The Future of Global Biotech in LA and the United Kingdom
Our Riskgaming director of programming Laurence Pevsner and I jetted around the country this week running our newest scenario, Experimental Automata, which we previewed a bit last week.
In Los Angeles, we were joined by Josh Wolfe, Shahin Farshchi and Shaq Vayda on the waterfront with a great group of friends, many of whom drove over two hours to attend. Thank you for the many who participated, and deepest apologies for the many who couldn’t since we ran out of space.
Yesterday, Laurence and I held the scenario at the British Embassy Washington as part of a U.S.-U.K. biotechnology summit focused on deepening the partnership between the two nations in frontier science. In addition to our own David Yang, there were several dozen senior biotech execs and policymakers in attendance, and we appreciate our British counterparts for all their help in pulling off a beautiful runthrough.
I’ll have more analysis on the game and how players in NYC, LA and DC differed in their decision-making. For now, Laurence and I are going to rest a bit — those transcons are killer.
Podcast: Americans are an incredibly generous people
This week on the Riskgaming podcast, we had on Maany Peyvan, the former senior director of communications and policy at the United States Agency for International Development (or USAID) during the Biden administration. It’s an agency that’s been closed and dismantled by the Trump administration, and we discuss why national self-interest is no longer a sufficient justification for many programs in Washington these days.
🔊 Listen to “Americans are an incredibly generous people”
Here’s a short excerpt of our conversation that’s been condensed and edited.
Laurence Pevsner: We've known each other a long time, Maany, and you have this term, you say, "We should have spent less time talking about the benefits to us and more time talking about how this is just a good and righteous thing to do."
I think that's a brave argument to make. Normally when you get into politics, you have to be the realist all of a sudden. What makes you think now in this moment of, as you were saying, dark clouds around USAID, that this is the right time to turn towards a more moral outlook?
Maany Peyvan: Well, I think the argument of pure naked self-interest is an argument that works really well with the foreign policy establishment, with the realist school of thinking. And I think it's an argument that works — or had worked — pretty well with the Republican Party, and frankly, the lobbyists who supported the Republican Party.
Where I think those arguments fall flat are with people who don't follow this closely, who aren't necessarily paying attention day-to-day. I don't think talking about naked self-interest to those folks is going to inspire them. And when you're talking about trying to build coalitions of support and trying to reach the American people, what you're talking about is inspiration.
Americans, we should not forget, are incredibly generous. In this country, we donate over half a trillion dollars a year to charitable giving, and the majority of that is individual giving. I think we need to start tapping into that moral fabric.
The final thing I'll say in favor of the moral argument is that it is what draws us to this work. The individuals who serve at USAID or who serve their country, yes, we care about national security. Yes, we care about economic security. Absolutely those things matter, but we are drawn to these fields because we feel a deep sense of patriotism, have a strong belief that we can make the world better, and know that our work matters in the lives of other people around the world. If that's what inspires us, we need to give the American people some credit that the argument would animate them as well.
Danny Crichton: With Riskgaming, we often try to model incentives for individuals. Most of our political simulations, most of what comes from them is people basically pursuing their own self-interest. And, as you point out, self-interest was an effective bipartisan argument for aid going back decades.
Why has that pulled back now? Because when I hear that self-interest isn't enough anymore, that to me is sort of insane. It's like saying, "I could make more money, but I have decided not to." And so what do you think has changed?
Maany Peyvan: I think there are a few things at work. I think there are a group of people among the Trump administration and Republican Party for whom the idea that giving something away may benefit you is simply too complex a thought. There's an America-first dictum that says, "Unless that money is going directly to Americans, mostly in the form of tax cuts, it's waste." They don't think giving away foreign aid makes us stronger. To me, though, it is obvious that it does; it's both lived and proven. But I think there are some people who really believe giving money away makes us look like chumps.
Danny Crichton: “Charity is a bad deal.”
Maany Peyvan: Charity is a bad deal, exactly. I think that is a bit of what's going on here. I think this has also been undertaken as a project to drive efficiency and to make things work better. I spent six years of my life in Silicon Valley. I worked at Google. I worked at YouTube. There is a real arrogance within the private sector, just as there is in the public sector, about what it means to be effective.
And I think what we're seeing is a bit of that private sector arrogance coming in, with some in the administration saying "You guys are inefficient. And so you need to be cleared out and we need to replace you with the kind of people who might thrive in a more cutthroat environment.”
What I would say to those people as someone who has been on both sides of the grind is that there is some element of truth to the idea that, in the public sector, you don't wake up every day and worry if you're going to make your quarter.
But what the private sector almost never has to worry about are the life and death decisions that people who work at USAID in humanitarian relief and in the public sector and in development have to make every day. Do I risk the lives of these aid workers to deliver aid in this war zone? Do I take my limited budget and invest it in things that are going to save infants or children or adults? They do not have the weight of those moral decisions. So there is a level of appreciation that should be given to those folks.
