In this episode of Innovators Inside Podcast, Ian Bergman and Arati Prabhakar, former director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), DARPA and NIST, explore the hidden system behind some of America’s biggest technological breakthroughs.
From GPS and semiconductors to AI, mRNA vaccines and self-driving cars, many technologies we now take for granted were built on decades of research and public investment.
Here are the five key takeaways from their conversation:
The blue dot on your phone did not start with a smartphone. GPS grew out of research dating back to the early days of satellite technology and was developed for military navigation long before becoming part of everyday life.
The same pattern applies to semiconductors, the internet and AI.
The takeaway: The technologies creating new markets today may have roots in research started decades ago.
Breakthrough innovation is rarely just a government story or a startup story.
Public R&D can fund risky research before there is a clear business model. Entrepreneurs and companies can then turn those advances into products, industries and new markets.
The smartphone is a perfect example. Companies commercialized it, but many of its core technologies grew from earlier publicly funded research.
The takeaway: Great innovation ecosystems connect research, entrepreneurs, investors and industry.
DARPA program managers typically stay for only three to five years.
That is intentional. Fresh experts arrive with new ideas, build ambitious programs and eventually make room for someone who may challenge their assumptions.
It helps DARPA avoid the expertise trap where experience becomes a reason to dismiss ideas as impossible.
The takeaway: Innovative organizations need expertise, but they also need mechanisms that continuously introduce fresh thinking.
Much of today’s AI investment focuses on making businesses faster and more efficient.
Arati sees a much bigger opportunity.
AI could accelerate drug development, improve education, strengthen weather forecasting and help address problems where the commercial incentives alone may not be enough.
The takeaway: The biggest impact of AI may come from solving problems that extend far beyond business productivity.
Self-driving cars may feel like a recent breakthrough, but DARPA was running autonomous vehicle challenges more than two decades ago.
Researchers and engineers from those programs later helped build the commercial autonomous driving industry.
As Arati points out, 20 years to becoming mundane is not overnight.
The takeaway: By the time breakthrough technology feels ordinary, decades of research and experimentation may already be behind it.
The central lesson from Arati Prabhakar’s conversation with Ian Bergman is simple: innovation is a system.
Founders, investors and companies matter, but so do researchers, universities, public institutions and long-term investment.
The technologies behind tomorrow’s startups may already be taking shape inside research programs today.
Have a question for a future guest? Email us at innovators@alchemistaccelerator.com to get in touch!
Timestamps
00:00 🎙️ Introduction
01:47 👋 Meet Arati Prabhakar
03:07 📍 The Hidden Innovation Behind the GPS Blue Dot
08:00 📱 How Public Research Built the Modern Smartphone
10:01 🔬 Why Government R&D Matters for Innovation
12:55 🤖 The 70 Years of Research Behind Modern AI
17:25 🚀 How DARPA Creates Breakthrough Technologies
22:15 🧠 Avoiding the Expertise Trap in Innovation
27:05 ⚠️ Why America’s R&D System Is at Risk
33:35 🇺🇸 What Should America Invest in Next?
38:24 🤖 Why AI Is Not Just a Marketing Problem
42:57 💡 Creating Value Beyond Business Productivity
43:35 🚗 How DARPA Helped Launch Self-Driving Cars
46:30 ⏳ Why Breakthrough Innovation Takes Decades
47:02 🏛️ How Public Research Funding Actually Works
50:30 🔮 Rebuilding America’s Innovation Future
00:01:47:19 - 00:01:49:27
Ian
Good morning. Welcome to Innovators Inside.
00:01:49:28 - 00:01:52:00
Arati
Hi, Ian. Great to be with you.
00:01:52:02 - 00:02:19:06
Ian
I am incredibly pleased to welcome Aarti Prabhakar to Innovators Inside. And you know, Aarthi is one of those people who has been at every piece of the machine that enables the innovation that the US is known for. And I can't wait to kind of learn some of your stories and, you know, get some of the insights into what kind of makes things tick.
00:02:19:06 - 00:02:43:07
Ian
Because I live in the world of startups, as many of the folks who who follow us know, you know, we often celebrate the individuals, the entrepreneurs, the agitators, the builders, the people who create new things. And sometimes we forget that every single one of them is building on the shoulders of the people that have gone before them. So welcome again.
00:02:43:08 - 00:02:43:19
Ian
So we.
00:02:43:19 - 00:02:44:10
Ian
Dive in.
00:02:44:12 - 00:02:45:06
Arati
Absolutely.
00:02:45:06 - 00:03:07:10
Ian
Let's go. Let's dig in. In the introduction. The I kind of briefly alluded to this idea that at least as I observe your career and your writings and kind of philosophies seems pretty core to who you are. And this idea that there is a hidden layer of research, of engineering, of innovation and capability that powers so much of the modern world.
00:03:07:10 - 00:03:27:22
Ian
And you've got this very simple visual that I've heard you talk about, and that is the blue dot that shows up on a map on our phone. Right? Would we and we take it for granted. We take this blue dot for granted. Of course, our phone not only knows where we are, but can show us on a screen.
00:03:27:25 - 00:03:42:04
Ian
But it occurs to me that there's probably decades of public investment that has gone into enabling this simple blue dot. So, you know, to get started today, how did this come to be? What's your perspective on what enabled this magic?
00:03:42:06 - 00:04:03:08
Arati
Talking about the blue dot, I think about this every time I look at the little blue dot on my phone. And I think it's a good example because it shows the richness of all the things that had to happen before we got that navigation capability that we can, you know, walk around in our pockets all the time. There are lots of places to start the story.
