Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I'm Sonal and I'm here today with Adam Tier,

who is a senior researcher at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, who has long

focused. She's actually been in the public policy world for over 25 years, focusing on

technology and innovation and policy. That's right. Thanks. Welcome, Adam. Thanks for having me.

No problem. Well, since. Thanks for having me.

No problem.

Well, since you were here, we thought it would be great to talk to you about some of the things that we care about.

And one of those themes is actually the name of a book that you put out last year, that you have a second edition coming out next year called Permissionless innovation. And do you want to actually just start, and the subtitle of that book,

by the way, is the continuing case for comprehensive technological freedom. I want to unpack that subtitle in a minute, but first I actually want to just start by asking you, how do you define

permissionless innovation? Like, what does that mean? So, permissionless innovation generally refers to

the idea of the freedom to experiment and learn through ongoing

trial and error experimentation. It's an openness to change in disruption and risk-taking and even

the idea of failure as part of the process of innovating. It's an idea that basically has been

part of the American ethos for a long, long time, but especially with the internet,

we've embraced this idea of this general freedom to experiment and even sometimes fail,

which really makes America unique in the world in this regard. We've led the way with the

internet for this reason, in my opinion.

I actually agree with that, but now I want to get to the subtitle of your book, which is the case for technological freedom.

Right. The question, I think, that comes out a lot in some of the policy debates,

especially when people have fears around new technologies, is does that freedom come out of price?

Because sometimes we'll toot the horn of technology freedom without thinking about safety and why some

of those regulations or policies were there in the first place. I spend most of my time trying to

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