Episode 82 • 14 December 2024

Tom Kalil on Institutions for Innovation (with Matt Clancy)

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Contents

About this episode

Tom Kalil is the CEO of Renaissance Philanthropy.

He also served in the White House for two presidents (under Obama and Clinton); where he helped establish incentive prizes in government through challenge.gov; and where he designed and launched dozens of science and tech programs, like the $40 billion National Nanotechnology Initiative. More recently Tom served as the Chief Innovation Officer at Schmidt Futures, where he helped launch Convergent Research.

(Image) Tom Kalil

Matt Clancy is an economist and a research fellow at Open Philanthropy. He writes ‘New Things Under the Sun’, which is a living literature review on academic research about science and innovation.

(Image) Matt Clancy

We talked about:

Resources

Renaissance Philanthropy

Books

Articles

Organisations & websites

Initiatives & Datasets

Let us know if we missed any resources and we’ll add them.

(Image) Da Vinci

Transcript

Intro

Fin: Hey, this is Fin, and this episode is a little different because I was joined by the world’s most overqualified guest interviewer, Matt Clancy, in order to speak with Tom Kalil. Matt Clancy is an economist and a research fellow at Open Philanthropy. He writes New Things Under the Sun, which is a living literature review on research about science and innovation. You should absolutely check it out. There is also a podcast version narrated by Matt himself. I’ll link to both of those in the show notes.

And it’s not obvious how to begin introducing Tom Kalil. He served in the White House for two presidents, under Obama and Clinton, where his team helped establish incentive prizes for government through challenge.gov, and where he designed and launched dozens of science and tech programs like the $40 billion National Nanotechnology Initiative and others in robotics, small satellites, and mapping the human brain. More recently, Tom served as the Chief Innovation Officer at Schmidt Futures, where he helped launch Convergent Research, which itself incubates so-called focused research organizations—you’ll hear about them in the interview. Tom is currently the CEO of Renaissance Philanthropy, a new nonprofit supporting ambitious philanthropy around science and innovation.

We spoke about the idea of influence without authority, why public funders should make more financial commitments contingent on success rather than failure, about policy entrepreneurship, the bull case for U.S. state capacity, why philanthropy isn’t much better and how to change that, and what it was like being principal staffer to Gordon Moore of Moore’s Law fame. Okay, here’s Matt Clancy and Tom Kalil. Tom, thanks so much for joining us.

Tom: Great to be here.

Can science and technology policy create self-fulfilling prophecies?

Fin: And a question to get started: can science and technology policy be used to create self-fulfilling prophecies of the positive kind?

Tom: Yes, I think they can, and I think it involves two pieces. One is the identification of a goal that policymakers and the public would react to with, “Wow, that would be a big deal if we were able to achieve that.” And the second is, “Why now? What has changed about the world?” This could be new fundamental insights or advances in one or more technologies that make something that was previously impossible now within reach.

I think that if you combine those, that can serve as a magnet for talent and resources. That can be the basis for positive self-fulfilling prophecies, in the same way that when a world-class political organizer says a million people are going to march on Washington, sometimes that actually happens.

Fin: Do you have an example from history?

Tom: Well, I can tell you an example of a conversation that I had with a philanthropist who was interested in ALS. I told her four things. One is that some versions of ALS are caused by a single gene. Number two, we now have CRISPR, so we can selectively edit that gene. Number three, because of the pandemic, we invested heavily in nanolipids, so we have new technologies for drug delivery, for delivering CRISPR. And number four, some researchers are MDs, so they work with patients on end-of-life decisions, and some of them are happy to have their bodies used in science.

Some researchers are in a position to start the drug discovery process in humans as opposed to starting in mice and then being shocked to learn that what works in mice doesn’t always work in humans.

So my point to this philanthropist was not, “Oh, this will definitely work.” It’s that we have a combination of new tools and approaches that mean that something that 5 or 10 years ago would have been impossible may now be within reach.

Innovation prizes

Matt: You’ve done a lot of science policy-type work, and I thought it might be interesting to zoom in on a couple of specific examples from your time and see if you have reflections on how things have gone since, and so forth, since there’s been a bit of time since then. For example, you helped launch Challenge.gov back in 2010, which helped governments run innovation prize competitions.

Matt: Economists have been fascinated by using prizes to model or to incentivize innovation for almost centuries, with some examples. But I’m curious if you want to reflect on how you think that has worked out since and what was the genesis, perhaps, of that, if you think again of this self-fulfilling prophecy question?

Tom: My engagement in this started in the late nineties when I was working for President Clinton. I randomly picked up a book called Longitude, which was about how the British Parliament had created a £25,000 prize for solving the problem of measuring longitude because the British Navy was losing so many ships. I thought, “Oh, this makes a lot of sense. Why isn’t the U.S. government doing this?” So I was able to help get DARPA Prize Authority in the late nineties and also got the National Academy of Engineering to work on this, making the distinction between recognition prizes like the Nobel Prize, which reward you for something you’ve already done, and inducement prizes, which encourage teams to accomplish something that no one has done yet.

DARPA used their prize authority to run several self-driving car competitions. The second time they ran it, a team led by Sebastian Thrun won the prize. Larry Page was at the finish line and promptly acquired the winning team. That’s where Waymo and Google X came from. Then, when I came back into the government, I was able to work with the Senate on legislation to give every agency the ability to run inducement prizes for up to $50,000,000. That led to the creation of Challenge.gov. I would encourage your listeners to take a look at the website and see the amazing array of challenges that different agencies are offering.

For example, the Department of Energy has a competition going on about the circular economy. NIH has challenges in delivery systems for in vivo gene editing and for quantum sensing applied to biology. Another agency is trying to come up with the equivalent of the h-index, called the s-index, to incentivize researchers to share their data. The idea is to create something as concrete and powerful as the h-index but focused on data sharing. DARPA is also running the AI Cyber Challenge, which aims to use AI to find and fix vulnerabilities in critical code.

I think this approach is beginning to have an impact. But the set of ideas I’ve also become interested in includes a broader range of what you might call conditional commitments.

Tom: So one of the things that I think is really nuts is that currently, the US government has a widely utilized mechanism for making financial commitments that are contingent on failure. Those are loan guarantees. So that is the government saying, Matt, if your company goes bankrupt, Uncle Sam will assume those debt obligations. And what we should be doing much more of is making commitments that are conditional on success.

