Doing Big Things in Policy: It's All White Space

Hey, listener, wanna do big things? Well, today we're gonna record a guide of sorts. Joining me today, Remco's Wetslude, co-founder of the Horizon Institute for Public Service, as well as Kumar Garg of Renaissance Philanthropies. Welcome to China Talk, everyone. Kumar, what is Renville? - Right, we help donors bat big on science and technology. - And Remco, Horizon builds pipelines in the public service for people working on emerging tech. - Kumar, what do you wanna tell the kids? - There's a Tyler Cowan line about raising people's ambitions, which I think I love. But I think the practical thing that when I have career advice for people, it's just that people are very narrow in what they think career paths look like. So they say, "Hey, I was looking around and I saw these jobs being listed, which one do you think I should apply for?" And then I say to them, "I have never applied for a job that I have actually worked at." Like, I am this far along and I have invented some version of every job. I like, got a fellowship, by going to the government and saying, "If you gave me this fellowship, I could sit here. Do you want to hire me?" I like took something where I was working for somebody and then converted into a job. I've started organizations. So there's many ways that one can actually work out there in the world. So that's any one part. The second part is what you actually want to work on. I think people worry, there's all this talk around the burden of knowledge, like how do you get to the frontier? And that has not been my experience. My experience is you can get obsessed with a very technical topic. And pretty soon after talking to all the people and trying to figure out why that topic is stuck or what's not getting worked on, actually be on the edge where lots of people who are the experts on that topic are like, "That person's really on to something. We should be doing more of that." So your ability to go from not knowing something to the edge is actually quite a lot. And then the real magic is actually, do you actually want to devote part of your career to then working on that and actually trying to make progress? And that, I think, takes time. How do you actually figure out how to get something in the National Defense Authorization Act or how do you convince, how do you figure out, how do you get good at raising money around your ideas? All these things take time. But I think the, can you do big things is actually, I think, a lot more possible than people realize. Like how much latent capacity for big thing doing is there out there, both from the world needs things perspective as well as like, there's talent that just hasn't had their kind of horizons raised. I generally think we're always talent blocked. I think like, but we're bottlenecked on talent on basically everything. And the reason is not that, yeah, the reason is not that we have an infinite set of problems. It's just that one of the ways I have conversations with donors is, you know, somebody might say, you know, let's do like a white space analysis. Where's the white space? And by that, what they mean is like, the some space where like everybody's working and it's, and then there's another place where like, no one is working. But the, like, the sad joke of it is like, it's all white space. Like you get into these problems. And as you dig in, there's like, you've like, very quickly figured out that there's like a bunch of stuff that is quite important that is not getting worked on. So one recent example I often tell people is in the past five years, there's been a huge increase in the number of people that now realize like, lead pollution is a really big deal. You know, maybe quarter to a third of global learning rates between rich countries and poor countries can be explained by the fact that we have huge amounts of lead pollution. When I started talking about this to people, you know, maybe like five, seven years ago, like it would be like, I would get kind of a nodding head, like, yeah, like, pollution's a problem. But then I would say like, oh, well, how much money is getting spent on this like, really big problem? And they would say, oh, I can think of this thing and others and then eventually people looked into it and globally, there was $10 million being spent on lead remediation. And I asked how many people do you think work on lead remediation globally full time? And they were like, well, maybe a hundred, you know? And we're talking about something that might have like, you know, trillion dollars plus of like lifetime outcomes plus. And so, you know, we, I think under S.S. to make how many really important things don't have enough talented people working on them. You know, the lead elimination project, when they first, you know, came to a partheni for their idea, they said, you know, and I could tell they were onto something because they were like, this is what we did. We flew to a country, we bought lead on the market, we then put out paper and we put the paint on it and let it dry. And then we took a sample and then we took it to the, we tested the sample for lead. And then we took it to the regulatory authorities and said, did you know the paint is being sold with lead in it? And the authorities were shocked. The paint suppliers were shocked. And in like, a multiple countries, that alone caused them to change the law. So they were getting like off like a plane flight and buying paint changes in like, whether lead was being sold in the public market. Like in, you know, this happened in 2023, you know? So just like a week ago, I'm like, trying to buy fishing supplies for my son, I go to the store, the tackle shop, I cannot find any weights that are not lead weights. And I'm like, oh, I'm going to have to order these on Amazon. Like even today, you cannot, if you fish, find weights that are not let in most places in the United States of America. They're like, well, they're just heavier and they're more useful. And I'm like, do I really want my kid using lead weights on fish that they, that he's going to catch? Like, I just think like we have blind spots everywhere. And so that means like there's lots of interesting stuff to be done. You just have to be a nerd about it and figure it out. There's a funny story related to this, which is for the Policy Entrepreneurship Network conference, which is a community that Kumar, along with Parth, who he