How do we fund scientific breakthroughs?

Yeah, well, look, we live in partisan times now where people get spun up in there in sort of a toxic polarization. And the truth is, if we want to know the facts, is that in the Trump administration, we have not cut one dollar of NIH funding. We have not cut one dollar to the general Medicaid budget, that is the overall Medicaid fund. And the proposal for the future is to increase Medicaid by $200 billion. So you hear all the time, oh, Trump cut Medicaid, Trump cut the NIH. No, what we want to see is reallocating money at the NIH from just chemotherapy and proton beam therapy work to study food as medicine and school lunch programs and the microbiome and gut health. We've got to start talking about school lunch programs, not just putting every six-year-old on Ozempic.

I think the US has always indexed on human safety over speed to market and that has cost us in some ways. However, some other countries are indexed in the opposite direction which costs lives. There's a balance there. But there's research going on in China and other places, experiments and cloning and all things that, that as far as I know, aren't happening here. Yes, and I think the gutting of the CDC and the NIH and an anti-science vibe that has now pervades this country has driven a lot of mindshare elsewhere as funding is drying up for basic research.

And in the context of government funding, I think you could say one thing, well, look, okay, all the easy problems have already kind of been solved, sort of low hanging through has been picked, so it's harder to solve the next thing, sure. But I think broadly the issue is we have not been innovative in any way on the way that we actually conduct the science. The, you know, whether it's at NIH or at NSF or at any of their other science agencies, the answer has always been, let's just keep doing the same thing but add more money and hope that we get more outcomes proportionally. Rather than asking the harder questions about are there other ways that we can be conducting the science? Are there other types of scientists that could be getting the funding?

And this was initially actually tested in Denmark and some other places. And the theory is that, you know, the reviewer will then be able to unilaterally, without the rest of the committee agreeing, can make a selection of a particular grant. So you incentivize folks to have more interesting grants. But I think what's also kind of cool about this concept is that you're actually incentivizing better people to participate in the boards, because they have a golden ticket now and they're more likely to want to participate. So we want to run that experiment and see what kind of applications actually get approved and what kind of science gets done.

But the benefit of curing all cancer, the government is incredibly rich. And when you're incredibly rich, you can afford to take different bets to maximize your outcomes. The problem is, is that the government co-invested through things that are poorer than it. So each department says, you know, we can't really afford, we don't get that many appointments. So we're gonna go with somebody who has a very high probability of succeeding at a very modest outcome. And then we're gonna start lying about how important that is. You'll notice that if you ask people, how's your field doing? Everybody says, it's never been a better time to be a particle theorist. What's a terrible time to be a particle theorist, right? And we can't say that. And it's funny because again, in portfolio theory, if you have a balanced portfolio and part of it starts succeeding and part of it's failing, what you usually do is you take money out of the thing that's succeeding and put it into the thing that's failing because otherwise you get too much concentration in the portfolio.

I think the US has always indexed on human safety over speed to market and that has cost us in some ways. However, some other countries are indexed in the opposite direction which costs lives. There's a balance there. But there's research going on in China and other places, experiments and cloning and all things that, that as far as I know, aren't happening here. Yes, and I think the gutting of the CDC and the NIH and an anti-science vibe that has now pervades this country has driven a lot of mindshare elsewhere as funding is drying up for basic research.

But the benefit of curing all cancer, the government is incredibly rich. And when you're incredibly rich, you can afford to take different bets to maximize your outcomes. The problem is, is that the government co-invested through things that are poorer than it. So each department says, you know, we can't really afford, we don't get that many appointments. So we're gonna go with somebody who has a very high probability of succeeding at a very modest outcome. And then we're gonna start lying about how important that is. You'll notice that if you ask people, how's your field doing? Everybody says, it's never been a better time to be a particle theorist. What's a terrible time to be a particle theorist, right? And we can't say that. And it's funny because again, in portfolio theory, if you have a balanced portfolio and part of it starts succeeding and part of it's failing, what you usually do is you take money out of the thing that's succeeding and put it into the thing that's failing because otherwise you get too much concentration in the portfolio.

And in the context of government funding, I think you could say one thing, well, look, okay, all the easy problems have already kind of been solved, sort of low hanging through has been picked, so it's harder to solve the next thing, sure. But I think broadly the issue is we have not been innovative in any way on the way that we actually conduct the science. The, you know, whether it's at NIH or at NSF or at any of their other science agencies, the answer has always been, let's just keep doing the same thing but add more money and hope that we get more outcomes proportionally. Rather than asking the harder questions about are there other ways that we can be conducting the science? Are there other types of scientists that could be getting the funding?

And this was initially actually tested in Denmark and some other places. And the theory is that, you know, the reviewer will then be able to unilaterally, without the rest of the committee agreeing, can make a selection of a particular grant. So you incentivize folks to have more interesting grants. But I think what's also kind of cool about this concept is that you're actually incentivizing better people to participate in the boards, because they have a golden ticket now and they're more likely to want to participate. So we want to run that experiment and see what kind of applications actually get approved and what kind of science gets done.

But the benefit of curing all cancer, the government is incredibly rich. And when you're incredibly rich, you can afford to take different bets to maximize your outcomes. The problem is, is that the government co-invested through things that are poorer than it. So each department says, you know, we can't really afford, we don't get that many appointments. So we're gonna go with somebody who has a very high probability of succeeding at a very modest outcome. And then we're gonna start lying about how important that is. You'll notice that if you ask people, how's your field doing? Everybody says, it's never been a better time to be a particle theorist. What's a terrible time to be a particle theorist, right? And we can't say that. And it's funny because again, in portfolio theory, if you have a balanced portfolio and part of it starts succeeding and part of it's failing, what you usually do is you take money out of the thing that's succeeding and put it into the thing that's failing because otherwise you get too much concentration in the portfolio.