So two examples of this: Operation Warp Speed—the government said to Moderna and Pfizer, if you develop a vaccine which is safe and effective, then we will buy 300 million doses. Or the NASA-SpaceX collaboration. When NASA retired the Space Shuttle, we had to give the Russians $50 million per astronaut per ride to the International Space Station, and no one thought this was a good idea. So NASA said to SpaceX, if you develop a rocket that can go to the International Space Station, deliver and retrieve cargo, and ultimately crew, not only will we buy rides on the rocket, but we will provide milestone payments for intermediate progress towards that goal.

So in general, I think these approaches are massively underutilized, and we should be increasing the extent to which both the government and the private sector are utilizing these.

(Image) Space

Matt: That’s interesting. So these conditional commitments, of which prizes are maybe one type, we could say have a role in, you know, self-driving cars, SpaceX, and, you know, the COVID-19 vaccines, which is actually a pretty spectacular record if you think of it in that broader way. Yeah.

Tom: Yes. And I haven’t met any policymakers who, once I point out that we have trillions of dollars of these financial commitments contingent on failure but almost never make financial commitments contingent on success, I haven’t had any policymaker who says, “Oh, no. That’s exactly the way it should be.” I mean, I think most people recognize that it seems somewhat perverse.

Fin: But once you set up these incentives, does the information inevitably reach the right people? Or do many potential prize winners miss out because they just never find out about the prizes?

Tom: So, I think it’s important for the US government to be able to partner with intermediary organizations that can help get the word out because I don’t think that the federal government necessarily excels in marketing and increasing awareness. So I think that there are some instances where we have a good incentive prize or some other mechanism, and the right inventor never finds out about it.

National Nanotechnology Initiative

Fin: So in the Clinton administration, you helped set up the National Nanotechnology Initiative. I was wondering, do you think that R&D on nanotech has succeeded so far?

Tom: You know, with the benefit of 2020 hindsight, there are definitely some things that I would have done differently. There was a study that was done of, like, what do we think is the revenue associated with nanotechnology-enabled products and concluded that it was probably somewhere between $67 billion and $83 billion in 2022 alone. So, I think it’s definitely been worth the federal investment.

We’ve seen things like smart anticancer therapeutics that deliver drugs to tumors while leaving healthy cells untouched. And then we’re also seeing nanotechnology play an important role in the evolution of the semiconductor industry as the industry now is putting hundreds of billions of transistors on a single chip. Or new battery technologies.

Tom: So, there’s a startup that is using 3D graphene, and they claim that they’ll be able to eventually make batteries that are 50 to 75% lighter than today’s battery technology. So I think that it’s had a pretty pervasive impact. It’s not always very visible to the public because it’s not something like ChatGPT that you’re interacting with. It’s like the German chemical company BASF. Their tagline is, “We don’t make the things you buy. We make the things you buy better.” And so people are not looking at their displays and saying, “Boy, it’s a good thing that these have semiconductor nanocrystals in them. That’s really improving the quality of the display.” So I think that the sort of nanotechnology revolution has been more or less invisible to the public.

Ebola outbreak and government response

Matt: So another initiative that you’re involved with during your time at the Office of Science and Technology Policy, or I guess a sort of science outbreak that happened, was—or maybe not science outbreak, but a science-relevant topic—was the Ebola outbreak. And I’m curious what you learned from that, kind of an antecedent to the COVID-19 pandemic, back when you were in the Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Tom: So I wasn’t primarily working on pandemics and infectious disease. What had happened was that prior to the Ebola outbreak, I was getting briefed on a series of DARPA programs. And there was one DARPA program manager, Dan Wattendorf, and he said, “Oh, I have this program so that if we have an emerging infectious disease and we have no therapy or no vaccine, the time it currently takes—years—is just totally unacceptable. I want to reduce the time to go from bug to drug from years to months.” And I remember saying at the time, “This sounds good,” right?

And then the Ebola outbreak happened. I remembered our conversation and I called Dan, and I said, “The president is going to ask for additional money in something called an emergency supplemental to contain Ebola in West Africa so that we minimize loss of life but also ensure that it doesn’t spread. Could you use additional funding for some of these programs that you started?” And he and the leadership of DARPA said, “Yes.”

So I went to the Office of Management and Budget, and this was on a Friday afternoon. They said, “Well, you know, we sent this idea around, and everyone is opposed to it. But if you get everyone to agree by Monday, we’ll put it in the president’s proposal.” So, Dan and I called all of these agencies that were opposed to it, and they would sort of send us to someone lower in the hierarchy of the organization to talk to someone more technical. And we eventually convinced them.

But Dan was the program manager who funded Moderna to work on infectious disease. And in the absence of that program, they would’ve worked on cancer because it’s a more attractive market. So, it was a good example to me of the value of having parts of the government that can make these non-consensus bets. Because I can tell if someone ever does a FOIA of my email—me interacting with NIH, NIAID, and the other agencies—they’ll see this sort of very high level of skepticism about this idea. And so, you know, I was already a fan of the DARPA model, but it made me even more of a fan of the model.

Metascience and funding gaps

Matt: So zooming out a little bit at science policy from a kind of more meta perspective, one, I guess, prominent theory of change is sort of called the metascience movement where you do experiments, try to learn from different ways of organizing this. Like, I guess, you could compare prizes to grants in different situations, but you could do lots of different things. I’d be curious what your assessment is of this approach and if you have any advice for the metascience movement in government.

Tom: There was a survey done as part of the Fast Grants process where they asked researchers: if you had the same amount of money but had carte blanche about how to spend it, would your research program change not at all, a little bit, or a lot? I believe 78% of respondents said “a lot.”

So, I think an interesting metascience question is: why is that? What are the things they would like to do but are unable to get funding for? Is there a taxonomy of reasons that account for that gap, and how could public policy try to address them? That’s one thing I’d be very interested in seeing the metascience community address—this phenomenon of a large gap between what researchers would like to do and what they’re able to do. Is that widespread? What is a taxonomy of projects they’d like to pursue but can’t get funding for? And are there metascience interventions we could propose to address that gap?

I think the other thing is to start with some specific challenges or opportunities where we’re unhappy with the status quo. For example, I think some of our mechanisms for supporting midscale projects have real limitations. The canonical mechanism we have to support midscale projects is called a center grant. These often involve three different universities and 20 PIs. What’s really going on under the hood is that each of those 20 PIs feels morally entitled to 5% of the budget. That makes it very difficult to support projects that require a unity of effort.

