Tino takes on the skeptics and makes an impassioned case for an “idea sector” independent of government and industry—even in the age of AI. 

Transcript

Note: this is an AI-generated transcript and may contain errors

Jon Bateman: Tino Cuellar, welcome to The World Unpacked.

Tino Cuellar: Delighted to be here.

Jon Bateman: So we're talking about think tanks. You're the president of a think tank, a very unusual and unique perspective on a somewhat mysterious and misunderstood institution. So let's just start with the basics. What is a think-tank? Why are you doing this? Why are running one? What's the purpose of it? And

Tino Cuellar: Having been in a bunch of positions inside government, I have a lot of faith in how much people in public service try to do their best. They don't always get it right though. And creating places where you have scholars with a degree of independence asking hard questions about the fall of the Berlin Wall or about the shift in Chinese economic strategy or about how much the Russian invasion of Ukraine is creating risks for the country. How that will actually ultimately affect people's lives or kids, their work. Technologies they use, the ideas that they're carrying around. I just find that we are not wrong when we think that that's just a set of challenges that rarely can be worked out entirely inside government. So it's really about trying to bring the strength of American civil society, the fact that we don't think that everything is run by government, and letting that take root in other kinds of institutions that can add to the ideas, have a chance to with different folks behind the scenes and try to get to the right solutions.

Jon Bateman: So you gave us a tour there of a bunch of global events, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the post-Cold War era. Maybe if I could just ask you more pointedly, do we have examples from these periods of think tanks really changing the world, contributing to government officials successfully navigating these unprecedented events? I guess that would be the acid test, right? If we're creating institutions, funding them, putting some of our best and brightest in them, in the hope of influencing government policy, can we look back and say that influence has existed and it's been positive? What are the stories that we can tell there?

Tino Cuellar: Let's go back and take a look at some really critical periods in the 20th century, right? So after World War I, the question of what role the U.S. Should play in the world is a big question, probably one of the most debated things on Capitol Hill. And there were different views about this. Should the U S be part of a legal nation? Should it not? What is the global trading system gonna look like? And you can say that in that time, many of the ideas that shaped American strategy were not all coming from inside the government, nor were they all coming form the JP Morgan's of the world, nor should they. Right at the end of the day, private sector plays an important role in American history, but I don't think we'd want it all to be decided between just folks in government and folks in the private sector in some smoke-filled room. So you can look at that interwar period, and rightly or wrongly, there were some ideas that flowed from the Council on Foreign Relations, which is a... An organization that has some overlap with our mission here. Going then forward to how Americans were confronting the horrors of World War II, what sort of world is gonna be a safe one for America? That was also a question that think tanks, including this one here at Carnegie, shaped in a big way. The ideas that came to structure the United Nations, the role of human rights, the role concept of psych-religious freedom. Raphael Lemkin, who's a scholar right here at Carnegie, thinking about what does genocide mean? Why is that something that everybody in the world should care about? Going forward, you had the reality that the world was confronting nuclear weapons for the first time. Not just nuclear energy, but nuclear weapons after those detonations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There, the RAND Corporation, funded heavily by the US government but separate, sitting over in Santa Monica, was trying to think about concepts of nuclear deterrence. So I'll tell you, it's hard to go back in history and imagine the world run without some of these nodes. Of knowledge and thinking, that doesn't mean that these think tanks always get it right. Also doesn't that we don't face some dilemmas about how do you get independence, but also relevance? Where does the money come from? But I gotta tell you, I feel like these places have made a difference over many years.

Jon Bateman: I want to hit on questions of independence funding. It's essential to understand some of the critiques that think tanks have faced, some of challenges to their work. I think you're right, Tino, that if we didn't have something like think tanks, we'd sort of have to create them, right? An independent source of expertise outside of government that can still stay connected to policy ideas, you know, think a little bit more long-term. I imagine there's some people out there thinking, well, gosh, the world just isn't going well. And so if these are the people who are claiming the mission to help make the world go well, if these of the people trying to advise those in power, well, the people in power are just torching things and screwing up and they're corrupt and the whole system is broken. I guess what would be the message to people out their who are either supremely dissatisfied with the state of the country, or who feel like America just hasn't successfully navigated many of the challenges that you pointed out. How would you make the case that think tanks are either not to blame for that or can play a positive role in dealing with some of these issues?

