Playback speed

Share post at current time

Share from 0:00

0:00

Transcript

#18: Alec Stapp

The Institute for Progress, American Dynamism, and Fixing Governance

Theo Jaffee

Jul 11, 2024

Transcript

Alec Stapp is the co-founder and co-CEO of the Institute for Progress, a non-profit think tank dedicated to accelerating scientific, technological, and industrial progress.

Chapters

0:00 - Intro

1:13 - Why can’t smart people fix the Bay Area?

3:38 - How to get normal people on board with IFP

10:23 - How to get smart people into governance

15:55 - How IFP chose its priorities

21:56 - How will IFP avoid mission creep?

24:17 - How important is academia today?

26:03 - Would Alec press a button to fully open borders?

29:45 - How prepared are we for another pandemic?

33:16 - Why don’t easy wins happen?

36:17 - Is Biden’s spending good?

40:51 - How important is the repeal of Chevron deference?

43:23 - Are land value taxes good?

45:01 - “The Project” for AGI and AI Alignment

48:19 - Is globalism dying?

50:32 - Overrated or Underrated?

59:28 - The most overrated issue

1:00:26 - The most underrated issue

Transcript

Theo Jaffee (01:05)

Hi, welcome back to episode 18 of the Theo Jaffee podcast. We're here today with Alec Stapp.

Alec Stapp (01:11)

Hey Theo, good to see ya.

Theo Jaffee (01:13)

Yeah, you too. So first question, pretty much everybody I know in Silicon Valley on tech Twitter, many of whom are extremely intelligent and high agency and wealthy, agree with you on almost everything, but the Bay areas still are like the most politically dysfunctional place in the country and in some ways in the world. So why can't they change things? Is it just a skill issue?

Alec Stapp (01:37)

Great question. And I'll just carry out this answer by saying that my organization, the Institute for Progress, we focus exclusively on US federal policy. So we only work on stuff in Washington, DC. So I claim no unique insight into local politics in San Francisco or state politics in California. But I do think it's at some level not taking politics very seriously on its own terms. It's part of the issue.

So a lot of people in tech either haven't been engaged for a long time in local politics, or they don't understand what drives these elections. I think they're very low turnout events. It's not the kind of people that folks in tech world often interact with. It is not driven by the same dynamics that drive tech Twitter and things that are like in the discourse or in the ether. And so, for example, my understanding is that a lot of the recent election outcomes in San Francisco have been driven by

crime as the major issue, especially in the Asian American community. And of course, housing is a major issue, but maybe crime in that one demographic is actually the thing that's like really moving voters. And so to understand that you would need to conduct polling, focus groups, do door knocking, do a lot of like the really grassroots organizing that the tech community is not experienced with. But is increasingly there are folks who are jumping in, trying to learn about this. I think they have some long run strategies in terms of

getting on the local Democratic Nominating Commission to then nominate folks to run Shadow Gary Tan. So it's changing, but I think we shouldn't be surprised that people like, I believe Aaron Peskin is his name, who's now running for mayor against London Breed. Like he's been doing this for decades and he's a very like active person and high energy person. And so even if tech folks disagree with his politics or his policy positions.

Theo Jaffee (03:08)

Shout out Garry Tan.

Alec Stapp (03:32)

You shouldn't take someone like that lightly in terms of thinking how you can beat them.

Theo Jaffee (03:38)

And similarly, how do you get the general public to actually agree with IFP style ideas? Like most people don't even think about the issues that you write about. Are there any lessons from like gay marriage going from overwhelming opposition to overwhelming support in a single generation?

Alec Stapp (03:48)

Dublin.

Gay marriage is obviously a unique issue or at least it's like a cultural issue. And so that feels quite distinct from what we do at IFP. We focus, not only do we focus exclusively on federal policy, we also focus exclusively on innovation policy. So you see us work on things like high skilled immigration, meta science, AI, biotech. We really try to just stick to these issues in a way that can be bipartisan.

Theo Jaffee (03:57)

Maybe two.

Alec Stapp (04:24)

or even just nonpartisan and kind of technocratic in nature. And we want to increase the salience of the issues we work on to a degree where they get prioritized by folks in government and people agree with our positions ultimately. But these are not mass mobilization issues and that's not key to our theory of change. Our theory of change is really about can we get on any given topic the 100 to 200 people in the Washington DC area who really matter.

to agree with our position and coordinate and work with us. And so it's a very elite driven theory of change. Not to say that mass mobilization doesn't have its place, it's just that it's not our focus on the topics we care about.

Theo Jaffee (05:07)

Can you elaborate on that a little bit? Because it seems to me like it would be, you know, quite effective to get large amounts of people to start campaigning for, say, high skilled immigration. Like people tend to have very strong opinions on immigration and it seems to be like quite bipartisan, you know. It's very rare that you see even like the most anti -immigration Republicans oppose high skilled immigration. So why not make it a mass mobilization?

Alec Stapp (05:33)

Yeah, I think you need to look, well, one, let's first look at like where mobilization has worked for the progress community, abundance community, Yimbyism, however you want to frame the groups that we work with. It's obviously happened first at the state and local level for housing. I think that is a situation where raw numbers of mobilization really could move the needle. It's that you had these low turnout city council meetings, town council zoning meetings where

less than 1 % of the population shows up and they're all retired people who don't want any change, don't want any new housing, and they already own their own homes. And if you could just get 1 % of the local population to show up and be pro -housing, then you've now offset them and it's like a very tractable, achievable outcome. I think in Washington, D .C. it's very different. Representatives and senators represent hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people.

in their constituencies. And so it's hard to actually mobilize the scale of people that are necessary for changing their opinion. And because you brought up immigration as an issue, it's very hard to raise the salience of that in a mass politics way without getting, without making the situation worse. So for example, if you look at the polling on the issue across all different types of immigration reforms, there's broad support.

like more positive than negative sentiment among the American people for more immigration. But by far, the people who feel the most strongly about it, the most passionate about immigration as a topic, are the restrictionist and anti -immigration folks. And so, and then if you think about what is the bottleneck to reform, the bottleneck to reform is currently congressional Republicans. And due to our primary electoral system in the United States,

most members of Congress are only concerned about winning their primary because they're not in a competitive seat or state for the general election. And so a Republican who only cares about winning or potentially losing their next primary race is mostly concerned about not doing anything to increase immigration from their right flank because they might get primaried on that issue because it's very for a minority of the Republican base who do vote in primaries and care a lot.

any kind of immigration is seen as a betrayal almost. And so I think it's very tricky to raise this topic in a mass mobilization context without it backfiring on you. And so we prefer a much more targeted, again, elite theory of change, which involves using arguments that we think are most targeted and most effective, so making this a national security issue, because it is in terms of having talented folks in our defense industrial base. This is the best way for us to beat China.

