn't viable now, or doesn't seem to be viable, but actually has the germs of the catalyst of an idea, so I thought I'd post it. It doesn't have to have anything, but I just thought, you know what? I came across this idea and I just know it wouldn't be possible, but this is something that science fiction tells me, or this is something that I just think would be worth exploring, even though I wouldn't be able to get any mainstream funding to do it because it's just not there. This is something you need to put in your lottery application because your committee is going to reject it, but you got a one in a hundred chance that you get a second chance.
Alec (15:36): Yeah. Maybe I'll go for space exploration issues. Pretty fascinating that I learned recently was that NASA and space exploration weren't even popular. People think about the golden age of space exploration is the fifties and sixties of going to the moon for the first time. And this is the heyday of NASA. I saw a polling recently that it wasn't even popular back then. It was more of an elite project. I think if you ask people in the public should we be spending this much money on space exploration relative to other issues of national importance, it polled extremely poorly and then of course today there's a lot of narratives around billionaires going to space and we need to first solve poverty and healthcare inequalities, et cetera, et cetera, before we do anything in space. And I think both for EA reasons of colonizing the galaxy and spreading out and be a multi-planetary species is important. Also, I think it's important from an optimistic vision setting perspective of it's the final frontier of we've explored most of earth, now it's time to explore other planets and stars. And so, I think a massive investment in interplanetary travel technologies to enable that, the James Webb space telescope; super inspiring, very cool to see NASA successfully so far get that off the ground. But if I'm being realistic, I don't think it's tractable because I think it would be politically unstable to invest that kind of money. I think people are too narrow minded about a lot of these issues and they wouldn't see the value in it. And so, I don't advocate for it in my work because I think-- and I know people share my interest in seeing us achieve these great things that people would say, this is a waste of money or time. So, it's unfortunate.
Ben (01:17:28): I can see that. I'd vote for it. I'd probably go for oceans before space, but I actually would do oceans and then space just cause oceans are slightly nearer and we still, you know, what's it called? The Mariana Trench. We know nothing about it. So there's a lot that we don't know here, but it's the same idea that this exploration frontier-- It's probably as expensive to do oceans as space actually. So, I'm not sure you get the cost saving. I flip flop on the two I have in my mind at the moment. Actually Patrick Collins has written a little bit about this. One is really exploring a different way of teaching and learning and my unattractable policy would be say in the UK and the US you give an open kind of lottery to-- If you are this person, we are going to give you a 1% chance to that. If you want to have three or four person, small group learning with a, I call them an elite set of teachers, but a set of teachers or tutors who we know are meant to be really good. But you gather together these set of teachers and you gather an obviously self-selecting group of students who like, okay, we're going to forget traditional school and we're just going to go to these three or four groups and we're going to learn in a completely different way, probably off curriculum.
Ben (01:18:54): So we'll learn about whatever this group wants to learn. Can you get like a 10 X or a hundred X return from these type of people, because you've just something radical, which actually is kind of how we learned 200 years ago when you had this kind of governor elite type of system and then we went sort of mass produced. Is there something which would spark essentially more breakthrough or very different ideas because they've come through a very different way of learning and I see that because you see so many of these kind of home educated, self-educated or differently educated type of people seem to be making more of these breakthroughs and if it's a small percentage, if you can up them 10 X, then maybe that's something. Obviously [the idea is] completely intractable but something to it.
Alec (01:19:38): I love it. And it's not even just like we observe these kinds of atypical people being really successful and there's the famous finding. It's the bloom 2 Sigma phenomenon that if you do one on one in tutoring, you can get two Sigma better results in terms of learning for that student. I don't know how much it's been replicated or how scalable it would be, but the idea being this one on one tutoring can really unlock huge gains. The other one that I'm fascinated with that seems very replicable, but underutilizes space repetition. So, so many fields-- Like creativity happens once you've mastered all the basics and got to the frontier and then you're combining new ideas from different places but I think rote memorization actually is kind of underrated at this point and the importance is just to remember a large body of knowledge to help you get to the frontier, it matters a lot and space repetition of like using flashcard systems that you do it every day and then every other day, and then every once a week, and then once a month, and you're accumulating lots of knowledge very easily. It is an underleveraged tool that I'm surprised people don't talk about. I would pair it with one on one tutoring as like the two most underrated ideas in the field of education based on what I know.
Ben (01:20:47): Yeah. So Nintil (Jose) has done some essays looking at that. So the mastery has been replicated, but with not quite as strong as effect as when he [Bloom] did it, but it still seems to be apparent and particularly, although this is contested when you can also-- Essentially how to do it, when you use this other principle of following the child's interest-- So, it's obvious to anyone. If you're curious about something genuinely you learn 10 X better than if you're not interested. So if you can pair that with it, this is why you kind of go off curriculum. If you've got something boring in the curriculum, why do it because you're 10 less productivity, but if you find something adjacent, so you get 10 X better, and then you compound that, then you do seem to get it. But again, nothing which you could necessarily explore and space repetition is definitely has been robust and seemingly repeated and actually if you combine it with kind of memory palaces as well, I think you can get really good gain. My last one on the kind of crazy idea, although this is slightly more UK specific, though you could do it everywhere.
