Why America Stopped Innovating - And How We Can Start Again

0:00How can we invent technologies and science that will make people 40 years from now look back in the 2020s and say, God, that world sucked. Right now, science and tech policy at the federal level, I think, is too reliant on what we happened to do 50 years ago. They solve the problems of their age. We have to solve the problem of ours. We're alive, cosmically speaking, for like three seconds. Why wouldn't you spend your time trying to do the most important, interesting things in the world?

0:32Today, I'm thrilled to be joined by Derek Thompson. He's a staff writer at The Atlantic, the host of podcast Plain English, and the co-author with Ezra Klein of the new book Abundance, which outlines a bold new vision for building a more prosperous future. Thanks so much for joining us. It's a real pleasure to be here. Thank you. Can you paint us a picture? Like, what is the abundance agenda? And if it succeeds, what could daily life look like in 2050? So this book is, in many ways, a very serious policy book. I mean, we get into the details of housing policy and energy policy and infrastructure building, but it begins with three pages of science fiction.

1:13It begins with a vignette of what the world would look like in 2050 if we got everything right. And of course, it's a world of housing abundance. And it's a world of clean energy abundance, where people are waking up in rooms that are cocooned with clean energy, abundant solar and wind, enhanced geothermal, nuclear. but this is a science and tech show and I want to talk about the tech that we think would be available if we got everything right. There's a lot of technologies, whether it's vertical farming, whether it's cellular meat or mass desalination of water. So you turn on your faucet and it's basically ocean water that's pouring out that you can drink.

1:52These are incredibly energy thirsty technologies. They require an enormous amount of electricity. And then on top of it all, there's carbon removal, which might be one of the most important technologies of the next 30, 40 years, that's also incredibly energy intensive. And so there's a huge vision in this book of if we got energy superabundance right, what are the technologies that we could build with that energy superabundance? Another feature in that sci-fi vignette is that this family gets a little ping on their AI earpiece and hear that their friends are taking the long weekend to fly on a supersonic jet from New York to London and the jet is using clean fuel.

2:32I mean, these are the kind of technologies that are just on the come up. You know, companies like Boom that are building supersonic technology. But a lot of this needs a ton of energy. It needs more hard tech breakthroughs. And so while this book is absolutely about making abundant things that we know how to build, like say apartment buildings in San Francisco, a lot of it is about dreaming about the things that we haven't invented yet and how to build not just an abundance agenda of housing and clean energy, but an invention agenda for all sorts of technologies that aren't in our fingertips right now.

3:02In startup world, we sort of have this aversion to deceleration. It seems like if technology is to actually bring us to this sort of 2050 vision, we do sort of have to accelerate, but not without accountability. We think about speed being a virtue in business. Ezra and I think about speed being a virtue for government. we think about it as being a lost virtue, a virtue that we used to have, that we no longer have. When California authorizes$33 billion to build a high-speed rail system that does not exist, that's a fantastically tragic example of a failure to prioritize speed. And there's another slightly wonkier example.

3:47So in 2021, Joe Biden signed the infrastructure bill, the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which he and Pete Buttigieg hailed as the most significant and most important infrastructure bill in modern American history. And it was, if you looked at just the numbers,$1.2 trillion. It included a$42 billion policy to build rural broadband. Oh, yes, absolutely. This is a classic example of a progressive priority. Let's hook up underserved people to the internet so that they can participate in the online economy and even participate in things like telehealth. There was a 14-step process created for the states to apply for that$42 billion pot of money.

4:24So first, the FCC had to draw a map of where Americans were underserved by broadband internet, and then the states could challenge it. And then the states could draw their own map, and then there was a challenge period. And then the states could apply for their letter of intent, and then that could be challenged by the Commerce Department, and then they could apply for their funding. And so those could be challenged because they didn't have the right equity matrices. They didn't have the right workforce development programs. And here's what I find so interesting about the rural broadband story.

