I thought the first thing we could do is get the high-level context for Works in Progress. For those unfamiliar, what is it, what sets it apart from other publications, and how do you think about yourselves?

We call ourselves a magazine of new and underrated ideas to improve the world, which might sound a bit lofty, but our view is that there are loads of exciting and interesting stories across the world of science, technology, and economics that aren't really recognized. Partly that's because, for obvious reasons, a lot of media has to focus on current affairs, the news agenda, and partly it's because media tends to focus on bad stories and so on.

So one thing that we try to do is publish stories of success: where have things gone well? An example is we did a piece on how Madrid was able to build its metro and add about 125 miles to it in about 12 years, for about a tenth of the price that London has spent on building a new line and about a twentieth of the price that New York recently spent on the Second Avenue subway. Partly this is just cool. This is really interesting if you're interested in engineering. But it's also supposed to be a how-to guide for people in other cities who want to be able to build a metro cheaply, and so we try to pull out some of the lessons there.

We're also really interested in the future, and in what we can do to make the world better. There's a technology called the gene drive, where you use CRISPR to insert a self-replicating gene in an animal species, and we did a piece on how you could do that to eliminate the malaria-carrying mosquitoes from an ecosystem. Obviously, sometimes people's alarm bells will go off: "Oh, that's playing God," and things like that. We're not trying to do that, but we are trying to pull out, as we have in most of North America and in Europe, the very small number of species of mosquitoes that can transmit malaria from the areas they're in, and do it in a way that's controlled and allows us to have fail-safes.

So sometimes it's speculative, sometimes it's backward-looking case studies, but all of it really is about this idea of optimism and the belief that human progress is something that we do, that we can learn about, and that we can do faster if we try.

When you think about identifying these underrated ideas, what's the editorial filter for what deserves more attention, whether it's a specific category or topic? What's the lens you use to search for stories to tell?

The three things we look for are: Is it novel? Have you read about this before? Number two, is it tractable? Are you proposing something that could actually happen? We're not that interested in pieces that say, "Oh, we should do X, Y, and Z," but it'll never happen because it's just not possible and nobody will accept it. That's not a good Works in Progress piece; that's just fantasy. And the third is, is it interesting?

In some ways we have as much in common with think tanks as we do with media institutions. But our model is that people will read our stuff if it's interesting and if they're learning things from it. What I often say to authors is that it's OK if the reader disagrees with you at the end of the piece. They have to, though, be glad that they read the piece, even if they disagreed. They have to feel that they've learned something or that they were entertained, and feel happy having read it.

I think that's a pretty good rule of thumb that gets us pieces that, yes, are pretty deep. They're often quite long. We have the luxury of writing long reads. We're not just chasing clicks. We're really interested in high-quality readership and high-quality readers. But we need to make sure that we're giving them interesting facts and interesting observations about the world, and I hope also useful models, ways of understanding the world that they might not have had beforehand.

You talked about similarities to think tanks, and one of the metrics you look for is whether an idea could be used or implemented. How much do you think about success in terms of awareness, getting a topic into the conversation, versus policy influence and pushing certain ideas forward?

A little bit of both. Take an example like housing. We do a ton on housing shortages. My view is that housing shortages are basically the number one problem in most Western countries, simply because they're expensive and they make housing expensive, but because they make it harder for people to have kids when they want to have them. They make it harder for people to live near the jobs that they want to have. They make people drive more when they might want to walk or cycle. There are all sorts of extra costs that we don't see from housing shortages.

So one thing we've written is a piece called "The Housing Theory of Everything," which makes this case and gathers together all of the evidence that housing shortages have these huge effects on Western societies, not just "I have to spend more money on rent or on my mortgage than I wanted to." That was a pretty big piece. It got a lot of attention, and I'm very proud of it.

But we're not just interested in raising awareness. What we want is to give people workable tools, workable policies and ideas that they can pick up and apply themselves. We don't do lobbying. We don't do very much in Washington, D.C. But we do aim to inspire people who do that kind of work, and give them case studies and ideas from around the world of where this sort of thing has worked.

One example that I think is really interesting is in Israel. They have a policy that allows apartment buildings to redevelop themselves. The residents can vote to redevelop their apartment building, adding more units and then selling those units, and selling the units funds the redevelopment of the building. Everybody who lives there already gets a new and bigger apartment, more units are added, and it's a win-win. What this has done is add a huge amount of extra apartment supply to cities like Tel Aviv. This policy now accounts for about a third of new housing in Israel.