Tino Cuellar: I believe in democracy. I think you do too. And I think in a democracy, ultimately power rest of the people. And at the end of the day, elections do actually matter, right? So one answer is to say, yeah, think tanks develop ideas, they help shape the policy agenda, they helped generate information, they connect the hard and difficult world of policy and practical decision making to knowledge and ideas. But in the end, nothing is more powerful than what happens at the ballot box in a democracy. And also, let's bear in mind that to the extent that people have a critique of how our democracy works, right? If they say, you know, we have elections, but there are these interest groups, and they work behind the scenes, I would say, I don't think think tanks can buy themselves with the force of their ideas or their research or their knowledge or their information somehow rewire the system of power in any country, even a democracy, right. So it's an ingredient in what drives policy. But let's remember that. In a pluralistic system, you got the private sector, you've got civil society, you've got the voters, and all of that ends up being part of what really shapes the world. There's something else I want to go back to. You said, it's hard for us to imagine a world without him. I remember having a conversation in South Korea years ago when I had just left the White House and I was sitting in a cafe in Seoul talking to somebody who had been a regulator in South Korea. He said, you know, so much of what in the country here is either the private sector or it's the government. You have this whole third sector, the vibrant idea sector we have, which is almost like adjacent to the media and the universities, but different. That is something that is more a part of the American narrative than I would argue almost any other country in the world.

Jon Bateman: To flesh out this conversation with some concrete detail, and just to take us into the current moment, the Carnegie Endowment is a foreign policy think tank. The biggest thing happening in foreign affairs right now is the war with Iran. Trump and Yahoo have attacked Iran, deposed the leader. They're continuing to bomb the country, seeking some form of either regime change or negotiated outcome. Debilitating its military, it's somewhat unclear. But this is a huge force in global affairs right now. I wonder if you have a view of how think tanks, your own institution or other institutions have shaped these events or shaping people's understanding of events.

Tino Cuellar: If I compare what you get from a think tank like Carnegie, which is totally committed to unbiased, objective, nonpartisan, some would say centrist kind of analysis, you're going to get something different than what you might get from the corporate policy shop of a bank or an energy company or tech company, right? They also want to put out their policy papers. They might be thinking internally about how the war in Iran is affecting their business. But they've got an angle, right? And our view is we have a very general angle, but it's an angle we're first transparent about, which is that we start from the premise that some attention to international relations, international cooperation is good for the country and the world. And second, that if you really want to improve governance and make people's lives better, you have to think not only about the first order consequences, like what it is that is accomplished by a bomb being dropped, a bunker buster somewhere in Iran. But the second and third order consequences. What does that do to energy markets? How does that affect the tech sector? What's China's diplomatic calculus right now? Why is it not coming to Iran's aid? But what is it doing behind the scenes? How is China's planning about its own relationship with Taiwan being affected by this war? How are the Europeans playing this, the places that are most directly affected in the short term by the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, how are they reacting? So I would say, again, it's not like Would this war be happening? Did we cause this war? But what further insight can we provide that is going to help informed decision makers and even the general public understand the consequences of what's happening?

Jon Bateman: Yeah, and if you've been following this war, watching CNN, Fox News, any of these media enterprises, you will be seeing think tank experts opine on all of the questions that you just raised, Tino. I'm often struck by how the mainstream media is one of the ways in which a regular person might encounter think tanks. I think it's almost unusual to read or hear any story on a major event with big public policy consequences. And not hear a quote from, you know, Jane Smith at the Center on Budgetary Excellence or something of that sort. Think tankers may be kind of working at the shadows and sort of poorly understood by the general public, but in many ways, they are shaping how stories are covered. They're providing information to journalists. And I think many people may even underappreciate the extent to which journalists rely on this expertise as well.

Tino Cuellar: So I want to talk about what think tanks actually are and what they do a little bit more, but first I just have to acknowledge that for people listening, you just probably hear the words think tank and your eyes begin to glaze over.

Jon Bateman: People who clicked on this podcast, they probably have a baseball podcast right next to it. I just hope to God we can hold their attention for one more minute. So Tino, that's on you.