4:48If you go through those 14 steps, there's not a single one of them that is obviously stupid. They're all kind of understandable. Yeah, we should probably have a map to point out where we want to build this stuff. Yeah, maybe we should have an opportunity for folks to challenge the map because maybe the map drawers are wrong. Yeah, we should care about equity. Equity is important. Yeah, we should care about workforce development. Yeah, we should care about this certain procurement process. But this is the nature of bureaucracy. bureaucracy is a means of decentralizing care in a way that de-emphasizes focus on an outcome and so what happens is you care so much about every single step that there is no outcome we are four calendar years after the rural broadband provision was passed no rural broadband effectively has been built and of the 56 states and localities that applied for funding only three of them even made it all the way through that 14-step process.

5:44And so much of the book is about a liberal criticism, because we're liberals, of the ways that we've allowed process to overcome outcomes. And that is fundamentally a bureaucratic character. There has been a lack of accountability to the outcomes. There's astronomical amount of money for some of these things, but for high-speed rail, how do we fight this? How do we prevent this from happening? We still want high-speed rail in California, but the funny thing is I remember on Twitter watching people protest in Sacramento about it, like don't defund it and things like that. But where were they when there was a trial – there was a lawsuit, a CEQA appeal for just that one-mile track?

6:31A CEQA appeal? Hundreds of CEQA appeals, right? If you're asking for my personal opinion, this project is dead. Yeah. There was a window of opportunity. When California authorized$33 billion to build high-speed rail, when you had a recession with low interest rates, Barack Obama was the president. He passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, AARA, which was known as the 2009 stimulus. And that was the golden opportunity to build high-speed rail in California. And nothing was done. And no one learned from the fact that nothing was done year after year after year. And in fact, some of these policies were examples of precisely the, what Ezra calls, everything big of liberalism, the attempt to pull every progressive priority into every piece of legislation in a way that makes it impossible for that legislation's purpose to be accomplished.

7:28I guess historically, do you have a sense like when did it happen? How did this happen? You know, there was definitely a moment where the Democratic Party did not have this problem. And yet it sort of emerged maybe over the course of 20 years. I like to tell this piece of history, and I think it's true, that we've really had two very different regimes of building in this country in the last 100 years. Between, say, the 1930s and 1960s, we changed the physical environment of this country dramatically. We built so many homes in the 1950s. We built so many bridges. We built so many dams and connected so many houses with rural electrification, like the Tennessee Valley Authority.

8:11We built so much in this period right after the Great Recession up until the 1960s that there was a backlash. There was an enormous backlash. And part of that backlash was earned. The air was disgusting and the water was disgusting. That's the world of the 1940s, 1950s that was reacted to. And it was reacted to along several dimensions. One, you had this explosion of environmental legislation, the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, NEPA, Endangered Species Act, which made it harder to change the physical environment, which imposed strictures on the physical environment. At the same time, you had Ralph Nader, who created this revolution of adversarial legalism, where, without simplifying it too much, he just made it cool for liberals of a certain age to sue the government and sue businesses to stop things from happening.

9:02In fact, in the 2000s, when Jim Lehrer asked Ralph Nader why he deserved to be president, Nader's answer was not, no one deserves to be president more than me because I understand the federal government better than anybody. Instead, he said, I have sued the federal government more than anybody. There was a very specific attitude among lawyers and progressives of a certain age, I guess who are now boomers, that the way to prove your progressive bona fides is to sue the government from not changing the physical environment. And that made it harder to build. At the same time, you can take little specific stories like what happened to the decline of nuclear power.

9:34Well, it's very similar. We built a lot of nuclear power in the 1950s and 1960s. Then you had some fears from Chernobyl and from Three Mile Island coincide with the fact that there were concerns about what to do with the radiation. And so we passed a series of regulations through the NRC and ALARA to make it much harder and more expensive to build site specific nuclear. And there was this, let's just call it a vibe shift in the 1960s, 1970s, where you went from a growth machine to an anti-growth machine. And the same way that the growth machine had problems. We were despoiling the earth. We were sometimes knocking down minority neighborhoods to build highways through them.

10:14Things were bad, and we had to change them in a way. But the medicine of the 1960s and 1970s has become the disease of the 2020s. The very same policies that we used to stop the despoliation of the world 60 years ago now stop us from building dense housing, which is good for the environment, solar and wind power, which is good for the environment, nuclear power, which is zero emissions. That's what happens when a country loses the spirit of institutional renewal. When you save the world from itself once, and then you never revisit the question and you simply live with the afterwash of the bureaucracies that you've built.