And it gets past the political problem that most Western countries have, where people who live in a certain area don't want more houses to be built, because right now they basically feel that they lose from them. We're trying to find ways that people can win from new housing around them, so that we can turn this NIMBY problem into what you might call a YIMBY solution.

On the opposite end of the spectrum from the pieces that have been most popular and gotten the most attention, what's a topic you've written about that didn't pop off the way you'd hoped, but feels just as important and that you wish had gotten more attention?

I'm really, really interested in clinical trials, and I'm really, really interested in how to improve the speed and the practice of science. In some areas this is called meta-science: basically, doing science on science. I think we do really interesting work there, but it remains a fairly niche interest. It hasn't quite caught fire the way housing has, since everybody is affected by housing shortages.

But my view is that one of the main reasons Western countries are growing as slowly as they are is that even though we spend a lot of money on scientific research, we don't spend it very well. We often end up adding huge amounts of bureaucracy to the work that scientists do, and funding more conventional, less radical, breakthrough-type research than we would if we had a different system, or than we used to historically.

So I think the work we do is good. It's definitely popular with the crowd of people who are interested in doing science on science. But I think there is still work to be done in bringing this to a bigger audience, and in getting people to connect the dollars that we spend on science with the 1.5% or 2% GDP growth per year that we've been getting since the '70s, rather than the 2.5% or 3% that we were getting up until that point.

That great stagnation has a lot of factors. A lot of things cause it. One of them is housing shortages, incidentally. But I think this slowdown in scientific productivity, and this decrease in really radical, breakthrough-type research going on in science, is a really, really big part of it. I think we will get there, and people are beginning to realize that this is much more important than it might seem at first glance.

I want to shift gears to one of your essays (by Alex Chalmers) from this week, "The Bad Science Behind Expensive Nuclear." The thing that really caught my eye was that I think you said on Twitter that one of the reasons nuclear energy is so expensive is that regulators are forcing these huge designs to cut back on radiation by about as much as you consume when you eat a banana. I think that was a pretty good way to encapsulate that something weird is going on here. For those who haven't read it, what's the core argument?

In the 1950s and '60s, the United States, Great Britain, and a few other countries built nuclear reactors very cheaply and very quickly, about cost competitive with coal, without any carbon taxes, subsidies, or anything like that. Just in the way we were building them, they were roughly cost competitive with coal. Maybe slightly more expensive, but coal was very cheap.

Something happened in the 1970s to change that. There was a trend going down: we were getting cheaper, we were getting better, we were getting faster at building nuclear until around the 1970s. And then something changed, and that trend went into reverse. Now we're building nuclear reactors for 10 times the price that we were building them 40 or 50 years ago, and at incredibly slow delays. In the UK, we're looking at the first nuclear project we've done since the 1990s. It's going to take something like 17 or 18 years to build. Compare that with some East Asian countries, which are still able to build nuclear reactors in four or five or six years. That's still more expensive than we were building them in the '60s, but a lot cheaper than we're building them in America or in Britain.

One of the reasons for this, we argue, is the introduction of a principle called ALARA, which stands for "as low as reasonably achievable." This principle says that any productivity benefit you get as a producer of nuclear reactors, any cost savings you make, any learning by doing, any cost reduction, instead of being able to take it either as profit or as a lower price, you have to reinvest in more safety: in more casings, or in reducing background radiation more and more and more.

That has gotten to really, really ridiculous levels. As you mentioned, there is a case in Britain where a safe reactor design, one already in operation in Japan that actually withstood several earthquakes, was required to completely change its floor plan and completely change its ventilation systems, at huge cost, to reduce the amount of background radiation, as you say, by the amount that you get from eating a banana. Eventually, they abandoned the project for this and related reasons.

Every year we experience, depending on where you are in the United States, between two and three of what are called millisieverts of background radiation. This was about one ten-thousandth of what you experience on a day-to-day basis. Routine things that we do in our lives also expose us to more background radiation. If you take a transatlantic flight, you're experienced to a sizable fraction of what you will get on an annual basis. If you take a CAT scan, a CT scan, sorry, you experience basically five years' worth of background radiation all at once. I don't recommend people take loads of CT scans if they can avoid it. But we have lots and lots of real-world examples of places and people who have experienced much more background radiation than this, and do so completely safely. If you live in Iowa, you get seven millisieverts of background radiation. If you live in North Dakota, it can go up to nine or 9.7.