Russia, other countries that are adversaries to the United States. And that takes it out of the immigration context. It is another way to get folks on board and doesn't involve mass mobilization at all.

Theo Jaffee (08:37)

So when you said you mainly focus on persuading the 100 to 200 people in DC who have the power to do things, like, who actually are these people? Members of Congress? Heads of agencies? Or something different on top of those two?

Alec Stapp (08:54)

Yes to all those and I would say just the most important thing is that it varies based on topic So it's not the same people who have power over everything. Of course, it's like In the high skilled immigration community It's the certain committee members themselves in Congress and their staffers their lead staffers who've been working in Congress drafting legislative bills for decades it's the leadership of USCIS in the executive branch and Some of their staff members. It's the outside communities. So like who are the top lobbyists on this issue?

who are the top nonprofit organizations, and then who are the leading experts, academics on this topic. And so on a very niche technocratic topic, there are really only like dozens or maybe 100 people who have the requisite experience to really be engaged in the decision making. And obviously, they don't determine exactly what happens. But as soon as elected officials put it on the table and say,

let's consider doing something on high skilled immigration reform, or let's consider doing something on reforming the National Institutes for Health or the National Science Foundation. Then they hand the baton to staffers, sometimes lobbyists, sometimes outside groups, academics, to flesh out the details, to figure out like, we have this vague abstract goal, how do we implement it? And it's roughly dozens, and at most 100 people who like ultimately end up mattering in those kinds of conversations.

Theo Jaffee (10:23)

How do you get more smart people into orgs like IFP or into government? Most of the smart people I know who are trying to make a lot of money want to be like quants or something or work for big tech. So how do you get those kinds of people to work for you instead?

Alec Stapp (10:33)

Mm -hmm.

Yeah, so I think, well, one thing we talk a lot about is for when we're hiring people IFP, we don't play the role in the ecosystem of usually being people's first job. We tend to hire more experienced folks because we're a small, lean team and tend to wait a little more towards senior people who are autonomous and have an agenda they want to drive. But that is not to say that sometimes we don't hire folks with more limited experience.

And usually the exceptions are when someone has a demonstrated track record of public work on the topic. So there's really no substitute to working in public. That's a blog, publishing academic papers, publishing white papers, showing up to events. It's much easier if you already live in DC. Again, not impossible to do this from the outside, but if you're already in DC, you're going to the events with other experts on the topic, you're doing all the reading.

all the hard work, especially if you're doing like quantitative analysis in public, either on like a sub stack or other venues you can publish in. And then the people who matter will notice this and they'll recruit you or they'll be open to an unsolicited pitch to join your organization. And so that's the main thing I'd recommend for people is if you're considering getting into this field, there are two big mistakes people make. One is doing nothing out of risk aversion. And this is often people from elite institutions to do this because

they're taught their whole life to climb a ladder and keep their head down and just don't do anything too risky that could be seen as outside the Overton window. And that is just not the kind of person who actually ends up mattering in the long run or making a big impact in DC. You have to have your own ideas and you have to be willing to put yourself out there. But then on the flip side, lots of folks make the opposite mistake, which is they want to become a takes person who has an opinion on everything, even though they have either only expertise in a narrow domain or they have no expertise at all because they're...

in their early 20s and they're still learning. And it's great to still be learning, but I wouldn't go on record on 100 different topics, especially culture war topics, especially things that are very controversial. Instead, what you can do is develop a niche expertise that adds value to people in Washington, DC, and then they will be receptive to your ideas. A very good example of this is Thomas Hokeman at the Foundation for American Innovation. I recommend everyone follow him on Twitter. Thomas first started his career just like...

a little more than a year ago, he's not been in DC long, DC policy world, and he just went very deep on the Clean Air Act. And now he's like one of the experts on the Clean Air Act in Washington DC, even though he's like just graduated college this year. But like he spent most of his time thinking about like how do we improve the Clean Air Act and he didn't spend all of his time like fighting different culture wars. So you go, if you're very focused and go very deep, you can make an impact early. And then the other thing I would recommend to your audience is that there's this great website called emergingtechpolicy .org.

and it just lays out all the pathways to getting into tech policy in DC in terms of fellowships, in terms of resource guides. And it's by far the best one -stop shop of like, if you're in tech or outside DC and you're like, hey, I want to get into policy, just go to emergingtechpolicy .org and read through their resources.

Theo Jaffee (13:48)

What about not just nonprofits that shape these policies, but what about getting smart people actually into elected office or into government agencies? It seems like there are a lot of people who would be open to the idea, otherwise who are not right now for some reason.

Alec Stapp (14:08)

Yeah, so elected office is a tricky one. I think that's much, a much harder hill to climb. The only thing I would say about that is only go that path. If you're an extreme extrovert, everything about fundraising, campaigning, running for office is constant social interaction. You must be a people person. You must be an extrovert. and if that's your personality and you also happen to have interest in like the substantive policy ideas that we care about and some of the people our friends care about and that then more power to you go run for office, raise money, try to win.

But most people we work with are much more wonky, technocratic, in the weeds. They're not the right kind of people to run for office. But elected officials need really talented people in government, whether it's in Congress or the executive branch. And not to beat it to a horse, but the emergingtechpolicy .org website is by far the best resource for what are the entry points? What are the junior level fellowships? How do you get your foot in the door? And then I would just say, once you get your foot in the door, whether it's a staffer in Congress or someone in the executive branch, an executive branch office.

