Institute for Progress co-founder on R&D reform, replication crisis, and poaching China's top scientists

www. rebuilding. te. Yeah. So Santi Ruiz is joining and he can share the technoindustrial industrial policy playbook. Is the United States still the world's leading technoindustrial power? The answer is no longer obvious and that should worry us. Let's bring him in to have him break it down for us. How you doing?

Welcome to the dramatic entrance. Fantastic entrance. What's going on? How you doing? Good. I'm good, guys. Thanks for having me. Longtime listener, first time caller. Yeah. Yeah. Great. Great to have you on here.

Uh yeah, we got a little bit of an overview of how the uh the little uh what think tank cinematic universe came together. The Infinity Stones uh came together. Yeah, the Infinity Stones. Avengers of Thinking. Uh but uh but so so let's just jump into it.

Um what what what what uh I I know that there's a number of policies, but which one uh do you think is the most relevant today? There's a lot of things in the news around tariffs. Tik Tok is still in the news but has kind of faded.

Uh if there's just one takeaway that you uh want to dive into first, what where should we go? Totally. Let me get to that in one second. But I just want to say Kelvin did not slog the hard copy of this thing to you guys. We got to get that. But it's really but it's really nice like uh really happy.

I got a hold of it yesterday and I'm like really feeling my on this. So yeah, we'll we'll put up we'll put up the uh the uh the drop shipping link soon. Yeah, we love we love the printed word. We're big fans of the Wall Street Journal. We love we love books. We love everything printed.

And the playbook should be in print. I mean, it's it's you know, it's more deserving uh dump it out of a C130 all over Washington capital. Right. Right now, you know, while while we're talking, a couple of my colleagues are doing hand deliveries to every congressional office.

So, we're doing we're trying to do trying to do that. That's great. Um, yeah. So, so let's go into uh some of the top topics uh in the report and what we should be focused on first and foremost. Totally.

So, Kelvin pushed on this project and the and the way he broke it down which I thought was really useful was basically you've got like your national security recommendations which are what they sound like you know a lot of the defense acquisition stuff a lot of like uh making it easier to do hypersonic testing for instance in the US and like really defense specific stuff.

Then there's like a broader, you know, industrial-based section called industrial power. Um, that's, you know, critical minerals. It's like small business administration to make it easier for small manufacturers to get going. Um, the chunk that we really own IFP and again for context, I'm at the Institute for Progress.

We're a nonprofit, sorry, a nonpartisan think tank, we focus on like uh largely kind of the innovation policy side of things. So, our section was like frontier science and technology. So we not all those submissions are by us, but a lot of it we we source most of those submissions.

Um, and a lot of that stuff is just how do we get more out of the marginal dollar that goes to R&D in the US, whether that's a federal dollar, R&D through like the NIH or the NSF or the Department of Energy.

Um, in a lot of those places, we we think there's some really actionable stuff where you just want more bang for your buck. Let's say, you know, whether or not, you know, agnostic of whether you should be cutting NIH funding by 30% or whatever.

I happen to think you shouldn't, but like agnostic of that conversation, we think there's still a lot of ways that you can get more juice for the squeeze.

So, a lot of the stuff that we were really championing in that section was um for instance, one of my one of my favorites is my colleague Caleb Wattney who's got a piece about XLABS for science funding. He's got a new new proposal.

the um basically the way the NIH and the NSF and to a certain extent DOE are set up, it's really easy for them to give money to universities andmies and really hard for them to give money to other kinds of institutions even if those other institutions might be better at the kinds of basic research or the really kind of hardware intensive high you know basically high capex research that you might need for certain manufacturing fields or science and tech fields.

There's Caleb gets into it pretty well, but there's basically existing authority that all these agencies can use to just start setting up another kind of grant structure. There's no no statutory text needed, no EO needed, they can go do it right now.

Um, and you can basically, you know, whether it's the Arc Institute cool biomedical stuff that that's frontier where there's some of the best stuff is not happening just at Johns Hopkins or just at these academic institutions. So that that's one example.

I could go I could go all day, but like there's a lot of stuff that we really try to be as actionable as possible.

Most of this stuff either needs small statutory tweaks or president or the ex executive branch can say let's do it right now or it's already kind of firmly in agency authority and it's just culturally or for whatever reason it's hard for them to get going. Yeah, we we were talking to Delian about this last week.

this weird uh dynamic where uh arguably the greatest new innovation in science and technology came from OpenAI's nonprofit arm which is now spinning out this forprofit and everyone's going to make a ton of money off of it.

uh is is the open AI I guess like what lessons are uh the the think tanks on this uh project or even just what you're seeing in Washington uh what lessons are they taking away from that experience obviously it's very different than doing basic research the on you know the the human brain for example but at the same time you know they're the the government didn't really fund the transformer that happened at Google uh they didn't really fund the development of the initial large language anguage model that happened at OpenAI and yet uh like the research did get done and so is that coloring how policy makers are thinking about allocating funding towards research and development in kind of the modern era.

I definitely think it is and I think you got like a really live debate right now in like if you want to talk about the meta science field, right? People who want to do more science on science to figure out how you get the most bang for your bucket.

