Larry Lessig talk with Andrew Yang

This podcast is part of the Democracy Group. This is Larry Lessig. One of the most creative candidates that we've seen run for president in a generation is Andrew Yang. I met Andrew Yang early in this last cycle. In April 2019, we had a town hall in New Hampshire with Andrew Yang. The room was packed because already there were thousands in that state who were extraordinarily excited by the clear thinking, the new thinking, the creative thinking of this extraordinarily talented candidate. And in that town hall, which literally moved me and many people to tears in that audience, Andrew Yang described how he thought of the challenge of the presidency. And while he went into that town hall pushing the idea, which he pushed throughout the campaign, universal basic income, he ended that town hall recognizing, as he said, that the first issue, the primary issue, the only issue that makes anything else possible is the issue of fundamental reform. And Andrew Yang became an early supporter of what I think is the most transformative potential in the way we fund campaigns, Democracy dollars or vouchers, which Andrew Yang said Everybody should have $100 to help fund campaigns. And he became the first candidate who we got to commit to fundamental reform within the first hundred days. Of course, Andrew Yang did not become the nominee, although his ideas have affected the debate and will continue to drive thinking about what the right policy should be, not just economic policy, where I think his ideas are extraordinarily important, but also, and I think just as importantly in reform. I was incredibly happy and honored that he asked me to be on his podcast. He now has an extraordinary podcast talking to all sorts of people. And so this is a rebroadcast of Andrew Yang's podcast with me. The original podcast is video, but of course, this is not video. I'm a little shy about video, so I'm really happy you're listening to it here. This podcast is sponsored by Equal Citizens. You can find us on the web at Equal Citizens Us. And you can share this podcast and other podcasts on of this series at that location. I hope you enjoy it. This is Andrew Yang,

Thrilled to have with me on Yang speaks former presidential candidates so we can bond over that democracy. Reformer, legal scholar, prolific author, general powerhouse and force for intellectual progress and reclaiming our democracy in the United States of America. Lawrence Lessig. Lawrence, thank you for being here.

Thanks for having me, Andrew.

You are such a deep thinker on so many issues that I now believe are core to our survival. You know, and I don't want to be hyperbolic, but at this point, it literally is survival of our democracy, survival of of hundreds of thousands of Americans, and you were ahead of the curve. I'm going to tell a story. I don't know if you know, but when you ran For President in 2016, you started, like, the pack to end all PACs, and I donated. I was like, that's a great idea. Like, this guy is onto something. So would love, and I'm sure you've regaled people in other contexts with your tale from the 2016 campaign trail, but would love for you to share it here so we can perhaps edify some folks who don't remember your run as well, and then we can compare some notes.

Well, I'm happy to. And I'm, first of all, extremely honored to be on this podcast with you. As many people know, I admire so much what you did. We started together on that campaign in April of 2019 when you came to New Hampshire and we did a town hall. I was trying to convince you the issue you needed to think about first was democracy reform, and you were all game to talk about that. But the reality is that you've actually convinced me that the UBI is the number one issue we need to think about after democracy reform. Unfortunately, it's taken a pandemic to convince most of the world that that's true. But I think it's an extremely important lesson you've taught. Now, my story I actually think of as a story of optimism, because, you know, in 2016, it was my view. It's actually 2015. When we started this, it was my view that unless we got the nation to focus on the fundamental problem of the corruption of this democracy, nothing else was possible. I mean, you know, you got these candidates like Bernie and Hillary up on stage talking about all the amazing things they're going to do.

You should have been on stage, too, man. We talked about that. What was up? Yeah, but they changed the rules on you, right? Yeah.

So I wanted to get them to focus on these fundamental issues. And I said, look, I will run for president if I can raise a million dollars in 30 days. And the way I'd run for president is by making this issue the number one issue, the issue I talked about before anything else, like, we have to commit to fixing democracy first. And so we raised the money in less than 30 days.

And then you're like, oh, my gosh, now I have to do it.

Right, Right. But the pollsters that we had said on what we. We know you're going to qualify for the debates. The first challenge was that the Democratic Party had a rule that said that you had to be. You had to be listed on a certain list of polls. And those polling companies were not including my name. So there's this.