mentioned, organizes, there was a bag, you know, swag as part of the conference. The bag had lead in it. It says on the label, if you look at it, there's a, you know, there could be small residual amounts of lead in this bag. Embarrassing. That's embarrassing. Kumar, how else do people get stuck or get blocked? Let's get another story out of you. I think another way people get stuck is just, you know, who your peers are. So I remember having a college friend who called me up. I was like working in policy. I was working in the White House. And he's like, oh, that's all very impressive. But how much do you get paid? Because he works in finance. And I was like, oh, I'm on a fellowship salary. I'm like clearing 40K. But I'm getting to do all this incredible work as a fellow in the government. And he's like, but what? Like if the work is important, why don't they pay you? I don't understand. And it just had-- it did not compute to him that, you know, and then eventually I moved off the fellowship to like a government salary. But it's still not comparative. And the thing that jumped out to me was he was surrounded by a peer group where like, that's how you kept score. And I find that like one of the important things, if you're going to do like interesting and vicious things, is like you have to have people around you that like value the striving even when all along the way. Like, you know, it's like you haven't gotten the win, you know? You're like, I've been working on this. And we've tried four times to get it into, you know, this legislative thing, but it hasn't worked. And they're like, so we used to call this, you know, like what's your water on stone? What's like a thing that you've been working on for many years? But like you haven't made, it looks like you are not making progress. And I still get emails from people, which is like, I accomplished my water on stone, like finally, the crazy person that was in my way, you know, died or left government. And finally we're going to get the win. And it's like, they email me because I know, they know that I appreciate how sometimes these things take time. And so one of the biggest, one of the big things that I always tell people is whatever you want to do, if you're not surrounding yourself with at least other people who value that work, they don't have to be everybody. But at least some, it's like very hard to do it because, you know, we need, so part of the reason for the policy entrepreneurship network is like, we celebrate nerds that are like, I have been obsessively working on how to make the organization system work. And like here are the 17 different ways we are trying to like reform opiodes and here are the 14 ways, the lobbyists killed us. And then we made a comeback and we found the right person in the government that we got this rule changed. And all the back and forth of like the Aaron Brockovich of it all. And it's like awesome. Like that's, and like, you know, that person is also like, I can't get anyone to get this work funded. It's crazy. But like the ROI on their effort is so high. So I do think like the work requires stamina and engagement. And so, So one of the big things you have to remember is to surround yourself with people who can feel the wind and feel the work alongside you. And so people just make the mistake of being like, not at least finding some peers to do it with. >> Roamco, why don't you introduce the horizon fellowship? And I'm curious sort of what have been the indicators of success impact failure from a selection personality mindset, whatever factor and how that's changed how you thought about filling your slots over the years. >> Totally. So yeah, the horizon institute for public service broadly exists to build government capacity in emerging tech. We focus on AI first and foremost and then also have biotech in some other areas. And we run several programs to try to build that capacity, all of which are meant to sort of create communities of people who both understand the technology deeply and want to work in careers of public service and think about policy problems deeply. The fellowship is our first and still the biggest program that we run which places people in government for up to two years or in think tanks in a placement focused on emerging tech issues. So very similar to the way Kumar mentioned getting into government, these fellowships are a pretty common model. We were the first one to focus on sort of AI and emerging tech specifically. And it's pretty interdisciplinary. So we have machine learning, PhDs and deep technical experts, but these are very interdisciplinary problems. So we also have lawyers and other people who bring expertise relevant to the field. And I think we really try to select for public service motivation and ambition. Trying to take like, you know, the, I think AI and other fields are going to have very widespread and sort of big, big impacts. And we need people in government who understand the technology and are thinking deeply about where it might go and what it's doing today. And then try to, by their light, do something that's good for the public and work on the office, work for the offices that they work for. And so I think one thing that's really required is this combination of ambition on the one hand and humility on the other hand, which I think is also a thing that many people in the policy entrepreneurship network that Kumar talked about has, which is, you know, we need to do big things. And there's many big wins we can try to pursue. At the same time, you're working with people who think pretty differently from you. You're working on behalf of often elected representatives who set the direction and, you know, that's sort of what we should aim for in a democratic society. And so your role as a staffer or as a fellow in the first instance is not to necessarily like, you know, have the world be the way that you want it to be. Even if you might pick an office to work for that, you know, has a mission that you really care about. And so I think selecting for that combination of ambition and humility is a thing we've iterated on over the years. I mean, one thing that I felt working in government was, you know, I worked in a science office. And there was actually no good correlation between how good of a scientist you were and how good you were at being good at policymaking. And part of the reason is just, you know, you could actually get pretty far kind