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Adam Thierer

Resident Senior Fellow, R Street Institute · 1 appearance on the record.

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analystauthor@AdamThierer ↗rstreet.org ↗

Adam Thierer is a Resident Senior Fellow for Technology & Innovation at the R Street Institute. A technology policy scholar and author, he previously spent 12 years as a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

14statements → 9claims → 2claims resolved → 3.86/5average certainty → 2.64/5average debate potential → 1said about them ↓

2 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 1 not yet assessed 6 not checkable as stated how the 9 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

3 predictions · 6 assertions · 1 opinion · 4 insights · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 9 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 2 are resolved, 1 is not yet assessed, and 6 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Adam argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Thierer: FDA Restricted 23andMe While the UK Welcomed the Service
“That's clearly been the case with 23 and me, which of course our Food and Drug Administration famously went after the innovators there for their genetic testing service. But over in the UK, they were welcomed with open arms by the government who said, come on …”
Adam Thierer Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 11:55 a16z Podcast | Making the Case for Permissionless Innovation

How they sound: speaking style how? →

252 words/min while actually speaking · 9.7 um and uh per 1k words · 6.8 false starts per 1k · 20.8% of pauses land inside a clause

No argument clarity score for Adam Thierer: only 2 usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 3,808 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

Everything Adam Thierer said on the a16z Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Insight
Thierer: Common law and torts adequately govern new tech without preemptive regulations
“Now luckily there are ways to address these problems. Sometimes they're already on the books in other forms outside of regulation. So if we could relax the rules, it wouldn't mean the end of all law. We would still have contract law and property law and torts …”
Adam Thierer Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 8:11 a16z Podcast | Making the Case for Permissionless Innovation
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Thierer: Global Innovation Arbitrage Will Drive Tech Companies Abroad
“So in a world where technology can move in the same way that capital did before it, to wherever you find the most open, hospitable environment, you're going to expect to see more of that in coming years.”
Adam Thierer Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 12:19 a16z Podcast | Making the Case for Permissionless Innovation
Opinion
Thierer: US internet dominance was driven by permissionless innovation
“We've embraced this idea of this general freedom to experiment, ah, and even sometimes fail, which is really makes America unique in the world in this regard. We've led the way with the internet for this reason, in my opinion.”
Adam Thierer Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 1:04 a16z Podcast | Making the Case for Permissionless Innovation
Insight
Thierer: Tech policy default should allow innovation until catastrophic risk is proven
“The whole point of my book and the idea of permissionless innovation more generally is that the benefit of the doubt should be with the idea of innovation allowed as our policy default. And until such a time as the other crowd can make a compelling case, That …”
Adam Thierer Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 2:31 a16z Podcast | Making the Case for Permissionless Innovation
Insight
Thierer: Regulating for hypothetical worst-case scenarios prevents best-case outcomes
“If we spend all of our time living in fear of hypothetical worst-case scenarios and basing public policy upon them, then best-case scenarios can never come about.”
Adam Thierer Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 4:18 a16z Podcast | Making the Case for Permissionless Innovation
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Thierer: European regulation prevented the growth of major internet companies
“Europe took a very heavy-handed, top-down approach to the data directives and privacy rules that made it almost impossible for innovators to really take hold there or really get any investment. And what, as a result, it's hard today to even name a major innova…”
Adam Thierer Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 4:57 a16z Podcast | Making the Case for Permissionless Innovation
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Thierer: Clinton administration's light-touch policy drove the US internet revolution
“It happened because in the United States, we had a clear bipartisan vision for the internet Mostly driven by the Clinton administration, who first commercialized the internet for open development, and then secondly came out with a framework for global electron…”
Adam Thierer Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 5:49 a16z Podcast | Making the Case for Permissionless Innovation
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Tech innovators should avoid federal agencies starting with an 'F'
“So what technology innovators need to understand is that their job is going to be a lot easier if they don't have to deal with an agency with an F at the beginning of it. So whether it's the Food and Drug Administration, or the Federal Communications Commissio…”
Adam Thierer Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 6:59 a16z Podcast | Making the Case for Permissionless Innovation
Prediction Open · timeframe Sep 2020
Thierer: First Amendment would block European-style 'right to be forgotten' laws
“If someone in the States tried to do something like the Europeans are doing with right to be forgotten, we could beat that back with the First Amendment in the US. We could say, no way it doesn't jive with our First Amendment.”
Adam Thierer Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 22:03 a16z Podcast | Making the Case for Permissionless Innovation
Insight
Thierer: Regulators primarily want tech founders to listen to their concerns
“For the most part, policymakers and regulators, they just want to be heard. They want to have their concerns heard. They want to know that you're doing something to address these things in some fashion.”
Adam Thierer Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 8:02 a16z Podcast | Making the Case for Permissionless Innovation
Assertion Supported
Thierer: FDA Restricted 23andMe While the UK Welcomed the Service
“That's clearly been the case with 23 and me, which of course our Food and Drug Administration famously went after the innovators there for their genetic testing service. But over in the UK, they were welcomed with open arms by the government who said, come on …”
Adam Thierer Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 11:55 a16z Podcast | Making the Case for Permissionless Innovation
Assertion Supported
Thierer: California proposed bills to ban Gmail in 2004
“Oh yeah, there were bills here in California that would have banned Gmail because it was unthinkable that we would target ads based on what was in your emails.”
Adam Thierer Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 13:54 a16z Podcast | Making the Case for Permissionless Innovation
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Thierer: Immersive technology will face major backlash over psychological distraction
“Of course, Google Glass has subsided as a technology now, but that technology is still with us in other ways, and we're going to witness, I think, a lot of concern about the issues raised by a world of immersive technologies, including sort of psychological co…”
Adam Thierer Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 19:34 a16z Podcast | Making the Case for Permissionless Innovation
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Thierer: First Amendment acted as a deregulatory sledgehammer for early internet
“The First Amendment became If you will, a deregulatory sledgehammer that you could take agencies to court for almost anything they did with the internet, and you could win. You could beat regulatory proposals.”
Adam Thierer Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 21:42 a16z Podcast | Making the Case for Permissionless Innovation

The other half of the tape: Adam Thierer's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 1 time in 1 episode on the a16z Podcast. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Samuel Hammond 1

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
0011112019episodesmentions
0112019episodes it came up in
000.50.5112019episodesmentions per episode
2019 1 mention in 1 episode

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
a16z Podcast | Making the Case for Permissionless Innovation Jan 2, 2019 17m
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