I just want to stop you there, Lawrence. That was actually really tricky for us, too. In 2018, they, they had a bunch of polls and my name was not on them. And then you're like, well, if I'm not on the poll, then it's going to be very hard to qualify.

So leading up to the first debate, Bloomberg wrote a. The Bloomberg press wrote a big editorial about how ridiculous this was because you could tell from other polling that I would have qualified, but I wasn't on the approved list. My view at that point was, okay, their rule was, here's the approved list. You got to be on that list. Fine. The next time around, we'll make it. A week before, at the end of October, my campaign manager called me and he said, you know, we're going to qualify. You're going to be in the next debate. And. And I said, he said, you got to get to work and preparing. So I drilled down to begin to prepare. And then at the end of the week, he called me back and he said, the Democratic Party has just changed the rules for the debate. You're not going to qualify. And they had recrafted the rule to draw the boundary precisely so that I would not qualify according to their new specified rules. And so when it was clear they

were going to change what was the new boundary, what was the old boundary,

what was the new boundary? The rules they had originally announced, which they eventually agreed were the rules, was that you had to be at 1% in three polls within six weeks of the debate.

Very reasonable.

And then they changed the rules to say you had to be greater than 1% in three polls. And then they gave a period carving out the time before the debate, and that period was carved to lop off polls that had qualified me. And we knew what other polls were going to be announced and there weren't going to be enough polls that were announced to qualify me.

That was a coincidence. They consulted the stars and found that there was a cut off that conformed to the.

Somebody wrote me and said, Democratic pulse of the nation, Right. Somebody wrote me and said, thus was Larry Mandering born, because this Larry Mandered. That's right. But anyway, I mean, you know, the point was it was clear they didn't want somebody up on stage causing trouble around this issue. And, you know, they saw what Donald Trump was doing on the Republican stage. I don't blame them. In some sense, but they didn't want this issue to be central. When I tried to talk about this issue as being central, people are like, no, no, no. People care about health care. They care about climate change. They care about student debt.

And I was like, what's the danger, Larry, is that it seems. No offense to you, but you seem like a very smart guy. So the danger when you talk about the. And you should know that I came away also convinced by our event together, where I was like, he's right. Democracy reform needs to be front and center because we'll never actually change anything meaningful without it. But the hazard I think that people have when you talk about it is they think in terms of process. That's what I meant by the smart guy. It's like a smart guy. You have some fixes to the process. And the danger is that people will just be like, oh, you know, like, this stuff is going to be wonky and uninteresting. But it seems like you've had a different experience when you talk about this, because Americans realize that we right now are not functioning in democracy. That's living up to the name.

Yeah. And this is what's so hopeful, I think, you know, in 2016, I couldn't get them to talk about this issue. In 2020, you, our group and represent us and Citizens United, succeeded in getting every major Democratic candidate. You were one of the first to commit to fundamental Democratic reform in the first hundred days of their administration, including, finally, Joe Biden. But I thought most dramatically was Bernie Sanders, who finally came around to embracing vouchers, which you had embraced back in April of 2019. And he had an incredibly powerful story about why vouchers were so fundamental, shifting power to ordinary voters so that they are the one driving fundraising and the intention of candidates. And so, you know, my view is we've come a long way in five years. We came from the issue not even being recognized. No, no, no, no. It's not just me. No, no, no. I mean, there are a lot of

people that helped you.

There are a lot of people. Right.

When we think about this issue, though, you are the first name that comes to mind.

Right. So I think we're at this moment where, you know, the House of Representatives passed HR1 in 2019, the legislation passed by the House since the Voting Rights act of 1965. If we get the Senate, if we send the dark Lord Mitch McConnell back to Kentucky and we get the presidency, there is a chance that a year from now, we will look at what happened and say, holy Shit. We have passed fundamental reform, including public funding of congressional campaigns and I hope including something more like what you were talking about, vouchers to help drive that funding.

Democracy dollars.