of like being dictatorial in science. Like, okay, I've run this lab. I've got this system and I've got this thing. But a lot of like being successful in government is sense making. Like why is this person not going to go along with this idea? Like what are their incentives, what's their blocker? Like why do they want to show up? And so you have to have that extra sense of perception that you're able to build over time. And how do you bring people along? So one of the things I think is really smart about the fellowship model and what you guys are doing is that. Some of this is just easier. I often find that two months after somebody has started a fellowship, they sound totally different about the questions they're asking me. Then when I talk to them like in the summer before they go in, there's just like once you're in there, you're like, oh, nobody knows anything. But I have to create this document in two hours. And when I say, oh, but like, and then like the document comes out of somebody very important mouth as like what they think. So like that two hours of work really matters. So suddenly you start to realize how compressed people's time and attention are. You start to realize like how much you have to figure out why people may or may not be into an idea. You have to understand like how things actually get to the finish line. So I just find that like if you're a researcher and you spend a year in these kind of policymaking roles, you'll become a totally different researcher on the kinds of questions you'll do if you go back to academia, anyone else. So you know, if you can pull it off, immersion is very powerful because you sort of understand much more intuitively the incentives of these systems. So how does that kind of track on to the humility versus ambition? Access. I think I think it gets at the thing Ramco was saying, which is I think you have to be kind of obsessed with winning. Like, hey, I think this is really important and I really wanted to happen because a lot of times people in government have taken fall into this idea of like, I own this portfolio. And I don't like the, I have a portfolio. My portfolio is these countries. My portfolio is global health. But like a portfolio just is like a fancy way of saying like, this is the range of topics that whatever seed I'm in has equities and I think it's better to have goals. Like, I want to move from here to here. And so I think being ambitious on things you want to move is important. I think the cut is that pull that work off. You have to actually be a student of the system. So I, one of the big things that I would, I used to do is I used to, when like an executive order came out or we got this, you know, the budget came out. I would go ask people, Hey, how did this idea make it into the budget? And they would say, Well, does this budget examiner with an OMB and, you know, they're the ones who write the first draft, blah, blah, blah. So that would say, Okay, let me go like, go get coffee with the budget examiner and they, and that budget examiner would say like a very interesting fact to me, which is I start in the spring on building out what is like going to be in the initial budget that I will send to the agency. And I'm like, Oh, you're starting now. And they were like, Yes, are there any questions you would like me to ask the agency? And I would say, Oh, so, but like, understanding that the budget process starts like the day after or even before the president's budget came out for the next year, like that is not an obvious thing because you might think that the budget happens in November. And it goes up to the president's desk. So I think curiosity and then putting that curiosity to work is very important. I think the focus on results and sort of outcomes in the world is a big thing that distinguishes I think some people in policy and government from from others. There was a guy we were advising with horizon who is a sort of tech entrepreneur who was interested in making the jump into kind of public service and policy work. And we were like, great, like someone with your background has a lot of relevant skill sets. You should absolutely consider doing this. You could add a ton of value and send him a couple of the Renville writings on policy entrepreneurship as like, you have this mindset and this is a thing you can deploy. He was like, Why is this a concept? He was like, This is just the way of doing things. You have an outcome that you want in the world and then you work backward to what's needed from it. And you know, you can call that policy entrepreneurship. Like that's just the way that you do business. It doesn't need to this like terminology or or specialness that people are attaching to it. And three months he did make the jump to DC and three months after he's like, Oh, I get it. Like I'm in so many meetings here in DC or I talk to people and you know, they have a portfolio or they have some things they're like working on or care about, but they don't have an outcome in mind. They have a way that they are actively trying to change the world or a thing that they want to be different from the way it is today. And they're not sort of working backward from that to like what's needed for that. And I do think that's just yeah, fundamentally kind of a different mindset. And I think a lot of people maybe on the outside don't realize that it's, you know, especially the folks who have that mindset don't realize that it's kind of a choice or it's like a thing that's not true across the board. It's that word entrepreneurship, right? If you're in a market economy and your business is not doing novel or different or differentiated things, you will lose market share. Make less money, have to fire people and eventually have to shut down, right? And there is a whole like universe of media books. I don't know, podcasts. What have you that talk you through like the different ways in which you can try to sort of grow a business or make my money or what have you. And as you were saying, Kumar, in like academia, think tank dumb, staffer dumb, there's not a PNL, right? There's not, there's not a way to keep the score in the way that your college, I mean, frenemy or whatever. could look at his bonus at the end of the year and say, "Okay, I did a good job because I did this many deals." And my portfolio company has had this sort of a year. So, but it's an interesting thing, right? 