[0:00] What is a think tank?Hello, the guest today is Eli Lehrer. He is the class of 1998 and he is the Co founder of think Tank in Washington DC. So hi hi Eli, what is a think? Tank. So a think tank is a Public Policy Research institution. There are a bunch of different types of organizations that call themselves think tanks. One good way to think about a think tank like our straight is that it's in many ways a bizarro world version of academia. We ask people to produce roughly the same products that college professors are asked to produce in their research, but don't teach classes and value the products in a very different order. The peer reviewed paper, which is key to any tenure folder, is for think tanks. A nice thing to have some of, but not our major purpose. Our major purpose is to do things that influence public policy. That's done by things like writing white papers, testifying before Congress, appearing in the media, writing op eds, doing blog posts on our website, things that aren't going to count for that much in a 10 year folder, but are better ways to influence public policy. There are other types of organizations other than our Street that call themselves, and they have just as much of A legitimate claim to the title as we do. But there are places that are more like consulting firms, that are places that are more like activist groups. And so there's no single thing, but I think type like Our Street, the best way to think about it is academia, but with products considered important universally. Gotcha. So at Cornell, I took a couple of like government classes and a couple of sociology classes and the professors would like share some of the research that they do. So is it like a similar kind of like topics that you would write about as like the government and sociology professors? Certainly there are some things that overlap with what government and sociology professors saw do. In fact, Louis Hyman, who is now at Hopkins but was at Cornell until recently as somebody I've I've learned a lot from and write stuff in our vein. So some of the work is so, but the types of work in the formats it's done in are quite different. And furthermore, we're more concerned about work that can be applied to public policy rather than sort of theoretical and philosophical things. It's not that those things are unimportant or bad to do, it's just that universities exist to do whereas we don't. So some of the work sure is similar to what will come out of poli sci departments or other public health departments for some work we do. So some of the work is some of the work is different because it's oriented towards shaping public policy. In the short term, we really want to do applied stuff for public policy. You know, of course we do do some stuff occasionally that's more that's sort of less applied. But Even so, we want to have a an impact and we don't want to write for other academics. We want to write for policymakers and people who make public policy rather than sort of the intellectual and academic conversation. So then what's the example of an output from a think tank like? Is it like a PowerPoint slide? Is it like a research paper? There are a bunch of different outputs the think tanks do. The ones that are streamed on it are events which can range from a short webinar with just two or three people talking to a multi day conference. White papers that are long form of papers footnote and and meeting academic standards. These occasionally are published peer reviewed journals that are very similar to academic papers, explainers and shorter white papers that sort of summarize the state of the research on topic or might present a single new idea or something like that. Op eds and blog posts, which are short things, generally topical and educational outreach to policy makers involving talking with people, informing them about what's going on in the research, and trying to move public policy what we think is a positive direction. So it's a wide range of ways to to have outputs. Exactly. Exactly. And you know, appearances in the media could be considered rather output. Again, they're basically the same things that college professors are expecting to do, except they are not value the same order. They would be in a 10 year folder. Yeah, that makes sense because for to get tenure, academics need to get a lot of peer reviewed papers. But there's no tenure at our street. But we don't have tenure. There is no tenure that I know of. There's some university affiliated thick tanks who people may have tenure at the university. But again, it's the number of organizations that refer to themselves as think tanks is quite different. So there's no single definition of what I think. Yeah. So, So what are some examples of the topics that that you would write about in these white papers or hold conferences about? So there are think tanks that

[5:37] Policy areas to coverdeal with almost any topic on our street, tries to focus on topics that are particularly areas where we can have the biggest impact. So don't try to do everything the way some of the tanks do or even close to. So there are large, very important areas, immigration, National Defense against kinetic weapons that we really don't do anything ourselves. And these are important foreign policy. We're really tax policy, we're really don't deal with. We focus on areas that we've picked as areas where we can have. We think an extremely large impact for us that's financial services and our financial service and freight project, which is our original finance, insurance and trade project, which is our original project energy and the environment. That project for us focuses mostly, but not entirely, technology and cybersecurity, which is basically what it sounds like, deals with the technology policy. That's where our AI work lives. That's our cyber security work. Governance, which deals with Congress, federal spending, the sort of institutions of democracy, elections and voting, criminal justice and civil liberties, which deals primarily with policing and the correctional system. And Integrated harm reduction, which is basically our public health project, which for us focuses on harm reduction methodologies such as syringe access and for opioid use disorder and E cigarettes. To try to meet people where they are other than sort of, you know, say this behavior is bad, don't do it. And we also have a project on women and families that does some work on social assistance, foster care that's. A wide range of topics. It's quite a wide range, but it isn't everything. There are big and important areas where we don't engage, and except for some controversial social issues, it's possible to put engage at things like, say, healthcare, National Defense one day, but that certainly isn't our plan right now. So So what is your portfolio of work like? Do you usually have like 2 papers and one and