00:04:03:09 - 00:04:29:19
Arati
A place I like to start is when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik. It's, you know, it's 1957. It's. Oh, 1958 maybe. And it's the first time human beings have ever put an artificial satellite on orbit. That's incredibly exciting. It turns out that human beings who did it were the Soviets at the height of the Cold War. So people in America, you know, people were literally freaking out.
00:04:29:20 - 00:04:59:06
Arati
There were giant headlines in the print newspapers of the time, and there was a lot of consternation because we were trying to get a satellite on orbit, and they beat us and we didn't think they could. So while everyone's running around being crazed about this, a couple of researchers at a lab at Johns Hopkins University, this is an applied physics laboratory that the Defense Department had already been funding for a long time.
00:04:59:06 - 00:05:29:00
Arati
So it's Defense Department funded university research. A couple of guys had radio receivers, and they lugged their radio gear up to the top of. They went to a rooftop so that they could catch that, that Sputnik signal and Sputnik whizzing around and coming by fairly frequently, predictably. And after a while, they realized that if they could track, they could track the Doppler shift from the radio signal that that the satellite was emitting.
00:05:29:00 - 00:05:58:22
Arati
And after a while, they figured out that they knew where they were. They could figure out where the satellite was going. So it wasn't too long after the very first satellite ever to be put on orbit, that people at Johns Hopkins started asking the inverse question, which is if you didn't know where you were on the ground, but there were multiple satellites and they knew where they were, could they send you signals and you could triangulate and figure out where you are?
00:05:58:25 - 00:06:23:21
Arati
Well, that's a pretty interesting problem to solve because navigation, you know, in the military, if you don't know where you are and how to get where you want to go, you are in deep trouble, right? Like it's a problem for us as civilians. It's you can't even get started on your military mission without that. And so it you know, over the course of many, many decades, it took so many different kinds of research coming together.
00:06:23:21 - 00:06:46:15
Arati
It took a massive push by the Defense Department, not so that we could find latte. It was in order to be able to first be able to tell ships and soldiers where they were, and then to be able to embed these technologies into weapons so that we could hit exactly the target we wanted and no other target. And that was a game changer.
00:06:46:15 - 00:07:13:02
Arati
And, you know, it's hard to talk. It's hard to overstate what a big deal that was. Think about all of human history from the time a caveman lobbed a rock. From that moment through generations, millennia of technology development, all of military technology was bigger and bigger bombs until we hit nuclear weapons that could literally obliterate, you know, life as we know it on planet Earth.
00:07:13:02 - 00:07:38:20
Arati
And GPS was part of the first advance. That was not about more mass. It was about precision. So that's what drove it. A lot of other miracles had to happen. Private companies had to get involved. We had, you know, we had these GPS gadgets and then it got soaked. It got pulled into the phone. I think Apple was the first smartphone that rolled out with a GPS integrated with a map that you could carry around.
00:07:38:21 - 00:07:39:13
Arati
Here we are.
00:07:39:14 - 00:08:00:24
Ian
And now it is utterly integrated into the fabric of our lives and taken for granted. And I'm curious, you know, what else have I interacted with in the first hours of my morning that I maybe I just take for granted, but had its roots in a publicly funded research environment, or a public lab or something of value.
00:08:00:25 - 00:08:32:22
Arati
Or probably a dozen things on the smartphone that if you're like me, you reach for it before you even get out of bed. And so the the GPS stopped for sure. If you use that to navigate around traffic, that's a part of the story. The fact that that all of that electronics could get shrunk into such a small form factor, one of the programs I was involved in back when I was a DARPA program manager in the late 80s, I started a program that was about a next generation of lithography that was used.
00:08:32:27 - 00:09:05:25
Arati
People thought it was impossible. We took it from impossible to merely improbable, at which point the industry picked it up and turned it into something that they then used for five generations of Moore's Law for semiconductors. And that's part of how those devices all got shrunk down. The chip in your phone that's talking to the cell tower, is a gallium arsenide power amplifier that traces back to a transistor design in a in a gallium arsenide technology that, you know, dates back to, I think probably the 70s or 80s.
00:09:05:27 - 00:09:18:15
Arati
Every time you use your phone, you're on the internet, which the TCP IP protocols were defined in a hotel room, and Palo Alto by a DARPA program manager and his contractor at Stanford.
00:09:18:15 - 00:09:20:01
Ian
I want to jump in because, I mean, you're.
00:09:20:01 - 00:09:23:00
Ian
Making the point, right? The list just goes on and on.
00:09:23:01 - 00:09:24:08
Arati
It's a lot. It's a.
00:09:24:08 - 00:09:25:16
Ian
Lot, and it.
00:09:25:16 - 00:09:48:09
Ian
Is a lot. And I think there are some big stories, right? I think I think there's a large number of people who understand that, that the GPS system, as we understand it, is effectively government and defense, instantiated, controlled systems. A lot of people that understand the some aspect of the origins of, you know, the internet, but a lot of this feels invisible in kind of the fabric of modern life.
00:09:48:10 - 00:10:01:04
Ian
I'm kind of curious for your thoughts there. Like, why do you think some things get recognized, but maybe so much of the of public infrastructure as role in creating this is not recognized in today's law.
00:10:01:06 - 00:10:27:24
Arati
Well, I think you need to go back to why all of that investment in the research that led to these technologies, why did it happen? And that, to me is actually the most exciting part of the story. Because, look, if you back up the the whole idea of the American constitutional democracy is that we the people can build a better future for ourselves than a king or a dictator or company or an individual.