'Cause like you think that most people go into government or policy because they want to make a difference. But it seems really not hard to go from making a difference to treading water just because of, I don't know, the way the system is set up and the fact that, you know, these are these giant organizations and it's not just like one scene of able to call the shots. - I used to play this game with my team was, I was like, can you actually tell me, I used to name all the White House offices and I used to say, tell me what they do and what is winning for them, right? And like most of the time, you know, you show up with a research background, I'm like, what do you think the office of presidential correspondence does? It's like they write millions of Americans write letters to the president and they write responses back and they pick out every day a set of letters that the president reads. They consider the job really important and sometimes policy comes out of that. So, like, how's like, what do you think speech writing does? What do you think the advanced team does? What do you think the office of public engagement does? And the interesting thing was, what do you think comms does? And the interesting thing is each of them are their own little tribe that have their own kind of internal logic and KPI. So for example, the office of public engagement, they do something called a fly-in, right? So 60 mayors from around the country are flown in, you know, to come to the White House and they like interact with White House aides, right? I used to, I would ask the office of public engagement, what's your goal with this fly-in? And they're like, the goal is the fly-in. Like, we're bringing these mayors to the White House. That's the goal. So then I would be like, the policy entrepreneur, I would say, well, can I pitch them on things? Like, there's a bunch of important mayors that are gonna be here. And they're like, you know, we need people to talk to them. We need them to have a good day at the White House. So I would then get the list of who's coming and then set up like, what are we gonna pitch them on on things we were working on? Or like CEOs are coming in through the building. So it made for a good pairing because their KPI was just, did people, important people who wanna have a relationship with the president so when we later on call them for something, have a good time, you know, do they have a successful visit? Same thing with like speech writing. You know, one of the things I learned from Tom was, Tom would say, speech writing does not want you to edit their words. 'Cause that's their job, that's the words. But what do they want from us, policymakers? They want the factoid. What's like the amazing fact that you can stick into the speech that like sells the point? So I would then create a list of like, amazing factoids and they would, speech writing would be like, you got any more of those? So like, state of the union would come around. I would get an email from the speech writing team. Hey, you're always good with those factoids. You got any interesting ones that we could like, and they were like, why is speech writing reaching out to you about the state of the union? I was like, oh, they like the factoids, right? 'Cause for them, that's like a thing they cannot immediately pull, make sure it's vetted, you know, I'm the policy person. And then what comes, what I would do is, you know, the comms team would think like, what's the visual? So I would be the crazy person who'd walk into the meeting with the comms team, where before I would show them the policy idea, I would show them the photo. I'd be like, the president is gonna stand in front of this massive wind turbine. And they're like, whatever it is, that's a good idea. Like let's do that. So everybody has their own structure. I'm sure like the social media team and others have their own. So different players in the system have different, and so you as the person who's trying to get policy work done, like some change in the world, you have to think about how you get that, those other teams to kind of like be into like what you're trying to advance, versus like, oh, they're gonna nerd out with you on, you know, like why we should change the organ procurement system, or why we should try to, you know, change the way certain, certain, some energy policy is done. - I think one interesting tension when, you know, we teach fellows or generally talk about people coming to DC and whether they're a good fit for it is, different people need to hear almost the opposite thing. Right, some people have are so attached to a certain outcome and think it's so obvious and think that when you get into a room with someone and just explain your idea and why it's important, they're gonna get on board. As Kumar was saying, you know, you kind of have to spend time understanding their incentives and world views and bring them along. And to that person, you really have to be like, man, you've got the ambition right, but you've got to like kind of, you know, learn how the system works and maybe be a little patient, be a little bit more humble, but maybe things you don't yet know about how things work and you might wanna iterate on your idea and compromise. And other people have the exact opposite. They come in and they're like, I wanna be a public servant, you know, like I'm here to sort of do good, like another people might tell me what that is. Like I expect to come into the office and be assigned a thing and my job is to do that. And then often they come into a space and they're like, oh, there's actually not really a clear agenda here. And you can spend two years in DC just responding to incoming and like, you know, doing a thing here and a thing there. And at the end of it, maybe you have contributed, but you haven't really changed anything in the world. And for that person, I think you have to push much more on like, you know, what is the thing you want to be different two years from now? If like, what does success look like for you? Or if you look back on your experience two years, five years, however long you wanna make that time horizon? And you have, you should think hard about that. But it's like two different, you know, two people who might be drawn to policy or public service, but they need to hear kind of almost the exact opposite message in terms of, you know, what they'll need to do and think about once they get to DC. - But I think, I mean, one other dynamic that at