 Hello, welcome to the Reason livestream. I'm Zach Weissmuller, joined by my colleague Liz Wolfe. Hey, Liz. Hey. Today we're gonna reflect on the record speed creation and rollout of the COVID-19 vaccines, the development of which was accelerated by a Trump administration program called Operation Warp Speed. And to help us sift through the good, the bad, and the ugly of all of it is Alec Stapp, co-founder of the Institute for Progress, a think tank with a mission to accelerate scientific, technological, and industrial progress while safeguarding humanity's future. And they've published a lengthy defense of Operation Warp Speed and called for duplicating many aspects of it to deal with other looming catastrophes. Alec, thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me, guys. Can you first tell us just a little bit about the origins of Institute for Progress? I mean, there's a lot of think tanks in DC. What hole in the landscape does this one fill? Definitely, yeah. So we're pretty new still. We've been around for about a year and a half publicly launched a year, a little more than a year ago, January. And my co-founder and I, Caleb Watney, we've worked at both center right and center left think tanks in DC for more than seven years. And we've really enjoyed working at a lot of the different institutions and organizations in this ecosystem. What we realized was primarily doing, traditional tech policy issues like antitrust, privacy, Section 230, net neutrality. These are really trench warfare issues that both the for and against side on every part of those issues is very well funded. There's not much evident progress while we're another on those topics. And we realized for the latter parts of our career, we wanted to shift our focus. And to do that, the best way to do it is to start a new institution. And we sensed a couple years ago when we were deciding to launch that there was an appetite and a hunger in DC for new institutions with a new set of ideas. I think you see this with folks like Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson talking about a supply side, liberalism or an abundance agenda, folks in the center right, James Pethicuchus at AEI, trying to kind of move past previous, highly polarized issues and work on things that are more positive some. And that led us to, broadly we work on lots of innovation policy issues, both inputs to innovation like public science funding at NSF and NIH, how those institutions work, high skilled immigration because we can't do any kind of innovation without talent. And we're currently the world leader in talent. And then also outputs of innovation of things that we can use innovative tools to fix. So biosecurity, and that'll be a big part of our conversation here today obviously is we think the best way to prevent future pandemics is through innovation through next generation vaccines, therapeutics, personal protective equipment, things like that. And lastly an area we just launched is infrastructure. This really gets to the question of why is it so hard to build things in the real world? We've seen a decent amount of innovation in software in the last few decades but if anything it's much harder to build real infrastructure in the real world. And so we have a team that works on those issues. Well, primarily through permitting reform. One of those guys is Brian Potter, right? Yep, Brian Potter, construction physics. I highly recommend everyone watching, go subscribe to construction physics on Substack. He is a great newsletter. I just shared an article from Brian with Zach yesterday about the speed of building in New York and how basically over the last hundred years the average amount of time that it takes to build these, like the Chrysler building and similar skyscrapers. Like it used to be that we were building very, very quickly, 20 months, 24 months. And now you see projects that are taking eight years to complete. You mentioned a variety of thinkers there some on the center left, some on the center right. What is it that connects all of these people or what is kind of the nexus that you're trying to build something around? Yeah, so we're a nonpartisan institution and in practice and given our backgrounds, both Caleb and I having worked at left aligned and right aligned organizations. We have networks in both parties. We think there's a hunger and an appetite and usually it comes from the more moderate wings of each party for real solutions to some of our biggest problems. And the nice thing is that a lot of the things you work on are not very polarized or at least they're kind of neglected. And so we can work very closely with people in Congress or in the administration and say, look, like this is going to benefit most Americans. Most Americans would support these kind of policies in terms of the billions of dollars we spend at NSF and in age. Let's not argue about whether we should spend more or less. Let's talk about given the money we do spend, how can we get more return on that investment? How can we fund higher risk, higher reward research? How can we fund younger researchers who are likely to have the next big breakthrough in their given fields? Questions like that, I think, have much more opportunity for cooperation, compromise and durable policy change. Doesn't just get flipped back when the next party retakes power. I think we're gonna keep having that conversation about whether we should be spending more or less on in various federal agencies, but we can get into those budgetary issues a little bit as we advance into the next section here, which is kind of the topic of the stream, Operation Warp Speed. You wanna take that up, Liz? Yeah, so one of the things that really piqued our interest, Alec, was the fact that you guys have put out a really interesting report, basically analyzing Operation Warp Speed and the degree to which it was a success. Would you tell us what is Operation Warp Speed and why do you think this model is something worth emulating in the future? Yeah, so Operation Warp Speed was the Trump administration program that delivered multiple safe and effective vaccines less than a year in 2020 during the beginning of COVID. And I think, looking back on it, you know, that's more than three years ago now. I think people have a lot of hindsight bias and say like, oh, it's kind of inevitable we need to admit vaccines or who knows, maybe just the companies deserve the credit. But I think if you look back at news reports and commentary at the time, spring 2020, just when COVID started taking off, a lot of experts, public health experts, medical experts said, the fastest we've ever invented a vaccine is four years and many vaccines are never possible to be invented or take just much longer than four years. And so there were a few voices and some inside the Trump administration saying, let's set the goal of a year and like because this is a crisis and an emergency, let's really move quickly. And I think they were, they really divide the odds and delivered that with the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines delivered in less than a year. And I think it's a really important initiative to learn from it ultimately cost $18 billion, which at the height of the pandemic, the COVID lockdowns and cost to our economy and to our health were costing $36 billion per day. So if operation warp speed just ended the pandemic, you know, 12 hours earlier, it paid for itself. And so it sounds expensive, but it has out to Tab Rocket, George Mason University economics professor, described as it may be the greatest return on investment of any government program in like 50 years. And so I think that is true. And there are a lot of lessons of like how they structured the program. You know, how did they collaborate with private industry to accelerate those vaccines and to get them shots into arms. And lastly, I would say the reason we're focusing on it so much is because it feels quite neglected and it's kind of currently doesn't have a home either the Democratic party or the Republican party for Democrats, they're very reticent to give the Trump administration credit for anything just due to traditional partisan politics. And then for Republicans, obviously, everyone knows vaccines are highly controversial and divisive within the Republican party. And so, you know, we're seeing presidential candidates in the next election kind of running away from this huge success, which we think objectively was a huge success in terms of saving lives and reopening the economy. Yeah, let's talk a little bit more about the politics of this and then dig into the policy specifics because, you know, if you flash back to Trump introducing this concept, we've pulled a clip from 2020 when he first was rolling out Operation Warp Speed, which will play in just a second. The reaction to that was quite interesting and telling from both sides and things have kind of flipped back and forth in multiple times. But let's have Adam, our producer here, play that clip and then talk about that issue for just a second. What appears to be employing the promise of a vaccine as part of his reelection strategy. Today, he took three opportunities to suggest that we could even see a vaccine by election day. So what's the earliest we could see that, a vaccine? A sooner than the end of the year. It could be much sooner. Sooner than November 3rd? Oh, I think in some cases, yes, possible before, but right around that time. I believe we'll have the vaccine before the end of the year, certainly, but around that date, yes. I think so. But for the election? It wouldn't hurt. It wouldn't hurt, but I'm not doing that. I'm doing it not for the election. I want it fast because I want to save a lot of lives. Under Operation Warp Speed, two vaccines are already in the final stage of clinical trials and we'll have a vaccine very soon, I hope, long before the end of the year. Dr. Anthony Fauci weighed in on that with his own reality check. We're trying very hard to ultimately get a vaccine that might be available by the end of the year or the beginning of 2021, but that's many months away. So what strikes me about that, first of all, is Fauci seemed to be pretty much cautiously agreeing with Trump on the timeline, despite how Brian Williams was characterizing at the time. And secondly, it's a reminder that the hesitancy back then was coming often from the political left. We've got a tweet here from Eric Topol, a well-known Twitter MD who at the time was stumping and here in this tweet, he's actually kind of bragging about the fact that his efforts delayed the authorization of the vaccines until after the presidential election, this was right in the midst of a major COVID wave. So who knows how many lives that potentially cost, but I am curious from your perspective, as someone who's trying to put together this kind of trans-partisan coalition to look at issues of technological progress or medical progress, what are some of the strategies you're using to try to overcome that kind of partisanship? Yeah, I like that you use that phrase, trans-partisan coalition because that's a term we like to use a lot here internally within our organization. I think for some of your audience that might be a new term, they've obviously heard of bipartisan or nonpartisan. The way we think of trans-partisan by contrast is that if bipartisanship is a messy compromise where one side gets half of what they want, other side gets half of what they want, then everyone kind of walks away dissatisfied with the bipartisan compromise. A trans-partisan deal would be if Republicans and Democrats support the same policy but for different reasons. And so I think Operation Warp Speed is a great example of in theory, and practice is a different, but in theory it has a lot to offer each party. So Democrats