another? The cadence of teams is decided by their by both sort of who they have on the staff and what's useful from a policy perspective. So in some cases where you're dealing with pending legislation minute to minute, A-Team might focus mostly on doing educational outreach, writing, you know, very short, pithy of things for policy makers to to read. On the other hand, if an issue is sort of not in the public spotlight, is still important and we're trying to develop new ideas, the project might focus on doing block form studies. So it depends on where you are in the policy process and to some extent the audience you're aiming for. For example, our energy project has a lot more work that's sort of highly technical about the electrical grid because that's sort of we're focused. On the other hand, our governance project, while it does get into things like the specifics how to administer elections well, also speaks about sort of general principles of democracy in a way that's accessible to a layperson. Gotcha. So like depending on what's like important to the country at the moment. What's important within the policy? I mean, we don't try to do what's most important to the country right now. We want to do it with idiot policy. But there are things that I, I think are very important to the country that we don't work on. Russian aggression is a very important issue and the US should have a position on that. And I have strong personal feelings about it. But yeah, but that's not an area which we do. We do do cybersecurity and in fact that does touch on, but fighting with kinetic weapons, that's that's not something that we have any expertise or positions on. And likewise, I have no idea what our staff personally thinks about the war. Is it, you know, going to be something that we write about? Gotcha. So, so the areas that you are like really good at, like you build up expertise that like what does this expertise like? Like, did you hire a lot of people who are experts in that area?

[10:31] How to build expertiseSo our street has about 80 full time staff within our policy areas. Most, although not all of our people are scholar practitioners. They're people who have significant credentials. A great number of them have taught in some way at the college level, some of former professors, some faculty adjuncts, but also have hands on experience in whatever they're doing. So for example, our cybersecurity, our cybersecurity, our technology had until recently was a lead developer and technologist for the US Navy developing undersea warfare systems. Our finance, insurance and trade header, who is a Cornell graduate actually it is spent a long career in the insurance industry and worked in the insurance industry and has sort of a deep knowledge of the way the insurance industry actually works and it's also taught classes on insurance. The head of our energy team headed the trade association for very large electricity consumers and his team also has a former public utility Commission. So there are a lot of our people have very practical heads on experience that lets them apply their work to to the public policy issues. You know, we have some people who are more policy walks or more academic, but a very large number of our people have direct hands on experience of the areas where they're which they're writing about and can speak as as somebody who's who's actually walked the walks. They're not just theoretically thinking about the issue. So many of these people do teach and and have taught at the college level, but they're not, they're people who sort of want to do the applied work. So like go, what's their day-to-day like? Like if the project comes in like do they work on the project and then in between do they look for new projects to work on? So with a very small number of exceptions, we design our own water plans. Once in a great while, a foundation might put up, might put out an RFP and we say, OK, we have expertise in this and we'll work on this project primarily when a foundation has something in particular they're interested in. But for the most part, we develop policy agendas each year through a formalized process and then come up with the types of things we're going to produce. This can be relatively detailed. Major papers are planned. What? So some of it is OK, We knew this year we were going to write a certain number of short things about AI since there's a lot of breaking news about it. We couldn't have planned out each of those in detail. And, you know, we leave some flexibility, but we, we know the general topics and the general gist of, of the resources. The way people spend their day is infinitely variable between people on the policy staff. Obviously we have people doing any number of other things. We have ACFO who helps us keep the books and a receptionist who helps us, who helps take care of the office and read our business. So we obviously have people doing those things. For the policy staff, it really depends on what their position is and what they're working on at the time. And it depends on what their skills are. So we might have some people on the policy staff who would spend, you know, substantially all day writing a single paper. We have some people who might rational staffers, talk to staff here are straight talk to people with other think tanks. And we try, as I think any good employer should, to focus people on whatever they can do best. So there's some people who will do much more writing, some who will do much more outrage, because they have special skills that are most effective doing that. That makes sense. And then like how do you like measure like when you're planning at the beginning of the year, what to work on? Like how do you measure the, the importance of something to work on? Is it by like the number of readers on the website? The number of the number of people who read something on our website, a lot of stuff gets the most visibility is published outside of all. So we wouldn't have the metrics. So the number of readers per SE could be an input, but that certainly would never be determinative because we could, you know, writing about Star Wars or something probably get a lot of travel. I'm a huge Star Wars fan and we have and we have done and we have done a few events that dealt with Star Wars as an organization of the public policy implications of it. But this is a dark predominant. There's a traffic per SE. It's a debt. It's based largely on what our policy heads think is going to be important to those areas, what the court, what's currently being discussed, what's pending in Congress, what we think will be likely to be pending in Congress. We want it to be useful to the current debate. So the mere fact that something is interesting isn't isn't sufficient. We obviously need to have people. Nobody's going to work on things that they're the mere fact something is interesting isn't enough.

