So how did the, how did the Trump administration find you in the first place?

That's a good question. I don't know. I'd written a little something for Mercatus on using prizes and things like that. So I think maybe, maybe somebody said Michael Kramer and somebody else said, well, we need some conservative guy. So I don't know how they find me, how they found me, but something on those lines. Yeah. And so, you know, what month was this when you, when you had that call? So it's a good question. So it was pretty early on. It would have been like March or April, something like that. I can't quite remember. Okay. The other thing which people don't know or don't remember accurately is actually the Council of Economic Advisors had written a report in 2019 talking about the potential trillion dollar loss of a pandemic. So that was purely coincidental, but they were in kind of a good place to be thinking about these issues. And the head of the Council of Economic Advisors, Thomas Phillipsen, he was a University of Chicago guy. And so he, he had written about FDA delay. So he knew my work. So maybe it was through him or something like that. But he again was in a good spot to once an athlete, but was in a good spot to give Trump good advice.

So yeah, so you put stuff on the internet and somehow, you know, somebody found you, I guess that's, I guess that's how it usually works. That's it. Yeah. So you, so the, so this was, so your views were, you know, radical outside the mainstream for economists, I mean, they used to talk about columnists, like, you know, Ezra Klein, people, you know, people even people on the left, people on the right. This was these were, you know, popular ideas. I saw, you know, just in circles that the people I follow online. This, but these people, this wasn't the consensus view or even seems like a majority of you in the public health community, right? And so public health, my, my understanding is they were much more cautious. You know, what do you, you know, I have ideas here, but what do you sort of attribute that difference to?

Yeah. So I think the, they weren't popular views at the beginning. They became more popular over time. But yeah, the public health people, I mean, there was a New York Times piece early on looking at all of the things we could possibly do to accelerate a vaccine. Okay. And it sort of gave you a options, you know, so you could be the vaccines are and do this and do this. Even under the most optimistic scenarios, we wouldn't have gotten a vaccine. So, you know, until much later. So I think there was a feeling that this just wasn't possible to accelerate it that much. The underestimated, you know, what could be done. In fact, we talked the team, which Michael Kramer and all these economists myself, we started talking very early on with a bunch of people in the field. And we said, you know, what would it take to what to get a vaccine approved in under a year? You know, how much would it cost? He said, Oh, that's impossible. It can't be done. And then you'd sort of say, well, what if we gave you a billion dollars? And then they began to like think about it. And you know, just nobody had ever offered this kind of money to them before. You know, nobody had, they hadn't really thought about it. So when you came with that kind of money and you know, in the grand scheme of things, what Operation Morph Speed spent like 15, 18 billion was not a huge amount, certainly not a huge amount relative to the benefit. But people in the medical sphere had never thought about it. Well, how could we, what could we do if we had a billion dollars? Well, we could start doing this and this and this. And once you got them thinking about it, then it became clear that maybe something could happen.

Yeah.