like to say they're pro-science, pro-public health, they're pro-masking. I know all the things that go along in that bucket. And Operation Warp Speed delivered these amazing biomedical innovations very, very quickly. And then for Republicans, there's often a concern every year around wasting taxpayer money. So whenever the government has a multi-billion dollar big public spending program, there's skepticism that the government will get a return on its investment or it's worthwhile. And I think some of the tools they used in Operation Warp Speed could be used to get in part of their programs. And the key is that you're paying for performance. So government said, we're gonna do pre-purchase contracts with all these companies that participated in the program. And if they deliver, invent a safe and effective vaccine approved by the FDA, then we'll purchase hundreds of millions of doses from the company. But if the company can't deliver on its end, then the government does not spend the money. And so I think that kind of public-private partnership that protects taxpayer money should be highly appealing to Republicans. And then also talking about, you know, the feasible alternative at that point in time if you don't get the vaccines quickly is a continued quasi lockdown in much of the country. And so what's the more, you know, freedom oriented, liberty oriented thing to do? It's to get the vaccines out quicker as opposed to more draconian measures that would need to happen in a counterfactual scenario. But why did government need to guarantee demand in that manner? Yeah, so again, I think this is where like there's a hindsight situation where we know at this point in time that there were lots of variants that the pandemic ended up dragging on for two to three years, even post, you know, when the vaccines were available. We can go on more into like promises around transmission and things like that with the vaccines. But I think it's useful to look at previous epidemics around the world. And this is what obviously vaccine manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies do. There are previous SARS outbreaks in East Asia that seemed like they might become global pandemics, but ultimately didn't. And so if you are a vaccine manufacturer, in particular building capacity of like, are we gonna actually start winding up manufacturing capacity to deliver hundreds of millions and ultimately billions of doses of vaccine, you're in a really wait and see cautious scenario. You wouldn't wanna sink too much money into fixed investments that ultimately there might be close to zero demand for the vaccine. And so the government is de-risking that. They're guaranteeing demand for the product so long as you meet the performance metrics in terms of it's safe, it's effective as a term by the FDA. You know, that could have been a world we lived in where the pandemic did peter out for other reasons and they still invented safe and effective vaccines. And then we bought a lot of doses we couldn't use. But that's the kind of, I think, preparation you need to have for the worst case scenario. And we were in a bad scenario where a pandemic just kept going. I'm curious, we can get into this a little bit more later, but like, do you have in your mind like one or two areas in which the operation warp speed public-private partnership model like obviously would work and then like one or two ideas where you're really worried about the federal government using it for something that would be unworthy? Yeah. So I think just as a default, it works in way fewer places. So if you'd like to add like at 100 problems the government is trying to solve, I think it's only a tiny percentage of problems. And the key thing here is always like can you specifically define what the target product profile is of what you're trying, what's the mission of the program that you're trying to deliver? And so, you know, vaccines are quite good because we know what safe and effective look like as determined by the FDA. But even that was still like the companies had different, you know clinical endpoints that they felt they were stronger on. So even that was like debated. But I think something like for direct carbon removal. So literally sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. So in the climate change debate this is a really radical technology that is currently not even close to economical, extremely expensive, there's no natural market for it. But it is a very easy thing to measure. Like on the machine you can measure exactly precisely the amount of carbon dioxide you're removing from the atmosphere. And so if there's government demand we are very likely to get economies of scale and learning by doing you can bring the cost of that down over time. But if the government doesn't invest there there's gonna be no market for it. Yeah. And I wanna get, I wanna talk more about environmental issues a little bit later in the conversation. Cause I think there's a lot of questions of trade-offs that are not quite as obvious as they were in the pandemic where as you said, it's kind of obvious like, hey, what are we paying for a vaccine that shows that it safely produces antibodies and passes like this FDA hurdle. But before we get there and we wanna go through each individual components of operation warp speed just to understand exactly how it works and exactly what lessons we wanna learn. But I think it's kind of important to address like the, you know, what the vaccine did and didn't deliver, you know what we all kind of think about that because that is partially, you know how you judge whether it was a success whether it, you know what level of protection did it deliver what level of risk did it bring with it? And, you know, just from our previous conversation I think where Liz and I are both kind of coming from and you can chime in here, Liz if you want to is that, you know, vaccines were on net imperfect and certainly far from perfectly introduced but overall a lifesaver, a net lifesaver and we're both keenly aware on the heels of some recent work that we put out that a certain segment of our audience strongly disagrees with that but I do take it as extremely likely at this point that the vaccines on net saved a lot of lives which you can see just by observing the gap between vaccinated and unvaccinated deaths per capita. Is there anything else you wanna say on that point, Alec or Liz before we move forward? Yeah, I'll just add there that, yeah I think that the data we have is extremely strong that the vaccines save lives on net but yeah, it's not to say that the operation warp speed or the messaging from public health officials following, you know, the invention of the vaccines was perfect and I think the key mistake they made in terms of communication was and again it's well intentioned they wanted to encourage people to get the vaccine because they wanted to save lives and hopefully in the pandemic was they made claims about the vaccines effect on transmission of the virus from person to person that I think ultimately did not hold up in real world settings. That's because the clinical trials weren't designed to test, you know, the effect on transmissibility and but the vaccine, the clinical trials were designed to precisely measure effects on severe outcomes in terms of hospitalization and death and those outcomes mostly did hold up in real world effects and so talking about like 90% reductions in severe disease and death and that's a huge benefit but I think it's understandable if people were promised like, hey, get this vaccine you're gonna protect your friends and family you're not gonna infect them and you know, and also you won't die yourself that transmissibility part I think they didn't deliver on and they shouldn't have made that claim in the first place because they didn't have the evidence. So that was the kind of messaging error from the CDC and the public health establishment more so than some sort of failure of operation warp speed. Exactly, yeah. But I think they're also not so separable just because operation warp speed was an interagency effort. All those officials were also being asked all the time to comment on these particular things and so we held an event last fall with the original operation warp speed team and that's one of the things that Secretary Azar said he wishes they would have done differently is they would have handled communications differently. He didn't say anything particularly about operations or how the contracts were written but it was around how they were communicating with the public. I struggle with this a lot because it seems like so many pandemic era health authorities are very sort of like late with their apologies and then very imprecise in it. And it's like, well, I would actually have preferred not to have been nobly lied to and a little bit more of a robust atoning for such sins and learning from those mistakes. And ideally some of those people being out of jobs would probably leave a better taste in my mouth. The other thing that I think about here because I'm very grateful for vaccines being administered to the 70 and 80 year olds in my life but the other thing that I keep coming back to is like was there really a reason for like New York City where I live to force children to be vaccinated in order to like go dine inside in restaurants in the winter with their families just given the what we know about transmission and then also given the mortality risk to six year olds and seven year olds that just seemed totally unjustifiable to me. But of course this was this patchwork federal government policy and media pressure and then lots and lots of localities and states making their own decisions on these things and New York was a particularly dumb and bad place surrounding a lot of this. I do want to go into a few more specifics though. So like what were the specific components of Operation Warp Speed? You guys identify like a few different prongs. Basically the thing that I'm really curious about in general, which you mind describing for our audience solving market failures using market shaped mechanisms what exactly are those? What do those actually mean? What did they look like in this case? For sure. And just one quick comment on what you said about the I think this patchwork thing is so important. This is where again like I would just separate what IFP works on and kind of our mission from other really controversial, tricky public policy questions that are gonna be handled in different states and cities across the country which is we think there should at least be agreement that it's really good to quickly invent a safe and effective vaccine. And then that's outside of our wheelhouse in terms of what's the best policy in New York City? What are the values and decisions that go into regulations around access to public spaces? Those are really important questions other people can kind of decide. But I think what we shouldn't do is let that latter conversation affect whether we design government programs to work with private industry that invent the vaccine in the first place. Like at the very least we should agree that having it as an option is a great place. I 100% agree with you. Like I feel like both Zach and I are in that category of like and correct me if I'm speaking out of turn Zach but like super interested in scientific innovation and doing as much as possible and allowing everybody to be a human getting pig if they want to. Like I love that type of thing, but then so adamantly opposed to any coercion that we saw like with the way these vaccine mandates were handed down. And it's funny because it seems like so frequently the Venn diagram overlap of those two types of people it's really small. Sometimes it feels like it's just me and Zach hanging out over there in that