Everyone gets democracy dollars. Yeah, yeah. Which is what you were very clear right up front. And then it was so funny. Kirsten Gillibrand's campaign I was talking to, and they're like, Andrew Yang says $100. Hell, we're going to say $600. $600 per voter if. If you have three. Three campaigns, President, Senate and House in one cycle. So you sparked it further. That's right. So I think we have a real shot if we can just get beyond the disaster that is looming in November of 2020.

This is very optimistic. And HR1 has many tremendous reforms in it. What are like the top reforms that you're excited about? And to the extent HR1 is missing anything, is it missing something?

Yeah, the most important thing in HR1 is public funding. It's missing a more robust voucher component because the kind of public funding it's framed around is matching funds, which is what New York City does. And matching funds are great, very helpful. But the point is, you're still appealing to a relatively small. I mean, you know, most rich people don't realize that the average American can't just write a check for $100 to a politician. That's just not within their capacity. But if they had a hundred dollar Democracy dollar, the way you were talking about it, of course, what else are they going to do with it? They're going to give it to politicians. So the point is that's a more fundamental reform we've got to build in. And I know the sponsors of HR1 are eager to think about how to expand it. So HR1, that's the most important thing. That gerrymandering ref is incredibly important. The restoration of the Voting Rights act is astonishing that we're still fighting about this issue. But yes, that's incredibly important. What it's missing is much stronger support for ranked choice. Voting. Yes, voting would have been extremely important in this Democratic primary as well as having an Iowa caucus that actually worked. That would have been helpful too. But I think that that's something a lot of people are talking about now we could begin to get towards. But I think those are the central, most important things that that bill carried.

Well, it would be a great leap forward to have matching funds for these congressional campaigns because some of the candidates we're seeing are generating popular enthusiasm and that if you got a bunch of small dollar donors, it could add up quickly. But I agree with you. People don't realize what a big deal it is for someone to donate 10, 20, 50 bucks to a political campaign. One, people don't have any disposable income lying around in that way. Like if you think 50, $100 to them, that's like a really big deal. Yeah, but the second thing is people are so burnt by politics that it takes like a really big connection or attachment to motivate someone to donate to a candidate. It's one reason why I'm so appreciative of the Yang gang rallying behind my campaign. Because I was really bad at dialing for dollars, Larry. I was terrible at it. So I was like, oh man, I hope some everyday American,

you know, when I was doing it and I did it very little. When we came to, you know, close to getting to the million dollars, my campaign manager sat me down and said, you've got to call these people and make sure it happens. Okay, So I did it. But the thing I was thinking as I was doing it is, okay, I hate this. Every normal person would hate this. What kind of person likes this? Because you know, that's the kind of person we're attracting to run for Congress. And you're like, do we really want our nation represented by the sort of person who likes sucking up to rich people for money? Because that's not how you build leadership in a nation.

I joke about it all the time that you'd have to be out of your mind to go to a cubicle farm and dial for dollars and think that was the way it ought to be. The problem is that as soon as you're in that cubicle farm, then you're like, well, I had to swim through shit to get here. And so now this system's going to protect me Because I'm an incumbent. I start out with, let's say, a million dollar advantage over Tom Dicker or Sally or whoever's going to run against me. So here it is. This moat now benefits me. So I guess I will suck it up and take advantage of the fact that I can do a soul crushing activity better than the next person.

The most depressing story I heard, a member of Congress told me, he said one of the things about Congress is it's totally broken institution. Nothing happens. It turns out fundraising is the one thing where you feel like you've accomplished something. It's like doing pushups. He says, I can go down for an hour and I can have my target and I can meet my target. I can feel like, holy shit, I did something. I accomplished something today. And you're like, oh, my God, this system is now built so that the only thing you feel proud of is your ability to raise money, because you can't do anything else. You can't legislate. You can't work with anybody. You can't bring about government services anybody's respectful of. It's just fundraising that is the measure of success.

That is very dark and very human and so important. There was a person running for president. Hopefully he doesn't mind that I say this, but Senator Michael Bennett and one of my colleagues was with him on the plane and was like, hey, so what's motivating the run? And he said, honestly, it's so I can try and get something done because I'm not getting shit done in the Senate because we don't pass anything.

Yeah.

