Ben Reinhardt is the founder and CEO of Speculative Technologies, a nonprofit industrial research lab built on the ARPA model to unlock materials and manufacturing breakthroughs that have no natural home in startups, academia, or government. A space-robotics PhD who once built tractor beams at Cornell and taught machines to see at Magic Leap, he became one of the most-read writers on how DARPA actually works, then set out to build a privately funded version of it. He hosts the Idea Machines podcast, where he interviews people who design the systems that produce innovation.
Caleb Watney is the co-founder and co-CEO of the Institute for Progress (IFP), a nonpartisan Washington, D.C. think tank that turns ideas from progress studies into policy. He runs IFP's work on metascience, high-skilled immigration, and emerging technology, hunting for the policy levers that could rebuild American state capacity and speed up the rate of scientific breakthroughs. Before IFP he led innovation policy at the Progressive Policy Institute and was a tech-policy fellow at R Street and a graduate research fellow at Mercatus.