It's really just like hard work and constantly networking. And so these are not like the most well -paid positions. So if you're going into this, you just need to understand that like you're giving up money on the table by working in the private sector to do this public service, but it's really important. And if you work really hard because, and you're talented and you just put yourself out there, you will get promoted and you will get retained because the system does need those people. And...

pretty quickly, not overnight, but pretty quickly, you can be put in a position of authority to really draft legislation, be in charge of a rulemaking or regulation at an executive branch agency, if you work really, really hard and know what you're talking about.

Theo Jaffee (15:55)

So IFP's five priorities on the website are meta -science, high -skilled immigration, biotech, infrastructure, and emerging technology. So why those five in particular? Mostly because they're tractable or something else. And if you had to add another category, what else would it be?

Alec Stapp (16:13)

Yeah, so those are definitely going to be the five we stick with for the foreseeable future. We're a team of roughly 16 people. And so five policy areas definitely keeps us busy. So how we pick those areas, I think the main factors were that they are both tractable and important. In a lot of ways, we try to tackle issues that are neglected as well. And so we think that EA framework is pretty useful for selecting topics to work on.

Theo Jaffee (16:34)

like the EA criteria.

Alec Stapp (16:42)

If it's important and tractable, meta -science, a lot of folks, there are a lot of lobbyists and trade associations for universities and other institutions that lobby for more scientific funding at NSF and NIH. There are libertarians and small -c conservative folks who argue to cut those budgets because it's wasteful government spending. They have a trench warfare fight every single year around those budgets. We don't think there's much marginal impact to be had by joining that specific debate.

But there are very few people who are in Washington, DC thinking about the question, given any particular budget added SF and NIH, how is it being spent? Is it being spent in the highest impact way? What alternative allocation systems should we be considering for scientific grant making? Those are very understudied systems and ideas. And then similarly for high skilled immigration, we've talked about that a bit already.

comprehensive immigration reform, stuff happening at the border, that is a very contentious, high salience fight, very well funded on both sides, not neglected at all. But tweaking visa pathways, for example, the 01 visa for immigrants of extraordinary ability, it's an uncapped visa program, better guidance from USCIS, which they first issued two years ago.

is going to help people realize they qualify for that visa program. And it's temporary, but it can be renewed as many times as you want. And so there are pathways in our current broken immigration system for talented people to come to the US. And then the same is true for biotech, AI, which we work under on our emerging tech portfolio, as well as infrastructure, where you just can focus on more neglected topics that are innovation related.

Theo Jaffee (18:34)

But if you had to add another category, what would it be? What else is tractable and important and neglected and does not fall under the umbrella of the other five?

Alec Stapp (18:44)

It's funny because these are so broad, like infrastructure captures energy, housing, and transportation for us. I would probably add like a specific, so we think about state capacity a lot, and this is a horizontal theme. If you think of those like vertical policy areas I just described, state capacity is the ability of the government to achieve its intended aims, to have the capacity to actually achieve its objectives. And it applies to all those policy areas I talked about.

Two state capacity themes we think about a lot and would potentially work on in the future are procurement and hiring. So federal procurement procedure is extremely broken and leads to really inefficient outcomes and a lot of stagnation and sclerosis in the government contractor industry. And then hiring as well. We just talked about getting good people into government. If you go through the normal hiring procedure on USAjobs .gov, it is a nightmare in terms of the incentives it creates.

People are incentivized to upload 100 page resumes that include every single possible keyword because the first filter is just like a keyword match filter for resumes to job description. And so usually the most qualified people don't get hired or take so long they give up and go to the private sector. And as anyone in tech and startup world knows, people are the most important factor in success. And so we needed to get better people in the government. We need much more flexible hiring procedures. And that's something that we would probably add as an area to focus on.

Theo Jaffee (20:14)

Yeah, procurement in particular is interesting. My dad used to work at Lockheed Martin back when it was Martin Marietta. And he always talks about the days of cost plus contracts and how terrible those were.

Alec Stapp (20:23)

Those are still the days today. Those are, that's mostly how it works today. There are some, yeah, there are some fixed price contracts, like SpaceX is famous for advocating for this and NASA has done some move towards fixed price. But my understanding is most government contracting is still cost plus. And like, there are some cases where I think cost plus makes sense, but in the majority of cases, it just creates bad incentives, obviously, where if it's cost plus a certain percentage, you just increase your costs and make more money.

Theo Jaffee (20:28)

Mostly. Wow.

Yeah.

Yep. So what have we learned from Trump and Biden after four years of each of them in power? Who do you think would be better for the IFP agenda? I understand if you need to be strategic with the answer.

Alec Stapp (21:04)

Well, we, not about being strategic, it's about just being committed to being nonpartisan. And so we are prepared for any election outcome this November. And we very intentionally do not weigh in on electoral politics at the presidential level or the congressional level because we want to make an impact in the areas we work on. And so we're a mission focused organization. The five areas you mentioned earlier, the only areas we work on.

And we have an agenda for either presidential administration, different compositions of Congress in terms of Republicans controlling one chamber, two chambers, and vice versa for Democrats. And so we would be excited to work with any particular US government because regardless of who wins, these issues are really, really important and there's lots to do.

