Derek Thompson on AI, abundance, and human progress

25:08Right. Rethink what a university could be. It doesn't have to be the same thing. All right, Reid, I'm going to go to you first. Too many, too little or just right Walmart locations in the United States. I think too few. I think the productivity of these kinds of centers, when it creates that kind of thing, it enables a lot of other productivity. So I would say more is good. Derek. My certainty here is incredibly low. So I'm going to say just right, not because I think America would be better off if there were fewer super centers, but rather because I think it would be interesting if we had another wave of innovation in physical retail.

25:44You had Walmart really take off in what, the 1970s and grow a lot in the late 1980s, 1990s. Amazon founded, I believe, in the 1990s and really takes off in 2000s and 2010s, especially in physical retail with its acquisition of Whole Foods. it's now been a few decades since the founding of America's biggest retail giant. And it'd be interesting to see someone else get a crack at that because Amazon turned out to be really good at a lot of things that Walmart wasn't initially very good at. So I'll say just the same because stagnation in Walmart locations with an overall growing retail sector would, I think, imply some innovation in other parts of the market.

26:25Some innovation coming in. No, absolutely. So this is something maybe everyone has known forever, but I just learned about, is government funding housing in Singapore is wild to me. Do you think we should have more or less the same government funding housing in the U.S.? I'm a huge fan of social housing. I also think that if you take social housing policy seriously, you see that it's basically impossible to build housing with the social housing policy structures that we have in places like California. And this is a part of the book. So it's been funny or interesting with some folks on the left criticizing the book for not explicitly advancing enough left-wing policies like social housing.

27:04But fundamentally, social housing is sensitive to many of the same physical world regulations that private housing construction is sensitive to. So Singapore founded their housing model in a much stricter and less liberal era and made it easier for them to build what they intended to build. And while I I am a huge fan of democratic liberalism. I also think that we should make it easier to build as well before we plow a trillion dollars into a public housing system that just ends up building, quote unquote, affordable housing for something like$500 ,000 per unit, which would just be a massive deadweight loss for U.S.

27:39spending. Absolutely. Reid? Well, I think abundance and efficiency in housing costs. I do think that one of the things you look at that have a massive increase in costs, which is housing, education, healthcare, et cetera, should be targets of an abundance-like model in order to make it much more plentiful. It's part of what makes the quality of life better. Now, I do think the Singaporean housing model, I don't know which parts of it would be doable in the US, but it's been amazing for Singapore. And the notion of the melting plot blend, which I think has greatly increased social cohesion in Singapore.

28:19And then also the question around making that more available as a general societal right is, I think, good things. Now, which things we could do like it, I think it's an interesting question given the cultures are so different. Fair enough. All right. Last question. Derek, I'll go to you first. Do you think we need more or less border security? I'm going to be honest. I don't know the level of border security that we have right now. My general impression is that the border security situation, say in 2022, 2023, had gotten to a point where not only were individual states finding it impossible to absorb the number of immigrants that were waiting in the asylum lines, but also was creating a terrible anti-advertagement for the Democratic Party, which is bad for immigration in the long run.

28:59Because if you're seen as the pro-immigration party that can't handle the border, then it really complicates the case for liberalizing immigration law in the long run. So I'm going to say the annoying thing, which is that having been on book tour for a while, I have just no sense of what the status quo of border security is. But I think that conservative critics of the Biden administration were absolutely justified in critiquing the border security situation. I'm generally one of these people whose position on immigration is, A, we need a ton more high skilled immigration. B, I'm for liberalizing immigration generally across the board.

29:33C, it has to be an orderly process because in the event that it's seen as a disordered process, you're undercutting your strong case for both high-skill and general immigration. Reid? I mean, generally speaking, I think in many things, more is better. I think higher border security is good. I think it's, again, I would tend to go more innovation-oriented. I mean, part of the things I found nutty about Build-A-Wall is like, okay, let's do the two-century-old thing versus like drones or sensors or, you know, this kind of thing. But I do think that it's important to do. I think it's important for the coherence of society to have a good sense of we have good social agreement on what immigration looks like.

30:14Now, we are a country built on immigration, and I think high-skilled immigration is our superpower. It's part of what makes our entrepreneurial community. It's part of what makes our scientific community. So the high-skilled immigration thing is I think, you know, we should be trying to 10x because it benefits all Americans. But, you know, I think that, you know, more intelligent, call it technologically forward border security, I think is a good thing. And that concludes our very first, and I guess possibly our last, game of too little, too much, or just right. And Reid, let's get you back in the co-host seat.