Rather than there being a loose academic collaboration, you’d want to say: actually, we’re trying to accomplish this specific goal. I think there are a number of midscale projects that have grown in importance, which makes the limitations of our current funding mechanisms even more significant. An example of that is: if I were leading a science agency, I would be asking the research community, “What are the next datasets that could have the impact of the Protein Data Bank?” As you know, that led to AlphaFold and RF diffusion. You absolutely could not create one of these datasets with a center grant because each of the 20 PIs would take 5% of the budget and more or less do their own thing as long as it was loosely related to the overall mission of the center.

Levers for science policy

Matt: So if you want to encourage science actors in government to change their policy or you just want to enact a new kind of science policy endeavor, you’ve got a bunch of different levers you could pull. You know, you could work with Congress, try to get something in legislation. There’s executive actions. Maybe you’re doing something with the budget. I’m curious how you think about these — is there anything that people underrate especially?

Tom: I think personnel is underrated, and I’ll give you one example. President Obama’s number one domestic priority was circling the drain because HHS could not contract for the development of a website. So what we did was put out the bat signal for senior technical personnel from companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. They dropped whatever they were doing, worked 18 hours a day, and got healthcare.gov back on track. Then the president appropriately asked, “Why don’t we have these people involved at the beginning of projects as opposed to waiting until we have this disaster?”

There was an effort through organizations like the US Digital Service, 18F, and the Presidential Innovation Fellows Program to create more people who had skills in areas like software engineering, product management, human-centered design, cybersecurity, and data science. That’s had a really transformational impact. So it’s not just the ability to recruit people. It’s also the ability to say, “Hey, there’s a whole skillset where the US has fallen behind what the state of the art is in the private sector. If we had those types of people in the US government, it would make a big difference in terms of the ability not just to develop policy, but to implement it.”

Matt: That’s kind of related to the next question I wanted to ask, which is about—you could imagine change being bottlenecked, I guess, on a variety of different factors. One of them could be individuals or the personnel, as you said, like people who really have the capacity to get things done. If they’re in short supply, nothing else really matters. But you could also imagine it being other things. It could be a shortage of just good ideas, or it could be that there’s an incentive system, an organizational system that doesn’t let ideas or effective people get things done. I’m kind of curious how you’ve thought about these different factors. Do any of them strike you as particularly important or underrated?

Tom: To be intellectually honest, the answer is it depends. I think one thing that I see in short supply is the ability for policymakers to focus on things that are important but not urgent. A canonical example of this would be after the pandemic. The response of Congress was, “Gee, we don’t really want to talk about this anymore.”

So rather than saying, “Let’s do a lessons learned exercise, let’s figure out what worked well, what didn’t, what investments should we be making in far-UVC light, metagenomic sequencing, and even faster development of therapies, vaccines, and diagnostics,” there was just a fundamental lack of interest in thinking about how we could do better the next time. I think part of the problem is that there are so many things that policymakers have to deal with that are urgent, like Ukraine and the situation in the Middle East, that it takes a lot of discipline for policymakers to work on things that are important but not urgent.

Fin: I think I’d be missing a trick if I didn’t ask. Earlier you mentioned that a kind of go-to model for funding these midsize research projects is to fund a research center, and that can be unfocused occasionally. What’s a better model? What else can you fund for these kinds of goals?

Tom: I’m the chair of Convergent Research, and I was involved when Adam Marblestone, who was at DeepMind at the time, said, “I think this idea is so important that I would be willing to devote the next chapter of my professional life to making this happen.” At that point, I worked to get Adam a fellowship. Adam and I spent a year interviewing over 100 scientists and engineers and asking them, “If we had this imaginary funding mechanism, is there an important bottleneck to scientific and technological progress that it could help address?” So in general, I think this idea of a research nonprofit with a CEO, while certainly not the right model for most projects, is something that we should be adding to the portfolio.

Influence Without Authority

Fin: So it’s fair to say that you’ve achieved an awful lot in government and outside. Can you explain this idea of influence without authority that you’ve talked about before?

Tom: So I think a lot of times, people assume that what they can get done is circumscribed by those areas where they have formal authority. They might say, “I have a budget of x $1,000,000 per year, and I have a team of 8 people who report to me, and I can shape what it is that those people work on.” And I guess because I was in jobs where you could have a lot more influence through indirection, I got very interested in this idea of influence without authority.

When I was in the White House, people would give me ideas, and some fraction of them I thought were sufficiently interesting that I would explore them in greater detail. Then I would try to think, “What is the coalition of the willing and able that I would need to build in order to make this happen?” For example, a group of researchers said, in essence, “We think it’s time to do for neuroscience what the Genome Project did for genetics.”

Tom: And I knew that there were three people in the US government that I needed to get on board for this idea to move forward. I didn’t really have the ability to compel them to do this, but I needed to figure out if they were willing to do this and whether there was something I could do on my end to increase the chances that they were excited about it. So those were the heads of NSF, DARPA, and NIH. And they all said yes. The president said yes. Congress did something they almost never do, which is usually they just dole out money for research programs one year at a time. Here, for the NIH component of this, they provided 10 years of funding.

So obviously that didn’t happen every day, but there were times when someone would bring me an idea, I would vet that idea, and then I would be in a position to build the coalition to make it happen. A thought experiment that I used to pose to people is this: people would come visit me when I was at the White House, and they would say, “Tom, you’re never gonna believe it. But it turns out that the thing I work on is really important.” And I would say, “Great. What do you want me to do?” A shockingly high percentage of the time, they did not have a good answer to that question.

So I said, “Well, imagine that you have a meeting in the Oval Office with the president, and he says, ‘Matt and Finn, if you give me a good idea related to metascience, I will call anyone on the planet. It can be a conference call, so there can be more than one person on the line. If that person works for me, like the head of the National Science Foundation or the head of NIH, I can direct them to do something. If it’s someone outside of government, I can challenge them to do something.’ So, you have to tell me not only what your idea is, but in order to make your idea happen, who would I call and what would I ask them to do?”

If people had the answer to that or I could figure it out for them, then there’s sort of a second round of questions like, “Is it in their enlightened self-interest? Who is the optimal messenger to deliver this message? How can I make it easier for them to say yes?” Those types of questions. So that’s what I enjoyed doing—people would bring me lots of ideas, and then for some fraction of them, I would ask, “What is the coalition of the willing and able that I would need to build in order to actually make this happen?”