space. I'm like a few other colleagues who reason, but it's funny it's like there's this odd almost like reflexive anti-tech innovation type strain that you see from some of the people who were rightfully pissed off about pandemic policy. And that really bothers me watching that play out. Yeah. And the only thing I would add is, you know to go back to this model here what we're about to talk about things like purchase guarantees and advanced market commitments. That's where I'm a little bit torn. Like is that, is it as separable as we want it to be? Because if you are saying, you know part of this model was that the government guaranteed we're gonna buy X many doses of this vaccine or you know whether it works or not just to like guarantee you at least give it a shot. And if you do make it successful we're gonna purchase this many doses. I worry the thing about that arrangement that concerns me is then it creates sort of sunk cost for the government and then there's an incentive to push it out to as many people as possible even if not everybody needs it or wants it. And you know, it's hard to prove that that's exactly what happened but that looks kind of like what happened the way it was so aggressively pushed and mandated by OSHA in the workplace which I think was total overreaction. I'm glad the Supreme Court, you know knocked that one down but is that a danger because you know you mentioned a couple different ways to solve quote unquote market failures. There's the, these purchase guarantees and then there's things like prizes which are separate from purchase guarantees. The prizes that seems more that's something that feels less problematic to me. The purchase agreements feel like it comes with a lot of potential baggage, but what do you think? Yeah, so just to first to kind of define some of these terms explained for the audience, market failures we just mean things the free market you know, uninfluenced by the government would fail to deliver on its own and usually that's due to a negative externality of some kind. And so we've been talking, I can reference back what I said earlier about like there's a market failure when it comes to pandemics because it's so unclear when an outbreak turns into an epidemic turns into a pandemic when is this going to end and private companies don't have unlimited capital and unlimited liquidity in terms of like oh we can just you know, waste a lot of money on a building out manufacturing capacity on the chance that this thing continues for two to three years and there's demand for billions of doses. And so they're very hesitant to commit early to lots of investment in the development R&D process and into the manufacturing process. And so I think there's a clear market failure here where given I think to your point about you know, government waste or we're being committed here I think just keeping the magnitudes in mind is so important of like ultimately operational speed cost $18 billion. But again, like it was costing tens of billions of dollars per day to the US economy in terms of health and economic costs. And so even if I know there would have been a political problem if it ended up being quote unquote wasted, but the math is just so overwhelmingly in favor of doing programs like these that I think it's worth the investment. And another idea I think a clear market failure is when it comes to climate and pollution issues companies don't internalize the cost of CO2 emissions. And that's why I gave the carbon dioxide removal example of seems like a promising technology that's just currently really expensive. But if we think that you know, this is something worth investing in this is one way to do it where the government is paying for performance. So the government's only on the hook if the private industry private sector delivers on the product that the government defined and it's in its contract agreement. So I think that's why it's can be really promising. How do you, I'm curious, how do you look at some of the quote unquote like vaccine failures? Like we've seen AstraZeneca and Johnson Johnson, you know, used for a short period of time but like now pretty much retired we basically have just Moderna and Pfizer as the vaccines and booster shots that are currently available. And then we also saw, I guess, NovaVax and Sanofi. How do you pronounce it, Sanofi? Sanofi? I think it's Sanofi. Sanofi, we saw them basically never really come to fruition despite, you know, all six companies were originally a part of this. Now I think the interesting thing is that with all of the strains that have emerged there's possibly actually some use like NovaVax vaccine makers have said, hey, we're actually, you know, might be rolling something out a little bit later on. So like was that investment in these companies, was that, did that go to waste or is there actually a case you made for having, for investing in so many different companies to basically give them the same mandate to develop these vaccines? Yeah, I think this is a clear example of why the portfolio approach that Operator Shortstead took was smart, betting on six different companies across three different vaccine platforms. So mRNA was only one of the three different vaccine platforms. And I think, you know, we ultimately ended up going with the mRNAs because they were most successful, but they didn't, it was an obvious ex ante that that would be the case. And so it makes sense to spread your bets. And also, I think, you know, it's also an example of when the doses aren't delivered from those other companies is the government's not, you know, out that money. So that's a great savings for the taxpayer. And then to your point about like, we have new variants, you know, COVID is still now, it's an endemic disease. We can talk as much as you want about this new program that Biden administration is launching called Project NextGen for next generation coronavirus vaccines and therapeutics. And the key thing about that program the features they're targeting are broad spectrum so that if there's a new variant, the same vaccine you've got will be effective against it and trying to get immunizing mucosal immunity. So potentially through a nasal spray, you have immunity in your mucosal membrane. And then that would actually likely reduce transmission. We have some good early data showing that that would actually work. So maybe kind of following up and delivering on some of those promises that were made three years ago, the next generation of vaccines that they're explicitly targeted that way could actually make big advances. Just to pick up on that next gen example because I pulled this article that you this opinion piece that you published with your co-writer Ariel DeSousa in the Washington Post saying Biden's vaccine project needs to be more like operation warp speed. And one of the things that you point to in kind of helping this $5 billion public-private partnership achieve its goals would be to speed up regulatory processes in a similar way as operation warp speed did in both in developing, testing and distributing vaccines. And you mentioned the US Food and Drug Administration for example, allowed clinical trial phases to be conducted concurrently. And so, FDA trials, they have three phases. There's a safety phase, there's a testing phase and then there's a kind of bigger final testing phase. And some of those were actually overlapping. And so getting into the regulatory component here is something that might be libertarians are perhaps more friendly to or an easier sell than the advanced purchase agreements. But for the non-libertarians out there kind of overlapping safety trials with efficacy trials that sounds kind of scary. How is that actually safe? Yeah, so I would just say that they weren't overlapped completely perfectly. So there still was some like very early safety data before they moved to efficacy. So there's some overlap at the same time but not 100% overlap. And I think there's also a relative risk factor. I think usually the stronger case for the multi-phase thing is just it fails to get out of phase one or fails to get out of phase two then the companies and the government don't want to waste money on clinical trials, large phase three trials that aren't gonna go anywhere. And so given the emergency environment and the desire to move very quickly, having those phases run concurrently made a lot more sense, but I could see how it's not, does it make sense for all drugs and therapeutics to go into the system to necessarily be structured that way in the future? It just made sense kind of in the crisis. Yeah, and this is also where I think we have to keep tying it back to the voluntary aspect of all this because if you are accelerating things and kind of bypassing the normal processes, seems to me that that makes it even more necessary to make this voluntary and not be using the power of the state, whether that's federal or local or state level to kind of push this onto people. It's one thing to have public health messaging and encourage people and try to sell the vaccines to people in an ethical, true way. But I think that's like what I was gonna ask you is like how far this can be pushed because I think that for one of the reforms that's been proposed by a lot of libertarians is to get the FDA out of the efficacy business altogether and just have it focused on safety or even make FDA certification altogether voluntary because there's this unseen cost to FDA regulation. We think of the FDA as like protecting and saving lives but the unseen cost there is that there are life-saving drugs that are safe that just get delayed for years and years and in the meantime, people die. So you could imagine a system where you have FDA approval and then you have the non FDA approved drugs that people can kind of voluntarily opt into. Does that sort of framework make any sense to you? Yeah, and before I comment on that framework, just one quick thing about another more aggressive thing we could have done that we did only the UK did which is in terms of human challenge trials. So having volunteers sign up to be intentionally exposed to COVID-19 while they're participating in a clinical trial with some of those candidate vaccines. And I think especially what we knew at the time usually the case against human challenge trials is there's not a rescue therapy that it's dangerous like someone could die. But at that point in time, late spring, early summer we were getting indications I think that young, healthy people were very unlikely to die from COVID. And so I think, again, I just support human challenge trials in the principle of like people should be able to volunteer to take risks to protect others and protecting others by accelerating the development of safe and effective vaccines. We let people serve in the military, service police officers, firefighters. Can I ask a quick question about the human challenge trials? Is that, would that be like placebo controlled? Would some people be getting the placebo or is this everyone in the trial is actually getting the vaccine? Yeah, I think everyone in the trial is getting the vaccine and you're exposed, you're challenged with the virus. Instead of what we normally do, we'd be waiting around to be exposed in the natural environment. Yeah, reasons Ron Bailey has written about this pretty extensively. I'm a huge fan of human challenge trials just because I think like, if we're going to fundamentally be libertarians and in favor of people's bodily autonomy then I think it makes an awful lot of sense that we should allow, you know, I don't know. I'm always a big fan of like Gonzo journalism just personally, like I enjoy just like, you know the reason TV film me like getting tattooed for a piece on how pandemic policy hurt tattoo shops a few years ago. And there's something