least I noticed is there are a bunch of jobs that are firefighting jobs inside the government. Because, you know, it's just like a lot, you know, like you can be in an Ash's security role and you're the person who's like, this thing happened in the world in the middle of the night and I have to get up to speed on it so everyone else can be briefed on it, right? And I often think that the more approximate you are, like especially the more approximate you are to the president, the more the things of the day just dominate your incoming. So either you have to get really good at thinking about goal development prior to being a role, you know, so you can actually still drive on it. And part of it is like I, one of the things I would always get the question when I was working in a science office is like, why not, you know, you're doing well, why not move to the National Economic Council and the Security Council or another one of the White House offices and be like, you know, more premier spot that gets more daily interaction with the president. And I always used to tell people that that's a double ed sword. The people who get daily interaction with the president are often getting handed like, oh, we're about to have a strike and the airports might close. Like your job is to go make sure that doesn't happen today. Well, like you might have other goals for that day, but like that's not your goal anymore for the day. And so a lot of, so I think you have to, the people who are able to like be more approximate while still being able to retain some degree of agency, I think is underrated. And so that's a role of the policy entrepreneur, outside government, but also to realize that some of the principles that you are staffing like really don't have, you know, they're getting to like, their passion project to fix the agency. They're expanding 1% of their time on that, even though if you had interviewed them before they were taking the job, you know, they would have said that's their, that's their main thing. So I think understanding how much firefighting happens and how you, you know, ideally you can put that to work because you can advance your ideas and put them in well-formed things, but it is a big part of like what to avoid. - I remember having this fantasy. This is how embarrassing I am. This is what my fantasy was of like in 19, like all, I think this was like Jeremy Pollock or something, just like got assigned the Iraq brief in like 1999. Or something. And I was just thinking, you know, it would be really nice if I just showed up at the CIA and they're just like, all right Jordan, Bulgarian tanks. Like you're gonna be the Bulgarian tank guy. And then the whole world kind of falls away and you can just focus on your one thing, you'll get really good at your one thing. And it's kind of like you're doing a PhD and you're just like sort of focused on that and you can own it. And then maybe it'll blow up and be the most important thing in the world, but at least you'll just like be the master of your domain. And there's, you know, there are people for whom that works, but you don't stumble upon the lead, the lead poisoning that's like getting half of the planet dumber than it should be without having the ability and the mindset to do more of the explore as opposed to just the exploit. and I think that's like, uh. It's a hard thing, especially when you're young, and what you're reading are history books about secretaries of state and now security advisors and presidents and generals. Because no one's, I mean, there aren't like movies, and there's not just like a cultural universe for someone who's going to find this nice thing and sort of fix it for everyone or do some policy entrepreneurship dirty work, which actually is like 100X impact. And by the way, the sort of like value over replacement, like whoever else would have been in that job doing the Bulgarian tanks probably could have done either a better job as me or like 90% is good at job as me. But there's so much like like impact alpha in finding which topic is going to be your hobby horse, even if you do end up being in one of those more sort of like firefighting reactionary. Oh, the senator, you know, needs to learn about this thing. Like, learning how to pick your spots and then picking them, I think is important. I don't know, Remco or Kumar. Well, I think the important part about how just taxed senior people are and how much the jobs can feel like firefighting is just that, you know, Tim Geithner had this great line where he would ask his team before a meeting started. Like is this a week hair meeting or is this a we decide meeting? And by that what he met was like, there's like things in government where you're like, nobody has a good answer. But like you do the meeting just to sort of show that you're like on it. Like you assemble and you're like, you know, we're like thinking about this. And then there's like actual decisions. Like, are we going to spend the money on this or this? Are we going to partner? Are we not going to partner? And like a decent amount of, you know, some of the meetings are like we care. Like we, it's just signaling like engagement and one of your jobs is to like actually be able to tell the difference because they look the same is to say, is this a we decide process or is this a we care process? And so being able to discern which of those things are in addition to the firefighting. So I think the value then of being able to do the work, do the exploratory work, do the explore, exploit and go out there and find those ideas, whether you're an outside policy entrepreneur, whether you're the young fellow in the office that can do the work. And I'd like mature the idea and then hand it to the right person. It's just very high. And you know, it's why people say like, why is DC run with all these 20 somethings? And why it is like, you know, the chief of staff, it's like, wait a minute, they're like 30. Like, how did that happen? Well, actually, like the reason is just that like you just, there's a huge amount of leveling up that you have the opportunity to do if you can actually use those roles to go find those things and do them. It also means that you can build a network of those people on the outside that when you now only have a fraction share of time, you can call and say, I might be able to push on this, but I need you to like, without much context, do all the thinking and send me a document. I