Theo Jaffee (21:56)

So how a lot of non -governmental organizations, lobbying orgs, nonprofits and such, have been subject to some kind of mission creep, like for example, the ACLU, which was originally about securing constitutional liberties. They famously like,

Defended like Nazis in court even like a couple of decades ago and now they couldn't be farther from that So how will IFP avoid the same kind of institutional capture or mission creep or whatever you want to call it? in a long term

Alec Stapp (22:31)

Yeah, it's a good question. And it's honestly, it's part of what I was just trying to do there. And we'll continue to do in this conversation and in every conversation I have publicly and privately in Washington, DC, my co -founder, Caleb and I are on the exact same page. We run this institution, the two of us together, we have equal say over big strategic plans for IFP and down to nitty gritty details. And at the end of the day, both of us observed that this phenomenon was happening that you're describing of like mission creep. And we think that organizations become

less effective over time when they do that on a per dollar or per person basis. And it's just like, then all organizations lose their identity as well. They kind of like become this big blob of everyone doing the same thing, this, this Omni -Cause phenomenon. And there is a role in DC for think tanks and organizations that just support one political party. Center for American Progress is the biggest one for Democrats, though there are others as well. The Heritage Foundation is currently the biggest one for Republicans in terms of

being a holding tank for folks to go into the next administration when their party wins, as well as to like develop policy ideas and white papers and stuff. And so in that sense, they often have to support the entire agenda. But lots of think tanks are very issue. They're supposed to be issue focused or much narrower. And I think it just hurts them and is counterproductive if those kinds of organizations expand due to mission creep and bleed into other areas that are outside their scope. And so from day one,

Caleb and I both decided that's not the kind of institution we want to run. We want to run a mission -focused organization that can work with either party. And we think boundary effects are strong, and so this is what we want to do with the rest of our careers. And we're going to be here to make sure that we don't succumb to that risk like other organizations have.

Theo Jaffee (24:17)

So as for meta science, how important do you think academia is today in 2024? Should government policy focus on getting smart people into academia or more into private companies and research labs? Or their own organizations within government?

Alec Stapp (24:32)

Yeah, I think on the margin, we probably, obviously, it's very field by field. It's hard to speak in generalities here. But in general, I don't think the marginal smart person should go into academia. I think most of our breakthroughs come from superstar researchers who are already obvious fits for academia. But the marginal person writing the marginal academic paper is not adding a lot of social value. I think that person would be much better fit.

Going into government in like kind of a high agency mindset of like with a clear goal, wanting to get something done, ideally even at the local or state level, because like a single great person at that level of government can have a lot of change, make a big impact. And then, yeah, we're also just very bullish on like new institutions. And so there are groups like Arcadia and the Arc Institute led by Patrick Su. Arc Institute's amazing. They're already having huge breakthroughs and they've been around for just a couple of years.

Theo Jaffee (25:23)

I love the Arc Institute.

Yeah.

Alec Stapp (25:28)

and those institutions outside of academia and outside of government, often privately funded, philanthropically funded are amazing. And I think I would encourage more people to start organizations like that as small experiments to join, like, you know, ongoing new institutions like that. And then let's double down on the ones that are working and close the ones that aren't. And I think that is a much more exciting prospect than joining legacy institutions.

that aren't that effective anymore for the marginal person.

Theo Jaffee (26:03)

If you could press a button that would fully open the US's borders, would you do it? Like, would fully open borders be better or worse than the status quo?

Alec Stapp (26:12)

It's a good question. I don't think about this a lot just because it's not within the overtopendo, but I'll play the game of just saying, high uncertainty, but I probably would not push the button. I think this is for like, very Tyler Cowen -esque reasons where this is not a permanent, and you can define the thought experiment however you want, but I do not think this will ever be a permanent option. And so what would immediately happen is there'd be a flood of immigration, and then there would be a nativist backlash to dramatic change to society in the short run.

housing prices would definitely go up in more competition for scarce resources before supply has the opportunity to expand. And so in the long run, I think most and pretty much all immigration has positive effects for the whole country, but there are in narrow local cases and especially in the short run, there can be costs and people observe those and there's a backlash. And so this would lead to probably the strictest immigration regime in the short period after open borders. And so...

At IFP, we're really focused on long run sustainability, what is a durable policy change that can get us to a better future and we can build on. And so when it comes to immigration, that includes things like having control of our southern border so that the domestic population has faith in a credible immigration system. And then it's focusing on what we see as successes around the world, whether it's Canada, Australia, elsewhere, where you have kind of more of a points -based system.

where immigration is targeted at occupations that are in shortage. And it's just focused on high skilled STEM immigrants who can really contribute the most on a per person basis to the US economy and to the world. And there's a lot of data that these are the kind of, it's the kind of immigration, a controlled orderly immigration that leads to the least amount of backlash and can be built on over time. And so I think the idea of like a magic button that opens the borders, it would very quickly change in practice.

Theo Jaffee (28:07)

I'm not certain about that because in Europe over the last few years they haven't had full open borders, but they have had substantial amounts of immigration from all walks of life. And the nativist backlash has been, I think, much less than people expected. Like in France just yesterday, the more pro -immigration left parties won the election. In Britain, Labour Party absolutely swept the election and they seem to be pro -immigration.

Alec Stapp (28:34)

I probably disagree with the characterization of the UK. I think a significant reason from my view of why the Conservative Party became so unpopular, not the whole reason, but part of the reason was that post -Brexit, they were supposed to be the party of controlled, orderly immigration, no longer having open borders with Europe. And like you said, they became like open borders with the world. And I think the polling and some of the data in the UK shows that the...

Domestic population did not like the direction immigration was going in the UK. And I haven't seen the entire labor policy position, but I don't think they're significantly pro -immigration in a material way and would be surprised if they totally maintained the policy status quo there. And then in France, again, yeah, it was better for immigration that the center -left and leftist parties beat the right -wing parties, but...

The Raving Parties did really well in round one and the fact that they are even contending for national power in France shows you something about the backlash even if they weren't ultimately able to get a majority.

Theo Jaffee (29:45)

So on the topic of biotech, how prepared do you think we are for another pandemic? Has the government learned anything from COVID? And if we're not prepared, what would it take for us to get prepared?

Alec Stapp (29:55)

Yeah, I regret to report pretty much nothing. They've done nothing, learned nothing. Arguably, we'd be in a worse situation if a COVID level event were to happen. The best success of the COVID pandemic was Operation Warp Speed. I'm not convinced that if Republicans were in office, they would do it again, or if Democrats were in office, that they would try to copy it. It's now seen as controversial. Obviously, among Republicans, vaccines in general are controversial. Democrats...

wouldn't necessarily trust the private sector to lead in the way that Operation Warp Speed did. And then besides vaccines, personal protective equipment, testing, surveillance monitoring, sort of wastewater monitoring and other passive detection for emerging pathogens, we're just not there. We are making almost no investments. And we've kind of not only reverted to the status quo ex ante,

but we've even done things like the FDA is now regulating lab developed tests. And in the, before the pandemic, they were not regulated. When the public health emergency was declared, lab developed tests became regulated by the FDA. And what happened, the CDC had monopoly on testing and they totally messed it up. And that's why we didn't have testing for the first few months of COVID is because our one source of flexible testing capacity for novel pathogens, lab developed tests, were legally prohibited from doing what they were capable of doing.