Policy entrepreneurship

Matt: I have a couple of questions about policy entrepreneurship. Maybe the first one is just, in your words, what is a policy entrepreneur?

Tom: You know, by analogy, you think about a commercial entrepreneur. They are identifying unmet need in the marketplace and creating a product or service to address that need. And I think the policy entrepreneur is identifying some sin of omission or commission. So there’s something that they believe we’re either currently doing that we should stop doing or not doing that we should be doing. And they take it upon themselves to increase the chances that that will happen.

Tom: And so they could be inside the government. It could be a member of Congress or a congressional staffer seeking to introduce and pass legislation, or it could be someone who works in the executive branch and is trying to include a new idea in the president’s budget or draft an executive order for the president to sign. Or it could be someone outside of government who’s seeking to convince policymakers that their idea addresses an important problem.

Matt: Yeah. So I’m curious about testing out how many ideas from sort of our thinking about entrepreneurship can transfer over to policy entrepreneurship. And so, you know, one is we have courses on entrepreneurship. I used to teach in a department that had a whole entrepreneurship kind of minor. I’m curious if you think we should have, you know, formal coursework available for policy entrepreneurship, and if so, how that would differ from formal coursework on entrepreneurship in general?

Tom: I think there would definitely be a value in, number one, identifying successful policy entrepreneurs, doing detailed oral histories, and then trying to synthesize what are some of the lessons that you can draw in terms of what it is that successful policy entrepreneurs know and are able to do. Obviously, there’d be a lot of differences, but I think that there would be some skill sets that are generalizable.

So, for example, one important one is that policy entrepreneurs often have to have the ability to communicate with different audiences. I found this out when I was in the White House. The conversations that I would be having with the Office of Management and Budget versus the President’s speechwriter and the communications department and the Office of Legislative Affairs and the Office of Public Engagement and the people responsible for working on events that the president would get personally involved in—they would have very different ways of thinking about an idea, different questions that they would ask, and different ways that they would have of keeping score as to whether an idea was good or not.

So, I suspect that if you did that sort of oral history, you would discover some things that come up over and over again in terms of what it is that policy entrepreneurs know and are able to do. And some of it would be much more issue-specific or specific to a particular institution or process that you’re trying to intervene in. But there, you could at least tell people, “Hey, these are the types of questions that, as a policy entrepreneur, you’re going to have to be able to ask and answer for you to be effective.”

Matt: I think another way that entrepreneurship skills and knowledge are sort of passed down is through mentorship outside of, you know, in the business world. And I think that there’s a rich academic literature sort of saying that mentorship is quite important. Assuming it’s sort of the same for the policy entrepreneurship world, do you think we have good ways to connect people with networks or with mentors? How are we doing on that?

Tom: I think there’s a lot of room for improvement, and it’s one of the reasons why we’ve been supporting something called the policy entrepreneur network. The whole premise of that is that successful policy entrepreneurs have accumulated a lot of tacit knowledge that isn’t written down anywhere and that mentorship is one way of trying to deliver that.

But also initiatives like Statecraft, which is interviewing these people as a way of allowing them to share what they’ve learned with a broader audience. When I was at OSTP, at any one time, I would have a team of 20. And one of the ways in which I would mentor people is I would have them shadow me. So I would say, okay, we’re going to this meeting. This is what I’m trying to accomplish in the meeting. These are some of the sources of resistance that we might run into. And then they would participate in the meeting, and afterward, we’d walk back and do what the military would call an after-action review.

The problem with that is that sort of apprenticeship was limited to a small number of people, right? So it’s not like I could have 500 people working for me. I could only have 20 people. So I am interested in this question of what are different ways for us to share and organize tacit information, which is often not written down anywhere.

Matt: How did you learn the tacit knowledge? Did you have mentors? Did you read oral histories? I’m kind of curious.

Tom: Yeah. I would say a lot of it is learning by doing. And probably the most formative experience was working in the issues department of a presidential campaign. The issues department is responsible for working with the candidate on their platform, generating proposals and position papers on domestic issues, economic issues, foreign policy, and national security issues, getting the candidate ready for debates, and making sure that they’re briefed on issues important to different regions—which in the late eighties might have been steel in Pennsylvania, autos in Michigan, and semiconductors in Northern California.

What you learn through that process is not that you become an expert in any one area. What you learn is to say, okay, if I’m a presidential candidate and I can only read 1 to 2 pages on any given issue, what’s most important for me to learn? How do I create a network of policy advisers that we’re not paying and try to find out who has really good ideas? So I think that experience was pretty formative for me in terms of just understanding a pretty broad range of policy issues.

Lessons from Christopher Alexander

Fin: What can policy makers learn from Christopher Alexander, the architect?

Tom: Oh, so as you know, he wrote this book about a pattern language, which included hundreds of these problem-solution pairs at different scales of architecture—all the way from the knob on the door to the role that natural lighting plays in your house, to the role that a street cafe plays in promoting serendipitous interaction between people within a community.

I believe that we should be building a pattern language for how to solve important problems, similarly through a set of problem-solution pairs. I believe strongly that you don’t want to be the type of person who has a hammer and is looking for nails to hit. You want to be the person who has a hammer and a saw and a tape measure, and so is able to use the right tools or set of tools for the right job.

Tom: And that’s not to say that you’re going to become an expert in all of them, but you should at least know that they exist and have some heuristics for when and under what circumstances you might use them, and then know where to go in order to get more information if it turns out that this is the right tool for the policy problem that you’re trying to solve.

Increasing US state capacity

Matt: So, someone who’s worked a lot in government and has worked on changing and improving government, I’m wondering if you’re up for some questions about US state capacity, which I think is something people are thinking about a lot these days. To start with, I think people are really down on the US’s ability to get things done right now. If you were to make a sort of bold case for the American government as an effective organization, or at least underrated, what would you say?

Tom: I would say the primary point I would be making is not to try to sugarcoat the US government. It is to say that I’m firmly on the Teddy Roosevelt—he said, “man in the arena,” today we’d say “person in the arena”—of encouraging people to get involved and to try to do something about it as opposed to whining. So I would say that’s sort of my primary response. It’s not to say, “Oh, the US government, it’s great,” because I think there are lots of areas where there’s just a lot of room for improvement.

I think the first point that I would make—an argument that I’ve been making about 2026—is that it’s America’s 250th birthday, and that in the 20th century, the United States defeated the Nazis, contained Soviet power, helped with the liberation of Eastern Europe, put astronauts on the moon, invented the Internet, and sequenced the human genome. What are the similarly ambitious goals that we should be setting in the 21st century? And what are the sort of coalitions of the willing and able that we’d have to build in order to achieve those goals?