[15:59] Expertise and influenceBut you know, do we have expertise and is it important? There could be something where and, and by applying our expertise, will we have an influence? So there may be things where we might have expertise, it might be important, but we don't think we we could have much influence. We might not do it. There may be argues we're going to admit aren't the most important, but we think we could have a real impact on them. So that's where we focus on our energy. Congress has like different committees, like is there like certain committees where we have more influence in this committee, so you focus more work towards that committee? So certainly our outreach staff and people try to work with all the relevant committees, and there are some relatively important committees that we just won't have much to do with, so we try to develop work at all of them. We obviously will have better contacts in some places than others. And, you know, we might have someone say the Foreign Relations Committee, but since we don't do foreign policy, we might happen to know some people. We're certainly not going to emphasize getting to go the staff on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. You know, on the other hand, there are so a special task force on artificial intelligence where we do a lot of work. That's a good one. We'd want to know all the staffers and stuff like that. Gotcha. And like, what kind of reputation do you want, like artistry to build up over time with that with the staffers. So whenever you like, reach out to them and the staffers like it's our street. What? What do you want them to think when they first see we? Want to be known as a right of sector organization committed to free markets and limited effect of government, but also a place that is an honest broker that calls balls and strikes and will work without ribbon. We have a clear point of view and a way of looking at the world, but we do not and will not do anything that sort of makes us partisan, involves us in partisan politics for the most part. We really want to stay away from anything that deals with who wins at any given time. There are ideas that I admire on both sides. Certainly it's no secret that I'm a Republican and that the Republican Party's platform is closer to my beliefs. But there are many things and many people who we agree with on both sides of the aisle, and we really want to work with all of them, even if we might disagree with them quite sharply and some other issues. So that's we really want to work with anybody who will work with us and not sort of like. So do you build up this reputation over time by having like a very strong editorial staff that reviews every paper that goes out to make sure it follows that branding? We do have an editorial staff which does an excellent job. A lot of it, though, is just having people who are honest with staff and who call things as they see it. We don't want to be, you know, we don't want to favor any side or say, oh, we're on this team. We're on the team of the free of the free market and limited effective government, not not the team of sort of some particular person or candidate. So, so let's say only there was a new AI bill. Like how like do you learn about that? And then do you form a plan? Like what's the step by step process?