So now we're in a worse equilibrium when it comes to testing. I think that's true across the board for most areas you care about when it comes to pandemic prevention, whether it's delaying future pathogens, stopping gain of function research. We did get one win, the deep vision program at USAID that was like a virus hunting program, like literally going out into untouched parts of the world to look for.

potential pandemic pathogens. The risk reward on that was awful. Thankfully, I shut that down. So that's good. We're not like actively going into the jungle trying to find new pathogens that could cause a pandemic. But no progress on gain of function research. And in terms of detection, there are some pilot programs in terms of like doing more testing in airports and other public places for emerging diseases, but they're not wide scale yet. And a lot of like the wastewater monitoring stuff.

It's been very hard for companies like BioBot to get customers from the government to pay for this stuff, even though it's incredibly useful. And so we're in a really bad spot, but we need to be making those investments. And this is the kind of thing again, where it's like, it mostly requires enlightened leadership of, it's not a ton of money we're talking about here. A current estimate from the White House science office is that for $24 billion, we could get prototype vaccines.

for the 26 viral families that are known to cause human disease. And so like on the grand scale of things, $24 billion is nothing. It's a drop in the bucket. But those are the kind of like long run investments we need to be making today before the next pandemic starts or something we could cut it off very quickly. And just in DC, no one wants to talk about pandemics because people are still a bit traumatized by COVID.

Theo Jaffee (33:16)

So when you talked about there's all these like little easy wins that we can do, like wastewater monitoring that just don't happen. Like mechanistically, what is going on there? Like you get your member of Congress or your Biden administration or CDC official in the room and you tell them, like, here's this thing that we can do that would.

prevent the next pandemic or could prevent the next pandemic and would be a very good thing regardless and would not cost that much money and would look very good for you and would be an easy win and is not exactly controversial. Like who's opposing wastewater treatment or far UVC systems? Like why does it not happen?

Alec Stapp (33:56)

Yeah, that's a great question. So I think a couple assumptions there that I think we need to tease out. One, I don't think the industry would look very good. So these things are usually uncontroversial, but they're not salient enough for the public. So like no one's going to win an election based on like properly installing a wastewater monitoring system. If you prevent the pandemic that never happens, then you get no credit for it because the pandemic never happened. And so there's this asymmetric risk reward to any of these investments that you basically

Never get credit for them when it works out and you do the smart thing. But you get blame if things go south. And then on the, it doesn't cost that much money. These are not, so I don't wanna, I wanna be very clear here. It's not that these are super expensive, but they're not free either. And in our current budgeting environment, we're now in a high -interest rate environment. We have, interest rates are above 5%. Money is not free anymore.

The days of high -deficit spending are over for the foreseeable future. And so the budget constraints are very real. And then that environment, the way budgeting works in Washington, D .C., because the budget has to be bipartisan. It has to get 60 votes in the Senate to pass, which means it has to get both Democrats and Republicans every single year. And what they do is they just take the previous year's appropriations bill and start with that as the base text. And then any change from there, whether it's new spending or cutting -old spending,

essentially has to be bipartisan in nature and has to be a top priority. And so when you come in and say, hey, let's spend a billion dollars on wastewater surveillance, the people in the room are like, maybe a good idea, but like, we're not going to get credit for this. Who knows when it'll pay off? It's a very uncertain payoff. Probably there won't be a pandemic anyway. And then what are you going to cut? Are you going to cut the money we're spending on flu? There are a lot of lobbying groups that lobby for more spending on flu. How about cancer, diabetes, heart disease, all of these like,

very specific public health issues, like disease specific programs, have massive lobbying groups behind them, whether it's corporations or patient groups. And in a zero sum budgeting environment, we're not really increasing deficits for the foreseeable future. New spending has to take from somebody else, and then it becomes a dog fight. It's very hard to win.

Theo Jaffee (36:17)

So speaking of spending, IFP has talked positively about Biden's spending, like the infrastructure bill, the Innovation and Competition Act. But like, is this spending actually good? Like would it pass a cost benefit analysis? You pointed out on Twitter a couple weeks ago.

that the Biden administration allocated $42 .5 billion for high -speed internet, and not a single home or business has been connected nearly three years later. And on top of that, our national debt interest payments alone this year will be something like $900 billion, which is more than we spend on defense, more than almost anything else in the federal budget.

Alec Stapp (36:55)

Yes, I think we're in a really bad equilibrium right now where we spend a lot of money and don't get much for it. I think when it comes to things like basic research, even if I think our current systems are very inefficient, there is just such a clear story of market failure, of companies under -investing in really breakthrough, high -risk, high -reward stuff that won't pay off for a decade, research ideas that don't have clear, obvious commercialization potential. I just think...

all the economic research points to that being a massive underinvestment by the private sector. And so there's just a large role for the government to spend, you know, roughly on the order of the $60 billion a year NSF and NIH spend on basic research type investments. So I think there's a lot of improvements you can make there, but I wouldn't cut it just given the large market failure and the massive spillovers to the rest of the economy from those kinds of investments. When it comes to more narrowly targeted things like the

rural broadband subsidies. Yeah, I just think this is one of the worst case scenarios in government where it's politically popular to say people in rural America don't have internet. Let's spend a lot of money to make sure they're connected to the rest of the world. This is like the urban rural digital divide thing. And no one can talk about being against the digital divide, but it's a massive waste of money. And we have Starlink. Just do Starlink. Don't run fiber cables to, you know, a single person living out in the boonies. Like this is...

on a per mile per user basis, exorbitantly expensive. And if you look at, it's the weirdest thing, if you look at surveys of people, you ask them, why don't you have internet? The number one reason they say is they're not interested. Like part of the reason they moved out to middle of nowhere is because they don't want to be connected to the rest of the world. And so we're doing this thing where we're spending tons of money to connect people to the internet, some of whom don't even really want the internet. And because of...

political biases against Elon Musk and who is a highly imperfect person, we're now not doing Starlink's terminals when we should be for that money. And we could spend much less than $42 billion to connect people.