30:45Take it away. One of the things in your book that I had wanted to come to, because you may or may not have known that I co-founded Manus AI with Siddhartha Mukherjee. So we are tackling cancer, which you say is one of the most frustrating areas of declining scientific productivity. So we are trying to use AI to increase the scientific productivity, but also the drug development part of it, which is actually particularly challenging. And that's usually because most regulatory agencies don't figure out on how to create abundance. They figure out how to create minimization of risk, which also tends to be somewhat anti-abundance.

31:14And what you want is minimization of risk with a growth of abundance and how do you get the balance of it. So go through a little bit about what do we need to do to incentivize the kind of scientific progress, the pipeline of young scientists, out-of-the-box ideas, because the current administration is basically trying to destroy American science. If Siddhartha were on this call and asked me, what do I think we should do to the NIH in order to increase the productivity of cancer research? I would reject the question entirely and say, can you just talk about that for an hour? Because there's literally nothing that I can tell Siddhartha Mukherjee about cancer research that that man doesn't already know.

31:50So let me answer the question. Then let me figure out if you absorbed any nuggets of wisdom from your co-founder, because he is an absolute genius. I think the NIH is an absolutely brilliant organization. And I think what's happening to it right now is an absolute tragedy. That said, just because it is a tragedy to destroy the NIH does not mean that the NIH pre-destruction did not need to be reformed. The NIH is, in its current evolution, essentially an 80-year-old program that, like any 80-year-old bureaucracy, is showing signs of its age. This is not my opinion. This is something close to a cliche among scientists that ask the NIH for grant money.

32:32To be very efficient with my critique of the NIH, which again, I think is the crown jewel of biomedical research around the world. It's just a crown jewel that has like any bureaucracy accumulated problems. One, like most bureaucracies, it has become very good at incremental conservatism. And science, I believe, moves forward one shocking discovery at a time. And so if you have a peer review process that is very good at rewarding incremental conservatism, you are almost by definition declining to fund the most high risk, high reward research that I think is most likely to move science forward.

33:09Number two, throughout history, young scientists have often been the most paradigm shifting thinkers. The classic example here is quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics was not a breakthrough among a bunch of 70-year-olds who thought about the photoelectric effect for a while and were like, oh, I finally figured it out. It's quanta. It was like a bunch of children, Schrodinger and Heisenberg and Planck. These were basically children at the time, and they revolutionized science. And it was the older scientists at the time, like Einstein, who had trouble accepting their conclusions. That's a great proof of the idea that if you want to fund paradigm-shifting science, you should have an explicit strategy for funding young scientists.

33:50And instead, the share of scientists under 39 receiving NIH grants has declined by something, I don't remember the stat in the book, but it's something like 50 % in the last 30 years. I mean, it's just stunning the degree to which science is getting older. There's nothing wrong with older scientists. It's just that there's a different kind of thinking that comes from being frankly young and stupid enough to think that you can change the world with a new idea. Sometimes it's really nice to have that. And Silicon Valley, frankly, has demonstrated the profitability of allowing young people to believe that they have paradigm shifting ideas.

34:19And then finally, and this is one that I feel most passionate about sometimes, it's not just about bias against high risk, high reward research, and it's not just about bias toward older researchers. It's about a bias toward paperwork. The average scientist in America now spends up to 40 % of his or her time filling out grants and filling out paperwork about the grants that they filled out. As I say in the book, imagine if the entire American Academy caught a virus that gave him chronic fatigue disorder for half of the year, and so they simply could not work. No one in science could work between January and June of every year.

34:53Imagine if this was a Trump plan, right? Imagine if Jay Bhattacharya said, hey, there's a new rule for NIH-funded scientists. you're not allowed to do anything until July. We'd be like, that's effing dumb. Why would you do that? But this same principle of essentially zeroing out half of scientists' time for non-productivity is what bureaucratic paperwork is already doing. It's already taking half of their time. So this is a virus we've given ourselves. It's a policy that we've designed for ourselves, even though I think no one can explicitly defend it. So I think that NIH should take a page from science and try to master the science of science.