I we at IFP this is one of our, you know, our five verticals and the five areas that we work on and you definitely get people across the spectrum, people who think like I've heard people say, you know, like all federal R&D is like down the drain. I don't think that's true.

I think there's good evidence that it's not, but like you get people in the space who think like you have to overturn the apple cart completely. I think the things that most people agree on is increasingly you're seeing uh institutions that are not universities being much better at leveraging AI.

And I think that's like a pretty pretty straightforward argument. Y um you're seeing nonprofit set up often by you know folks from the west coast who want to be able to leverage a lot of cap. They have a lot of capital.

They don't have a lot of the other institutional ties but you can build kind of new institutions and you're not constrained by the tenure or you know whatever. And if you can affiliate with say a Stanford then you get the grad student pipeline and so you still get a lot of the great talent from the academic system.

I think you've seen you know focused research organizations or FRO's where the idea is hey we're going to spin up for like five years to tackle one basic research problem. We're going to see if we can just crack this. We're going to be a nonprofit because it's we're not going to commoditize ever.

It's just like it's too fundamental but it's either a basic research thing that we think is upstream of some like whole field that other people will be able to tackle or it's we're going to build tooling.

We're going to build like an open source like map of the brain at a level that hasn't been done before and we're never going to make any money on it.

So there's no reason to do it uh as a for-profit company and we're going to move at a pace that you could never do at the academy and so we're going to try and like build the institution to solve a kind of problem instead of starting at your institution and saying how far can we take this institution and I think that instinct that like you want to just solve the specific problems and build an institution that's like built to solve that rather than try and pick up whatever you have and squeeze it in.

I think you're seeing a lot of that in Washington right now. Can you talk a little bit about the replication crisis? Is that front and center? What uh what is the replication crisis in your mind? And and is there actually a plan to solve it? Is it something we should even be trying to solve? Yeah.

Um we've got a great uh recommendation in here from uh our good friend Stuart Buck where he basically pushes us to to get more serious at the federal level, you know, investing replication. I think it's a really plausible idea.

It's funny you ask, but my my first uh on-ampus job over over the, you know, I think my my freshman summer was working at a place called the Center for Practical Wisdom, which was like a psych research lab.

And about halfway through that job, I kind of realized it's a great name, but I think I I kind of had to come to Jesus moment where I realized this this research is like just not going to hold up. Like two years from now, this is going to be poked full of holes. Like what am I what am I doing here?

Uh, it was not practical. It was it was you know uh I still I still think you can probably study wisdom but maybe not with like these small end studies about how people appreciate paintings. Um it was really bad.

Uh I I tend to think that the replication crisis stuff is more of an issue for the soft sciences for the social sciences. I think a lot of the hard tech that you really want to push on you can get a yes or no and replication's a lot easier.

Um, I also think there's a lot of uh basically regulations or like encouraging of gating of science that the federal government does that if you loosen that you can make it easier for people to try and replicate stuff and to basically crush bad science quicker. What you really want is just faster turnaround cycles.

Like you're no matter what in a thriving scientific ecosystem, I think you're going to get a lot of kind of crap. You know, the question is like how quickly does that stuff get flushed out of the pipeline by good replication or by incentives that make it easier.

You know, if if if there's a got a bunch of great scientists out there, you're still going to get random stuff that doesn't replicate, but you just want to kill it early and and have strong incentives for that killing to happen. Makes sense. How do you think about timelines for all of these issues?

It it you know, one of the potential disadvantages of our democratic system is, you know, potential turnover every four years uh or two years in in leadership.

And uh we we were talking with um Kevin about sort of China China's ability to do a bunch of consecutive five-year plans that are kind of building on each other's.

So across the board, how how do you make sure that uh these kind of policy recommendations can uh really outside of getting im you know immediate changes implemented uh have sort of longevity because in in many of these you know we're not going to fix ship building in the next three years.

We're not going to you know set up you know it's going to be hard to set up a meaningful amount of special compute zones in a few years right. So, um maybe talk to the strategy around um on for you guys in terms of making sure there's like really these become kind of organic movements in Washington. Totally.

There's a few different pieces I think. One is go on a lot of technology podcasts. You know, that's really essential here. Yeah. No, I I would say like at the top level like you just have to sell this to the democratic to a democratic public.

And you know what Kelvin mentioned about like you don't have the Sputnik case, you know, short of a a Taiwan invasion. There's not one single thing that's going to, you know, wake up the American people to this where they weren't on before. I think you're just going to have to sell.

You just have to, you know, keep keep making this argument. I tend to be pretty bullish on, you know, the American people's, you know, perceptiveness about this stuff, but you just do have to go sell. Um, a lot of the recommendations in here are around shortening timelines for stuff.

There's a lot of things I think you can do to just make that kind of change in administration, democratic accountability problem easier by just saying like for any given thing that you work on, can you make it last, you know, two administrations instead of three?

Like, and what are the kind of technocratic things that are standing in the way of that? Like what are the actual regulatory things that make you take four and a half years to get, you know, your initial NEPA permit for a for for infrastructure? And I think that's like a that's like a real issue here, right?