Theo Jaffee (39:08)

Well, like if this is true, should the government's main focus be on infrastructure spending or just like infrastructure permitting? Like for solar energy, should they pass, you know, a multi -billion dollar package to build solar or should they, should IFP be pushing for them to just allow private companies to do it easily, get their permits done?

Alec Stapp (39:28)

Yeah, so we really focus, for that reason, we really focus our efforts on the regulatory side to unlock private industry because a lot of these cases are situations where there are narrow targeted benefits to the users. And so if you make it legal to build the infrastructure, people will build it and they will sell it to private citizens for a profit. And so that's true of solar. And again, this is where like understanding institutional structure in DC is really important. So like, why did we get...

the subsidies and not the permitting reform. A key part of this is actually because of the rules of reconciliation. A bill can only go through reconciliation, meaning it would get only needs 50 votes in the Senate, which Democrats had for the first two years of the Biden administration. If the provision is primarily budgetary in nature, spending money on subsidies and tax credits is primarily budgetary in nature. And that's how we got the Inflation Reduction Act. But now we need to do permitting reform.

And we're also not going to increase deficits. We're not going to do massive new spending programs. And so our effort, which has always been around the higher efficiency, increased productivity in the economy, is now the only game in town. Going forward, either we're not going to get new reforms, or we're going to do the reforms that actually increase efficiency and productivity. There is no more new massive spending package coming.

Theo Jaffee (40:51)

So last week the Supreme Court struck down chevron deference, which is a legal doctrine for the audience, that if a court determines that a statute is ambiguous, it must defer to the interpretation of the relevant federal agency. But they no longer have to do that. So how important is this?

Alec Stapp (41:08)

It's a big deal. I think there is still uncertainty around exactly how it will be implemented. The court did not offer a very clear framework for how future decisions should be made. And so this is one of these things where, is how the common law system works in the United States. You get one new Supreme Court decision that establishes a new precedent. And then you see how it plays out in practice. You see which agency decisions get challenged. You see...

what lower courts do in terms of how they interpret this new guidance from the Supreme Court, and you see how it works in practice. So I think, one, I would just caveat this with, don't trust anyone who's overly confident on what Chevron deference or really any other Supreme Court decision means for the future. You'll notice that most people can't predict reliably what the Supreme Court is gonna do ahead of time on all these high profile cases. The law is inherently uncertain, at least in how US legal institutions work.

And we'll have to see how it evolves over time. But in general, Chevron deference will probably be a big deal. It will probably mean that agencies are more risk averse on the margin. They do less. They spend more time making sure that the limited actions they do take are unimpeachable on legal grounds and directly tied to their statutory authority from Congress. And something we've been talking about internally at IFP is like,

We're now going to be in the world of NEPA, the National Environmental Policy Act, for lots of other parts of government. Because that's how NEPA worked. It was a very short statute passed in 1970 that was then interpreted by the courts more broadly year after year for 50 plus years. And through litigation, brought by private actors, and then decided by judges, all of a sudden everything was a major federal action, so it was covered by NEPA. Almost everything has a significant environmental impact.

And you could never consider enough alternative mitigating measures. And so you can sue any project and say the environmental review missed a significant impact or it didn't consider an alternative measure. And that's the world we live in for NEPA and environmental review. And it's going to be increasingly the world we live in for a lot of other areas of policy.

Theo Jaffee (43:23)

What do you think about land value taxes as an intervention for YIMBY?

Alec Stapp (43:27)

I think they're great. We haven't done any explicit work on them, but I'm very supportive of all the Georgists out there. When I first heard about land -value taxes and looked into it, my prior was that, as I try to think about a lot of policy issues, is like, this is not really implemented anywhere in the world. Something else is going on. Like, probably the idea is fundamentally flawed. It's not that you can never come up with a wholly new idea that hasn't been tried and it won't be successful.

But it's probably a very high bar. Probably there are like fundamental things about human psychology and human institutions in the modern nation state that like lead to your idea not working. I think land value taxes could be an exception to this rule because it seems like we have a clear theory of why they haven't worked so far. And there are folks who have done a startup company to figure out the how do you estimate the land value? How do you separate it from the value of the structure on the land? And I think

You can tell a story where up until now we didn't have the data collection and the like quantitative statistical tools to actually make this, you know, produce these answers in a reliable way, which is why, you know, we're left with things like property taxes that are less efficient. And so I think technology applied to the land value tax problem in terms of land valuations could unlock them. And then obviously from economic first principles, they are the most efficient.

type of tax to implement.

Theo Jaffee (45:01)

So Leopold Aschenbrenner a few weeks ago just published this very long document called Situational Awareness. For those in the audience who don't know, Leopold was on the super alignment team at OpenAI. And he's very concerned about AI and AI alignment and doing it right. And one of the main ideas in this book length

Alec Stapp (45:04)

Ahem.

Theo Jaffee (45:22)

blog post series that he wrote was that eventually as AI gets really good, governments will wake up and kind of like they did during COVID and realize, this AI thing is a big deal. And they will nationalize all the AI labs and try to build AGI themselves in one big kind of Manhattan project thing called The Project. So do you think this will actually happen? Do you think this would be desirable?