delightful about having yourself be the human guinea pig for fun but it's even more delightful when you're the human guinea pig for medical advancement, right? Like it's odd to me that we would prevent people from voluntarily choosing to do that if they're 25 or 30 and super healthy and feeling comfortable with the risks. Definitely. And then just to get back to your framework question is actually an important one. I think at the very least I support moving away from the current binary system we're in where a drug is either declared safe and effective and pretty much it's mandatory for public health insurers and a lot of private insurers to purchase the drug if a doctor prescribes it or it's just completely legal and no one can take it. I think that binary system is untenable in the long run and yeah, it leads to a lot of the negative outcomes that you mentioned. And so having more of a tiered system where something that we suspect is dangerous, definitely illegal, no one can produce it or take it and then we'll be up to things that we know are safe but it's unclear if they're effective. We shouldn't mandate that Medicare or Medicaid buy that for everyone if there's no evidence that it's effective or more cost effective than other alternatives currently available. And then you can move up that tier given the evidence we have in terms of effectiveness and cost to ultimately public health insurers being required to pay for something. I think just the current binary system is kind of outdated at this point. To kind of start to close out the operation warp speed part of this conversation. I wanna pull up a little bit of data that you referenced earlier Alec which is the sort of pace of vaccination innovation over the years. This chart shows, it goes from 1880 to 2020 and shows the time from the introduction of disease to the licensing of a vaccine that and at the top there we've got malaria which this only goes to 2020 there actually is a malaria vaccine now it's not indicated on this chart but you can see that's a long time without a malaria vaccine. And then down at the bottom you see that tiny sliver of the COVID-19 for the COVID-19 vaccine that is just a remarkable visual there. Do you, is your vision that things are gonna look much more like that now as the norm maybe not a year but much closer to that than say this hepatitis vaccine that's halfway down the chart. Yeah, I think it's definitely it's a question of political will because we've definitely shown it as possible at this point. I don't think it'll be quite a year just because I think that's part of that is definitely due to the emergency environment and when you're in normal times it's harder to get consensus and coordination among the necessary stakeholders to move that quickly but we can definitely do much faster than we have in the past. And I think this is where some people criticize Operation Warp Speed but I think it's more of a defensive operation Warp Speed to talk about investments in mRNA technology and the science of mRNA have been happening since the 1980s. And so through public and private investments in that scientific evidence base we were ready when the crisis struck. And so we'd already had an mRNA vaccine in animals and this was the first one in humans but then there were either decades of scientific literature and companies like Moderna that had not brought product to market yet but had raised lots of money from private venture capital and from the government to prepare for future products in the market. And then when the emergency the crisis happened they were ready to try their hand designing and manufacturing a vaccine. And I think also people don't realize that Moderna and Pfizer and their partner BioNTech designed the vaccine in a weekend. Like once they had the genetic sequence for COVID-19 they designed it in less than two days. And then the rest of that process was safety and efficacy testing and preparing manufacturing capacity for the doses but with modern biotechnology we have a lot of opportunity to move more quickly and to design really innovative biomedical products. I was just about to ask about the mRNA thing. I think that that's a really good point because on one hand we attribute an awful lot of success rightfully to Operation Warp Speed but on the other hand also for people who follow mRNA technology development it was something that was in the works for a while and this very much got it through the finish line and expedited development and certainly expedited administration of these vaccines but it is also worth kind of splitting hairs and saying well mRNA had been in the works for a while so it wasn't totally starting from scratch. The thing that I do want to ask about before we move on to another section though is the role of the Defense Production Act in Operation Warp Speed. I mean this raises some libertarian hackles the idea of the federal government essentially like on one hand you could make the case that you needed the federal government to basically ensure that there was the ability not only for these companies to have guaranteed demand for these doses but also have places, factories to actually produce this you needed to have a distribution model but the Defense Production Act is something that I really don't want to see the federal government use that mechanism for anything that is in any way falling short of an emergency on this level. I mean that's a very dangerous precedent to set. What do you make of that and are there any, do you think that that could have been gone about and handled in any different way? Do you think the market could have been trusted more versus the federal government intervening? Yeah, I think it's certainly possible economically there are obviously different ways to incentivize the supply chain manufacturers to deliver their products to the vaccine manufacturers that needed them to manufacture the doses. I think we definitely don't want to forget that the supply chain crisis how bad it was in 2020 and 2021. So there needed to be some kind of emergency measures and I think yeah, I generally would prefer a stronger price signal. So if there's really tight supply in a relevant market and the government is confident that the highest value for those materials in the supply chain are going to these vaccine manufacturers then they should use money from an operation warp speed to pay a higher price. But I also think that you have to be realistic of it's an emergency environment we're using tools that are on the shelf. It's politically unpopular to dramatically overpay for products and overpay meaning just like relative to a pre-crisis price. The body politic is very sensitive to price gouging. And so I would say we had to be a bit pragmatic but I definitely share your concern that in normal times we should be very hesitant to use things like the Defense Production Act. I would just say like maybe as a counter example I know Israel got very early access to the Pfizer vaccines because they paid the highest price. And so countries like in the European Union they're kind of back to the line because they were haggling over pennies and dollars per dose. And the Israeli said, look, we'll give you access to our public health data to better test, you know, like real world efficacy in addition to all the safety and efficacy clinical trials that were done and they paid the highest price per dose along with the UK. And so I think that's the alternative that works as well. If I recall correctly, Israel also had a much more efficient means of distributing doses. It was just kind of free for all come get your dose as opposed to our situation, which is basically like if you're really, really old or if you're like in a teacher's union that's really politically powerful, you get your dose first and then, you know we sometimes got overly strict with having this like very rigid hierarchy that was established and each state had their own one. And then there were some people who were surreptitiously cutting in line as opposed to Israel's approach, which if I recall correctly was just more focused on efficiency overall. Yeah, and this is why we're so excited about things like the abundance agenda as a policy mission because it helps paper over a lot of these natural divisions like the tiered system you're describing. It's a scarcity situation. It's because we don't have enough doses for everyone. So we have to start making what seem like reasonable decisions in some cases and arbitrary decisions in other contexts. The best thing we can do is, you know in the case of vaccines is spend money earlier incentivize the companies properly to invest in more manufacturing capacity ahead of time. And then once the vaccines are ready there doesn't need to be this how do we allocate these, you know based on a system that nobody's happy with there's just an abundance of vaccines like they had in Israel and then everyone gets one. And so it's really kind of pushed past a lot of these more controversial decisions. Yeah, that model is very attractive, right? Because it just means we get to sidestep a lot of the very frustrating politics of all of this. Yeah, I want to broaden this conversation a little bit now beyond Operation Warp Speed and take a look at how you want to apply this model to other realms and just like the idea of kind of public-private partnerships as a concept. Before we move into that zone let's just go through some of the audience questions that have come in because a lot of them are about what we just talked about so we can quickly address some of these. One is from Javier Cardenas. What should governments do next time but out? Lockdowns only destroyed the economy and way of life as we knew it. I agree that the lockdown policy was deeply flawed. I think partly what you were talking about Alec was that some of these technological solutions hopefully can make such a policy in the future far less likely to be implemented, right? Exactly, yeah that is the solution is that through innovation and new technologies we can make these choices a lot easier for policymakers because yeah, I agree it was also imperfectly implemented the kind of non-pharmaceutical countermeasures they used like that are variously described as lockdowns but the only realistic way out of that at the time given the number of deaths per day especially among vulnerable populations a much better alternative is a safe and effective vaccine that's voluntary to take and so that's where I think it's more productive to focus our time. And then speaking of safe and effective Joe Hanoosh says quote effective when you have to have a jab five times and still get the thing it's supposed to prevent we talked a little bit about that how it was oversold in a lot of ways bad job public health agencies. We've got Wes, no there are reasons it takes a long time to develop new medicines. Yes, some of those reasons might be good but a lot of them are really bad so that's what we're trying to talk about here. Susan Pagan, Biden, CDC all were demanding censorship of other opinions from professionals even in the end the censored were correct. In some cases, yes, the censored were correct we're anti-censorship here at reason. Okay, we got Joe Hanoosh the last question here is from Jared Schneider this is a direct hit at Liz not trying to be mean but Liz Wolf lost all credibility with me for her recent ridiculous sloppy straw man laden hit piece on RFK. What we need is actually inert placebo controlled trials long-term. So what would the effect I mean I don't know if you have any if you've looked at that issue at all Alec and Liz you can also respond of course since it's directed at you but have you looked at that issue of what would that do to vaccine development if you went the other direction and said no actually we need more rigorous