think there's, yeah, there's a lot of, at least there's a certain type of person, especially folks coming from academia or other roles where you think like, man, I really want to work in policy and public service. I want to contribute, but I need to understand my area just a little bit better before I make the jump, right? This is sometimes a blocker for people who is like, you know, I need to know the full answer to what I think should happen with China policy before I go and try to get a job where my task is to say what China policy should be for the US government. And I think people often don't realize one that it's very hard to study that question from the outside. I think as Kumar was saying earlier, you sort of need to be in the system sometimes to even know what the relevant research and what the relevant questions are. And second, I think there's a, you know, I'm a PhD dropout, sort of former political scientist, but I still love my two-by-tos. And the, one of my favorite two-by-tos is on one axis, there's unconscious versus conscious. And on the other axis, there is incompetence versus competence. And most people start out when they think about an issue in an unconsciously incompetent quadrant. So it's like the top left quadrant. And then your first part of the learning journey is you become consciously incompetent. And then you become consciously competent. And your learning journey culminates by being unconsciously competent. And people, I think, really neglect to the importance of being consciously incompetent. Like a lot of experts, I think, like you will not know all the different things you need to know to like have the solution for AI policy, for example. Right? Like it's just too complicated. And if you're not in DC yet, you just also don't know all the ways in which you even need to think about that in the first place. But you can know enough about AI to very quickly know, you know, what are the knowledge gaps I need to fill in order to say, you know, something about open-source AI models versus close-source AI models, for example, or like what China is doing in AI. And one of my colleagues, who was a fellow on the hill, previously, was like, had a nice saying, which is, your job is not to be the expert. Your job is to mobilize expertise. Like that is your job as a staffer. And to do that well, you need to be sort of consciously incompetent, be humble enough to know where your gaps are, and then be sort of entrepreneurial enough to know how to fill them. And so I think that's a really, you know, neglected skill set. But I think it really lowers the bar for where someone needs to be in order to make a contribution in DC. And so someone who I think wants to sort of, you know, be the world's expert on Bulgarian tanks, for example, might be like, "Oh, I just need to read that extra book before I can really conclude something or like jump into this field and make a policy contribution." And I'm just like, you know, lower your standards. Like you probably already can contribute so much more than you think just by being kind of aware of the gaps and, yeah, leaning in early. One question I have when I think about this is, you know, Jordan, you've talked about like posting to policy, you know, sort of that pipeline, which is, I definitely think how ideas now make it into policy makers' heads and happen is changing. And it's like an interesting question around like, you know, how does it intersect with the, you know, the way to learn is like you got to be in there and learn all the internal mechanisms of government? Like that system was certainly not as present when I first showed up in government in 2009, right? Like it's become way more present. And I think one of the things that it shows is like we still live in a real deficit of clean ideas, you know? So like I always used to say to people, we're sitting around trying to come up with state of the union ideas. And I would be like, why don't I have a book from each think tank that says, here's everything we wrote in the last year formulated as a state of the union idea. Here's the sentence, the president would say, here's like what the logic model of what the policy proposal would be. And here's a link to all the appendices so that you could, you could make it bigger or smaller and here's the phone numbers of the experts you would call. And instead I'm like, I'm like hunting around being like, have anyone written on this? And is there a paper? But I'm like, the president gives the speech every year and like the fact sheets already exist. And so part of it I think is like kind of understanding the clarity of like what is a good idea and answering the questions of like, here's what needs to happen. Here's why it needs to happen. Here's the here's the button. So, you know, whether it's like you can eliminate, you know, the double staircase and it won't actually allow more construction and that's a policy change, you know, like a state or a city could actually pass if they care about more housing. So I do wonder if like both the policy entrepreneurship on the like people going in and serving, but then also just reminding everybody just there's a lot of documents that get created in policy and not that many ideas. Jordan, I'm curious to ask you for your, you've sort of, you know, you have an early career guide on policy like and you're a big fan of the posting the policy pipeline. Like for people who haven't sort of heard of that, like what's your favorite example of someone sort of going from quote unquote posting to policy. So we've talked a lot in this show about kind of like the staffer path where you have to subordinate a lot of what your work to what the principal is, whether that's an elected representative or an assistant secretary or what have you. And there's obviously a lot of power, you know, a lot of power and influence that you can do from that. But there is like an aspect of it which turns into kind of office space. where you are not wholly yourself. You are like a vessel for someone else's ideas and ambitions. Like you are constrained by their pressure, the pressures that they're under. And I think for some people, there's something very both like intimidating, but also liberating and empowering to be forced to put on to paper or a sub-stack draft, if that may be, of like what is the change that you actually want to see in the world. Remco earlier you talked about the folks who showed up applying to your program saying, you know, I just like kind of want to be a public servant. I want to work on the NSC as something I've heard from a ton of like very highly educated 20 year olds. And that's a failure state, right? But it's very hard to look at a piece of paper, fill it up with 2,000 words of your thoughts and not get to something passed. I want to be a public servant or I want to work on the NSC. And I think that just that act of like self-reflection which comes through the writing process, I think is really important. Now there's like a whole second part of this of like, to what extent is writing in public like important to like get things done in the world. But I think the introspection that goes along with the writing process is almost the right place to start. And why I think this having this sort of writing that you're only doing for yourself is important in this world. Kumar. Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think that one of the interesting things, one of the interesting trends that I've just sort of seen is like the the doer, like the individual doer, just getting a lot more traction in a bunch of different formats. So in media, I think you would sort of think about this as the individual writer, right? So it used to be that the way you were important as a writer is who you wrote for. I write for Time Magazine. I work for this and the idea of the individual writer, just having their own brand and their own voice and their own analysis from Ben Thompson on became much more of a thing. I think at Renaissance, we try to think about as like the fund leader, the person who's leading the fund, like you don't need to go work for a foundation and be a program officer. You can lead a fund and raise the capital and deploy the work. I think similarly, I think the idea of like, people have this phrase of like a public intellectual, but there's like a, it kind of had this imprecision because a public intellectual was like, well, they write books and they're an expert and they write essays and sometimes you write an op-ed in the New York Times and they're an authority. But I think that too as an idea is getting more democratized where you can start obsessing about a topic and writing about it consistently and cleanly. Other people who are experts on the topic can say, hey, this is actually pretty good. There's a lot here and can start devalorated and then you can get encouraged to then say, you know, some of this, you should keep working on this. This is actually a really interesting insight and you should build it out. And then that can open up other crib hats, including terms of service and government, the opportunity to affect. And I think that writing has an agenda set in quality if you wanted to and you're just starting to see that democratization happened. The piece that I would just sort of push on is one of my favorite conversations to have with folks who have just become really excellent writers is what is the role they want to have in taking their insights and converting them into insights that policymakers can use? Because, you know, so I said this to Nico at Asimov. Like I was like, you've got a bunch of interesting stuff. And I think some of these ideas would be really interesting if you or someone else then said, here's the way, you know, NIH should be like operationalizing some of these insights and how they do their grant making. That doesn't necessarily have to be Nico's job, but I do think like the, there's a big role that the writer can have in that influence taking those ideas and operationalizing them. So they might want to do themselves, but they could also do that by just being aware that there's like this opportunity that they could have. - I think one of my favorite examples of this is Thomas Hockman for, you know, anyone listening who's interested in energy policy may have read his stuff, but he's at the Foundation for American Innovation and wrote a great sub-stack about sort of one year in policy, like what has he learned? And I think part of it is, you know, the public writing is a big piece of it and is, he did a very impressive job building his profile. And then there's also the follow-on work from there. Like, you know, the public writing is almost lead generation. It gets you into a meeting, it gets you like the, you know, the outreach or folks interested. And then you need to do a bunch of follow-on work. And that follow-on work often ends up not being public and gets more into the traditional quote-unquote policy entrepreneur method. But I totally agree that it democratizes. Yeah, this kind of work and I think it's super exciting and people who feel naturally drawn to sort of the posting to policy work should absolutely lean into it. - You know, that second part, I think it's super important. I think some people get so wedded to like the public, persona side of it that they don't then want to take the hit and like do the secret congress work of like all the things where policymakers call you up and ask you for ideas that you may give them input on, but then you don't get to talk about it. And I think some people are like, well, of course, you know, some of these have to be conversations that, you know, are just not the kinds of things that you will then immediately write about. Otherwise, those policymakers won't call you. And so I do think people leave some alpha on the floor when they're like, you know, everything has to be brand enhancing. And so ideally, you can do it in a way that allows your ideas to travel, but then you're smart enough to then realize like to really get the idea to the finish point, you know, you're gonna have to have different ways of interacting with decision makers. Well, I guess one question I have for Remco is, you guys have been putting out a bunch of these guides on like how do people navigate and everything else. And I often get like lots of like somebody referred to me on, oh, this person is thinking about philanthropy or policy and they're very technical, they're very smart, they should figure this out. Do you have like a, what's like a, you're, you know, you, you built a startup, you know a lot about a particular topic in a technical area, but you're curious about like large or systems level knobs you want to turn. Do you like way, what would be on your like list of things they should check out or all that stuff? Because certainly I get on the phone with them, but if what, what be