On a long enough timeline, anything is going to get vetoed. If you have veto points throughout the process, like the longer the timeline is, doesn't matter what it is, someone's going to kill it.

Um, and so I think you have to have like an affirmative democratic case for like, look, people voted for this, we're going to do it and it's going to be done and we're not going to let somebody 15 years from now kill it.

And then there's a lot of stuff in here that I think is bipartisan where it's wonky, it's technocratic, you know, there's not like huge rifts on critical mineral production, you know, there's not huge rifts on like the small business administration should be really effective.

Um, but you need to exercise political will to do it. And so some of it is just like really fine grain technocratic stuff that we think like you have agreement, but you just need to push and you need a really clear action plan for how to do it. It's not enough to just say like, hey, ship building should be better.

You need to be able to lay out like here are two things you could do tomorrow to improve it and it's easy. Yeah. I mean staying on ship building.

Um what does the vibe feel like around uh advanced manufacturing, automation, humanoid robots, let's not worry about the workforce at all versus um let's go into reskilling, upskilling. Let's bring let's bring back the idea that you can have a beautiful American dream career in an industry like ship building. Yeah.

Thanks to our our friends at American Compass, you know, I'm an IFP. Kelvin's at FAI. American Compass is kind of the third part of this, but they spent a lot of time thinking about workforce skilling and redevelopment. So, there's a lot of stuff in the industrial power section here about like what do you actually do?

What's worked? because there's, you know, it's easy to say, okay, workforce retraining, but like it's it's not an easy problem. There's lots of failures there. So, what do you actually what do we actually know about how to do that?

I think everybody on this uh on on this team, like the ven diagram is there's not going to be as many manufacturing jobs five years from now as there were at, you know, at the peak of American manufacturing.

even if we improve output and I think you know your listeners will know this that you're going to have to lean on automation pretty heavily to kind of get close to competing with China at the same time I think there's absolutely room to say like if you if you re-industrialize and automate that's there's going to be a lot of jobs there so I think the question is just like on what scale is that is that you know a World War II level mobilization I don't think anybody here is pushing for that you know that that more than half of you know all able-bodied men should be working in the factory but I think there's absolutely room to to push to push that even without even without looking at those kinds of orders of magnitude.

They should be in a warehouse in Elsa Gundo. Honestly, maybe everybody making it rain. Uh what boys what topic in the playbook do you think is going to get the least attention this year that will get the most attention let's say in in in five years? Is there a specific area?

Because right now it feels like, you know, a big a big part of this is around, you know, is is all-encompassing around kind of industrial policy, but you know, we were in Washington last week and there was, you know, very bipartisan event around reindustrialization.

So, it it seems like everybody is is uh not not everybody, but it feels like there's a general alignment there and a lot of attention there. But of these kind of subtopics, where do you think uh is being kind of like underrated or under discussed?

Yeah, I think probably in the discourse there's a couple I would point to. One is just nobody wants to talk or think about pandemics anymore. You know, there's just like no energy to like relitigate COVID or to kind of think ahead of plan.

I think this is one of these weird lessons of CO is like Operation Warp Speed is a massive success in a lot of ways. we learn a lot about like what should we do to prevent future pandemics sort of to minimize them and then just nobody has any energy left to talk about that.

So I think there's some really good ideas here on like pathogen sequencing and there I think there is real movement in DC on uh like allpurpose like v viral vaccines and a couple colleagues put together some really good work here but it's just like nobody wants to talk about that right now.

I think that's like you know and I get it to be honest.

Then the other one is you know the high-skilled immigration fight is going to keep happening uh you know throughout you know over the course of this admin I think uh you've got different parts of the coalition you know in the admin that have very different views on this obviously even among the orgs that put this together we you know we don't all agree on everything on immigration but there's a proposal in here that I really like that's basically uh uh DoD could be much better tracking like who are the top scientists maybe the top thousand scientists out there who we would like to have state side and just like keep it keep it tight.

You know, this it doesn't have to be lumped in with the 01 or the other just kind of general like high level talent, but if you have like a specific list of here are the people we would love to poach from China and then just like make it extremely easy for that specific list of a thousand or 2,000 people to if they ever want to come over here, you know, they've got the the kind of golden ticket path.

And I think there's, you know, if you think that science is like long tailed, that the the really the rockstar scientists, the best founders, the best R&D people are just or like a few orders of magnitude better than some pretty good people. This is not a kind of crazy idea.

I think like let's, you know, poaching the highest highest value people would have an outside impact. Awesome. Makes a ton of sense. Uh we're we're we're staying on ship building. Um but thank you so much for stream. This is great. Great to have you. Come back on again soon. Yeah, we'll have to talk more soon.

And uh yeah, congrats on the launch. Thanks all. See you. Bye. And we got Phil from Drack coming in the studio. I want a sound effect for Phil. Phil, the man I once called? A child. I didn't call him a child. You called him a baby. No, you referred to him as a 5-year-old. You said he was a toddler. No, it was very rude.

You're going too far. Going too far. We've all had mistakes in the live stream. I made a big mistake.