10:56That's why we have the problems we have today, I think. I mean, I think the most heartening part of the book to me is this idea that technology does not have to despoil the earth. We actually have a role to play in hard tech and bringing about clean energy and working on fusion energy and bringing about carbon capture in a way that would sort of undo the worst parts of this. And, you know, some of it is even just philosophical. Like, you know, why do we get to even sit here and have this incredible conversation? Thank you so much on society and politics when, you know, our ancestors even, you know, hundreds of years ago had probably to be subsistence farmers someplace.

11:39It's like, actually, it's technology. And for the people who are watching, I feel like that's actually a very important message. A lot of them are trained as engineers, but they're sort of taught, like, hey, the stuff we do is problematic. It does not have to be. It is sort of a choice, actually. The day-to-day that we get to enjoy in a modern society, even if you aren't at the top of the income spectrum, it's better than the best thing that a king would have hundreds of years ago. Oh, absolutely. I mean, you look at the 1700s. I mean, Thomas Jefferson was one of the richest people in the world, and he didn't have technology to keep the ink in his room from freezing in the winter.

12:20He just couldn't write when it was too cold in Virginia because there was no way to warm the ink. I mean, we are, most of us, certainly the billions of people who are global, middle class, and above, in so many ways richer than every single individual who lived in the 1700s in a world before electricity and vaccines and heating and cooling technology. And the truth is, if we get everything right, 50 years from now, we'll look back at us and think, how did they live without mRNA vaccines for cancer? How did they live without carbon removal technologies? How did they live without planes that traveled basically at the same speed in the 2020s that they were traveling in the 1950s?

13:01So I think a really interesting and fun project for science and technology folks is to think about just the same way that we can say of the 17, 18, early 1900s, God, that world sucked. How can we invent technologies and science that will make people 40 years from now look back in the 2020s and say, God, that world sucked, right? Like that's the level, that's the threshold that we should be aiming for. And it's going to take not only brilliant entrepreneurs, and of course it will take that. I do think it will also take really ingenious public policy. And that's why so much of this book is about getting both parts right.

13:34Yes, yes, we need people, but we also need people in the right systems. And so how do we get the right systems in science and technology to pull their ideas forward? What are some of the policies that are sort of top of mind? So I'm really interested in American science policy. The National Institutes of Health has basically been around in some form since the 1870s, where it was founded as the hygienic laboratory, where it was doing some really early research for the U.S. military and the Navy. It was really in World War II that we saw the beginning of what we now think of as the American innovation system.

14:05And this is a really undertold and underexplained story. So I'm just going to tell you a little bit of detail right now. That sounds very important. So in the early 1940s, as the Nazis are advancing into France, Vannevar Bush, who's one of the more famous elder statesmen of American science in the 1930s, 1940s. Came up with the Memex. Came up with the Memex. One of the godfathers of early thinking about the Internet and was also serving, I believe, as a dean at MIT and served at a predecessor to NASA. So he was just like a jack of all trades kind of statesman. He comes into the White House and he says, if we don't supercharge American science and technology, we're going to lose this war.

14:43And this was even before the U.S. was in World War II. But he had the foresight to recognize that just as it was science, technology, and say tanks that won World War I, we needed a new kind of technology to win World War II. And so he came up with this idea that we should create an office of scientific research and development. We should coordinate scientific and technological development at the federal level, and we should distribute grants to scientists that are working on things that can invent the future. And it was through these policies that we spun out the Manhattan Project and invented nuclear power, nuclear bombs.

15:15We invented radar, famous rad lab at MIT. And the story that we tell at great length in this story, in his book, is the invention of penicillin. So penicillin was famously discovered by Fleming, the Scottish microbiologist in 1928. But the fact that very few people understand about penicillin is that if you fast forward the clock to say 1941, penicillin has done shit all for the world. Like five people have been delivered penicillin in all of human history 13 years after it was discovered. And the two of them have died. Penicillin has done nothing. and it took a very concerted U.S. effort to implement penicillin, to grow it in large vats, to grow it at scale, to test it, to make sure it worked in humans, to distribute it to millions of people and help to bring down the disease rate, the bacterial death rate of both British and American soldiers significantly.