Alec Stapp (45:48)

the way I currently think about AI is the future is highly uncertain, especially in this area. And so I won't say whether this will or won't happen. I think it's a possibility. I don't even can begin to describe the percentage chance of this happening on any reasonable time frame. The way we can think about AI at IFP is we're trying to focus on what are the robust ideas that will be good in a wide range of futures. So

There's folks like Leopold who believe in very short timelines. They believe in the scaling laws will hold. This is how we're going to get super intelligence. The resources required to get these orders of magnitude compute increases will require the nation state nationalization. One single concerted effort to avoid duplicating resource use. It's possible, but I also think there's another scenario where for whatever reason, the scaling laws stop holding.

capabilities kind of peter out or capabilities keep increasing, but the real world is heavy tailed as lots of people in Silicon Valley like to say. There are a lot of frictions in the real world. Maybe we get like the internet, much more innovation in the digital world and the physical world because it's hard to maybe progress and robotics doesn't happen as quickly. And so in all of these scenarios, whether it's like the Leopold future where we're very close to super intelligence and it's going to be a national project.

or the world where we have like limited gains and we're just trying to like make this internet 2 .0 thing happen. Under those world states, we want more state capacity on AI. We want NIST, the federal agency tasked with a lot of like standard setting and evaluations under the executive order from the Biden White House. We want them to work. We want them to have talented people. We want them to be focused on the most important issues. We want to make sure that that

When they evaluate a model, they know how to test its capabilities, they know what risks to work with, they know how to talk to the companies. That is just in almost every future world state, a better thing to have is that there's expertise and competence somewhere in the government to handle these really technical challenges in a fast changing world. And so we're really focused a lot in our AI portfolio on these state capacity issues because we're open -minded about

a wide range of possible futures and we're not sure where it's going.

Theo Jaffee (48:19)

If America is increasingly focusing on domestic production and manufacturing, like domestic manufacturing in America has increased significantly over the last few years, what does that mean for globalism? Is globalism dying?

Alec Stapp (48:31)

Globalism is definitely in retreat right now. I think it remains to be seen how much output we get. There's like all I've seen all the charts. I'm sure everyone has seen the charts of like massive increases in manufacturing capacity in terms of spending in the United States. We'll see what the productivity looks like, what output increase do we get for these these new investments. I think that remains to be seen. But probably we'll get we'll get some noticeable increase. And yeah, due to

rising geopolitical risk, multiple wars, potential conflict with China over Taiwan, ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. I think a lot of countries look around and they see kind of the end of Pax Americana and the natural implication of that is let's make sure we have domestic capacity for manufacturing, critical supply chains, and there's like a movement towards more on -shoring. The thing I think is underrated in this debate that I would...

hopeful that US policymakers move towards is the idea of friend shoring of you don't have to have all this capacity in the United States, but you do want to have it in friendly countries that in the event of a hot war or conflict, you aren't vulnerable to a critical input being leveraged against you. And so let's dramatically increase trade with Canada, Mexico, the European Union, the UK.

Obviously attempt to do so with South Korea and Japan, but also recognizing that they're in a more vulnerable region of the world. But overall, let's massively increase the density of trade networks with allied nations, I think is an obviously good idea that balances the national security risks, along with the reality that the United States is never going to be the world leader in every single facet of manufacturing.

Theo Jaffee (50:32)

So for my last segment, I'm going to shamelessly steal from Tyler Cowen and say we should play a game of overrated or underrated. So overrated or underrated prediction markets.

Alec Stapp (50:42)

Let's do it.

I will say currently underrated just because probably your listeners are people who read works in progress. And our friend Nick Whitaker just wrote a great piece about why prediction markets are overrated. And so I think probably in people's mind, they're currently overrated. I will say they're underrated just because the biggest event in Washington, DC right now or the biggest ongoing conversation is the presidential debate and the aftermath of should Joe Biden step down? Will he step down for the nomi - for the -

convention, if he steps down, who will the next nominee be? And the primary way this conversation is happening is via people talking about prediction markets, which is crazy. This is a very niche thing relative to years ago. And now it's mainstream for political pundits to talk about prediction markets. And so I think they're a little underrated given their recent progress.

Theo Jaffee (51:40)

And a personal lesson from Prediction Markets, when Trump and Biden were both trading at around 50 -50 a couple weeks ago, I bet on Trump yes, but I should have bet on Biden no, because I forgot to take into account the conditional that Biden would actually get the nomination, and I didn't expect him to collapse like this after the debate. So, yeah, lesson for anyone who wants to bet on Prediction Markets. Overrated or underrated? Charter cities.

Alec Stapp (51:50)

You

Gotta be careful out there.

Hmm underrated probably I think they've had a lot of you know, obviously struggles and false starts over the over the years, but I think Still the idea of like can a fresh start for a city with new institutions have a big impact and I also think that Charter cities as a case study for for incumbent cities to learn from is underrated so if you get a successful charter city in Africa that you know grows to

even 100 ,000 people, maybe they learn new ways of doing things that can be adapted to cities in America or at least other cities in Africa. And so I think there is a transfer of learning across cities that a charter city could kickstart.

Theo Jaffee (52:54)

Overrated or underrated? Existential risk and long -termism.

Alec Stapp (52:58)

probably currently underrated. It's obviously taken some huge hits with the controversies around Sam Bankman Fried, FTX, the AI, EAC, AI safety debate. but I think you should just like separate out the ideas from the communities. And at the end of the day, is it possible that there are technologies that could have catastrophic risk and it's like nuclear weapons already exist?

We have had pandemics that have killed more than 20 million people multiple times. Biotech is advancing very quickly. It's possible we could engineer pathogens that are much more deadly than COVID. And again, like I said, we're very uncertain about the future of AI, but if we actually achieve developing super intelligence, there are risks involved with that. And so I think being realistic about the possibility of existential risk is something people should include in their mental model of the world.

Theo Jaffee (53:56)

Overrated or underrated, effective altruism.

Alec Stapp (54:00)

And this is where I think it's underrated currently because it got attached to the controversies around long -termism and ex -risk. I think of effective altruism primarily as bed nets to fight malaria in Africa. And like, again, just like take it down to brass tacks because I know there are a lot of like controversial people involved in all sides of this debate. Yeah, and like, yeah, lots of people. And it's like, is it good to try to help others?

Theo Jaffee (54:13)

Yeah.

Savvy Goodread.