00:10:27:26 - 00:10:55:25
Arati
This is like the most I think it's the most exciting idea in all of human history. Well, so one of the ways people in this country made a bet on the future was by investing in research and development, and they did it for national security, for better health outcomes, to create economic opportunity and build prosperity. And all every one of those things takes more than the government.
00:10:55:25 - 00:11:24:27
Arati
But the research investment that the government makes, the point of it is to have this foundation to open opportunities, to change what's possible. And by the time it turns into change in our lives, so many other things have to happen. And all the examples we've talked about so far involve commercialization and therefore entrepreneurs and corporations and investors. And I had the great privilege of spending about half of my career on that side of it.
00:11:24:27 - 00:11:44:26
Arati
And the strength of the American innovation system is that we have all of these pieces. But when you're the consumer, what you see is that Steve Jobs made this amazing device and you bought it from Apple. You might not even be thinking about the semiconductor chips that are inside, or who made the battery or who made the display.
00:11:44:27 - 00:11:51:25
Arati
Leave aside the public research that all of us paid for that that made all those pieces possible.
00:11:51:26 - 00:12:28:20
Ian
And obviously, we can't expect everyone to understand everything about the chaotically complex system, right? That that is America. But it does strike me that there's these big projects. Some of them are like Manhattan Project. Some of them maybe don't have the name cachet of the space race, the the internet. But there are ongoing big projects. Right. And so I'm curious, you know, I think about, for instance, fusion as something that maybe is coming and has been driven by a lot of public investment.
00:12:28:20 - 00:12:55:01
Ian
I think about AI as something that has arrived to an extent, the version of AI that we understand, but it certainly built on decades of research. What are the what are the headlines that you would point the listeners to? The things that show that we are still benefiting from ongoing investment in fundamental research?
00:12:55:02 - 00:13:36:04
Arati
Yeah. And continuing to you know, we're now at grave risk and we should talk about that. But we as a country have continued to make the investments for the next generations. So your list is a great one, because what's artificial intelligence is just the latest in a huge series of waves of technological advances in information technology. And many, many, many things like semiconductors started purely as something that the Defense Department and NASA needed and then very quickly were so practical and so interesting that they started finding commercial applications.
00:13:36:04 - 00:14:13:02
Arati
But semiconductors, communications, computing, all of those generations, then the internet generation, which had this commercial side, that was social media with this underlying piece that was started through government research. AI builds on top of all of that, and that too has 70 years of public investment and research behind it. If you look at the people who were some of the key layers of the foundation for the AI breakthroughs, they all were trained on public dollars and were part of this publicly funded research.
00:14:13:02 - 00:14:37:02
Arati
And now now industry is driving it in a whole set of directions. And we can come back to what else now needs to happen. Because in a nutshell, I think our industry is doing a phenomenal job at finding market opportunities. But these new AI technologies will open the door to things that are going to change lives for people that are going to have societal benefits, that continue to need public investment.
00:14:37:02 - 00:15:10:28
Arati
So that's the information revolution. There's a whole nother story about energy technologies. Fusion, I think, is a great example of something that's still out ahead of us. But building on a public research foundation, here's something that's completely different that people tend not to think about. We've made enormous progress in reducing cancer death rates. Well, when you look at why that is, part of the reason is amazing new therapies that got commercialized through the pharmaceutical industry and delivered through our health care system.
00:15:11:00 - 00:15:38:02
Arati
It turns out that's a pretty small part of the story. The single biggest factor in reducing cancer death rates was lowering smoking rates. When in the 60s, when I was a kid, when everyone's parents smoked, it was something. Yeah, something like 40% of American adults smoked. Now that number is about 12%. So we're not done dealing with this huge health issue, but going from 40% to 12%.
00:15:38:03 - 00:16:05:10
Arati
That saved 3 or 4 million lives, that people who never had to get lung cancer or other kinds of cancers, because it turns out it affects a lot of things. And that that's not a commercialization story. That is a story about pulling policy levers and regulatory levers until people's behavior changed, until it became, you know, when I was a kid, we were the generation that were telling our parents not to smoke, right.
00:16:05:12 - 00:16:07:27
Arati
So that's part of how culture change happens.
00:16:07:27 - 00:16:10:02
Ian
Well, and it is interesting, I actually I actually am.
00:16:10:02 - 00:16:30:18
Ian
Really glad that you made that point. Right. Because there is a base of science, of research of, you know, theory that was validated that said, actually, this is probably not good. And it did. It actually was almost an anti commercialization letter. There were strong commercial force that was working against this. Right. There was cultural innovation. It played out.
00:16:30:18 - 00:16:57:09
Ian
So I, I really appreciate you sharing that story. That said, let's stick with the research. Let's stick with the technical research piece for a second, because I'm kind of curious how this works. Right? You've been on the inside, you've been at DARPA, you've been at nest. These are institutions that have been around for a number of years, decades.
00:16:57:13 - 00:17:25:00
Ian
Right. These are institutions that have continued to generate, enablers of the world that we live in today. So I want to start with when things are going well, why how do these institutions work? How do they maintain purpose and mission year after year, decade over decade? And then maybe we're going to lead into some of the challenges that we're seeing right now.
00:17:25:01 - 00:17:52:10
Arati
That's good. Yeah. I think you said the most important word, which is purpose. And, you know, every job I've had, public sector and private sector has been in one way or another. It's been about using science and technology and innovation to bring to bring advances into the world. What's very different, though, is when I was a venture capitalist, the working in, you know, you're an investor.
