Here is the audio, video, and transcript . Here is one excerpt:

Cowen: Talk me out of this worry: So we agree science is an ecosystem, and there’s always a temptation to want to fund the most dynamic, most productive parts of the ecosystem. And right now, that would probably be A.I.

But if you need the whole ecosystem to be working well, arguably you should be funding, at the margin, the less productive parts, which need the aid. That will sometimes be universities, but there’s plenty of other inefficient parts of our ecosystem.

So is this plan not putting more resources into the parts that are working well, but we get stuck with bottlenecks if the parts that are not working well end up with fewer resources?

Kratsios: Well, luckily, we’re not investing all of our money for the federal government into S.I. for science. It’s a portfolio approach.…