trials for vaccines we need placebo controlled double blind trials for every single vaccine. Alec you can go first. Oh Liz it was directed at you but I think if you look at the body of literature in terms of vaccines I think the current standards are quite rigorous and oftentimes I'm sure because Liz just wrote a big piece on RFK Junior she has a lot more of the specific data points to offer but a lot of the concerns and certain individual studies get retracted later and I think the current standards are very rigorous in terms of delivering safety effective vaccines it's just important to be specific about what ultimately I think in an evidence-based way turned out not to be true that public health officials were claiming and I think there's really good evidence they were wrong about the transmission stuff and I think all the other evidence in terms of hospitalization and death that ultimately held up and I think and it's also not totally abnormal for a person to need to get a booster shot for a vaccine multiple times like this is annual flu shots work the exact same way so I don't think it's too weird of a thing to happen. Yeah the thing that I would point to is the fact that specifically when it comes to coronavirus vaccines we saw myocarditis incidents happening especially in like the teenage boy population and sort of like young men and we saw that pretty attributable to Johnson and Johnson shots and that was something where like now it's very, very hard for you to get a Johnson and Johnson coronavirus shot in the United States. I think that generally speaking when it comes to adverse incident reporting this is something that the FDA and other health authorities tend to take pretty seriously and I think the myocarditis example is a really good one. I mean, if you actually look at your, like say you're a 20 year old guy and you got vaccinated your odds of actually developing myocarditis are extremely, extremely small but your odds of dying from coronavirus are also super, super, super small. So I think it would be perfectly reasonable in that situation to say I would like to abstain from getting vaccinated but I mean, let's be very clear even with so few cases of myocarditis developing the shots that were responsible for that were thought to be responsible for that were still pulled from the market out of an abundance of caution. I mean, to me there's an awful lot of evidence to indicate that public health authorities are if anything over cautious with this but I do think that, you know everybody should only put things in their body that they're comfortable with and to me the fact that public health authorities especially in like my state of New York or Zach's former state California they really aired and they really encroached on bodily autonomy. I mean, to me that's a huge argument for libertarianism in the case that we've been making for more than three years now and really for 50 plus years at reason, right? Like we are in favor of that always and everywhere. Let me make one more comment on that which is that with the myocarditis risk I mean, there's some signal that it might be there for some of the vaccines in a certain demographic the Moderna vaccine if you get it within a certain amount of time in a certain age group but again, this is why volunteerism is important this is also why, you know going back in time and looking at some of what was being proposed one of the proposals I recall people like Alex Tabarak putting forward was something called first doses first where instead of trying to get everyone, you know dose, double dose as quickly as possible you kind of just like get everyone at least one dose and then maybe spread it out a little bit and that would have had the benefit both of getting the vaccine out to more people more quickly and also, you know maybe not raising that risk profile so much so these are lessons, you know, learned going forward but your point is totally correct and well taken that, you know, it's a it's these are all like margin calls and that's why again, I favorite being, you know down the decision making devolved down to the individual level as much as possible. Yeah, something else you want to say on that Alex? Yeah, just to build on that because now I'm getting flashbacks to all these debates like the first dose and first debate when the UK went for it and we didn't I recall at the time, I think this is a good example on the margin of us being too conservative we're having too much epistemic humility and so I think at the time I recall a lot of the public health experts were saying no we can't do first doses first because the clinical trials were designed to give the doses at a certain interval a fixed interval for each of the different companies for their products and we don't know whether it's better or worse to, you know space the dose and let alone like rationing number of doses, but just in terms of like well, how will this affect the efficacy if you wait longer? And I recall Alex Tabrock and others stand up to effectively in the New York Times talking about, well, what we generally know from the vaccine literature is that the longer spacing you have between the first and second dose of a multi dose vaccine is it, you know, overwhelmingly usually increases and you boost immunity and gets you longer lasting so as a case where if we're being good Bayeians in terms of like what do we think is likely to be true we should look at all the knowledge we have in a given, you know, scientific literature not just like how do we arbitrarily kind of arbitrarily, you know design the initial clinical trial for a given vaccine the thing that I come back to I totally agree with that the thing I come back to is if we had done human challenge trials and if we had done first doses first how many lives would have been saved as a result of that? I mean, these are not just these abstract theoretical goofy libertarian questions these are things that could have actually saved many tens of thousands of people if not more than that, you know and I think that that's just something that that's why we talk about these things and that's why kind of post mortems skews the pun there I think are so important so I really appreciate the stuff you guys are doing on Operation Warp Speed because we do need to prepare for the next time this happens whether it's 10 years down the road or 100 years down the road. Absolutely. So let's make a hard pivot here into space policy I want to play a clip from a documentary that I co-produced with Natalie Dozicki at Reason came out in December last year and it's about NASA's attempt to return to the moon with the Artemis program so as many people know NASA has gone hard into privatizing their rocket program so things like SpaceX and Blue Origin have really stood out as kind of the stars that have taken us to the stars going forward but NASA is kind of trying to recapture a little bit of its former glory with this Artemis program which is rockets built by and are designed and overseen by NASA engineers in conjunction with some private contractors let's play just an excerpt from that documentary and then talk a little bit about the SpaceX of NASA partnership and why you have written positively about it. SpaceX has engineered a way to land its boosters after use instead of disposing of them into the ocean as NASA does. Poole remembers the first time he saw SpaceX's method in action. There came the boosters coming down beautifully settling down right on target of the pads and I thought, my God, this is incredible and the thought that immediately came to mind was, my God, Robert Heinlein should be alive today to see this. He wrote the first science fiction story ever that I know of about private enterprise creating a rocket vehicle to launch the moon. It crystallized me how important the business approach to space launch has become. SpaceX has recovered 32 boosters that have all been reused at least one time for the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launch vehicles. One booster has even flown 14 times. The company is pushing to get that number up to 30. While Artemis-1's launch costs $4 billion, the average launch of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy runs between 100 and 150 million with enough capacity to carry about 80% of Artemis's load. So I mean the cost differentials, the efficiency, it's really staggering and you've written that the federal government should do more things like partner with SpaceX. It's almost like a platonic ideal of a public-private partnership. What can we learn from this particular relationship? Yeah, so I think it's another example of these kind of, the family of market shaping mechanisms, how the government is using particularly funding and it's demand for private sector products to shape what actually ultimately gets invented or which companies are able to compete and give it a market. And so obviously only until recently and until the birth of the commercial space market, the space industry was really the only buyers were large nation states. And so in the late 90s, early 2000s when SpaceX was getting off the ground, they needed NASA to be a major customer. But under the pre-existing contracting system, it was these large, very bureaucratic corporations that have been missing deadlines over and over but they knew how to game the federal contracting system to check all the boxes, they had the right lobbyists, they were kind of just like enmeshed in the system. For a startup like SpaceX, that's a really impenetrable thing to get access to. But with the COTS program, the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services Program, they switched to a different paradigm which was more around milestone payments around technical objectives of if you can resupply the International Space Station and achieve these technical milestones along the way, you'll unlock government funding. And that was a viable way for SpaceX to get its first customers. And then also the nice thing here is the complementarity between public and private capital. So once that public money is committed to companies that deliver on these milestones, it's easier for companies like SpaceX to raise private venture capital because they can tell the investors there is demand for this product. It's not 10 years away, it's two years away if we hit these key milestones. And ultimately that was the first big success of SpaceX and then they've grown in partnership there with NASA over the years. But I really think given how hard it is for government to do a lot of these really ambitious things, this kind of having a perfect role for each public and private industry is really a nice way to design programs. It seems like that, I'll go ahead, Jack. Well, I was just gonna say what I learned, helping on that documentary was a lot about these contracts that NASA has used in the past, they call them cost plus contracts, which are completely insane. It's like you are paying Boeing or whoever, kind of an somewhat uncapped budget because you're like, here's your budget, but then like if you go over that budget, like we're still gonna pay you all the overages. So it kind of incentivizes going over budget and just like flipping that model a little bit and saying, no, we're paying for deliverables makes such a huge difference. What I would ultimately like to see is a completely private market in all sorts of mass transit, including space travel. And I think privatization is a fairly effective pipeline to that world, but one of the fears I have is that the pipeline can sometimes run the other way by creating the sort of permanent marriage between private and public, corporatism or cronyism. What are some of the best ways to avoid that trap? Yeah, well, I would just say at the outset that this is, you can't even have a private in, a