00:17:52:10 - 00:18:21:22
Arati
Your job is to generate returns for your LPs. That's a different, ultimate purpose for the institution that you're in. When I was in public service, it was always serving the country in one form or another. When you're at DARPA, the mission is to create breakthrough technologies and new capabilities that change national security outcomes. And that that includes, but is not limited to, military capabilities.
00:18:21:24 - 00:18:52:00
Arati
It's a broad charter, but it's a very deliberate focus on national security. When I was at NIST, the mission was to provide the measurement and standards and technical infrastructure that allows the entire economy and the rest of the research base to work. And in both of those cases, those were two agencies that had roots in very specific purposes for our country.
00:18:52:00 - 00:19:12:03
Arati
So in the case of DARPA, DARPA started on the heels of Sputnik. It was a direct response to the fact that we were shocked when the Soviets beat us to space. And DARPA job was to prevent that kind of surprise. Fortunately, the people who started it recognized that the only way to prevent surprises you go driving, you create your own surprises.
00:19:12:03 - 00:19:34:03
Arati
And that's why it has now a, you know, they're getting ready to celebrate the 70th anniversary, but that's a long track record of disruptions from the internet to stealth and precision strike. And, you know, while I was there, as well as director, the only thing you think about as director is, what's the thing I'm going to you know, I've got this whole portfolio.
00:19:34:04 - 00:19:37:07
Arati
One of these things has to change the arc of the future.
00:19:37:07 - 00:19:39:26
Ian
It is a little bit like venture in that, in that regard.
00:19:39:27 - 00:20:02:27
Arati
Oh, yes. Yes. Although you're not measuring financial returns, you're measuring impact on national security. It turns out that the first thing that really changed the arc of the future that came out of my time was the work we did on mRNA vaccines that made that possible for the pandemic, which, you know, we didn't know yet was coming. I left DARPA, I was there 12 to 17.
00:20:02:27 - 00:20:23:04
Arati
So even by the time I left, of course, and I knew that particular pandemic was coming. That's the DARPA story. Nest is is a really it's it's a crazy story. It's even longer than 70 years. When the founders wrote the Constitution, one of the things they knew the government needed to do was to set the standards for weights and measures.
00:20:23:06 - 00:20:50:10
Arati
Right? Because if you don't agree on that, you can't have trade, you can't have commerce. And that that wasn't a very high tech mission in 19, you know, in the time of the Constitution in 1901, the National Bureau of Standards, this predecessor, that agency, that lab was started. And the reason was we were electrifying. And you can't electrify the country if you don't agree on what a volt is.
00:20:50:12 - 00:21:25:00
Arati
And now you had something that was technical enough that you actually started meeting a rigorous laboratory to support that. And now, you know, now fast forward over well over a hundred years, and this is doing the measurement research that supports every semiconductor wafer fab, so that they know that when they're building that incredibly small dimension on the chip, that's only a few atoms wide, that they're measuring it reliably and they are working on, they provide a lot of the it's crazy.
00:21:25:00 - 00:21:51:19
Arati
But they also in the information side, they now provide some of the standard benchmarks for AI and ML systems. And they're trying to crank up what they're trying to do to support, you know, our understanding of these Gen II systems, which is a daunting challenge in itself. So there's it's a core mission over centuries. But as the world changes and technology changes, what they need to do keeps changing.
00:21:51:21 - 00:22:15:24
Ian
Well, and they're keeping up, which is which is really interesting. I want to talk actually about some of the people within these organizations and what it's like to manage them and how you enable them for success. We had a guest on the show a couple of months ago. Yeah, John Michael shirt, he's a Harvard like adapted leadership guy, came up through professional ballet of all things.
00:22:15:24 - 00:22:41:28
Ian
And there's this line that he kind of repeats that has stuck with me, which is that the hardest part of innovation is letting go of what used to work. Now, when I think about DARPA and you're asking people to like, figure out the barely feasible, I think about an expertise trap. I think about hiring all of these experts that know how to do things, which means you also know how things don't work.
00:22:42:01 - 00:22:54:13
Ian
So, like, how do these systems continue to take smart people, help them avoid the trap of their own expertise, and keep generating research?
00:22:54:19 - 00:23:22:26
Arati
Yeah. And just to start with the DARPA side of it, you put your finger on one of the challenges at DARPA, which is people come in to as program managers at DRP to bring their fresh thinking after they've been there a few years. That's not fresh thinking. That's just the way they think about everything. And they've now if they've been successful as a program manager, they've won resources through our approval process and they've mobilized a huge community.
00:23:22:26 - 00:23:54:24
Arati
And now this thing that was sort of crazy at the beginning is starting to become the way the world works if they're successful. And so then what if they stick around forever? Then you don't have that fresh thinking. And so specific to DARPA mission, which is to find those breakthroughs and to think in ways that are often orthogonal to the conventional wisdom built into the way that organization is structured is the idea that program managers come for short, fixed terms, typically 3 to 5 years, that they stay.
00:23:54:24 - 00:24:20:22
Arati
And I will tell you something I watched over and over and over again is people would come in fresh, they would be lively, they would be open minded. Then they would pick a path and they'd go down it. And often around year five they would start saying that that's not going to work. We already tried that, and it's almost as if you can see that their bad state, everyone comes in and they get a bad state.
00:24:20:22 - 00:24:39:16
Arati
They know when they have to leave. And about that time is about when they actually need to leave, and then it's time for the next person to come in and the next person may blow up what the previous program manager did. They might take it across the finish line. They might take it in a whole new direction. But for DARPA's mission, you need that.