Tino Cuellar: Why does it matter? Like, I'm not as young as I used to be, okay? I'm 53 when my dad was born. We're talking about a world where people on average didn't live longer than to their 40s, okay. Nowadays, it's pretty striking how even the poorest countries in that era are able to deliver life expectancy to their people in the 60s, global life expectancy in the 70s, in many countries it's in the 80s. Their lives. Are shaped by ideas, not just by scientific breakthroughs, not just my private sector entrepreneurship, not just government policy, but by paradigms that then turn into the Green Revolution or the revolution in making vaccines available to huge populations around the world, or the idea that countries, yes, can grow their industries domestically, but have some degree of trade with each other. And as these ideas come to really affect people's lives, You then have to ask if you're trying to really understand the world, the second order question, where do these ideas come from? And for better and sometimes for worse, what we describe as think tanks, these independent policy research institutions, they are the infrastructure of ideas that take something that is a sketch on a napkin and can make it real when they're at their best. And we're not always at our best, right? But I think you have to start with how people's lives have changed over decades to begin to get a sense of how ideas can matter in the world.

Jon Bateman: Yeah, so for example, there's a think tank called the Center for Global Development, and they have been a real champion over the last number of years of evidence-based policy around global health, economic development, malaria bed nets, lead initiatives, things of that kind. Can be a powerful source of ideas. You said something else earlier, Tino, about another channel of influence is people with ideas go and work at a think tank. Develop them, mature them, and then go into a presidential administration to try to implement them, for good or for ill. I'm thinking examples from recent history. So the project for a new American century, people who are a little bit older may remember in the late 1990s, this was a neoconservative think tank established. And many people there wanted to depose Saddam Hussein. Many of those people then migrated into the Bush administration and helped launch that war. Fast forward to the Biden years. We had folks like Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden's national security advisor, who was a Carnegie employee prior to that. He developed ideas around what he was calling foreign policy for the middle class. That became a Biden slogan. He went into the administration, implemented that. Even in the Trump administration, some people might think, Well, you know, this is an administration that... Often is not the most friendly to traditional experts. Surely, they're not getting people from think tanks, but we've had the rise of kind of MAGA or Trump-friendly think tanks like the America First Policy Institute, the Center for Renewing America, and that's where people like Russ Vogt developed ideas around the impoundment of federal funds or the direct presidential control over the Justice Department, things that are influencing policy right now.

Tino Cuellar: Somebody leaves government, they have some government experience, they can go to the private sector, they go to university, they're going to law firm, they could go to consulting firm or they can spend all or some of their time trying to develop ideas in a place where the whole goal transparently is to shape some of that discussion using some objective analytical methods. Having some places where people can land to do that can be helpful and then they go back into government. Now I'll acknowledge that there are so many of these think tanks now have more of an ideological bent, and it's on the left, it's the right, it's in connection with particular industries, like the reality is all these places have to have a funding model. That's an honest, practical reality we have to be honest about. With every passing year, it feels to me like the space for institutions that are more at the center and less like with an ideological lean is shrinking, still there. So many of these institutions have an angle explicitly, and that, I think, does change the conversation.

Jon Bateman: It seems like one way to think about it is that you've described a key to the think tank model is independence. So it's outside of government. It's this kind of third thing, right? Neither the private sector nor the public sector. But also, unlike academia or people who are just purely spinning up ideas for their own purpose, there's an attempt to be relevant, to influence, to persuade. There is some tension between the idea of kind of independent objectivity on the one hand and then relevance and being kind of a player and being part of the action on the other. Does that resonate with you? And how do you navigate that tension?

Tino Cuellar: No, there's no tension whatsoever. I'm just kidding. No, of course there's a tension. Step one is to be aware of the fact that, yes, we in the think tank world often want to measure our success in part by being able to answer forcefully the sorts of questions you started the podcast with, which is, can I trace a little bit where we've been in the room, we've briefed the right people, we've written the report that people message back to us was helpful to them in public service, but can we avoid having that desire? Turn into effectively something that compromises our independence and makes us so eager for that attaboy from somebody in policy that we fail to realize that sometimes the real role we are cast on to play is to speak truth to power. To say, you know, three or four or 10 or 20 policymakers have all said forcefully that this is going to happen, but that case is not proven. It's got a lot of holes in it and it's not likely that we're going to be able achieve what people say.

Jon Bateman: Yeah, and one way of thinking about this is, I started off trying to get you to prove or demonstrate that think tanks are relevant, that they do matter. But I think then some people might be thinking, well, that's not the problem. The problem, actually, is that think tanks are too relevant, exactly, that they have too much power. Or I guess it would be the wrong form of power. And this is where concerns come in around compromised independence having to do with, where does the money come from? Really, that is probably the heart of it. Let me just ask you that, where does the money come from?