Matt: Yeah. That makes me think of another question. So the country’s coming up on its 250th birthday. And in my sort of field, science, there’s this view that as science matures and gets older, there’s more and more stuff to know. It gets harder and harder for young scientists to make their mark because you have to master so many more fields, for example. Do you think there’s some kind of similar analogy in government where, because we’ve become older, it’s become so much more complex? You have to do so much learning by doing, perhaps, that it’s just hard for a young person to come into government and be effective right away. And you look back at how young the founding fathers were and what they set in motion. I’m just curious if you have reflections on the role of the age of the workforce and if you think this analogy rings true or not.

Tom: I think there may be something to it, but I’ve definitely seen young people be able to come into government and make an important contribution.

Tom: And I think particularly in areas where there’s a significant gap between where the state of the art is and where the public sector is. Technology is an obvious example of that. People in their 20s who have just learned the most modern and cutting-edge techniques in areas like software engineering and data science—there’s a program aimed at recruiting them, and they’re having an impact as interns, let alone as professionals.

Matt: What advice might you give people who are really motivated and interested in the question of increasing US state capacity—our general ability to get things done? Do you have any things you would prioritize, strategies, or things to deemphasize?

Tom: I would like to see the US government participate in a marketplace for outcomes that has three participants: the entity willing to pay for the outcome (in the same way that Operation Warp Speed said, “We’ll buy 300 million doses if you get an emergency use authorization from the FDA for a COVID-19 vaccine”), the teams that believe they can achieve those goals, and the investors backing those teams.

So, I think that is the ability to identify outcomes that the US government wants to achieve and, if necessary, create the incentives that will get people to work on those problems. The government doesn’t need to do anything to encourage innovation in enterprise SaaS because the private sector is funding that. But the private sector is not investing in new antibiotics, despite the fact that antimicrobial resistance is already killing more people in Africa than HIV and malaria combined. If you talk to VCs, they’ll say it’s a crappy market. So, I think there are areas where the use of these incentives is going to be important.

I think another thing that I’m a big believer in is what we call the “tour of duty” hiring mechanism. Most people’s mental model of the federal government is that you have two types of people: political appointees like myself, and career civil servants who are going to be there for 40 years. I think there’s a third way, and that way is people who are willing to do a tour of duty at some point during their career but may not want to work there for 40 years.

It’s no accident that some of our most effective organizations, like the ARPAs, are staffed almost entirely by people who are only going to be there for four years. As a DARPA program manager, you actually have a date on your badge that says when you’re going to be leaving.

Why is that useful? Number one, you’re getting a constant flow of new ideas. You don’t have the situation where someone says, “Oh, we tried that in 1993, and it didn’t work.” DARPA has forgotten that they tried that in 1993, and it may be time to try again. Number two, you’re much more willing to take risks. You’re also more impatient if you’re only going to be there for four years. If someone says, “Oh, you can’t do this this year, but maybe next year,” you’re going to say, “Well, that’s totally unacceptable because that’s one-fourth of my tenure in the government.”

Tom: And then I just think that the range of people you could recruit goes up dramatically if you’re not asking people to work in the government for 40 years. So DARPA in computer science is able to recruit top researchers from Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, Caltech precisely because they’re not saying, “Oh, why don’t you work for the government for 40 years?” They’re saying, “Do a tour of duty at some point in your career because it’s interesting and exciting, and it’s a way for you to give back to your field.”

The role of academic research in the policy world

Matt: You mentioned a bunch of universities there. That took me to another question I had, which is the role of academic research in the policy world. I was a professor at Iowa State University before I joined philanthropy. I’m curious—what’s your view of how academic research fits into policy design? I think academics like to think that they write these papers, then the policy leaders read them and base the policy off that. But what’s the reality?

Tom: The reality is that in the same way we’ve developed a set of translational institutions for commercializing results in the natural sciences and engineering, we need something similar in the social and behavioral sciences. The model of policymakers reading NBER papers and then using those insights to inform policy does not occur that often.

So, what might we need to do? Well, obviously, think tanks can play a role. You can have people at think tanks reading the literature and asking, “Is there some actionable insight from this, and can I write it up to make a policymaker aware of it?” There have also been instances where academics have gotten involved. Michael Kremer, for example, not only wrote about advanced market commitments, he worked with other researchers to produce a paper called Making Markets for Vaccines and then interacted with the leadership of the G7 to actually get them to support the idea. Writing the paper is only step one.

I think that, in the same way we talk about moving results from the life sciences from bench to bedside, there’s a similar set of institutions we need to create around translating insights from the social and behavioral sciences.

Matt: Do you think academics need to change their behavior as well? Like, should they be working to make their research more policy-relevant? Or is that the responsibility of these translational organizations?

Tom: Yeah. I think that if they’re interested in that, then they should. And we should also change the incentive structure of academia. For example, if I were a university president and I had a public policy school, I would want to give those professors the option of having tenure and promotion based on real-world impact, not just how many highly cited publications they had.

I wouldn’t mandate that, but I would make it opt-in. A lot of the time, when you see faculty doing this type of work, they’re doing it in spite of, rather than because of, the incentive structures they face. So, I think there’s a lot more we could be doing to encourage faculty to work on real-world problems.

Reflections on government vs. academia

Matt: Going back to the sort of tour of duty, economists will often join the Council of Economic Advisors for a year or two, and then they’ll come away with a much deeper and richer appreciation for the role that academics can play in public policy and what types of arguments work and don’t work. A member of my team, Maya Shankar, created something called the Social and Behavioral Sciences Team, which was inspired by the UK’s Nudge Unit. And so that encouraged that, you know, there needs to be these receptor sites within the federal government that can be having these conversations with academics. You’ve also had, you know, a role in trying to make change at a major university, Berkeley. And I’m kind of curious for your reflections on making change in government versus academia. What different approaches are sort of called for, and what are the things that are easier or harder in each setting?

Tom: When I left the Clinton administration, I served as the special assistant to the chancellor for science and technology. My job was to work with the leadership of the campus to help it develop and grow multidisciplinary research and education initiatives that cut across multiple departments and colleges. Actually, one of the ideas I got interested in was empowering students. So I started this program called the Big Ideas, and the premise was that students have ideas of their own, and sometimes they just need very small amounts of funding to get started. That was one thing I got interested in.