00:24:39:18 - 00:25:06:24
Arati
I'll contrast it to Mist and many other places, our national labs, where you need people who have a full careers worth of expertise in one deep, deep, deep area. And again, the power of our system. We've got it all right. And nurturing that kind of talent is very different than nurturing the the DARPA kind of talent. And I loved getting to lead these very different kinds of organizations.
00:25:06:25 - 00:25:17:13
Arati
At the end of the day, the most fun thing in the world is mobilizing people to be able to do these important missions. And learning how to do it in different environments was incredibly fun.
00:25:17:14 - 00:25:33:01
Ian
I mean, I'm envious of some of those experiences that actually just the nerd in me wants to just walk the halls, right, and peek over the cubicles and see what's there. But I think there have been a lot of lessons there. I want to play a little because I want to talk about some of what's happening right now.
00:25:33:01 - 00:26:03:07
Ian
And there is a lot of discourse about the role of government in all aspects of our society. But even in the world that I swim in the world of entrepreneurship and venture and kind of private commercialization, there are some very, very vocal, very sometimes Partizan and some and just kind of very kind of black and white or binary views on the role of government.
00:26:03:07 - 00:26:28:08
Ian
And it's interesting. I want to just a bit of a preamble as we record this this week, there's an article of rumors going around to the information about one of our portfolio companies, a lithography company called X light, and receiving significant amount of investment from the US government as a direct investment to support this piece of technology for national infrastructure.
00:26:28:09 - 00:27:05:01
Ian
Right. And I'm seeing that rumor floating around at the exact same time as I'm seeing what feels like a complete pullback at the federal level, I mean, kind of across the board, but impacting a lot of these research institutions. So, you know, from where you're sitting, from where your perspective, what's going on, but also what do we need to be paying attention to right now very closely as dreamers, innovators, entrepreneurs, engineers and citizens.
00:27:05:03 - 00:27:43:14
Arati
We are at a time of national crisis. It has come about because of the divisions in our country that are long standing and technology has done a lot of good things. But I think we also have to be clear that advances in technology have contributed to these divisions from the wealth inequality, from the fact that, you know, I'm talking to you from my home in downtown Palo Alto, the lack of opportunity in America, but not every part of this country is experiencing those kinds of opportunities.
00:27:43:16 - 00:28:18:07
Arati
And we are at a time now when we're in the middle of an attempted authoritarian takeover of our constitutional democracy that is is celebrating its 250th year. I'm quite concerned about all the institutions that our democracy has built because many, many, many of them are at risk. Today. The rule of law is at risk. Underpinning all of that, the institution I know something about and that I can do something about is federally funded R&D.
00:28:18:07 - 00:28:46:09
Arati
And that's the one that I focused my attention on. And what is happening. There is a whole host of actions that combine to put the R&D system, the federally funded R&D system, that's the foundation for innovation in America. It's putting it at grave risk. That includes stopping a number of research projects in their tracks, including leaving people in the middle of clinical trials high and dry.
00:28:46:10 - 00:29:29:00
Arati
It includes removing tens of thousands of scientists and engineers from research agencies across government. It includes President Trump's attempt to cut $40 billion from federally funded research and development in his proposed budget last year. The good news is Congress did not go along with that. Congress appropriated a flat budget rather than -40 billion. And then the bad news is that OMB, under President Trump, is not allowing agencies to spend to the level that was appropriated under law by Congress, again, a continuing violation of the law.
00:29:29:02 - 00:29:56:10
Arati
All of that is resulting in immediate harms and damage. I mentioned clinical trials. You can imagine what it's like for researchers who are in the middle of projects that got canceled, or projects that they had in the pipeline, that they were proposing enormous chaos there. But here's why it matters is the implications for our country, for the future of our country.
00:29:56:13 - 00:30:32:03
Arati
This is putting us on a path to a time in which Americans will be will lead shorter and sicker lives. We will be less secure, and we will have fewer opportunities. And that won't manifest for the nation overnight. You know, the first few things you'll see is things like measles outbreaks, because we're walking away from decades of a very clear understanding of the power of vaccines, having I think we've got the most phenomenally underqualified or qualified secretary of Health and Human Services you could possibly imagine.
00:30:32:03 - 00:30:56:18
Arati
So there are immediate harms, but the real issue is a generational impact on our country in every conceivable area. So look what the reason I'm fighting against that and working on what we need to do when we rebuild, because we must build again for the future. The thing that's at the heart of it for me is this country does big things.
00:30:56:18 - 00:31:04:10
Arati
We do phenomenal things. And I've watched it and I've been part of it. We've got to get back to that business and that only happens together.
00:31:04:12 - 00:31:34:28
Ian
Well, okay. So I want to dig in on this because I am I am extraordinarily, extraordinarily sympathetic to the dangers of taking the foot off the gas on, you know, the, the hard, you know, de-risking of technical and engineering challenges to prepare them for commercialization. And I I'm conscious kind of like you indicated, that unfortunately, there's so much lag in the system that we're not going to notice these impacts for years and decades.
00:31:35:03 - 00:31:45:25
Ian
Right. But they're going to hurt. But okay, I am sympathetic to the idea that.
00:31:45:27 - 00:32:11:13
Ian
The, the, the US budget and finances appear to be a mess. Right? And so there's an enormous you know, there's this really interesting. It's a it's a social debate. It's a political debate. It's an economic debate. There's a million forces coming together that are forcing us to question what are our priorities as a nation, what is the right level of funding, what is the right level of accountability?