Tino Cuellar: Well, money doesn't grow on trees, but we're very lucky at the Carnegie Endowment that as our name suggests, we are benefiting from the generosity and the flexibility and the independence that comes from having at the core of our funding model, an endowment that was set up over 100 years ago by Andrew Carnegie, who at the time was not only wealthy, but he was also, I think, somebody who had come to experience the world in a way that made his views about the world complex. He didn't think that the world was going to be well off if there was a lot of war, so he wanted to make an investment in what would help the world better navigate these judgment calls and set up this organization. An endowment from somebody who is enlightened enough to want to have it play out with few strings attached, but a general mission, that can help a lot. But you also have to be sensitive to how there is a market in effect for funding that requires some real fidelity to your principles so you can decide, I'm not going to take money from a whole bunch of countries that might want to offer that money, but how are we going to be perceived if we take money most countries? So why don't we only have a standard that focuses on a few places that are democracies where we feel like we can defend what we're doing? Same thing with external philanthropic funders. Plenty of folks will say, well, we're happy to write your organization a check. But we want the report to say this, to do that, to prove this point, we don't take that money. We want support from organizations that believe in the broader mission, that ideas and analysis and rigor and objectivity and research can make the policy-making context better. Some of making this work effectively just is always gonna require some judgment and fidelity to principle.

Jon Bateman: What you were just saying, Tino, I think, is key to the credibility of think tanks. The idea that there are lines in the sand and somewhat of a firewall between the desires of funders and the outcome of the research. Some people out there are just skeptical of those sorts of things in general. The type of person who might think DC itself is just a swamp and that most people in and around national capitals are hired guns of some type. And so a think tank in their eyes might just be pretty similar to a lobbyist or to another more political actor. And that when you say, we have this firewall, they might say, well, how do I know that? So how can they know that, what would be the way in which you can demonstrate that to the public?

Tino Cuellar: It's a very good question and I want to take a step back. Am I suggesting that there are not scholars out there who wouldn't compromise their independence or just write something because they want to attract certain funding? Of course there are people out there like that. That's like a triple negative I just have but the point being you've got people who sometimes get pulled in particular directions against maybe their better judgment of ultimately. And maybe they're seeking funding for their work. Maybe they're speaking eyeballs and attention. Maybe they're seeking a government job, maybe they're trying to line up a different career. But it is also true that we can find, and we do find people who clearly care about their own reputation, who care about what they're gonna be able to say to their kids about what the do, who ultimately turn down funding, who come to institutions like this one where they know that their work is gonna be pretty rigorously evaluated so that even if they had a certain angle. That might promote a particular cause or interest, but it doesn't hold up objectively with peer review, then you're not gonna be able to publish that, right? So, it's not a perfect system by any stretch. And we deserve the kind of scrutiny we're getting. In some ways, I would say, a good answer to your first opening questions, like why are these places even relevant, is folks in America fight over what think tanks do, over who works there, who funds them. Coverage in the media comes to what we do to some degree, and... Sometimes I'm perfectly happy if it wouldn't come because we work a little bit more just with the objective and analytical report that might be a little dry for some folks. But I think all of this does suggest that there is a real need to take seriously what our responsibility is to the sector. And I want us to be able to hold our head high and say, nobody's perfect, but we are trying our best to get close to that asymptotic line of really living up to our ideals. And we're just gonna keep on doing that.

Jon Bateman: I love your point about turning down money as actually like evidence of independence or not hiring somebody who's like the wrong foot in the culture. It almost makes me wish that would be part of kind of think tank transparencies. There'd be a list of all the money that we didn't take, all the people that we did hire, all the reports that we didn't publish. Create some weird incentives out.

Tino Cuellar: I mean, we laugh and yet it is interesting how much in the end this sector is difficult to evaluate, but I've found you probably have too that so many of the most important things in life are difficult to evaluate. I mean let's just take for example some idea that comes either out of a think tank or a university. Some of what we do, you can measure in months and years. Like the example I gave you of the Center for Global Development or what we might do to help policymakers prepare for a summit. On the other hand, take our work on nuclear proliferation or nuclear security. Like these are problems the world has been facing for so many decades. And actually reducing nuclear risk is something that happens in a scale mostly of years, if not decades. The fact that something is difficult that is gonna take a lot of time is not a reason for us not to work on it. In fact, if anything, it's the opposite. It's making sure that the marketplace of ideas... Has in it institutions that can almost function like a central bank, like a federal reserve, where you have to adjust a little bit and make sure that something that is otherwise not getting attention is getting attention even if it takes a long time to have an impact.