And then, my other learning was just how decentralized universities actually are. My favorite observation is that a university is 1,000 entrepreneurs united by a common concern for parking. In terms of what the leadership of the university can do, it’s much more about encouraging interdisciplinary collaboration and trying to make resources available to support that. One of the things I worked on was that the campus said, “We’re going to allocate 20 faculty positions, and we’re going to do that not by allocating them to departments, but to areas.” We encouraged the faculty to identify areas where, if Berkeley invested in new faculty positions, they could strengthen Berkeley’s position and also develop new interdisciplinary research programs, as well as educational programs.

I do think that the leadership of the campus has the ability to do things like that, which encourage interdisciplinary collaboration. Universities have departments, but the world has problems. I think trying to organize some things around these interdisciplinary opportunities is important.

Renaissance Philanthropy

Fin: Let’s talk a bit about philanthropy, if you’re up for it.

Tom: Sure.

Fin: Now you are the CEO of Renaissance Philanthropy. I guess, for context, do you want to just say a bit about what Renaissance is doing?

Tom: Yeah. So our goal is that, in the same way wealthy families supported the Italian Renaissance by supporting Michelangelo and da Vinci, today’s philanthropists could support a 21st-century renaissance that is fueled, at least in part, by advances in science, technology, and innovation. There are some instances in which a member of the team has conviction around a particular thesis and is proactively trying to make it happen.

So Joshua Elliott, our chief scientist, believes that we are underinvesting in climate emergencies. These are things like the West Antarctic ice sheet, where we’re funding climate science—modeling what is likely to happen and what its impact on sea level rise might be. But what we’re not doing is funding climate engineering, which is: is there anything we can do about it? And if so, what would that look like?

So, in that instance, Joshua is talking to researchers to find out what are the best ideas, but also philanthropists and foundations that might be interested in a multi-donor collaborative to support ideas in this area. There are lots of those types of multi-donor collaboratives that we’re trying to build, but we’re also getting to know more philanthropists and foundations to find out what they care about. And if there’s an intersection with an area where we have expertise and we agree with this philanthropist that it’s important, then we could do everything from giving them advice to helping work with them to design and execute a program that is designed to achieve that particular philanthropic goal.

To the extent that we are successful, we’ll be able to increase the number of matches between philanthropists who have funding and scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs who have great ideas. And, importantly, we think that there is an opportunity to reach a higher level of ambition, both on the part of the research community but also philanthropy and foundations.

The reason we believe that’s possible is that we think researchers tend not to think about ideas if they do not see a legible and repeatable path to getting them funded. So, if their worldview is, “Well, I have this idea, but you know, the government isn’t going to fund it or they’re not going to fund it adequately, and therefore, I have to do this more marginal, incremental thing,” then they’re operating under constraints that philanthropy might be able to address because of its flexibility.

That really is what I think is one of the superpowers of philanthropy and foundations: if they choose to exercise it, they have much more flexibility than government sources of funding.

How the wealthy engage in philanthropy

Matt: You probably have a better window into something that has really low visibility for most people, which is, you know, how do high-net-worth people or the wealthy engage in philanthropy? Presumably, it’s different than the rest of us who are, you know, writing a check to GiveWell or something each year. I’m curious if you have anything you’ve learned, any misconceptions, or if there are any generalizable lessons from how this group approaches philanthropy.

Tom: Yes. The generalizable lesson is that if you’ve met one philanthropist, you’ve met one philanthropist. I’ve been struck more by the heterogeneity than the commonality.

What I think is interesting to do is to look at some case studies and say, at least from the outside, what was it that motivated that philanthropist to pursue that strategy? So, for example, my understanding is—and this is secondhand knowledge—that one of the things Bill Gates’ father instilled in Bill Gates was this value that every human life is of equal value. That’s number one. Number two, he then learned about something called the 90/10 problem, which is that only 10% of health R&D is devoted to 90% of the disease burden.

Tom: And that’s what, for him, was a trivial amount of money. He could double the amount of R&D going into a disease that he’d never heard of, that killed a million people a year. And then I think, and this is more speculative, he might have gotten interested in vaccines because he recognized that vaccines have the same economics as an operating system. That is, there’s a large fixed cost associated with developing it, but then the marginal cost of making it available to more people is very low, right? So I think that’s an example.

Patrick Collison, we know from reading his essay on progress studies with Tyler, is very interested in this question of why aren’t we applying the experimental method to how we fund this research? And I think that motivated things like Fast Grants and this AHRQ Institute. I think there certainly are some commonalities. For example, I think a lot of philanthropists want to know, if I give you this money and you are successful, how would I know? Right? So I think many of the more sophisticated ones are happy taking risks, but what they would like to know is what success would look like.

You know, many of them have made their money in tech and run their organizations on the basis of objectives and key results. And so, they’re more comfortable supporting a team that has the ability to say, “Our goal over the next 10 years is to do X, and this is how you would verify whether or not we were effective.” I think another thing is that they believe, again, particularly the ones who have made this money in technology, that there are many areas of human endeavor that have a power-law distribution as opposed to a Gaussian distribution. So, the very best people are not just marginally better than the median person, but they could be in an entirely different quadrant. Right? So, in math, it’s not just marginally better than your median mathematician, for example.

Why isn’t there more philanthropy?

Matt: So I understand that there’s a lot of heterogeneity among ultra-wealthy philanthropists. But here’s one thing we can say about the ultra-wealthy in general, right? I think there’s roughly 2,000 families in the US with wealth over half a billion dollars. And on average, it looks like those families give away a shade over 1% per year. You yourself have pointed out that they could afford to give more than twice that, without losing wealth in dollar terms if they invested the rest. And even in some sense, just the selfish returns to philanthropy surely beat out the kind of other marginal uses of those dollars. You know, you buy an extra yacht, or you can contribute to a scientific breakthrough or save lives. It seems almost obvious what you’d go for. So why isn’t there just more philanthropy?

Tom: Well, first of all, you’re starting to see that. So I think you have a growing number of philanthropists who really are stepping up to the plate and beginning to do more. But I think you’re right, which is that there is this enormous gulf between what philanthropists are currently doing and what they’re capable of doing. And that’s true not only in the United States but around the world. And again, there’s no single reason for this. But here’s a common pattern.

Tom: People have made their money when they’re still professionally active, and they have no immediate interest in doing what Bill Gates did. He stepped down from his CEO role at Microsoft, devoted full time to learning about malaria and other challenges associated with global health and global development. He built an organization of 2,000 people tasked with turning his wealth into advances in global health, global development, and now domestic economic and social mobility.