35:30Run more experiments. Give young scientists a bucket of money for 15 years and say, go away and don't call us back for the next decade and a half. See what you cook up. We're not going to ruin your life with a bunch of paperwork requirements. Fund new research or fund new ways of rewarding grants. Maybe fund some by lottery, fund some by what's called a golden ticket, which means the three of us are on a review panel and read Naria, you hate this idea that someone proposes and I think it's brilliant, so I use my golden ticket to fund that grant even though you guys think it's stupid. This is going to be better for sort of fat tail research.

36:04It is totally fanciful to think that anybody has a formula for scientific discovery other than running experiments. If there was a formula for discovering fusion technology, then everyone would know the formula and we would have fusion technology. By definition, there is no formula for discovering the unknown. And in the face of total uncertainty, you should be wide open to experimentation. Instead, what we have at the NIH is a system that has built up over 80 years to concretize certain theories of scientific discovery that I think might not be the best ways to push science forward. Think about the importance of productivity for every other sector.

36:44What if manufacturing never had a productivity growth? What if agriculture never had productivity growth? We'd be still living in the 1700s. Well, there's lots of research suggesting that scientific productivity is somewhere between flat and down. Why aren't we interested in fixing that? If we could speed up the productivity rate of scientific research, the inventions we could pull forward in time are unthinkable. So I think it is a huge, huge national policy blind spot that we're not talking about this more. But now I want to know what Mukherjee thinks. Well, I would like to know what Mukherjee thinks too, because I agree with you about the fact that he is just an out-and-out, very broad-spectrum genius.

37:30You know, I myself have thought that this whole bureaucratization of science, especially once you've identified, you know, the talent, is foolish for exactly the reason of like fatigue syndrome disease. years ago i used to do this deliberate grant making to try to break scientists free of the writing time i'm actually very hopeful this will be one of the accelerations that ai will give us because ai you know like if it just made that 10x more effective and just doing the bureaucracy you win a bunch of that back i helped a colleague of mine david sanford start this thing called the hypothesis fund which is go out and identify through a venture scouts model the youngest scientists to just give them money to go do bold things.

38:10Because the key thing is going and doing bold things. And one of the challenges you have in essentially government and scalable capital allocation is the incentives tend to be that any error is used to kill you. And so you try to go to no error, which means no risk, which means you can't be bold. And so you have to do various things to kind of make the bold things work. And we need to actually have that because the only way you get to the scientific invention, the only way you get to the abundance is through what you could call experimentation. I think the thing that I love about what you and Ezra have done with Abundance is it's exactly right, which is how do we build as much goodness in the future as possible?

38:47Technology being a huge driver of it, but also, of course, social systems and incentive for young talent and identifying that talent and having the 20-year-old quantum mechanics folks go, and now we're going to be bold. So, you know, plus one to all of that. I love it. I do want to note that, Derek, if you haven't checked out what David Fagenbaum is doing at University of Pennsylvania, he is actually using AI to figure out what drugs that are on the market right now, for one thing, can help autism or help all of the spectrum of things. And he's super being helped by AI. So I love that it's already like seeping into what people are doing.

39:22But so to switch gears from sort of science and the amazing things that we can do to something that just seems simple, like I will tell anyone who will listen that there's only two things you need in life. You need to move your body and you need deep relationships. And I am so obsessed with the loneliness epidemic. And you've talked a lot about it. You wrote, you know, the antisocial century and how this wasn't just COVID. This was accelerating before COVID. A lot of people blame social media, the downsides, kids being home, adults being home. And you talk a lot about it. How do we need to rethink society or design choices related to technology to sort of halt this epidemic?

40:01I think the first thing to recognize is that our lack of purposefulness is part of what got us here. We adopted these technologies without any real sense of how they were going to advance our values. Technology doesn't have values. Technology works within systems that imbue it with values, right? There's nothing about the phone itself, nothing about Instagram itself that demands that its users spend less time with people. But because the technology makes a certain kind of communication and a certain kind of entertainment more frictionless and convenient, it ends up displacing a lot of human-to-human connection in the absence of someone purposely pushing against it.

40:48That's fundamentally what I think we're seeing. I don't think these technologies, I don't think it's something like evil, I consider them, like so much technology, powerful. And powerful technologies can have powerfully surprising side effects. One mental model that I've talked about a bit, even though I don't think it's really deeply discussed in my essay on a social century, which is just, by the way, an essay that billows out my observation that Americans are spending less time with other people than ever, and that this has a lot of implications for the way we live, for our economy, for our politics, and for the future.