Jon Bateman: Yeah, measuring impact is so tricky. I spent a couple years working for the Government Accountability Office for people who haven't heard of that.

Tino Cuellar: You're braver than I am, my friend.

Jon Bateman: You could call it an internal think tank of Congress, in a sense. It's a legislative agency that does research on what the executive branch is doing. One of the things it tries to do is save money by pointing out waste, fraud, and abuse, or areas where dollars aren't being used effectively. And so the GAO has this statistic like, for every dollar put into the GA, the federal government saves like nine or $10, something like that. It's directionally true, but if you were to really peer back the measurement theory, you'd have all sorts of epistemic questions there. How many recommendations did they make that were just going to be done anyway? So there's an element of kind of over-credit claiming that a policy institution can do. There's also an element under-credit claiming. Right? Like, Maybe if you got that meeting in the Oval Office and convinced the president to go to war with Iran, you actually wouldn't go out and brag about it because that could undermine your relationship with the policymaker.

Tino Cuellar: So now we have two strikes against us. We use the word think tank and we use the words epistemic in this podcast. So if anyone is still listening, I would just say. I'll edit that out. No, no, no. I think the hard questions that often drive corporate strategy, government decision-making, values-based decisions are often the ones you have to make with incomplete information. So I feel like the question of how we assess our work. You can think about it in two ways. One is like, well, because we can't coherently or consistently or incontrovertibly prove that we did X, then there's just really kind of noise, like what is the impact we're having? The other way to think about is we get different signals, ultimately, about the work we're doing. Sometimes those signals reflect that our policy-oriented scholars are meeting with policymakers because asked to come and brief as our scholars are briefing folks on Capitol Hill right now because of the Iran war or the folks working on nuclear have frequently briefed the Pentagon or the folks working in tech policy have frequently had serious conversations with policymakers, with corporate folks, right, just to make sure those ideas get out. But as we've discussed, if we focus purely on that as a measure of our impact on world. And how much we positively contribute, there's a real risk we'll bias the work, right? So we have to think about other measures. We have to a little bit about what very thoughtful, very perceptive scholars think about our work, and we pay attention to that. We have think about whether we're connecting with the general public. That's not the main reason we exist, but it's an additional demand signal that is relevant. We have the think about whether partners that are open-minded and don't put. Strings attached to their resources, believe that we are the kind of organization that is worth supporting. So you look at that whole picture and you begin to get a sense of where and how we're doing. But ultimately, I think it's a process of continuous learning and improvement that forces us to be thinking hard about how the world around us is changing, too. Media, technology, government decision-making, polarization, geopolitics, so that we're not so inflexible and bound to one way of working that we're not able to adapt and discover new ways of having impact.

Jon Bateman: Do you have a favorite story from your time at Carnegie about a signal that you got, about the impact of Carnegie's work where you thought. So fulfilling. Everything's coming together. This is what I'm hoping for, and this gives me confidence that we're doing something positive for the world.

Tino Cuellar: Our work in Ukraine and around Ukraine and on Ukrainian security, to my mind, has been critical because it takes a discussion that is often at 50,000 feet or at 100 feet and pitches it in the middle tier where you actually connect vision to practice. So my first story is simply about how a dedicated team that we've built here at Carnegie has been constantly asking the middle question, which is... What is the architecture of security agreements? In many cases, bilateral ones, because we don't just wanna put all our eggs in a NATO basket that is very fraught, that will allow this country to hang on, to get the weapons it needs, to be effective at governing itself, and to defend itself, right? And that work began in the previous administration, continues in this administration. Briefly, the second story, nuclear proliferation. We are facing a world where increasingly The nuclear picture is becoming more complicated, more risky as more nuclear saber rattling is becoming part of the international discourse, as more countries begin to wonder whether the geopolitical environment they're living in with fewer stable relationships and more kind of revanchist action from some countries makes them rethink their security. In that environment, what will happen to American security if more countries have nuclear weapons. And that picture really needs to be informed, not only by a question of like, well, what happens if Iran gets nuclear weapons, but what about countries that have been friendly to the United States, even treaty allies? How might the U.S. React? What will happen to U. S. Security in those circumstances? And the point I wanna make to you is that just as in the Ukraine context, we were able to reach across the aisle at a different moment with a different administration in different countries around the world. Our nuclear proliferation work also is connecting with this administration, with folks on Capitol Hill from different parties. And that highlights it the appetite for ideas despite all the polarization.