16:07So you go to the end of the war and it's so obvious that this federal effort to accelerate science has saved American lives and won the war, that we want to instantiate it in new policy. And so we create the National Institutes of Health in its current situation, and we create the National Science Foundation. That's the good news. And the NIH has done extraordinary things in the last, what is it, 80 years. Basically, it has its fingerprints on maybe 99 % of every medical breakthrough we've had in this country. But it is an 80-year-old bureaucracy. It does not deserve to be destroyed, but it deserves to be reformed the way we should seek to reform every institution that is 80 years old.

16:51This is a startup accelerator. You guys believe in the idea that every generation needs an influx of new ideas. So do bureaucracies. So do old institutions. And the NIH, I think, has really gotten stuck in its ways. It funds older scientists much more than younger scientists, even though, I don't have to tell you this, it's often young people who have the most earth-changing ideas, the best paradigm-shifting ideas. It's in true in software with Zuckerberg, Gates, as it is in science with, say, Heisenberg and Schrodinger, you know, breaking open quantum mechanics. So it sounds like we need a founder mode for the NIH.

17:29Founder mode for the NIH is a good way to think about it. I think we need much more experimentation at the NIH. We need to take a bureaucracy that is very settled in its ways and enact an act of science on the NIH. Experiment with, say, golden tickets where one person can hand out a grant if they think it's a fantastic idea. Experiment with giving founders, excuse me, giving scientists 10, 15 years to work on a project so that they're not just applying for grants over and over and over again. And one of the most remarkable statistics from the book is that today's scientists now spend 40 % of their time filling out paperwork and filing for grants.

18:04Like imagine if you're a founder and you spend half of your time just filing paperwork with the federal government? Like maybe there are some folks who are working in highly regulated industries that are doing that. How much time can you spend actually working on the company? So I think we need to be much more innovative, much more experimental at the NIH and the NSF. And I think that by doing so, we'll allow scientists to ask more high risk, high reward questions that break open really new frontiers in science. That sounds great. How do we actually make this happen? I would like to see the NIH rebuilt with a sense of experimentation rather than a sense of doing whatever the previous generation has done.

18:45And so there's this idea that I call metascience, which is a somewhat popular idea in some very science nerd corners of the world, which says that one of the eternal mysteries of scientific discovery is that we don't actually know how it works. What is the best way to understand how to cure cancers? What's the best way to understand brain inflammation? What's the best formula for breaking open the biggest mysteries of health? In fact, there is no formula. If there were, there wouldn't be health mysteries because we would just solve them all immediately. And so the way to approach that situation is to run a ton of experiments, not to run one experiment over and over again.

19:27And I think the NIH, which does some wonderful work, again, I think it's been an exceptional institution in so many ways, relies overwhelmingly on an R01 grant process that has scientists applying for grants, has peer reviewers reviewing those grants, and then has a system by which those grants are allocated to those scientists and the scientists have to fill out paperwork proving that they're fulfilling their obligations. I think we should try a lot more stuff. Maybe that's the best way to do science. Maybe it's the 17th best way to do science, but we just haven't experimented enough with ways one through 16 to know that those are actually better to solve the problems of the 21st century.

20:06So I want to see a huge experiment with giving scientists money and saying you don't have to fill out any grants for the next 15 years, just go do whatever you want to do. I want to see what I call golden tickets where an individual says, I think this is a fantastic idea. We're not going to use a peer review vote. I'm just going to give you the money now. I want to see ways of, for example, having enormous chunks of money that are designated for the most high-risk, high-reward research that doesn't pass the typical plausibility tests that we put on science, but actually we're funding the projects in part because we think they're so fantastically implausible.

20:40And maybe science will move forward one implausibility at a time. I want to run those experiments. I want to take years, decades, to measure the results. And I want those measurements to inform science policy for the future. Right now, science and tech policy at the federal level, I think, is too reliant on what we happened to do 50 years ago. I want science policy that is determined by what we discover works when we run the experiment. It sounds like the two pieces that you're sort of advocating for, one is like a lot more agency. So the bureaucracy is about taking agency and dispersing it to people and sort of like these drips and drabs.