00:32:11:14 - 00:32:37:22
Ian
And I got to tell you, I have no idea how to get through this. I believe in I believe in research. I believe in technology. I believe there should be support for these big projects. And I believe in things like American dynamism. I think there is a reason that the US has generated a significant percentage of the, you know, step function changes in technology and innovation over the last 100 plus years.
00:32:37:25 - 00:33:11:20
Ian
But, you know, when I when I hear an expert come on the show and say, hey, like, we need to maintain those funding levels. And then I hear someone else say, we're spending $1 trillion every 77 days. Things get hard. So in my experience, people get behind dreams. They get behind optimism. They get behind a common ambition. This is what drove the space race.
00:33:11:22 - 00:33:35:04
Ian
That and a little bit of, you know, positive dictatorial political power. How do we do that with engineering? How do we show Americans living today how important these institutions, these funding mechanisms, and to an extent, the policies that drive research actually are?
00:33:35:06 - 00:34:02:04
Arati
Well, to me, the answer has two parts. And one is to be clear about the amazing accomplishments that the American people have already delivered, so that we remember that we're actually very good at doing this. And then secondly, if we're going to figure out what we need to do with publicly funded research going forward, the place to start is to figure out what our country's great ambitions are.
00:34:02:07 - 00:34:22:08
Arati
The reason you do research for the country is because there are things you want to do, things you have to do, and you don't know how to do them. That's that's the reason for research. Well, we've got a pretty full plate of what we need to handle going forward. Some of it is things like national security, which has always been a reason for for public investment.
00:34:22:08 - 00:34:49:28
Arati
But the world in which we now need to maintain national security is one that is becoming less stable every single day as we alienate our allies and undertake undeclared wars that where we give away blood and treasure for no gain whatsoever. So we are in a less and less stable world. But what you need to do for national security is not the same as it was ten and 20 and 30 years ago.
00:34:50:00 - 00:35:19:10
Arati
That's one question. That it's health is another area where health has been a reason for major public investments in research. But very much like my story about reducing cancer rates, we disproportionately fund biomedicine that feeds into pharmaceutical companies. That's important. I want every one of those cures. That is not that is not helping solve the fact that American health outcomes are in the toilet.
00:35:19:12 - 00:35:38:10
Arati
We are totally unacceptable for the world's richest country. Three dozen countries have longer lifespans than the United States. We spend twice as much on health care as the next country, and we're getting worse outcomes. So that's the we got a boatload of work to do there, and it's not more of the same. It's a different kind of R&D.
00:35:38:10 - 00:36:01:27
Arati
And then there are areas that that have not been a focus of research in the past, but they matter. And now there are things we can do about them. And exhibit A for me is educational outcomes for our kids K through 12 outcomes. So we have known for a long time, as long as I can remember, we've understood that we are not getting the job done.
00:36:01:27 - 00:36:23:13
Arati
We're not serving our kids, we're not serving our future. We need to have every child in America go through school and come out, you know, with a path forward, living up to their full potential. It's so that they can navigate the world. It's so that they can contribute to the future. So that's not news. None of that is news.
00:36:23:13 - 00:36:53:21
Arati
What is news is there are areas where research has been turned into real, real new methods, new approaches, and scaled at a level that now is starting to show us that we can change outcomes for kids in K through 12, with innovation applied in a really effective way. When I see that, that tells me that now needs to become a focus of public investment in innovation.
00:36:53:21 - 00:36:58:16
Arati
So those are the things that are possible and we can't leave them on the table anymore.
00:36:58:18 - 00:37:23:22
Ian
I wonder if maybe we're trying to get the rallying cries wrong, the vision, the, you know, the future that we can paint. Because, I mean, let's just talk about AI, right? US innovation US companies are at the frontier of AI, and maybe that gap is narrowing a bit, but everything is being generated in US labs. It is being distributed from the United States globally.
00:37:23:27 - 00:37:49:03
Ian
It is being applied in the US first. And yet and so so you would think, I would think that the optimistic among us would be looking at all things AI and being like, no, this is a tool we can use to become who we want to do. This is a thing we could use to rally the nation, but that's almost the opposite of what's happening, right?
00:37:49:04 - 00:38:23:28
Ian
What's actually happening is we're seeing a fairly massive shift into fear mode around AI, away from technology. We're seeing people walk out of, you know, AI leaders speeches at graduations. It was amazing and terrifying. Actually terrifies me, terrifies me for the future of our society. So it does feel like we are really struggling to communicate the the, the value and the potential of what we're doing.
00:38:24:00 - 00:38:59:24
Arati
Oh boy. Let me just say, I do not think this is a marketing problem. Everyone I know in tech thinks we're having a marketing problem and that it's about the narrative. And if we could just tell people and stop scaring them with AGI, but just tell them how great it's going to be. Step back for a minute. Imagine you don't live immersed in the world of tech, and that you live in a part of the country that's been hollowed out because of manufacturing job losses, partly because of globalization, partly because of automation, and nothing got done to help you, your uncle, your father, your aunt.
00:38:59:24 - 00:39:25:04
Arati
As those jobs went away and your community got hollowed out, imagine that you are not only hearing, you know, tech people tell you that jobs are all going to go away, but everyone you know who studied computer science in school, because that was going to be a guaranteed good job for life. Their jobs are morphing and sometimes going away.
00:39:25:07 - 00:39:52:07
Arati
I don't think people are being irrational by saying, no, this doesn't look like it's going to work for me. So I think we've got a ton of work to do. And I got to tell you, I think I fully share your optimism because the potential of this technology is phenomenal and we've just scratched the surface. I know everyone in the tech industry believes that they are going to, you know, revolutionize everything.