Jon Bateman: Let's think about how the shifting nature of information and ideas is changing your work. One model of a think tanker is that person is a repository of expertise. They've lived in a country. They know people in that country. They've read all the books. They've written their own books. And so it's someone who you can call up in a crisis, or if there's a policy decision, and get a lot of questions answered and get insight, background, context, ideas. You can also get that from chat GPT now. AI models have made tremendous advances in the last few years and can answer all sorts of arcane questions. You could maybe say that the rise of AI is just part of this broader trend of the democratization of knowledge and expertise started with the admin of the internet. How does this affect your work? The fact that as each year goes by, more knowledge, more expertise is more instantly available in some form to more people than ever before. How does that change the nature of an expert and an institution that houses experts?

Tino Cuellar: One reaction that I have is that democratizing knowledge through AI models can be a very good thing for the world. The idea that what eight, 900 million people regularly use on a weekly or monthly basis, like one of these models, that's a very big potential audience for information if it's reliable. But that raises all kinds of second order questions, which is part of where you're going. Like, you know. Can we be confident that the Carnegie-level quality information that we would like to see served up and the answers to those questions on these models is actually served up? Does it end up being possible for us to get a little credit for that sort of information, the kind of questions that many media organizations have been facing? So all that is going to need to be front and center strategically. We, in this sector, went through a transition when we went from quietly briefing policymakers to writing reports that were privately mailed to people, to writing books that were private mailed people, having a website that gets millions of visitors now, despite the interest in AI. People find their way to our website and find information in multiple languages, in English, in Arabic, in Russian, in Hindi, about global affairs. Right? So those transitions continue. We would be wrong to neglect them. We have to ask questions about how the influencer economy intersects with getting information out to the informed public. We have be asking questions about whether we develop our own models and effectively imagine a world where instead of writing a report, a scholar would curate a model that would be made available to policymakers or the public that would be embodying the expertise. I do want a world that has more democratized expertise, but I'm not sure I want to give up my own agency. I want to be knowing why I'm voting for somebody when I do vote. Or if I'm a policymaker, I want be able to defend, for example, if I ever have to do it under oath to a congressional committee or to a court, why this decision was made, why we decided that this particular substance is not safe to have in food, or why it was ultimately important to have export controls govern the diffusion of this technology. And if human decision-makers in enough quantity, even if they're not a majority, want to make those judgments. It will matter in all likelihood for them to be interacting with other humans. So I think in that world, there will be a lane for scholars to be gathering facts at the front lines of a war zone, as sometimes our own scholars are doing, or having interactions with decision makers who are human to understand what the dilemmas are from their perspective, practicing a kind of strategic empathy. I don't for a minute suggest that these models will not have a But I just think that the demand signal from folks who don't want to turn everything over to them is going to keep some of the work we do limber and relevant as well.

Jon Bateman: I'm fascinated by the idea of a think tank scholar writing to an audience of AI instead of to a human audience to seek to influence what the AI is doing. You also mentioned that a think-tank could create its own AI rather than writing a report. That could be another vehicle. And then finally, this idea of what is left that can't be automated, that shouldn't automated, where we still do need that human supervision and authority. I guess all of this reminds me how the form factors in which we consume information, the vehicles for transmitting information, are radically shifting. I mean, we're on a podcast right now, right? That didn't used to exist. YouTube, X, Substack, these are spaces where increasingly policy thinking is happening on these spaces. And policy makers are reading and consuming information on even TikTok of all places, and they're using this to transmit their own ideas. If the stereotype of a think tank is a kind of intellectual space, you know, sometimes people will call them professors without students, how do they exist in this radically changing environment. Where maybe the way to get the White House's attention is to tweet something that gets 3 million views or to have a viral, short-form video. I mean, what's the space there where a repository of deep expertise can kind of find their in in an increasingly attention-driven?

