Welcome to the tech policy podcast. I'm Evan Schwarzenstraber, your host. On today's show,

permissionless innovation. Should innovators and entrepreneurs have to get permission from the

government or regulators before experimenting with new business

models and products, or should the assumption be that innovators and entrepreneurs should be left

alone as long as consumers are not harmed? Joining me to discuss this is Adam Thierer, author

of Permissionless Innovation and Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center at the tech policy program.

Adam, thank you so much for joining me.

Thanks for having me.

So your book kind of lays out two competing visions of how to regulate technology.

One of them is Permissionless Innovation, the title of your book.

The other is the precautionary principle.

Can you take listeners through the difference there?

Yeah, I'd be happy to.

Well, basically,

permissionless innovation generally refers to a freedom to experiment with new technologies and innovations free from prior restraint. The idea is that basically you should be able as an innovator

or a creator of a new technology to go out and release it into the wild and let people try it

without having the government or somebody

else tell you that you can't. By contrast, permissionless, I'm sorry, precautionary principle

basically refers to the idea that we should limit new innovations until such time as innovators

have essentially received the blessing from someone, usually in a government agency or

regulatory agency that basically says,

you're okay to do this now. You have our blessing. And this sort of tension we see at work in

...