41:21One way to think about it is something like this. So with the agriculture revolution, we used to be organisms whose bodies were designed around scarcity. And then suddenly we invented an abundance of calories at our disposal. And over time, many people, especially in rich countries, gained weight because of all the calories that were available to us. And so you could say that, well, of course, caloric abundance is a pure good. It's a pure good that comes alongside this risk. And it took us a while to really make peace with or recognize the risk. And so maybe you could say we're dis-evolved for a world.

41:57Humans are dis-evolved for a world of caloric abundance. I think you could argue that humans are dis-evolved for a world of entertainment abundance and for communicative abundance, which is not to say that abundance, the material realms that Ezra and I talk about in the book are important, you know, housing and energy and scientific discoveries. I think these are public goods you want to make more of, but ours is not like an aimless abundance. So let's have more of everything. There's risks to the ample supply of goods and services. And even more importantly, something I see is like, there's this TikTok trend of young people, 20-somethings, celebrating when their plans are canceled.

42:34This is very interesting to me because it goes directly at this question of like, is this really a loneliness epidemic or is it something much stranger, right? Loneliness, many sociologists would say, is a biological response to the gap between your felt and desired social connection. So you feel like you're not around a lot of people. And so you start feeling lonely and like, I want to get off the couch. I want to hang out with people. What we're seeing in this world is actually stranger than mere loneliness. You're seeing young people who hang out with their friends less than any previous generation celebrate when their friends cancel plans with them because they feel so tired all the time and don't have maybe like the dopaminergic drive to leave their house and suffer the indignities of driving in a car and parking in order to hang out with their friends.

43:18And so like I find that beyond concerning. I find it really like phenomenologically interesting. Like that this is how we live today, that we have access to these technologies of incredibly ample entertainment and we're using them in many ways to replace human to human interaction. Like that is a really, really interesting thing to me. I just listened to Jonathan Haidt on Ezra and I decided that what I'm against is YouTube and I'm pro movies. So I'm going to now have my kids watch movies all the time with morals and they have to be engaged and we're forcing the kids to watch it together. And so I'll just ask, are you like, okay, let's delay the smartphone till 16.

44:02What do you think? My feeling is I want my daughter, like myself, to have a healthy relationship with the technology rather than an aversive relationship to the technology. I think there's a danger both in sort of self-regulation and regulation of our children in making something seem like the enemy, especially when it's going to be a part of their lives. It's the same thing with food. It's the same thing with exercise. It's the same thing with desserts. Look, I grew up in a household where chocolate was banned because my mom didn't like it. And as a result, whenever my sister and I were in other people's houses, we were just like gobbling up chocolate.

44:41And so that's a situation where you make an enemy of something and then kids, they'll have a different kind of relationship with it. So it's important for me to help myself and help my kids reconcile themselves with the inevitability of technology and build a healthy relationship with it rather than consider any of it like totally off limits. Fair enough. Probably good. So as we've talked a little bit about our kind of living in the wrecking ball administration, you know, whether it's wrecking science, wrecking international friendships and partnerships, or wrecking the economy. But one of the things is that sometimes a wrecking ball is a good thing for clearing out things.

45:24What are like some number of policies, three to five, that you think hinder abundance, however well-intentioned, that if you were swinging a wrecking ball against would be the right ones to get rid of? And then what would be some policies that would be pro-abundance? policies to add Operation Warp Speed for, if not everything, at least five more things. I'd want to convene a panel of scientists to think about, okay, what technologies are close enough that the pull funding mechanisms of Operation Warp Speed could be incredibly useful in bringing this technology to light and especially creating prizes around it that would make the final application of that technology cheaper?

46:02In the book, we talk about clean cement. We talk about pneumococcal vaccines, I believe, for the low-income world. I think there's probably other medicines and other clean energy breakthroughs that'd be sensitive to pull funding. I'll describe that bucket. We'll call that bucket Operation Warp Speed for everything. I would want to create at the NIH a science prizes layer, a layer of the NIH that was created for the purpose of running more projects with the current amount of money they have or more rather than the current strategy, which is we don't like the word mRNA, so never put that in your research.

46:38We don't like certain words, so don't research them. It's not totalitarian, but there's a kind of autocratic insistence that scientists don't do certain things that I think is totally opposite to what you want science to be. So rather than cut and dictate, I would want to open up a new layer of the NIH that is devoted to studying scientific projects that are run out of the NIH. Those are two policies that I would want to see added. In the housing realm, I think it'd be interesting to see what happens if you make certain pots of federal money contingent on states accelerating permitting or taking away zoning laws in high demand cities.