sort of the resources you'd want to direct them to? Yeah, totally. I think, yeah, for us, we created this website called EmergingTekPolicy.org for people interested in emerging tech policy. So anyone listening who's interested in that field highly recommend it. I think it was for us a starting place because we kept finding ourselves repeating the same things in conversation. And it was a little bit of I think Jordan would say the same thing if you find yourself repeating something three or five times in conversation, like write it down and put it on the internet, right? Like you can just reach so many more people with the ideas that way and the people who get connected to us naturally, you know, are probably not a representative sample of everyone who should be in DC and in policy conversation. So EmergingTekPolicy.org got created for that and then has a bunch of guides on, you know, if you're new to policy, like, what's the think tank? Like, what is it like to work in Congress? What are different federal agencies doing on AI? And so I think if you're new and you're not sure like which type of institution or which type of job is good for me, which I think a lot of people face that question of like, I want to have an impact. I think government's important. But, you know, I love reading and writing or I love like this kind of work. I don't totally know where I would plug in because I don't understand DC enough. I think that's a great starting point. But then I think like very soon after that, you know, you want to be like meeting peers and sort of chatting with people who are similar to you and who have made the jump into policy or who are thinking about some of the same problem. So, you know, I think start with start with reading, but then, you know, very soon after come, you know, to DC for a weekend visit. We have a guide on that. Of, you know, if you want to do federal policy, like there's many other domains in which you can do policy, state level, city level, also super important. But suppose you want to do federal policy and you want to come to DC, how can you make the most of like a weekend trip if you have the resources to do that? And then we host a bunch of events so people can monitor our website for like a weekend workshop is one of the types of formats we offer. So it's, you don't have to feel ready for a fellowship or apply for a fellowship, but you can come and check it out briefly. Because I think this human element of, you know, seeing other people who are like you in this world, you know, we try to get some fancy speakers for the workshop. But often the most important people to talk to are the people who are just one or two years ahead of you in the journey. And they can be the most useful because senior people often have curves of knowledge about, you know, this is sort of the unconsciously competent part of the quadrant I was talking about like they don't remember what it was like to be in your shoes and might give you advice that's no longer actionable or no longer relevant. Whereas people who are just a year or two ahead are often the best kind of mentors and people who can guide you. And so, you know, we try to serve as many people as possible. People can sign up for career advice on our website. We get so many more applications than we know what the process of we can't sort of do the one-on-one calls with everyone. But there are these kind of event type things that you can go to that are a little bit more scalable and would highly recommend. There's also a list of fellowships other than the horizon fellowship that we have on the website if people want to go through programs. So, I think we have, you know, hopefully at some point soon, Jordan will have a China-focused workshop in particular. We have AI and national security workshops. We have bio workshops. So, you know, folks will hopefully who are listening to this who have those different interest areas. We'll find something that suits them. Amazing. I don't know. Kumar, what do you want to shout out? Besides taking leg out of the planet, what should people give their billions to or be working on next? Maybe that's not too close on. You close on what everyone calls. I mean, I think that technical people who are, you know, trying to figure out what to do the most impact on just can benefit a lot from just seeing what, you know, like, Renaissance philanthropy, we're putting out lots of interesting, like different ways to have impact, we're building programs all the time. I would like click around and read, but like us, convergent research, horizon, you know, all these, there's a bunch of new organizations that have appeared in the past five to ten years that are just like pushing on the how do you take technical expertise and use it to agenda set on really important outcomes. So I would like read around and be like, I think it's both inspiring, but all these organizations would tell you is like, we need more help. Like, come reach out and like raise your hand and like, you know, either help build a program or help, you know, support one. And so, yeah, that's what I would sort of suggest, which is, like we can, we can coach you up on how to talk to the money side. That's not the you know, that's just a step ladder. But I think using your passion and ambition and technical depth against these hard problems that are not just what's the next start up can be a really powerful way to contribute. Yeah, say for you do listeners, sorry, take, if listeners take one thing away from the conversation, I hope it's the message Kumar had earlier about this is just fundamentally talent constrained work. I could not name you a problem where I do not think like part of the solution is many, many more people should work on it. And there's lots of complicated how questions of depending on your personality and personal constraints. How do you work on those problems? But I can guarantee you that for someone who's trying to do good and thinks about science and technology and China related topics, there's so, so much impact you can have. And I hope, you know, people who are in jobs that don't feel like they're aligned with their ultimate mission in life think pretty strongly about how they can make the pivot in the next couple of years because there's a lot changing in the world and there's just so much need. All right, Remco Kumar. Thanks so much for coming on China. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]