[19:26] Example of influence on AI policyAI, that's the place where we had quite a bit of it. It's one of the major, well, the, the major AI thing did not pass. There was a crypto that included some AI stuff in there. But there is a major AI legislation. But the idea of a regulatory moratorium on AI and saying that states should not regulate for for now was large than our strid idea was developed by one of our people by Adam Thayer on our staff. And it's something that we pushed and passed the House of Representatives who did not pass was voted down in the Senate. But that was one thing where we directly, we developed the idea of a moratorium, educated people in Congress about the idea of it. They proposed legislation and worked out the specifics sort of a political way, did sort of political jockeying. We remained available, testified to explain why we thought this was a good idea, to do additional research on it and to help inform people of other research on it. We had decided that we wanted to, I don't know exactly or two years ago that was, that was something that we that we believed in and we thought was good policy. And and we believe we have empirical evidence that shows that's good policy. So like, what's like the process of creating like an argument for something? Do you collect data? Do you do like interviews with people? Like what? How do you collect the information from? From area to area, you start with first principles, sort of what you think is the goal. You know, I myself am a classical logo. I really think that it's important to have a state and to have government. But on the other hand, that the government should not try to dictate the specifics of people's lives and instead primarily as a guardian of inalienable rights. Not to not the government necessarily shouldn't, you know, provide a health care or something, but that its first and foremost purpose is to protect basic rights that are held in every. So you start with the first principles and you say that those are always the check on what you do and sometimes you see something that you could say momentarily would have good results, but violets those first principles. You then look at sort of empirical evidence indicates about certain policies. I think it should it should help and consist with class of liberal ideas, reviews and other things to determine what the empirical. Then based on a combination of the first principles and what the empirical evidence tells us, we go forward to come up with, you know, first sort of efforts to frame the issue and sort of say, OK, there's a good way to think about it. And then as it gets closer to policy, you know, specific policy proposals, this is how you advance this public policy, which is empirically shown of these results, which in concert were the first principles society. So you start off with those first principles and those first principles apply to like all the different areas you focus on you. Know if you know. For example, the policy that relies on says that the state should be the first reliance in solving the problem is one that checked out of hand. Not that, not that the state should have no role, but if it's a novel problem, you know what's we don't want to assume for example, that the state must solve it. Or it may be that there's a private voluntary market based solution to it. On the other hand, it's not if we were to do National Defense work, we also want to do what's practical as an organization and look for real solutions. That's a model free markets, real solutions. We have to find real solutions to public policy problems. And could you come up with say a free market way to do National Defense? Probably not National Defense aren't role of government. We would not spend a lot of time deciding, you know, should try. We try to have a market for for building missile defense. We might say, OK, you know, here's the government should do defense contracting this way. Again, this scenario which we don't work, which is why I'm using it as you know, that's where we just sort of say, OK, here's the state rule. But other things, it may have some real effect on what we do. You know, we're not concerned about everybody's civil liberties being protected. And you might be able to improve the political, certain aspects of the political things in ways that I might consider good by restricting speech. But I think freedom of speech is a core right of every person, so I would not favour restrictions on speech about politics, even if I would acknowledge that they might do some good things. Did you usually like figure out like who the decision makers are in like in like the committees and then you tailor? To them, we want to target the policy makers and that's really our audience policy makers. We're not trying to sort of influence the general public for the Muslim. Our work may sometimes do that. You know, we try to appear immediate sources and stuff like that, but we're not going to ever run a massive advertising company, you know, saying that this about official intelligence. So we're really trying to focus on the people who actually make the policies, not sort of changing public opinion about the policies. We might change public opinion in some cases, but our goal is not primarily to do that. It's to help the policy makers make good decisions. And then like, like from the like a Congress person's point of view, like when you have a new, new bill to write, like do they usually talk to many, many different groups before they write it? I think it varies quite a lot how many, how people will consult. There are some people who will try to work with just about anybody. Other people in Congress who come with their own ideas. They think you know, what they what they do will represent the staff. They don't why they consult. For the most part, to get things passed, you need to consult with other members of Congress at minimum and be able to build coalitions around whatever it is you want. So that's certainly a thing to think about. So, so, so like as you grew this over time up to 80 people, like what was the process of building it? Did you start off with one area and then from there you have grown to other areas I. Was the vice president for Washington DC operations of a think tech called the Heartland Institute? The Heartland Institute the president of the Heartland Institute. I was a vice president at the time but decided to run an extreme way of communicating that I didn't agree with. So along with the staff who worked for me at the time, I resigned from the Heartland Institute to start and we were all the founders of it, as was the first person who joined us. My partner and Co leader of the organization, Erica Scheller is. So we did you know, we started