00:39:52:07 - 00:40:20:22
Arati
At the end of the day, what companies are doing, what companies are doing are what they're going to make money at. They are business productivity applications. And that is totally fine. You know, like I keep Eric at Stanford did the first, I think, really rigorous study that showed I think it was a 14% improvement in customer service productivity in a controlled experiment, in a real company and real, you know, in real life AI versus non I.
00:40:20:26 - 00:40:40:20
Arati
And all I can think is I bet there's a CFO who went home really happy when he saw that. And I bet none of those people are making more money. I bet they're losing their jobs. And I can tell you my customer service sucks. Like it sucks so bad. So, like, I just I'm pretty bored when I think about like, why do I care?
00:40:40:20 - 00:41:12:25
Arati
I get why it's good for a CFO. I just don't care. And I'm, you know, I'm being I'm exaggerating. Yes, there will be good things that happen in business. Number one, those things today are being impeded because we don't have the basic ground rules in place. You see it when you see companies dealing with product liability lawsuits that are that take forever and that nibble at an industry, that's a terrible way to figure out how we're going to manage this technology.
00:41:12:26 - 00:41:33:07
Arati
You see it when the Trump administration just tells anthropic to pull down a model that it's just put out into the world, that this is not a rational way to try to build an industry. And while this industry has said, let's let's have good regulation, it's what it's done. Is everything possible to make sure there is no regulation?
00:41:33:08 - 00:41:54:07
Arati
I think it's shooting itself in the foot and we need to get that sorted. If we get that sorted sensibly. And it's not just state by state, it's not fractured like that. But there's some way that people building companies can know what the rules are and then they can go build. If we do that, then I think we're going to get really good improvements in business productivity.
00:41:54:07 - 00:42:11:03
Arati
I want those, I want them to be well managed. I want I want us to think and figure out and help people who are displaced by that. But I'm still pretty bored, and I want to get to the, you know, like I want to get to better drugs in a month rather than in two decades and for billions of dollars.
00:42:11:03 - 00:42:37:01
Arati
And I want to get to different outcomes for my kids. Well, that's how you get me not bored. And it's going to take a lot more. That's what I to get to the point of public investment that's going to take public investment. So if you want better drugs fast, if you want better outcomes for our kids in K through 12, if you want better weather forecasts that all rely on public data, that's getting blinded today.
00:42:37:01 - 00:42:57:14
Arati
Because if you don't want to know how the climate is changing, you don't get to know how the weather is going either. So these are things where there are huge, you know, really big deal applications that will change people's lives, not just change CFOs lives. And it's not going to happen unless we get back in the business of of the kind of bold public investment in research.
00:42:57:15 - 00:43:21:25
Ian
Well, there is this underlying notion of things of that deliver systemic value, right? Not just new business, not just monetization. And I think one of the challenges is it's really hard to know what these things will be until you see them. Right? And by the time you see them, they kind of have become mundane. And now we're getting into like Psychology and Human 101.
00:43:21:25 - 00:43:34:28
Ian
But like, you know, you're in the Bay area, there's self-driving cars. This is sci fi stuff. Like they're just wandering around and they've become mundane. So the you know, I take your point, okay.
00:43:35:00 - 00:44:11:15
Arati
But okay, I'm going to push you on that. The DARPA, the DARPA challenge for self-driving cars dates back over 20 years. So, you know, 20 years to mundane is not actually overnight. And that's another that's another great example of a public. I mean, those challenges for self-driving vehicles were because in Iraq and Afghanistan are are logistics, you know, the trucks delivering things to forward bases were getting hit by IEDs.
00:44:11:16 - 00:44:37:28
Arati
That's why we that's why DARPA. I wasn't there DARPA, but that's why DARPA did that. Those challenges when you know fast forward. So that was like 2008, 2006. Fast forward on DARPA director and I took a congressional appropriation staffer with me to visit Google, where, you know, I think it was before Waymo existed, but to want to visit their self-driving car project, they gave us a ride in a self-driving car.
00:44:37:28 - 00:44:56:00
Arati
This is still back when you had a human being behind the steering wheel. But it was still, you know, like we were a Gog. Maybe this is 2014, right? And then we stood in the parking lot with the team and one guy said, yeah, my team came in third in the DARPA challenge. And another guy said, I and my team came in first.
00:44:56:02 - 00:45:16:15
Arati
Every single person there had been in the DARPA challenge, and you needed then the private sector push, right? You needed Google, which now led us to Waymo and all the other things that have happened. So again, it's a great story. But yeah, it's totally mundane. In my neighborhood. I see Waymo's all the time. I see them clustered waiting for me.
00:45:16:16 - 00:45:23:06
Arati
Right. But mundane happened after a lot of a couple of decades and a lot of people doing great things.
00:45:23:06 - 00:45:37:12
Ian
So and that to me is part of the story that we I don't know if it's tell the story, but that's one of the things that we need to kind of realize as a society because like I what you just said, 20 years to mundane is not overnight. That's going to live rent free in my head for a really long time.
00:45:37:12 - 00:46:05:22
Ian
It's a great turn of phrase, but but it kind of backs up this, this existential problem. And I don't think we're going to solve it on this show, but it feels like a very real problem. And that problem is that by the time you realize that these things are valuable, they have become as mundane as the blue dot, and you don't assign any value to all of the work behind the scenes that got you there.