For people who are still professionally active, I think it’s very easy for them to say, “Oh, I’ll deal with this later. I’m still raising a family. I’m the CEO of this company. It’s still growing very rapidly. I’m really enjoying being the CEO. So, this is something I’ll deal with when I retire.” I think that’s one thing.

I think there are some who just haven’t made a change in their professional identity—from, “I am a Wall Street financier” to “I’m someone who’s now going to devote a lot more time and energy to giving away my money.” Sometimes they see what happens to people who are more active, and they get pilloried by the public and the press. They might look at that and say, “Well, who needs that?”

The reason I think this is problematic is that we have many challenges with a high level of urgency. There are some problems where I personally would be okay if it took us longer to solve, like, “Why is the universe expanding at an accelerating rate?” But there are other problems, like climate change and pandemics, where we care not only that we solve them, but also when we solve them.

I think there are a set of problems, and this is part of the reason why we created Renaissance Philanthropy. We do think there’s a lot of capacity for philanthropists to do more. We can work with them even if they don’t want to start a large organization like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation or the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

The role of philanthropy versus government

Matt: I guess another shadow hanging over this that some people might wonder about is: Is philanthropy kind of a second-best option when public sector funding fails? Actually, if we could go back to our discussion about state capacity and making the federal government more effective—do you think there’s a role for philanthropy even in a world where the government is more effective and getting more done?

Tom: Well, I think there are a sufficient number of gaps between what governments are currently doing and what they should be doing. I think it’s an unlikely scenario, but it would be a high-class problem if we were to meet in 10 years and I were to say, “Gee, the government has just massively stepped up to the plate, and I’m seeing fewer opportunities.”

It reminds me of when I worked for President Clinton. Not only had we eliminated the deficit, but we were also on track to pay down the debt. People were concerned that there would be no instrument like the Treasury bill to play its role in financial markets. Obviously, today, we would look at that as a high-class problem.

Matt: So the future of this government, which is funding so much in so many different areas with such a high level of quality and rigor, leaves no room for philanthropy. Should they just spend more money on yachts? That’s my definition of a high-class problem.

Matt: Fair enough. But I used to work for the Department of Agriculture, and I remember feeling like there was this sense of, “We are spending people’s money who did not necessarily hand it over willingly, so we have to be really thoughtful and careful and not waste it.” There’s perhaps a different attitude towards risk or taking gambles that philanthropists might be more willing to take.

Tom: Just thinking about global public goods, right? I think there’s always going to be a limitation on the willingness of the American taxpayer to invest in R&D that is about solving other people’s problems. In the area of agriculture, there’s not a huge amount that the US government is contributing to on how we leverage science and technology for climate-resilient agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa. So I think there are going to be a lot of those types of problems where it’s not like the US government is doing nothing, but what it’s doing is small relative to the scope of the problem. And I would be surprised if there was an upswell of support for R&D to support global public goods anytime soon.

ARIA Collaboration

Matt: Can you also tell us a little bit about a really interesting public-philanthropic collaboration that you’re involved with, which is the Renaissance Philanthropy-ARIA collaboration that you guys announced? I guess that must have been last week when we’re recording this.

Tom: Yeah. So the broader context for this is that ARIA had a program called Activation Partners, and they’re interested in strengthening the overall UK research and innovation ecosystem. They identified a number of partners, and I’ve just been very impressed by ARIA, Ilan Gur, and the program directors they’ve been able to recruit. So we were delighted to be one of the activation partners.

We’ve been thinking about what role we can play in strengthening the innovation ecosystem surrounding ARIA at both a creator level and at the organizational level. For example, Joshua Elliott, our chief scientist, has a program about helping a scientist or engineer who wants to join an ARPA-style organization. What is that role like? What can we learn from the successes and failures of different types of ARPA-style programs? That program is an example of being useful to ARIA.

There is also an interest in crowding in additional private and philanthropic capital to support some of ARIA’s programs. These are examples of the types of things that we’ll be working with them on. But I would encourage your listeners to check out a number of the partners. Convergent Research is also a partner for ARIA, and they’re going to be working to identify more strong candidates for focused research organizations in the UK.

Matt: I just want to circle back really quickly and say, I think this is a really interesting way. We were talking at the beginning about how Challenge.gov might have a problem where what if people are not aware of the prize opportunities?

And so sort of building these—an agency building these connections with, you know, lots of partners—is an interesting way to diffuse out what they’re working on and where there might be complementarities.

And, you know, increase their service area, right? So that more people… Tim O’Reilly has this wonderful phrase, “the architecture of participation.” And so if there are different ways in which people can both benefit from and contribute to a relationship with ARIA, that’ll increase their impact.

Field strategists in philanthropy

Matt: Can you explain this idea of a field strategist in philanthropy?

Tom: You occasionally run into people who… You know, a lot of times, scientists and engineers, if you have a conversation with them, they will say, “You should fund my lab.” And, obviously, there’s nothing wrong with that. You know, presumably, they’re working on a set of problems because they think that they’re important. But there are other people that you occasionally meet who will have a thesis for what might move an entire field forward.

There’s a great article that I encouraged Ed Boyden and Adam Marblestone to write called Architecting Discovery. And, basically, the idea is that you identify in a field the binding constraints. Those might be, for example, if you’re talking about neuroscience, that we don’t have the ability to measure and perturb this very complex three-dimensional biological system in all the ways which would be ideal. So there are limits on our ability to both measure and perturb, you know, the activity associated with, say, mammalian brains. And for some of those limitations, those might be addressable, right? So you could work backward from that challenge and say, are there a set of technologies that would enable us to measure what is currently unmeasurable?

This notion of a field strategist is someone who is capable of looking at a field or a problem and saying, is there something that we could do that would be transformational? In the same way that I think most biologists would say that our decision to not only sequence the human genome but to drive down the cost of that from $100,000,000 to now rapidly approaching $100 has been transformational. And so these field strategists are the types of people who can help identify those opportunities. And so one of the things we’re interested in doing is finding those types of people and amplifying their ideas so that those ideas are informing the allocation of philanthropic funding.