thriving, innovative dynamic industry in some of these really technical hard tech markets unless the government is the first buyer. This is the story of solar power. The first buyer of solar power lives in the 1970s was government satellites needed a way to power themselves in space. And so they're willing to pay much more than any other private sector buyer in terms of price per solar module. And then that was what allowed the industry to get on the learning curve, start reaching economies of scale. And then we've seen obviously amazing declines in the cost of solar production since the 1970s. And so I think we see that story again and again and if we hadn't had the initial public-private partnership with SpaceX, we could be looking at a situation where China and Russia are actually the ones that are dominant in the global space industry. And so I think it's also a geopolitical dynamic here where even if in some situations we'd prefer pure privatization and we're competing with other countries that do things differently, we never actually bootstrapped some of these private markets off the ground, you can't even get to that point. But isn't solar power kind of an example of where this can kind of go awry because it can create malinvestment or just investment in something that just spending a lot of money on something that's not quite there yet. I mean, solar, yes, the price of the materials and so forth and the production and batteries has gone down over time but it's still a problematic energy technology to say the least. It's got some reliability issues. It's running it on grid tends to be more expensive than the alternatives at this point. It's not a obvious success story. It's not that widely adopted. It's not a cautionary tale in some ways. Yeah, so I would say this is why I'm gonna be careful and this is not the right solution for every technology or product or market. There needs to be a clear market failure. And I think when it comes to energy production, energy sources that produce CO2 emissions, I think have a clear negative externality that's not internalized by those companies or really any private sector actor. And so they don't have the right incentive in terms of having that entire social cost of carbon internalized and I think maybe we can just disagree on exactly where solar is today in terms of cost competitiveness, but it's fallen dramatically in a lot of sunny regions around the world. It is by far cheaper during peak times per day. And I think the key thing for me would be also so like, is there a market failure? And then do we have like pretty solid evidence is something like Wright's Laws at play and Wright's Law being as you double capacity, you get some kind of like percentage decline in costs. And like we have 50 years of data that solar power just gets cheaper and cheaper and cheaper as you expand capacity and production and that could end at some point, but I'm pretty confident it will continue. And then obviously for things like oil and gas, like these are volatile commodities that display no like long-term downward trend in costs and so I'd rather bet on clean technologies that have that potential, especially given the market failure. The thing that I keep coming back to is this question of when you have these public-private partnerships or any amount of public investment, one classic criticism is that the government is intervening into some degree picking winners and losers. Some companies are given an unfair leg up. And sometimes the government makes that decision based off of how viable the technology that a company is producing is. But I look at like electric vehicle production as an interesting example of this where I think a very standard objection and obviously these are both Elon Musk companies we're talking SpaceX and then we're talking also Tesla. But like Tesla has been given a leg up compared to competitors because of subsidies sold out by governments. And at this point, lots and lots of different companies producing EVs are given these subsidies. But now we're seeing some of these subsidies expiring like what do you make of this? Do you think that this criticism of government picking winners and losers? Do you think that that's a fair one? If you could wave your magic wand, would EVs be a space of public-private partnership or not so much? Yeah, I think this is where just to beat the horse of market shaping mechanisms. And again, these are things like advanced market commitments, innovation prizes, milestone payments. And really what they all share is that the government is setting the goal, commercialization goal of a product that has X, Y and Z features. And if the private market delivers it, the government will make a payment. So in the terms of an advanced purchase agreement or an advanced market commitment, the government is saying we will purchase 100,000 units or 100 million units. Or in the case of an innovation prize, it's just a pot of money. It's you've won the competition and here's a million dollars or $10 million or $100 million and the winner gets that. And then you can have sorts of questions around intellectual property. And does that, they get to retain intellectual property rights or because they got the innovation prize? Does that mean it's now in the public domain? Those are all like interesting programmatic details. But the key thing is the government doesn't pick ahead of time who wins the innovation prize. They don't pick ahead of time in an advanced market commitment. They would just describe the product. It would look a little different than operational warp speed. They would describe the product and then any company could enter into it. In the case of warp speed, as we talked about, they had purchase agreements with individual companies. So there was some selection process there. But again, it's different than direct subsidies because the government only pays out those contracts if the company's deliver a safe and effective vaccine according to the FDA. And so I think that's the way to get out of this bind as much as possible to move. Cause right now the vast majority of government spending is in this, you know, subsidization, picking winners and losers model. And we just have only scratched the surface in terms of the potential, what we could do based on the SpaceX model or the warp speed model with these police pull funding things. And I think electric vehicles as much as we could move this towards more of a pull funding model, the specifics of the subsidies, I'm not, you know, I don't think they were designed optimally. I think I'm actually optimistic about something like government incentives for the EV charging network because it's such an obvious like market the benefits from network effects of like there's, it's really hard to have an EV when there are no charging stations. And then Tesla obviously had to go out and build their own and now we're reaching a point where there's standardization and availability there. But I think there could have been a government role in helping out the charging station availability. I mean, the environmental movements is so fascinating to me because it's increasingly this coalition of, I guess techno optimists like yourself, but also basically anti-capitalist greens. And you've even penned a piece I'm going to pull up here is speaking to that audience. It's in the Atlantic, what many progressives misunderstand about climate change. What is your message to that side of the environmentalist coalition? Yeah, I think it's really just about keeping our eye on the ball. And so I wrote that piece for the Atlantic based on what an environmental activists said in a Rolling Stone article that they didn't like certain climate solutions because certain large corporations like Exxon might benefit from carbon capture technology or yeah, like Elon Musk with Tesla might benefit if we switched to electric vehicles. And the point of that piece that wrote in the Atlantic was really just taking the idea of climate change seriously as an emergency. And not even let's not even debate like whether it is or isn't. Just like, if you assume it is, if you're the person in the environmental community who, activism community who says all the times that climate change is an emergency, then I want to take that seriously. So what would that mean? What would that entail to treat it as an emergency? And in my experience, in my opinion, treating something like an emergency means keeping a laser focus on a mission that would actually solve that emergency and end the crisis. And so for global climate change, this is an emissions problem. And so we should be pretty agnostic about who we partner with as long as that is something that actually benefits the climate and actually works towards solving the problem. And so I think I'm also pushing back against there's this term that some of the environmental actors that can be loved called like fake solutions like those are fake solutions to the climate crisis. And I don't think they're really fake or real solutions. They're just our solutions or there aren't. So is this a kind of return to the like the more technocratic idea of actually we're gonna literally like measure or create some sort of proxy or something to measure how much carbon is being put out and then do, I don't know, cap and trade or carbon credits or something like that because that's more of a agnostic, energy agnostic solution, something like nuclear under the right regulatory conditions might be able to compete on in that world versus the world we're in now where it's much more tax break and subsidy based. Yeah, so I think that's like, that's one version of this. That's definitely the one that vast majority of economists would endorse is some kind of, you know, first best is carbon tax, a very close second best is cap and trade because there's basically economically equivalent depending on how they're designed. And then, you know, second and third best are things like subsidies. We also try to be quite politically pragmatic in our work at IFP in Washington where we're working in Washington DC. And so as of now, and has been the case in recent decades, carbon taxes and similar programs are extremely politically unpopular and most elected officials are aware of this fact. And so anything that increases the cost of energy we saw over the last few years, the gas, the crisis over gas prices and how much that hurt the popularity of the incumbent president. And I think actually implementing those seems extremely unlikely. No. I think that's the case where second best solutions like some of the subsidies we see for clean energy technologies make a lot of sense. And then Zach, you and I can talk more about like how we can implement those subsidies in a more efficient way that limits the downsides of picking winners and losers. But I think we're working within that bucket and we're probably not in a carbon tax world, unfortunately. I wanted to ask a slightly nerdy question from your Atlantic article. In the Atlantic, you write, some environmentalists are skeptical of geothermal energy which requires extensive drilling. Yet it has high potential as a source of clean baseload power with a small geographical footprint that can in theory be deployed anywhere in the world if you drill deep enough. One way to accelerate investment in geothermal energy would be to give this clean technology the same expedited permitting that oil and gas companies already receive for leases on federal land. Where is the opposition to that coming from? Like for my little libertarian heart, clearing the path of regulations and treating a geothermal drilling company the same way he would treat other people in that space or other companies in that space. That's an obvious thing. Why do people oppose this? Yeah, so it says there's opposition