[26:42] How to grow a think tankwith a small group of people that have grown it from there. Originally I oversaw the financial services work for the Heartland Institute and I also did a fair about the work on environmental issues. So we started with financial services and energy and environment. One exception, all of the work we do has been outgrowths of other programs. So as we did, as we did something, it became clear that there was an adjacent issue that related to it. So our environment program originally arose out of work on flood insurance flooding. Flooding is impacted by climate change. Wetlands preservation is important to preventing flooding, and that connects you to environmental programs. And we have a lot of subsidies that are very harmful and encourage people to build an harm's way. And those need to be dealt with. And there's a good market solution to both public problems that we should, that we should embrace, and that led us to think more deeply about climate change and look at ways that the free market, allowing free markets for energy, for utilities, for consumers would be a better way to have a greener, better energy system and reduce CO2 emissions that Heavy had to mandate substance. What was that process? Listen, did you like hire somebody who was an expert on that and then that was able to grow the capabilities of the team? Typically, like we typically, you know, we've typically sort of as we've grown, we sort of made dabble in an area or maybe even have expertise in, in a part of. I feel pretty confident about my ability to talk about flood insurance in an educated fashion and even some technical issues related to, you know, the way the fund insurance rate maps over, for example. I feel comfortable that and comfortable also, for example, talking about why preserving wetlands doesn't work. When it comes to other stuff, I don't know as much. And eventually we hire experts in those areas, but often we have some adjacent expertise already because we're working on it or we realize that it's just necessary to develop this expertise. Like the climate change has a huge impact on insurance. So as a result you have to understand both of them. Yeah, right. Exactly. Gotcha. And like over time, did you have like ideal like shape and size to aim for is like 80% the right size, whereas like 200 the right size or 10 the right size I. Don't have in my mind any sort of goal of size. I want to be as effective as possible and financially sustainable and a good place to work at influential public policy. And the scale for that is going to, you know, is going to is going to differ. I think the very small, you know, the very small organizations probably can't be effective, but I think that there's probably a sort of dis economy of scale. I like the, it's not a formal policy, but Dunbar's number 150, which is the number with which you can maintain stable relationships in general, might be a sort of maximum size. Now we're that's almost twice our current size. So it's not a, it's not a concern right now if we grow dramatically, which we're not really planning to do in the next, you know, in the next decade. And I we're still here, I might say we're at 150. Let's let's just stay at this size, yeah? And do the staff members across different policy areas talk to each other? Like, does the harm reduction people talk to the insurance people? Oh. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it obviously varies. Sometimes there's a lot of interaction between policy areas. Sometimes it might be pretty mild. You know, for example, our tech policy team, there are AI implications in almost every policy area we work on. So people at our tech policy team, a lot of people, you know, it might be more rare, for example, for somebody focused on bank to talk with somebody focused on tobacco harm production. Like the outreach people, are they able to help all the different policy areas? Yeah, our outreach team. So our outreach team is divided up by a policy area and the people on our outreach team focus on helping certain policy areas. Obviously we're one team is an organization. So you know, obviously people will pitch in on all sorts of things if it's needed. There may be, you know, there may be cases where an issue, an issue where the where the person who does energy happens to have some connections that are very useful to the hardware reduction team. OK. So how about the conferences? Like do the conferences cover different policy areas or are they each conference on the policy area too? We've this past year and two years ago, we did a major conference day log that really touched on basically all of our policy areas and sort of all-purpose policy and so on that. That's the exception. Most of our events are related to 1 or maybe 2 areas that we work on and focus on something much more particular than sort of discussing public policy. You know, obviously there are an enormous number of policy areas. Very few people are interested in all of them, and some of the work we do is relevant in only that way. Sometimes you do like foundation RFPs like when the like what like how did you like grow it like financially over time to be able to grow?