Barriers to ultra-wealthy philanthropy

Matt: And I wonder if that connects to this earlier question of what’s blocking more ultra-wealthy philanthropy. And then there’s this problem of, “I need to find a trusted person who can direct my…”

Tom: Yes. I think that, to an extent, the research community has not fully realized the potential payoff of agenda setting. And by that, I mean the ability to say, where are we today? Where would we like to be? And how are we going to get there? That’s what I mean by agenda setting.

The reason I think that the potential value of that has gone up is that there are just more people who are in a position to support ideas. And it is inexpensive but hard to do well. The ability to look at a field and say, “Here are one or more plausible candidates for a really important source of leverage.” The ability to do that well does not grow on trees.

AI and science

Matt: You know, thinking about the role again of the public sector versus philanthropy versus the private sector in there, Tom, how would you apply this to something like AI? Right? What’s the role of government funding or development of AI versus the private sector and philanthropy? How do they all fit together on this particular question?

Tom: So one area that I’m very interested in is the intersection between AI and science. I think there are a set of things that the government is currently underfunding relative to their importance. That is to get the research community to say, what is an important prediction or generative design or classification task where AI and machine learning could make a big difference? And is there some shared resource that would allow us to solve that?

So there’s a Stanford professor, David Donoho, who calls this the common task framework. What he means by that is that the areas where we’ve made progress in machine learning have been where we’ve had a well-defined problem. This typically leverages the ability of machine learning to serve as a universal function approximator between an input and an output. We have a large, high-quality, diverse dataset split between data that we train on and data that we test on. We have a benchmark for evaluating progress, and we have a leaderboard so everyone knows what the state of the art is.

This idea has become conventional wisdom within the machine learning research community, but it’s just beginning to have an impact on the natural sciences and engineering community. For the reasons we talked about earlier, the government mechanisms for supporting mid-scale research projects are not aligned with creating datasets. That’s one area. But it’s not just datasets. I think it’s the intersection between simulation and machine learning. It’s the development of self-driving labs. It’s tools for inverse design.

So I see a lot of opportunities to use AI in combination with other computational and experimental tools to accelerate time to solution. And that’s particularly important in those areas where we really care, again, not just that we solve a problem, but when we solve it, like climate, pandemic preparedness, and disease.

Lessons from working with Gordon Moore

Matt: Speaking of AI or computer advances, I understand that you were a principal staffer to Gordon Moore. Is that right? I’m curious. What did you learn from that?

Tom: I worked for a firm that represented the semiconductor industry. And at the time, Gordon was the chair of the SIA Tech Technology Committee. So I I got to work with him. And one of the things that I saw was the value of the industry having this long term goal that Gordon wrote about in an op ed that he did in 1965. I wanted to be, you know, working in the semiconductor industry where they stopped making that level of advance.

So it’s another example of this sort of positive self fulfilling prophecy is that they started organizing all this sort of pre competitive collaboration, like the Semiconductor Research Corporation. They developed the National Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors to say, What are all of the advances that we need to make to continue to stay on Moore’s Law? Because obviously it wasn’t a law in the way that we think of Newtonian mechanics or something like that. It was just this observed regularity and then became an organizing principle for this sort of vast research enterprise that was aimed at staying on this this Moore’s law curve. So I thought that was very, very powerful.

Matt: Got a couple questions left to close out. 1 question I wanted to ask was about agency. I think this is sometimes in short supply, people feeling like they can, you know, they can make things happen themselves. Yes. Now you’ve got a lot done, so you kind of have faith in your ability to get things done. But how does somebody who’s getting things getting started, do you have any advice on how to build a sense of agency?

Tom: This relates to influence without authority and my time at UC Berkeley. I started a program, which is still going on, called Big Ideas at Berkeley. The premise of the program is that students have ideas of their own. One group of students was the Berkeley chapter of Universities Allied for Essential Medicines. They were interested in how university IP policies can make essential medicines more expensive for people in developing countries through exclusive licenses. They, along with the other chapters of this organization, had written a letter to the UC Berkeley chancellor. A month had gone by with no response. They met with me and asked what they should do next. I said they should draft the response they wanted to receive. They did that, and I explained they needed to send it to a specific person who would edit it. Once she was happy with the letter, she would send it to the person who controls the chancellor’s auto pen.

One of the things about agency is that you can accomplish things if you learn how to operate at multiple levels of indirection. You might have an idea or change you want to see in the world. There is a limit to what you can do directly, but there are ways to make it easier for the relevant decision-maker to embrace your idea. Experiential learning and identifying tasks that demonstrate your ability to exert influence, even when you have no authority because you’re just starting your career, is one way to create a virtuous circle between your ideas and your ability to move them forward.

Reading recommendations

Fin: Couple of final questions for you. First is, can you recommend 3 or so books, movies, etcetera, that shaped your thinking?

Tom: We talked about one of them, which is Architecting Discovery, which is a really underrated publication. It has very few citations. I think more people in metascience should be reading it.

Another work that had a big impact on me was a very short piece that Paul Romer wrote [‘Economic Growth’]. He said that in the same way we think about scientific and technological innovation, we should also be thinking about institutional innovation - that is, meta ideas.

These might be things like the patent system, peer review to allocate basic research, or the US government’s decision to create ‘agricultural extension services’. And as he wrote:

Only a failure of imagination, the same one that leads the man on the street to suppose that everything has already been invented, leads us to believe that all of the relevant institutions have been designed and that all of the policy levers have been found. For social scientists, every bit as much as for physical scientists, there are vast regions to explore and wonderful surprises to discover.

Outro

Fin: Very good. And final question is just, how can people get involved with Renaissance Philanthropy?

Tom: Yeah. So we’re always interested in talking to more philanthropists and foundations who would like to do more and are interested in the relationship between philanthropy on the one hand and science, technology, innovation, and the role that policy can play in accelerating progress. People can drop us a note at info@renphil.org.

Fin: Okay. Tom Kalil, thank you very much.

Tom: Thank you.

Fin: And, Matt, thanks for joining me.

Matt: Oh, thank you. It was my pleasure.

Fin: That was Tom Kalil, and thanks to Matt Clancy for joining me. Reminder again to check out New Things Under the Sun. That is Matt’s living literature review on research about science and innovation. A podcast version is available. If you’re looking for links or a transcript, you can go to hearthisidea.com/episodes/kalil. That is K-A-L-I-L.

And if you find this podcast valuable in some way, probably the most effective way to help is just to write an honest review wherever you’re listening to this. You can also follow us on Twitter—we are @hearthisidea, although we rarely tweet. As always, a big thanks to our producer, Jason, for editing these episodes, and thank you very much for listening.