Alec Stapp (54:29)

Generally, yes. Should we try to be effective about this? Should we try to measure things and use data to be more effective or less effective? Those are kind of unimpeachable ideas, I think. You can disagree with how it operates in practice. And I think the kind of like...

Theo Jaffee (54:42)

Yeah, but that's like the Democratic People's Republic of Korea argument.

Alec Stapp (54:48)

Sure, sure I guess. I mean, but that's obviously just like, but like, the effect of autism community does donate to bed nets in Africa and I do think that like, actually like reduces malaria deaths.

Theo Jaffee (55:01)

Alright, overrated or underrated? Within progress studies circles, climate change.

Alec Stapp (55:08)

within progress of these circles?

Theo Jaffee (55:10)

Yeah, because probably in the broader society, it's somewhat overrated. People are making these very short -term doom predictions. But within progress studies, do you think it's overrated or underrated?

Alec Stapp (55:23)

It's probably still a little overrated, I think. A lot of the tipping point arguments seem to have been refuted of like, the latest IPCC report shows that like the extreme worst case scenarios are increasingly unlikely. And so we need to do our best to limit warming. The arguments for clean energy abundance are over determined. So of course, mitigating the effects of global warming are one of those, but also just the general benefits of clean energy.

becoming more widespread. Those are really important. And so I think it's probably still in the progress studies community there are some folks who aren't up on the latest data in terms of like the catastrophic risks from the possibility of catastrophic risk from climate change being overrated.

Theo Jaffee (56:10)

Also within progress studies, overrated or underrated nuclear energy. Cause last time on the podcast I had Casey Handmer, who is extremely, extremely bullish on solar and kind of bearish on nuclear energy because it's expensive and complicated and solar is cheap and simple.

Alec Stapp (56:19)

Mm -hmm.

Yeah, I think it's still overrated. I think the way I talk about nuclear is it is extremely stupid for us to shut down operational nuclear power plants and we should be doing everything we can to bring those back online once we shut down to extend the life of existing Gen 2 nuclear power plants. We should be reforming the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to make it viable to have a chance for small modular reactors to make sure that

a possible future of nuclear fusion is not killed by the regulatory state. There are lots of things we should be doing, but if you're just trying to prognosticate about the future, nuclear power has experienced negative learning curves in almost every country for decades. It gets more expensive to build over time. South Korea used to be an exception. Now their costs seem to be increasing. France costs are increasing. They have a legacy nuclear fleet.

I'm sure your listeners heard it for Casey, the opposite was obviously true for solar. It just keeps getting cheaper over time. It's an exponential curve in terms of deployment. And so if you're betting on what the future is going to look like, it's going to look like much more like solar than nuclear. Even if we should have made different decisions in the 1970s with nuclear, we still should include it in our portfolio. And it's moronic to shut down existing nuclear power plants because they are safe and deliver clean 24 -7 energy. But are we likely to

quickly fix the cost problem, I'm pessimistic.

Theo Jaffee (58:01)

Overrated or underrated, California.

Alec Stapp (58:05)

California currently underrated probably. I mean, it's one of these things of when you have LA, San Francisco, the future of AI is being built in San Francisco, great climate, the coast, it's beautiful. Yeah, it's California. So I think currently underrated because of temporary problems with, major problems with the housing crisis, major problems with.

Theo Jaffee (58:23)

Yeah, I'm there right now.

Alec Stapp (58:35)

drug addiction, homelessness, et cetera, but I'm long run bullish on California because it has all the fundamentals and just needs to fix some of these policy errors.

Theo Jaffee (58:45)

And what about Florida, overrated or underrated?

Alec Stapp (58:50)

Probably currently a bit overrated. I think people underestimate the importance of weather and the hot and humid summers there I think make it hard to bet on like super long term. So Florida's great. They're innovating and people are moving there. But I think for the real bleeding edge frontier tech stuff, I think you need more than what Florida currently has.

Theo Jaffee (59:15)

Yeah, I grew up there and there's a reason that I'm here in San Francisco for the summer and not in South Florida. Yeah.

Alec Stapp (59:21)

Exactly. Weather matters a lot. It's real shame.

Theo Jaffee (59:25)

Well, it's not just the weather, it's all the tech people, but you know, the weather helps. And then what is the, yeah, what is the single most overrated policy or issue, either among progress studies people or just among the general public?

Alec Stapp (59:30)

Yeah, but why are the tech people, you know, it's like it's a bit circular.

Overriding the sense that people care about it, but it actually won't move the needle.

Theo Jaffee (59:46)

Yes.

Alec Stapp (59:48)

Uhhh...

I mean, because we were talking about it, it's on top of my mind, but rural broadband subsidies, it is, on a per dollar basis, almost a complete waste of money. And if we think that there is a redistribution element to this where we need to subsidize people's access to internet in rural areas, give them Starlink terminals and call it a day. But in the tech policy community, this issue is talked about ad nauseum, and it's almost a complete waste of money.

Theo Jaffee (1:00:26)

And then finally, what's the most underrated policy or issue?

Alec Stapp (1:00:31)

Most underrated. The most underrated, yeah. I think probably is on my mind today because there was a great piece in the New York Times about using elevators as an example of why there's cost bloat in all sorts of building construction. And I think it gets to a broader problem around building codes and standardization that I think is like the one of the most underrated ideas is

Theo Jaffee (1:00:34)

like the most underrated.

Alec Stapp (1:00:59)

The US federal system of government with local, state, and federal regulators and authorities leads to a lack of economies of scale in the construction industry writ large, whether it's commercial, residential housing, manufacturing buildings, et cetera. When you want to build anything in the United States, we have this fitocracy where so many regulators get to weigh in and impose different standards that it's very hard for us to be integrated in the global economy for building supplies as well as having any kind of national.

companies and so the federal government should use every carrot and stick it has to align building codes and standards so that companies can reach higher economies of scale and start to automate more.

Theo Jaffee (1:01:44)

All right, well, that's a good place to wrap it up, I think. So thank you so much, Alec Stapp, for coming on the podcast.

Alec Stapp (1:01:49)

Thanks for having me, Theo.

Theo Jaffee (1:01:52)

Absolutely.