21:16The downside is in aggregate, it means that nobody has agency. That's sort of like the defining thing that Brian Chesky from Airbnb, who coined the term, actually Paul Graham coined the term founder mode, but it was in response to, you know, Brian's own experience as a founder, like basically not taking enough agency as the CEO. It sounds like the NIH actually needs a Vannevar Bush for 2025 or the future. When we criticize the fact that NEPA review is used to slow down solar energy production, or when we criticize the fact that the NIH is relying on habits that were built in the 1960s, 1970s, we're criticizing the past for putting these rules on us.

22:02They were solving the problems of their own age. The NIH had to figure out how do we disperse billions of dollars to fund scientists all over America? Let's work out some program and then just operationalize it. They solved the problems of the 1960s. But institutional renewal is the charge of every new generation. And when we fail to update on the systems that we built 60 years ago, it's not their fault. It's ours. We're the ones deciding to live inside a building that was built half a century ago that we refused to refurbish. That's what relying on 1970s environmental law to build the world of the 2020s means.

22:44That's what relying on the systems of 1960s NIH in the 2020s means. Institutional renewal is our responsibility. They solve the problems of their age. We have to solve the problem of ours. I'm very interested philosophically, substantively in progress. And a part of that is thinking, you know, why am I interested in progress? What is progress? You know, one definition that I've used for myself is that progress is the elimination of pain and the increase in power for the most people. How do you find a way to reduce pain and increase power, which is another way of saying agency for people? We are able to talk about solving climate change through technology rather than solving climate change through deprivation.

23:35Yes, degrowth. Good God. Because someone was clever enough to invent wind power in the 1800s. And someone else at Bell Labs, I believe, was clever enough to invent solar energy in solar cells in the 1950s. And then someone else was clever enough to invent enhanced geothermal. And someone else was clever enough to build the first nuclear power plant. and someone else and someone else. The fact that the problem is solvable is a feature technology. And we're not even close to being done, I think. It's depressing, frankly, to think that all that's left to do is just to implement technologies that are essentially the children of the 1950s, right?

24:16Where's fusion? Where's carbon capture and carbon removal at scale and at a price that makes sense for the market? But these might be some of the most important technologies of the 2020s and 2030s that at the moment don't exist. And they're enormously difficult problems. They require doing things in the physical world, doing things with atoms that are expensive in a highly regulated physical world environment. But they're so unbelievably important because they give us the opportunity to live in a future that has less pain and more agency. I really like how, you know, earlier you were talking about literally penicillin winning wars, but also just changing the standard of living for billions of people.

24:53and yet it was sitting in a shelf someplace. It was not actively being sort of brought about. And then I guess the wild thing is, can you imagine how many other penicillins are there actually? I mean, even thinking about all of these next ailments that people are sort of experiencing because they didn't die because of smallpox. Each one of those has a shelf and there's a penicillin on a shelf someplace. or the shelf might not have been built yet. One way that shelf metaphor might be extremely literal is with the most popular or at least famous drug of our age, which is glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists, GLP-1s.

25:35Some scientist in the 1990s, I believe, was freaking crazy enough to be interested in the venom of the Gila monster. How does this stocky lizard eat four times a year and still survive? It was some incredibly bizarre digestive system. We study its venom in saliva. We syncretize a protein in it. We create a GLP-1 drug. We realize that it helps people with type 2 diabetes regulate their insulin. Oh, it turns out a lot of these people in the clinical trials are losing a ton of weight. Let's do another clinical trial on weight loss. Oh, it turns out that GLP-1 drugs are a great weight loss drug. And we're not even close to the end of the story.

26:08I mean, I did on my podcast, Plain English, an interview with someone who did this observational study, this population research on millions of people in the Veterans Affairs system who have been on GLP-1 drugs for their type 2 diabetes or on other drugs, and looking at the population differences, seeing what the effect of GLP-1 drugs was on this group, they had lower rates of inflammation. They had lower rates of dementia. They had lower rates of manifested schizophrenia. I don't want to suggest that GLP-1 drugs are like the miracle drug, but it does seem like we accidentally pulled from the tongue of the lizard something that works across all of these categories.