47:21I'd love to see the federal government use its might to encourage states to accelerate housing and energy production. So those are policies to add. And policies to subtract would be, I'd like to see an enormous increase in exemptions for NEPA. Pai, can you explain? NEPA stands for the National Environmental Policy Act. It's a United States environmental law that requires federal agencies to assess the environmental effects of their proposed actions and decisions. This is one place where it seems like there's mutterings out of the Trump administration that they might do some of this. Nothing is all bad.

47:56And one can simultaneously pursue a tariff policy that makes absolutely no sense and a NEPA deregulatory policy that in certain cases does make sense. So I would like to see the number of exclusions for NEPA really escalate. very similar to the way that the California Senate is trying to push through or is debating right now a rule that would exclude urban construction, downtown construction, I think especially in infill areas and also near transit, exempt that from CEQA, which is the California equivalent to NEPA. I think that's a really clever policy. I would love to see various ways of accelerating permitting.

48:31The Biden administration passed the IRA and then did not get behind Manchin Barrasso, which was the permitting bill, which is absolutely like the yin to the yang for clean energy. You can't cite if you also can't permit the long distance transmission lines. And so I would love to see something like that be passed into law. I would like to see more governors and mayors take a page from Josh Shapiro, who a couple of years ago when the I-95 bridge fell down, declared an emergency declaration and used it to wipe away environmental review, permitting processes, procurement processes, and basically rebuilt the bridge that would, under normal circumstances, have taken 24 months in 12 days.

49:09And I know emergency declarations, considering the tariffs, are a fraught subject right now. But what if Wes Moore, what if Jared Polis, what if Karen Bass, what if more Democratic politicians were less afraid about recognizing the proverbial fallen bridges in their cities and states as fallen bridges, as emergencies, and announced that they wanted to dramatically accelerate their process of working on these problems. So that's more at the sort of like institutional layer than the policy layer. But I think that would be an interesting idea. I'm just all about it. Like getting politicians to, you know, take some risks and then do something amazing.

49:50All right, Rapid Fire. Is there a movie, song or book that fills you with optimism for the future? Ezra had a good line on our tour the other day where he took a question about optimism and redirected it toward curiosity, which is to say like there's a kind of optimism that is synonymous with curiosity. You believe that by answering questions, you can learn more about the world and make it better. And the book that fills me with the deepest sense of curiosity that I've read recently was When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labattu, which is absolutely brilliant, very, very strange, and just made me deeply curious about scientific discovery and the madness contained within.

50:28it's very strange and very wonderful. Awesome. What is a question that you wish people would ask you more often? What are you thinking about? I have a very loud internal monologue. So at any given time, there's someone in my head screaming at me about something. Typically, it's like nice screaming, but that question can always be answered. What are you thinking about? Love it. Awesome. A variant of that, which is where do you see progress or momentum outside of your industry that inspires you? I think what's happening at the intersection of AI and medicine is incredibly interesting. And I'm really, really rooting for it to go well.

50:58And our final question, can you leave us with a final thought on what you think is possible to achieve if everything breaks humanity's way in the next 15 years? And what's the first step to get there? I'm really, really interested in the advances in blood tests and proteomics converging to create incredibly powerful diagnostics for all sorts of things. I'm talking about like something close to an all-purpose blood test that's like, why don't I feel good? But that also serves as an all-purpose blood test to what are my risk factors for like a thousand different maladies whose protein proxies or surrogate endpoints we've worked out in various AI models.

51:38The ability to essentially like take an x-ray of your cellular genetic and biochemical health would be absolutely sensational and requires a lot more advances in proteomics and genomics and a lot of other nomics and blood tests. But that's a technology that I feel like is both sci-fi and also possible. Derek, thank you so much for being here today. Really appreciate it. My pleasure. This was fun. Awesome.

52:06Possible is produced by Wonder Media Network. It's hosted by Aria Finger and me, Reid Hoffman. Our showrunner is Sean Young. Possible is produced by Katie Sanders, Edie Allard, Sarah Schleid, Vanessa Handy, Aaliyah Yates, Paloma Moreno-Humenez, and Nalia Agudelo. Jenny Kaplan is our executive producer and editor. Special thanks to Surya Yalamanchili, Saida Sepieva, Vanasi Delos, Ian Alice, Greg Beato, Parth Batil, and Ben Relis. And a big thanks to Eva Karens and Alex Premiani.