Ben (01:22:01): So in the UK you have an NHS number. So in the US, you could almost do it by social security but I think that if we were somehow prepared to do population health based on our NHS number or social security number, so you can pull that data together and actually get preventative algorithms. So, you know certain things, you could get huge gains in population health, but no one is as yet prepared to go down that. But I think it might actually come. So it's maybe on the cost of being tractable because it's more of a political economy issue, but at some point people will just go, look, we can't pay for this much healthcare. It's a sort of costly disease, but it's not. It's just basically, if you've got good innovation, we're going to be prepared to pay for it and a lot of health doesn't scale in that same sort of way, but population health digitally managed would scale, but we haven't yet gone down there, but I don't know, maybe one day.
Alec (01:23:00): In a previous policy life, I was often involved in the privacy regulation fights in the United States. I don't really work on that anymore, but the privacy hoax must be defeated. I think it's a very toxic element of the US policy conversation. A lot of people have very vague concerns about privacy that I think get exploited by privacy professionals, privacy advocates to stiny a lot of innovations, like the one you're talking about with biomedical innovation. And this vague sense of concern gets used against the public to do kind of fear mongering I would say. And I only use such extreme language because I think the costs are so high. I think that we really do miss out on all these huge breakthroughs because people get too concerned about it being demagogue against them.
Ben (01:23:48): Yeah. I think they prey on people's fears. I mean, again, I'm not an expert, but the work I've read has shown that for instance, in Europe, we have the nickname is GPDR. So it's around email privacy and it's not done what they would hope yet. It's a lot higher cost, essentially, big organizations comply, the rogue organizations are still rogue. And so you haven't really changed very much and I think the other flip side is the average person or more than average person, 99% of people who aren't involved either and thinking about policy or thinking about the deeply have essentially freely given all of their data to Google anyway and mostly don't care. I mean, obviously there is a sum, but it's actually really, really small minority unless you make them fear for how it's used and obviously you've got to trade off the other side with the benefits, but again, this is one of the things. So coming to you the last question which I guess is along these themes is what advice would you have for people? I guess this can come in two kind of buckets. One is any sort of life advice that you have taken the route that you've chosen about what you would advise people interested in policy to do, or maybe do differently and I guess the second one is a slightly effective altruism one is, how are you thinking you're having the most impact or advice there, but it could be anything so free for you to say, do you have any advice and thoughts you would like to share?
Alec (01:25:17): Yeah, for sure. I'll go backwards. So on the EA perspective one, I would say in your own personal life and career you should use the importance neglected, this intractability framework for what to work on but I would pair that also with a comparative advantage framing as well, where it's given your skillset and your experience in life, what are you best poised to actually do in terms of impact? And so, in my personal case, it's that for the last five years now, I've been living and working in DC, I've been at four different think tanks prior to founding this new one. I've been learning a lot about how DC policy works and then prior to that, obviously just reading for a decade or more about US politics and policy and really accumulating this lots of background knowledge. So there are lots of other things that someone can do to have impact in their life that are way different than working on policy and politics in DC. But me as an individual, I would be wasting the experience and knowledge I've built over time to completely pivot into an area that I have no comfort or advantage in. And so, I think people should really reflect in their own lives on what are you poised to be able to do? But then from that domain, there are very different opportunities that-- Are there low impact versus high impact or things that everybody else is working on that are neglected versus not neglected and really just be careful about that because how you spend your career matters a lot for improving the world and then for people as individuals I would just say people need to be much more risk seeking in their careers.
Alec (01:26:51): We have potential donors we talk to who are looking for new institutions to fund, and they think that right now the main bottleneck is not money, it's actually talent and scalable institutions, scalable organizations and we look around and we see that a lot of people we know in DC, they seem too risk averse. They're comfortable where they're at, and maybe that's a way of optimizing your own like personal utility but I think the world needs new organizations, needs new institutions and maybe a more stressful life route, but your odds of success are much higher than you think if you're the right kind of person. And here's the biggest part, if you fail it's going to be okay. I think most people think their life will end if they try something big and it fails, but actually as long as you act with integrity and try your best, most people will respect you more for trying to do the thing and failing, and you still have your network, you still have your experience. You can get a new job. In the US, the labor market is very tight right now. If something doesn't work out, you can get another position. It's okay, you'll be fine. And reducing that kind of fear, I think is one of the main obstacles for people to try new things. And so, I encourage everyone to pick the riskiest highest impact option they're considering.
Ben (01:28:09): Great. So that's great advice. So do the things where you have comparative advantage, look at things under research and attractable, and then also take good risks, which typically would be maybe bigger risks than you're currently thinking.