There are empirical studies done of shipyard workers, some of whom are working in nuclear areas of shipyards because they're working on nuclear reactors for things like aircraft carriers and submarines. They compare them with people with very similar backgrounds and very similar fitness profiles in other parts of the shipyard, who are not exposed to the same radiation, and there are no differences in outcomes around health, cancer, whatever it might be.

The fundamental principle behind this is the idea that there is no such thing as a safe dose of background radiation, and therefore you must always reduce background radiation as much as you can, as close to zero as you possibly can. We argue that this is just basically wrong and based on bad science. There's very little evidence to indicate that this is a sound principle, yet it has remained in place for decades.

What are the drivers behind that, whether it's institutional inertia or fear engendered in a prior era when there were a lot of different accidents? How can such a bad idea persist for so long?

Some of it is fairly shaky science (and I don't really mean to criticize for science here, because science is often shaky; that's how science works) being used as the basis for regulation, and then no real correction mechanism happening in that regulation.

The initial research on how radiation affects DNA was done on fruit flies, and it turns out that radiation does seem to have pretty bad effects on fruit flies, even at relatively small levels. Now, when that was the only evidence we had, maybe it was prudent to say we want to reduce background radiation levels. But even at the time, we had developed evidence, and since then we've developed much better evidence, that says fruit flies are actually not a very good model for how radiation affects human beings. We've looked at many decades of exposure to radiation, for example. We now understand how DNA works. The double helix structure of DNA means that it can repair itself. So we now understand that the human body is capable of repair, even at the cellular and DNA level, and that means getting a small dose of something that's harmful can be fine, because we've just repaired ourselves.

An analogy that I think is really nice is: what's the difference between having 365 beers over the course of a year, one a night, and having 365 beers on your bachelor night? It's a really big difference. With one you're totally fine, and with the other you die. The reason is that a huge dose of something all at once is something your body usually cannot handle, whereas if you take a small dose of it, your body can adapt, it can dilute it, it can repair itself. And the same seems to go for nuclear.

The other is simply fear of nuclear. Since the Three Mile Island accident, since Chernobyl, since Fukushima, a lot of countries have become very, very, very worried about nuclear, and fairly baselessly. Nobody died after Three Mile Island. Essentially nobody died from Fukushima. The people who died died because of the evacuation rather than because of the actual accident to the nuclear core. And very few people actually died from Chernobyl.

But we have become so frightened that the way we regulate nuclear now only sees downside, and what that's led to is these massive asymmetries in safety acceptance. We basically regulate nuclear out of existence. We make it so expensive. We make reactor cores have to be cased in feet and feet of concrete in case an airliner flies into them. These are extreme safety protocols that we don't remotely think of when it comes to, for example, coal plants or even gas or oil plants, which produce a lot of air pollution, which can kill a lot of people. Air pollution is very bad. It's very deadly. But we just don't think about that, because we don't have the same kind of fear images in our minds of a coal plant giving kids asthma or hurting people via air pollution. It's basically the seen versus the unseen.

So I think it's a combination of many of those things. But I also think that ultimately the nuclear regulatory establishment that has now grown up doesn't really have a strong incentive to change this. Most big nuclear companies have shaped themselves around this regulation, and removing this regulation and changing things would open the market up to new entrants, and hopefully to a lot of competition and a lot of innovation. If you're an incumbent, that's not necessarily good news for you. And if you're a new entrant, you don't necessarily have a voice. Actually, in the UK, some of the entrants that I've spoken to are quite frightened of the nuclear regulator, and they're afraid to speak out.

I think that's a perfect place to wrap up, because the piece does such a good job of drilling into case studies of what happens when you remove these regulatory burdens versus not, like the example comparing France and what they've done. So, a strong recommendation for everybody to read "The Bad Science Behind Expensive Nuclear." And more broadly, I think Works in Progress is a perfect place to find underrated ideas and try to put them to work. Sam, thanks so much for joining me to unpack it.

Thanks for having me.