Tino Cuellar: First of all, we're not professors without students. It's closer to the truth to say we're students without professors. Like, let's be honest, when we're at our best at these think tanks, we try to be candid about the real dilemmas the world is facing and the blind spots we all have in confronting them, what it means to have a world where certain developing countries are acquiring more power and influence, how the nature of the global economy is changing, how that affects security, how new technology is going to reshape the nuclear balance of power. Like we need to be. Humble, you used the word epistemic before, epistemically humble enough to realize what we don't know and to help the world understand that and to figure out what to do about it. That feels to me more like students without professors and professors without students. Some of what we have to do in the think tank sector is say, it might be like cool to influence the White House by doing a tweet that's going to get 100,000 views and then my next one will get 300,000 views and after that I'm going to start getting like a bigger following and then I can put myself in a position to do three million tweets or whatever. And instead, sometimes saying, no, actually, the integrity of my profession, as somebody who is a serious policy thinker, is to write this out in an 80-page report. 116 people are really gonna read anywhere near from cover to cover, maybe not even 116 people, but the coherence and signal that I'm sending. Like a model on a runway that is. Is closed in some very high fashion thing that ultimately that fashion house is not mostly going to sell, but it's proof of what they can do and why you should believe in their creative abilities. That's gonna be as important as adapting. But equally important is for these folks to realize we need to find new ways of reaching new audiences and that ability to be effervescent in our creativity while we hold on to key principle, that's the hard part of being at a think tank with integrity.

Jon Bateman: Reminds me of our whole conversation about relevance. And if I may just be kind of very crude about it, the desire to be just relevant enough, but almost not too relevant, right? I mean, if you really become the sort of voice where you're getting three, four, five million views on a tweet or an ex post, there's so many compromises that come with that. You will need to be chasing the news, glib, sensationalistic, tribal, the cat turds of the world. We don't wanna be that at a think tank. But neither does a think tank want to just be totally unheard to just have ideas that aren't out there at all.

Tino Cuellar: I'm reminded in your description of a conversation I had with the CEO of a big company just a little while ago. And he was pointing out that the hardest thing in his job, one of the hardest things, is almost the tyranny of the quarterly reporting. The fact that suddenly you've got these analysts saying, well, what has this company done in the last few months? And the ability to have a long view, he found, was so critical to making his business dynamic and effective. And it required a sort of resilience to get past the short-term. So in some ways, I think the balance that you and I are both alluding to requires remembering that we're in a long game here. If we just want to do something that will have influence in the short term, we're really not adding that much value to the incentives and pressures that people already have inside government. It's that ability to think about three, five, 20 year time horizons that I think provides the moral ballast to be more of the way I think you're describing.

Jon Bateman: So how does society at large, I mean, this is really kind of the big question I want to end on. How does society, at large preserve space for independent, credible expertise that remains relevant? I mean you described earlier this idea that there's the public sector, there's a private sector. But ultimately, even in a democracy, we actually don't want the government to be the sole source of expertise, knowledge, and decision making. We want to preserve this third option. How do we do that?

Tino Cuellar: There's no elegant solution to the problem of preserving independent capacity for producing knowledge, other than by reminding people what the alternative is. So let's remember that before the Industrial Revolution, between about 1500 and 18 something, like the amount of average economic growth in the world was like point something. It wasn't even 1%. To say that it was dismal is like an understatement. It went backwards many years and decades. The world just didn't get to be a better place at the end of the day. And I'm not suggesting economic growth is the answer to everything, but I am suggesting that you don't want to live in a world where there isn't economic growth. You want to be able to have more things for more people over time and to do that in a way that preserves human dignity, human values. Now to my mind, we can have a whole other podcast about this. The three things that broke us out of that were somewhat accidental combination of science, pluralism and institutions. It was the idea that human knowledge could accumulate. It was a notion that we had to be able to live in a society, at least in certain parts of the world, with more than one point of view. And it was the notion that we could develop institutions that were not just personal vehicles for corruption or for advancing narrow agendas. That together has made this a world of potential extraordinary abundance, if we get out of our own way to some degree. So I would say constant, honest, steady, not overly bombastic reminders to the world that that formula still works. Ultimately, will help them make sense of what they want from think tanks, from universities, from their own intuition, from their opinion leaders, from their own families. And I think that's part of the duty we have to try to remind people that there's a big picture.

Jon Bateman: Tino Cuellar, thanks for being on the show.