Laurence Pevsner: If USAID is folding into the State Department or slashed entirely, that obviously creates a vacuum. And we know the vacuum can be filled by a bunch of different players. There's a lot of talk about how China will come in, especially on the African continent. Another group that, to your point, doesn't normally do this but potentially could, is the private sector.
Maany Peyvan: I don't see a tremendous opportunity for the private sector to come in and deliver humanitarian aid in a war zone — it's not a profitable or a stable environment in which to do that kind of work. But I do think there are real revolutions available in science that could potentially change not just our lives, but the lives of people all around the world. So some of the clearest examples have to do with using AI-driven protein mapping to design more effective and less drug-resistant therapeutics, whether for tuberculosis or malaria, or for testing different vaccines.
It is also worth being very aware of the opportunities in agriculture as well as in precision breeding. Unless we equip farmers in vulnerable areas to be more productive with better technology and climate-resistant seeds, we're going to experience severe hunger around the world in a very serious way. And by the way, those innovations, heat-resistant maize or a perennial rice seed, benefit us as well. They make food cheaper here in the United States, too.
And when you're launching a big humanitarian response or you have a massive global health program that is trying to move medications around the world, you can think about how AI-driven forecasting could really improve the logistics, delivery and day-to-day operations. There was a really impressive company called Citus Analytics that built a predictive model that said anytime we see an increase in rain in this region, we know there is going to be an uptick of malaria adjacent to it because malaria comes from mosquitoes, which are waterborne. And so we will pre-position our malaria supplies around the world based on these predictive factors. That's the kind of technology that can, I think, do a ton of good.
And then finally, when you work in over a hundred countries around the world, just bottom-line, baseline translation is a really, really difficult problem. Being able to use generative AI to instantly translate documents, be able to access and communicate with different actors in your space, that is going to be transformational.
Danny Crichton: Last year, one of our most popular pieces was on how large language models are really dependent on English and Chinese because they have the largest corpi.
One of the challenges as you get to smaller languages is that, because of the digital divide and lack of access to technology, none of that text is able to be injected into the models, which means none of these models are designed for many of these languages. You can't actually translate very easily. And so there's a huge challenge there.
But I actually take this much more broadly, which is this idea of why would you go to an emerging market where there's theoretically no profit? And to me, it’s because you encounter this set of hundreds of different types of problems you don't see in the industrialized world. Maybe it's malaria, maybe it's lack of income, maybe it's different types of health problems, but these are problems that drive innovation.
The opportunity, then, is this interaction, this ability to see new problems, to kind of open your mind to new ways of doing things. If we don't inject new ideas in here, we get calcified. And that to me is a long-term threat to the competitive advantages of the United States.
Lux Recommends
- I liked this model of “industrial commons” proposed on Real Charts. “Neglecting the industrial commons isn’t just an economic oversight—it’s a strategic vulnerability. Once lost, rebuilding it is exponentially harder, requiring not just investment but also time, expertise, and a coordinated ecosystem.”
- Our scientist-in-residence Sam Arbesman recommended an article by the Royal Astronomical Society on how a “Global internet grid could better detect earthquakes with new algorithm.” "Distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) is a nascent technology that uses fiber optic cables to detect acoustic signals and vibrations. It can be used to monitor a variety of things, including pipelines, railways or the subsurface. It therefore has the potential to turn fiber optic networks—which carry data super fast—into measurements of seismic activity that can be used to detect earthquakes.”
- Laurence enjoyed Dexter Filkins’s warning in The New Yorker on “The U.S. Military’s Recruiting Crisis.” “When prospective recruits were asked to drop and do five pushups, many groaned and struggled, unable to complete the task. Some, their faces crimson, could barely hold themselves up. ‘You thought you’d join the Army without being able to do a single pushup?’ Staff Sergeant Kennedy Robinson barked at a recruit whose arms were twitching in agony. ‘Yes, ma’am!’ he said. To an extent that would have been hard to imagine a few years ago, he may have been right.”
- Sam endorses Deena Mousa and Lauren Gilbert’s “A Defense of Weird Research.” “And so there are scientists who study frog skin or become experts in the sex lives of flies. But that frog skin led to a new theory of rehydration, and ultimately the invention of oral rehydration therapy, which has saved over 70 million lives — most of them children. The sex lives of flies? Well, understanding how flies reproduce led to the development of a sterilized screwworm fly and the elimination of a common livestock pest, saving some $200 million a year.”
- Finally, and as a creator, I found Julia Alexander’s piece on “Everything that Built the Creator Economy is Trying to Kill It” to be an excellent overview on media strategy in 2025. “The same is true for creators. If the Instagrams, YouTubes, and TikToks of the world want creators to continue putting in the effort of full-time labor to produce videos, they need to make it easier for those creators to survive off of smaller audiences. That only happens by encouraging core fans to follow their absolutely favorite creators to third-party websites where those creators can maintain a stronger direct-to-fan relationship rather than the simple direct-to-consumer one that isn’t working as the creator economy grows.”
That’s it, folks. Have questions, comments, or ideas? This newsletter is sent from my email, so you can just click reply.