on both sides. And I wouldn't say that the majority of each party or each part of the coalition, but they're loud enough and this is a neglected under the radar issue of like how is geothermal versus oil and gas permitted under the National Environmental Policy Act? It's a very wonky question that doesn't get a lot of attention. But there's enough opposition to keep us in the current status quo. And not let reform happen yet. And so on the left, the similarities and fracturing. So even though geothermal is about capturing natural heat resources, using that to heat up water, turn it into steam, spin a turbine, is that there's no fossil fuels in this process. The fact that involves fracturing into the earth makes a lot of more conservationists than I would say climate folks concerned. And so they're opposed often to things in terms of geothermal. And I would add that the advantage that oil and gas has is they have a categorical exclusion for exploration projects on federal land, categorically excluded from NEPA, the National Environmental Policy Act. And a lot of the environmental communities just like they are across the board opposed to categorical exclusions. They just think any kind of carving out carve out of the process, whether it's clean, is there solar, wind, geothermal, fossil fuels, obviously like they just don't want to be carving out from that law because they view it as kind of sacrosanct. That's the left opposition. And the right opposition, I would say it's more just like oil and gas has the current advantage. And so they don't want to give subsidies to a new industry. And there's a lot of, on the right wing of the spectrum, there's skepticism around clean technology in general. And so they prefer to maintain the current status quo that favors oil and gas. Just really fast to follow up. You've written a little bit about how NEPA very much empowers people to stymie these different projects. It reminds me a little bit of our colleague Christian Britschke's reporting on CEQA, which is weaponized by the NIMBs of California to stop all kinds of developments. But NEPA's much broader and you write about how it gives enormous power to people to block innovative new projects. Could you just like give us a sense of like a few of the problems with that really fast? Yeah, so I think the key thing is for any large or medium sized project, they're going to be some losers. Even if project benefits 99% of the community, maybe one person who lives near a transmission line doesn't want the transmission line right next to their backyard. And like I'm actually kind of somewhat sympathetic to that claim of like, that is a nuisance. That is a cost can be an eyesore for big infrastructure projects. But the key is these things need to be built somewhere. And we need to be doing projects that we can get as much consensus on as possible. We can't wait for 100% perfect consensus because you almost will never get that. And so when you have a tool like NEPA, and the key thing is that it allows people to sue the government if the environmental review was incomplete in any measure. By incomplete we mean, has it considered every potential environmental impact? And the way this law has evolved over the last 50 years is the term environment and impact have just been defined more and more and more broadly. And it's kind of this impossible problem to solve where like the documents are currently, you know, often more than a thousand pages long, but they can always be longer. There's always one more thing you didn't consider, right? And so it's a very low bar to clear in your lawsuit. You don't need to say that this harms the environment. You don't need to say that it's, you know, violates the Clean Water Act or the Clean Air Act, those substantive standards. You just need to say, you didn't consider this one potential impact. And then if you can prove that case in court, the court can issue an injunction against the project and stop it. They send the review back to the agency for another multi-year, you know, addendum to the original review. And that just stops the dead in the tracks. And then often the tactic here is delay, delay, delay. To just keep challenging it in court until the developer is like, I'm broke or the bank pulled my funding. I can't do this project anymore. That's funny. These are these like wonky environmentalist techlorist vetoes, essentially. You see this with Nipah, you see this with Nipah and it's a story, you know, time and time again. And it seems like it's getting worse over time, not better. Yeah, it's absolutely reached a crisis point. And that's why you hear more and more about permitting reform in Washington, DC. And like your colleague, it's also a state level issue because many states have their own environmental procedure laws. But I think the key thing for the audience to know is that we should be pretty positive about environmental substance laws like the Clean Air Act and Clean Water. They're not perfect, but when you have an objective standard of like, this is what your product is allowed to, you know, affect the air, affect the water. That's a much better standard than these procedural rules that say you have to comprehensively consider every potential impact. I think that's the kind of thing we need to get back towards and like this proceduralism has run amuck at this point. What so much of this seems to open up is everything we've been talking about is related to this topic that's become known as state capacity libertarianism, something Tyler Cowan popularized in an essay. The belief, it's kind of the belief that libertarians should accept the existence of the states and really then focus on limiting it to a few essential functions and then have an agenda for making those functions work as well as possible in those domains. I understand that you're not coming from a strictly libertarian perspective. It's not a libertarian think tank, but do you have any thoughts or reaction to that idea or framing? Yeah, I think if people read that essay from Tyler and you look at things Derek Thompson's written about an abundance agenda as recline with his supply side, progressivism in the New York Times, as well as Noah Smith and his writing in public. And those are three, the philosophy voices I mentioned are obviously left of center and then Tyler's in the libertarian camp. They sound very, very similar. And I think the key things they share at their core is recognizing that there are large market failures and very ambitious projects that basically are only within the remit of the government is capable of delivering them, at least designing those programs and guiding the market or properly incentivizing the market to achieve them. And I think it's kind of a dissatisfaction with economic growth and productivity growth the last 50 years where, again, we've had some pretty interesting innovation in software but we're getting worse at worse at building things in the real world and we're poorer for it. Our standard of living could be much, much higher if we actually figured out ways to solve these problems. And so I think it's more of a focus on outcomes rather than procedures, the main thing I would say it's keeping your eye on the ball in that sense and not playing the lawyers in charge of saying like, did you check every single box and did you do it the right way versus did you actually deliver the right outcome? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I want to shift the conversation a little bit to another sort of pet issue that you guys have been focusing on which is immigration, which is something reason covers a lot. This is bound to make our YouTube commenter super, super mad. You know, we've written a little bit and I know you guys have too about how Canada is increasingly luring high-skilled migrants and both Zach and I actually covered a lot of the national security law stuff in Hong Kong with China encroaching on its freedoms and it was really interesting watching the UK open its doors to Hong Kongers who were fleeing. It seems like the Anglosphere minus the US is really benefiting from brain drain and a big case that you guys make over there is that high-skilled migration is kind of the thing that we need to be focused on as a way of cutting through some of the toxic politics surrounding immigration. Make the case for that. I'm not totally sympathetic to it because I'm also pretty interested in the crisis at the border and ensuring that low-skilled migrants can come in but you guys seem to think that this is like the politically pragmatic approach. Tell me about that. Yeah, we definitely do. And so across all the policy areas you work on the framework to choose these issues we try to work on things that are neglected, important and tractable. And so obviously immigration is an important issue. It's in the news a lot but I would say high-skilled immigration, specific things we're doing to bring scientists, doctors, engineers, into the United States, entrepreneurs. That is quite neglected. There are very few people in DC who work on that specific subset of the immigration issue. And we do think it's more tractable. Obviously immigration is one of the most polarizing issues there is in US politics but if you poll the American public, both Democrats and Republicans, the vast majority of them say they support high-skilled immigration. And so I think the border issues are separate in some sense and we can have a different conversation about people's feelings of control over immigration flows and how that is a shared experience in a lot of Western countries. But at the end of the day, what people want I think is the ability to be a bit more selective and to support high-skilled immigration that's extremely popular. And so that's why we chose to work on it and we think obviously in terms of science, innovation, technology, there are huge benefits there. And yeah, we haven't really made any reforms yet. Major reforms, some administrative tweaks but no big legislative change. In the meantime, Canada, the UK, Australia, they're eating our lunch and they're benefiting from this. And so I want the best people to come to the United States and you gotta make some changes. I mean, could you just sketch out some of those benefits and how it fits into your rubric of trying to promote material progress? What is the relationship between immigration and economic growth? Yeah, so there's lots of litany of statistics but I think a couple of the ones that I have to go back to are things like for unicorn startups, a billion dollar tech companies in the United States, almost 50% of them have at least one co-founder who's an immigrant. And so I think you also can look at Nobel Prizes. So Nobel Prizes won by Americans are disproportionately represented by immigrants. So I think it's roughly twice the rate of foreign-born citizens. They're twice the rate higher have actually won Nobel Prizes in STEM subjects. And so immigrants are vastly overrepresented in terms of our scientific and innovation horsepower and we should be trying to boost that as much as possible. And so just to give one specific example, we have a program called the 01 visa which is a temporary visa. Oftentimes it's known as the Einstein visa but it's a misnomer because you don't need to be Einstein to comment on it. But it's an uncapped visa program for immigrants of extraordinary ability. This is where we think there's a lot of discretion and maneuverability the administration has in terms of how do you define extraordinary ability? That was not defined by Congress. And there are many different ways you can define that but it's an uncapped program. And so however you define it and however you promote that program, lots more people can come to the United States and be here at least on a temporary basis under an 01 visa. And