00:46:05:22 - 00:46:19:19
Ian
And so in the next, you know, when the taxman comes and says, time to pay up for the next round, it's easy to say no. And I guess I don't know what to say, except that it feels like this just requires leadership, because I don't know that society.
00:46:19:20 - 00:46:24:28
Arati
Okay, well, I'm not as negative as you are at all. At all, and I'll tell you why.
00:46:25:01 - 00:46:30:22
Ian
You're the first person to ever call me negative, by the way. So I love this. Tell me.
00:46:30:25 - 00:47:02:07
Arati
So the reason I am I've seen this work for a lot of decades, despite the fact that it can be a long time from a very early spark to the time that something just becomes part of the fabric of modern life. And here's how it works. So I, I keep coming back to this idea that I'm just obsessed with because I think it's such a big deal, which is that we, the people, came together and decided we were going to make these investments in the research that would change our future.
00:47:02:07 - 00:47:21:25
Arati
I just think that's one of the most exciting things in the world. I can't tell you how privileged I feel to have been part of it, but let me unpack it. So how did that happen? Well, so what happened is that people through our democratic process, people elected members of Congress, they elected presidents. This is all the federal level.
00:47:21:27 - 00:47:57:19
Arati
And through our Congress, which has that responsibility under the Constitution, they established the agencies that I worked at and later ran. They established every year the number of dollars they funded those agencies. That process was one that was highly, highly interactive. So, for example, at DARPA, every year you submit a budget to Congress, it gets rolled up through the Pentagon and through the white House, finally goes to Congress, and it lays out your view of what's going to happen with with the dollars you're requesting for the next year.
00:47:57:20 - 00:48:18:18
Arati
Then you have meetings with congressional staffers, then you have meetings with members of Congress. Then you go up and you testify. And when you testify, they ask you, well, what the heck have you done for me lately? And you talk about the things that have gone on in the last year, and you point to the things you hope will get done with the money, that you hope that they will appropriate the next year, and then they appropriate dollars.
00:48:18:18 - 00:48:54:24
Arati
Sometimes it comes with directions. It says, don't do that or do more of this. Sometimes they just appropriate it. If you've persuaded them to see things your way, right there is the democratic process in action. These are people elected by the these are individuals elected by the people of the country making thoughtful choices after interrogating our proposals. And then our job, once we had those funds, was to go out and invest them, execute the heck out of them and deliver and be held accountable every, you know, every year I got held accountable again for the investments that I had made.
00:48:54:25 - 00:49:35:04
Arati
Now in a year, I couldn't tell them that I had delivered this huge national security change, but in a year, I could show them the progress. I could show them the new ideas and the advances out of this university research project that would help solve this problem. And that was the ongoing process. So in that story, I just told you, every single time I talked to a representative in Congress, a senator in Congress, or a president, every single one of those politically, you know, these democratically elected people, they understood that the reason we were doing this work was to achieve a better future for the country.
00:49:35:06 - 00:50:05:12
Arati
Right? Like there was no question in their minds. And they did the job of interrogating and bringing an appropriate level of setting priorities. Right. And then our job as experts, but then drawing on many more experts across the country, was to do the best technical work that we could. That's the system that worked. And and I'm telling you, I've had those conversations with Democrats and Republicans, and it's been one of the areas of the greatest bipartisan agreement.
00:50:05:14 - 00:50:26:16
Arati
This what this administration is doing is not representative of anything I ever heard from an informed Republican who cared about R&D. And that is, you know, everyone else I've ever met. So I just think we're off the rails right now. And when we get back on the rails, the rails we have to get on are not Democratic rails or Republican rails.
00:50:26:16 - 00:50:30:16
Arati
They need to be this bipartisan commitment. Once again.
00:50:30:18 - 00:50:30:27
Ian
You know.
00:50:30:28 - 00:50:31:26
Ian
Doctor Prabhakar.
00:50:31:26 - 00:51:06:01
Ian
We're coming up on time. And I actually think that is a really interesting note to end on because, you know, despite some of the scary things going on that, you know, are taking us off the rails and taking us off these patterns, these processes and these institutions that have delivered so much value. I like I appreciate your optimism, because your optimism is effectively grounded in the idea that we, the people, have decided and can continue to decide to invest in research and science for the common good.
00:51:06:02 - 00:51:27:14
Ian
And I think we covered so many stories today of how it's of how it's playing out and how this is creating a new generation of assets for entrepreneurs to go build on. So I just want to say thank you so much for coming on. Innovators inside this has been fascinating for me. I could go absolutely forever, but we are at time.
00:51:27:14 - 00:51:32:14
Ian
I need to let you get to your day. So thank you so much and I really appreciate it.
00:51:32:14 - 00:51:34:20
Arati
Thank you. Ian, it was such a pleasure to.
00:51:34:20 - 00:51:37:19
Arati
Talk to you. And I just really appreciate what you're doing.
00:51:37:21 - 00:51:50:05
Ian
Oh, it's super fun. And just to build on that, you know, for folks who want to stay connected with you. Where should they look? Do you have a website or are you on LinkedIn? How should how should the audience call you?
00:51:50:06 - 00:51:59:13
Arati
I'm on LinkedIn. I'll have a website. But right now LinkedIn is where you can see me and see what I'm what I'm saying about the world. If you're interested, I'd love to hear you.
00:51:59:14 - 00:52:07:18
Ian
Amazing. Well, we'll get that linked in the show notes. I really look forward to picking up this conversation in the future. One more time. Thanks for coming on. The innovators inside.
00:52:07:19 - 00:52:09:03
Arati
Thank you. Ian. Take care.