[32:50] Financial side of a think tankADP focuses on working with very large foundation with very large corporations. So for example, a State Farm Executive Center board of the insurance company, it's public record that involved with Google. In addition, you know, there are a lot of major foundations that have been supported, the MacArthur Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, the Stand Together Foundation, or some that have supported us. And we, unusually among think tanks, rely on very large corporations and very large foundations to support our work. That's sort of our business model. Many other think tanks have very different ways of getting revenue in the door. So the Heritage Foundation, for example, is incredibly broadly supported, has hundreds of thousands, not millions of individuals who write relatively small checks to support their work. You have places that focus on, you know, people who write, you know, on individuals and sort of wealthy individuals who are are sort of making their own decisions for what they're supporting philanthropically. So there are a bunch of different business models. We like the one that we have, but there's nothing wrong with with doing it otherwise. And we have and do respond to RFP's from foundations occasionally. That's a very small percentage of our work. For the most part, we design a policy agenda and then seek people to fund it. Foundation RFPs we generally will fund if it fits in to our existing policy agenda. So. Right. Now we're working a foundation. 2 foundations already support us, have put together a RFP relating to work in an area that is that we already work in and it extends. We need to partner with other people and, you know, and extend our own work in a little bit to do it. But this is not something sort of entirely novel. Yeah. So it's a good fit for your existing capabilities. For the agenda, we have so responding, but if those same foundations were to say do an RFP on National Defense, we obviously would not because we don't have any expertise on agenda on National Defense other than. Yeah, yeah. So this is a really good setup. You get a lot of flexibility. You know, so we basically want to, we set our own agenda and then look for, you know, try to find people who will support it. Yeah. And then like, what kind of like stewardship reports do you submit to these foundations to show you're? Doing a good deal. Every large foundation, we're supported by corporations too, every large way of doing things. So there is no single way of doing things. What I will say is that a lot of it is based on relationships, on credibility, and not so much that sort of writing a proposal. Particularly the world we operate in, there are some types of grants and some things in the world which you sort of do by writing, you know, by sort of having a proposal go before an export panel which evaluates the proposals. The type of stuff we do tends to be more personal and more based on sort of general capacities than sort of a ranking of proposals because there are only a certain number of organizations that can do these things, and they're often ideas of what to do it. And a lot of philanthropy, I'm in particular, some corporations are most interested in supporting what's generally good work in their areas rather than sort of dictating exactly what it is. Because for foundations, it may just be their philanthropic mission to support, you know, good work on climate change. And we just want to have the best ideas, the best work, and try to get people to fund it. And big companies are not going to support something that are not going to support an institution that opposes everything they want but they don't want or need. Whenever they really benefit from organizations just parrot their own views. They want instead, for the most part, to support organizations that are generally In Sync with things that benefit this corporation but have their own ideas and independence. Because then they have people who are mostly sick. And if we disagree with them on some things, that actually increases the credibility for both sides. Whenever I'm talking with the donor for the first time, one thing that I always say to them, almost always at least, is there's only one absolute promise that I can make with you about what we're going to do in our war that at some point will produce something that you disagree with someone. Promise that to anybody, that all of our donors, I will promise, I will absolutely promise that at some point we will produce something they disagree with. And you know, if somebody, there are some places that just don't, that want to support only places that rivet the 100% and there's a place for that. They're trade associations, they're old government relations departments. It doesn't benefit them or us to do things that are there are, you know, there are sort of just PR for the company or, you know, or just PR and exactly what the foundation thinks. Yeah, that makes sense. And they can read the report and there's something new. It's rare that it's sort of internal to their business. It's the public policy environment they operate in and they hope to improve for the most part. And sort of their own vision of the world, which in some cases might be quite different from some of the foundations that support us, are on the political left and really have some very different ideas about what a society should be like. But they see our work as helpful to other things, to things that they believe in. Not on everything, but on enough things. Super.

[39:12] Closing questionSo far. For the final question, I always ask the guest, what was the What was the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you? That's a very good question. The kindest thing that anybody has ever done for me. One thing that comes to mind is obviously there were things that my family and stuff like that, but one thing that comes to mind in the world is that the late Fred Segal, a top scholar of urbanism, I met him for the first time just a year out of Cornell. His one of his books is actually I have the same ABS on a couch I had at Cornell. So I ordered. I ordered from Amazon in 1996 or 1997, the very first item I ever ordered, and I could go back with a copy of his book on Amazon when Amazon is like this tiny website. He was this guy I admire. I met him for the first time and told him about myself. I interviewed him for part of The Washington Times at that time. And explained to him that I was, you know, that I was interested in other things, that I was, that I was interested in the think tank world. And having met me just once, he went out, talked with some people, and that led to my job at the Heritage Foundation. He had no real reason to do it except to help me out. And, you know, it did. I think it benefited him too. But that's one thing that really that got me a started a big way. That's really wonderful, but thanks for sharing you like.