we try to focus on those very technocratic issues in that sense and see where there's more leverage. Does this possibly make our immigration politics worse though? Because what it seems like, like just to be extremely blunt here, one of the main objections that restrictionists or super, super conservative people have with letting more immigrants in is there's the welfare objection and there's the crime objection. There's the, how are these people going to change the structure of my community? Are they going to steal things from me? Are they going to murder people? There's that objection. And then there's the question of like, are they going to be a drain on the welfare state? Like are they going to be things that take my taxpayer dollars away from services that could be provided to me and people like me and give it to poor people? Does the focus on high skilled immigration and sort of the side stepping of those issues, which I think as a libertarian, like I think it's important that we debunk some of those myths surrounding crime in welfare. Like does this sort of move our politics in a worse direction where, yes we help high skilled migrants come in from India and from China, but I wonder whether this means that we leave lower skilled migrants high and dry because we're side stepping the questions that really ought to be addressed. And let me throw in just to give some context from Alex's study here, this chart. This is from the financial times but you referenced it in your study and it's showing the blue line here is showing the level of immigration into the UK. That dotted line there is Brexit and the red line is showing the anxiety over immigration in the UK. So after Brexit, the anxiety level fell off even though the immigration kept going up. And so I guess like your point there by highlighting that is that the sort of anti-immigrant worries are less about at least among Britons not liking immigrants and more about a kind of concern over like sovereignty or control of the border. So it almost like, does that almost apply? Like the solution here is like build the wall but have like a really big door for everyone to come through and let even more people come through that door. I don't know, but that's, I just wanted to throw that additional context in there before you answered Liz's question. Because it's about perception, not about reality, right? Like there's an interesting perception, reality mismatch there. Yeah, it's about perception of control. I think we see this consistently across Western democracies. So we see that we use the data from the UK there but I think you see similar patterns in Australia which Australia is actually quite harsh and punitive in terms of border controls and boats that land in Australia with immigrants. Then Canada obviously doesn't have a situation we do with a large southern border with Mexico. So they have, they face different set of challenges. But I think the key thing is that the way that large scale immigration in Canada has a much, much higher share of the population that's foreign born in the United States does. So they succeeded so far in integrating a very large number of immigrants. And the way they do it is through targeting different skills that their economy needs. So identify different sectors of their economy. They're experiencing labor shortages and they increase the number of visas for immigrants that have skills in those industries. I think that communicates to the native population that yes, in a clearer way, like this is obviously a benefit to people in Canada and we should allow a higher, more sustainable rate of immigration. And Liz, to your point earlier, I think I'm definitely sympathetic to some of those arguments of those other immigrants being left behind, but I would say the current system leaves them behind. We haven't had immigration reform in decades. And in Washington DC, for a long time, the advocacy groups that work on immigration reform have had this theory. Their theory of the case was we should do no reforms and we should maximize leverage for comprehensive immigration reform. They got kinda close during the first Obama administration but couldn't get it over the line. And what we've been left with is no real improvements to our immigration system. And so what we're saying is we think based on decades of evidence, the comprehensive approach has failed and now we need to try other more pragmatic reforms that are focused on high skills because it's the demonstrated preference of people when you poll them, when you poll Americans, when you look at other Western countries with similar institutions to the United States. What people want is some kind of control and I think Raihan Salam at the Manhattan Institute calls this selectionism, the ability to have some kind of say in terms of selecting who comes to the United States. It does seem like though, if we did follow the Canadian model and we're trying to be responsive to industries where there are specific needs, like by that logic, we have a physician shortage and a pilot shortage in the US so we would be letting high skilled workers from other countries into alleviate those shortages. But we also see some of the degree to which like food service industry is really out of whack and struggling to find labor right now. And that would involve letting in lower skilled workers, most likely Northern Triangle and Mexican immigrants. Like if we did it the Canadian way, it wouldn't just be high skilled immigrants that we would be seeking to let in, right? It would be a mix. Yeah, and it could be. And I think for us, because we focus on innovation policy where we spent our time talking about working on issues that would affect again, like scientists, entrepreneurs, innovators coming to the United States, but definitely supportive of those other kinds of immigration you mentioned. And I think at a broader level, the probably more, yeah, practical distinction is skill-based or employment-based immigration versus family-based. And so a majority of US immigration is through family-based visas. And in Canada, yeah, it's all skill-based based on targeting. And then I have to just do a shout out for our immigration team who's been doing amazing work on Schedule A reform. Again, one of these like very technocratic things. It's a list maintained by the Department of Labor. Schedule A is supposed to report which industries are experiencing labor shortages to help guide certain kinds of visas and letting different categories of people immigrate to the United States. And it hasn't been updated in 30 years. And so that's like just a behind the scenes thing where we're gonna have like, maybe we should update that list because like right now it's basically only like nurses, certain category of nurses and a few other like very bizarre categories. But it's extremely out of date, needs to be updated. It's, there's a whole economics literature that we're trying to help synthesize and communicate to policymakers to fix that issue. And that would help us on the margin move towards this kind of Canadian model of addressing labor shortages. So just to close us out, if what you're putting forth here is a politics of innovation and material progress, you mentioned some of the intellectuals at the beginning who are sympathetic to these ideas from both the left and the right, but on the in the political sphere, Washington DC and Congress, what does that political coalition look like to you? I realize you're just getting started here but are you optimistic that you'll find purchase among Democrats, among Republicans, both, neither? Yeah, I think we're seeing increasing momentum on our side. And so yeah, these are new ideas. So they still need to be socialized and political coalitions need to be put together. And what we're seeing in practice is definitely the most sympathetic policy makers are the ones from the more moderate wings of the party. So moderate Democrats and moderate Republicans in the house and the Senate and then certain parts of the administration are definitely excited about these ideas. And the thing I work on maybe in terms of hours per day the most is permitting reform, which maybe some of your audience are familiar with the idea of like, yeah, how do we make the permitting process easier? These are the questions around the National Environmental Policy Act. And what we saw is we got very close to getting big permitting reform done in the debt ceiling deal. And I was like a crisis, everyone's focused on like welfare requirement, like work requirements for receiving welfare and top line government spending numbers. But behind the scenes, you know, the negotiators in the room, one of the things they were negotiating most frequently was around permitting reform. And we got very close to getting major reforms to NEPA. Ultimately at the very last minute due to one member of Congress kind of vetoing some major reforms, it didn't happen, but like it almost did. And there was enough momentum of people realizing NEPA and other permitting processes are so broken they need to be fixed. And so we're gonna try again later this year, but like very soon in the pipeline, we could be getting major reforms in terms of how we build infrastructure in this country. Momentum's on our side. Okay, there was one more thing I wanted to ask you though, cause we brought, I forgot that you'd brought it up at the very beginning and I wanted to come back to it. It was about overall government spending, the traditional way that you would measure the size of the federal government. You kind of hand waved it away a little bit as this is not a priority for us. But if you are thinking about innovation and material progress, the size of the budget and the federal debt in particular, that is something that I see as potentially crippling to the economy as a whole and could be a real setback. Should that be part of your agenda? I was gonna, I think there's a lot of people in DC who work on debt related issues, tax policy, lots of think tanks work on tax policy. All these spending questions are highly debated and highly controversial. I think those are important questions. Definitely, but the way we add value, we're a 12 person team currently, we're growing, but we have limited capacity. We work only on US federal policy, we don't do any state and local stuff, no international policy work. And when we engage with NSF and NIH and the committees in Congress that oversee them and set their budgets, we think there's so much low hanging fruit in terms of how are they designing their grant giving programs? Like how are the committees structured? You know, when someone's reviewing a project, like how are they scoring it? Do they have the ability to individually fund something or is it always just a committee process where it's an average of their scores? How are they auditing their work in terms of are we getting good returns? Is the process working to actually incentivize high risk, high reward research? And we think there's so much opportunity there that that keeps our science policy team busy. And so these aggregate questions, of all importance really aren't within our remit. Fair enough. Tell people what to do and where to go to find more of you and your work and feel free to promote anything else we haven't talked about that excites you. For sure, yeah. So our website is progress.institute or IFP. So if you search for IFP, you'll see us on all the social medias. Shout out for Threads. Threads is going to disrupt Twitter. You should all be on Threads. I'll see you there. We'll see you later. It's the new thing. But yeah, Google works. I appreciate anyone supporting our work. Alex Stubb, Liz Wolfe, thank you. Thank you so much, Alec. That was wonderful. Thanks for having me. We'll see you all next week. Same time, same place.