And so it speaks to the same thing where if you have a good person who wants to accomplish something, unfortunately, dialing for dollars at least gives them that momentary reinforcement that they got something good done or good. I mean, you know, they succeeded. Yeah. Yeah. That's like such a microcosm of something, I think so here. One of the things I said on the trail was that in American life today, if you have money on one side and people on the other, the money's gonna win. Who's gonna win? And people all, like, uniformly in my events, they're all like, yeah, the money's gonna win. And so this is the case I made for Democracy dollar. I said, we have to unify the people and the money, and then you have a chance. Then the legislators start responding to you again. So to me, there's this whole chain of problems that we're trying to resolve. And HR1 goes part of the way around getting money to different types of candidates, gerrymandering voter access and negating voter suppression is another. And then you climb up the chain to Congress, and then you have all the corporate interests that are in their ear all of the time, the fact that they can't get anything done. And then you have, depending upon how you look at it, either above or below that, you have the media organizations that are driven by dollars of their own in the form of advertising revenue. And so if you are website or news channel, you figured out that if you gin up sentiments around a particular set of ideas and a particular audience, then you're going to stimulate more engagement, get more money. And so it starts skewing your editorial incentives in various ways so that you present news that excites or angers your audience.

Yeah. The politics of hate is the business model of cable television. It's the business model of digital platforms. And it's incredibly profitable. It just happens to be incredibly destructive for the capacity of a democracy to do anything. And yet that is the reality that we see in the way media operates. It's the reality around fundraising. I mean, the fact is, if you've got to raise money the old fashioned way, the most reliable technique you've got is the politics of hate to sort of gin up hatred to the other side, make it seem like they're the devil. If they have any power at all, it'll be the end of the republic. And that drives the passion to get money into your side. And if we, if we don't find a way to build democracy on top of a platform that doesn't depend on making us stupid and hate each other, we're not going to build a democracy. And I agree it's really important to recognize it's not just campaign finance reform finance. I mean, that's a symptom of a deeper problem. But the cable and the digital problem is really profound. And given the First Amendment, there's relatively little the government can do about it. But we need to think creatively about how we're going to address that problem too.

I have an idea that I'm trying to develop around it because to me, so you have. So let's put people here and then media, corporate interests sort of as a layer between people and legislators and we'll put legislators on top and then legislators have their own messed up incentives. So to me, the media layer is vital because right now we're turning on each other. We're more polarized than ever. A lot of people are losing faith that we can get anything done together, which is being borne out by the facts. You have Congress walking away from a recovery act even though it's obvious to all of us that we need to extend benefits. So the polarization is going to destroy us. And the media unfortunately benefits from that polarization. So what do you do? So here's my suggestion. You're right that we have First Amendment protections and no one necessarily wants folks to be governing what can and can't be said in various news outlets. On the other side you have over a thousand local newspapers that have gone out of business because they can't survive. You know, Craigslist and Internet ads have disrupted their advertising models. And so to me, if you want a functioning democracy, you need to have local papers and there have Been studies that showed that if you don't have any local news source in your town, then you just vote on very polarized lines and nothing ever gets done is bad for democracy. And when I was going around the country in Iowa, New Hampshire and Ohio and everywhere else, they were very passionate about this because they lost their paper and you kind of lose your identity if you don't have a local paper. So step one is to say, look, local journalism, or journalism generally is a public good in a functioning democracy, and we need a way to pay for it that is not advertising or subscription.

Yes. And so why don't you take an Andrew Yang like idea? You could imagine giving people journalism dollars that they could use to fund their local papers. I completely agree with you. And one thing we forget is that at the birth of this nation, the biggest expenditures the government made were expenditures designed to knit together an infrastructure of information. The post office was the forefront of that. I mean, now we're trying to starve the post office to defeat the election, but at that time, the post office was the biggest employer. And the biggest debate was whether they should make newspapers free to distribute or charge them a tiny little amount to filter out just junk. But their commitment to subsidize the production of news and information and the spread of information was absolute. And they realized you couldn't have a nation if you didn't have an infrastructure of informed citizens. I mean, Jefferson's idea here is really powerful and supportive. And what we've done is we've evolved into a nation where we've handed over the production of information to these platforms whose incentives have nothing to do with informing us in an imbalanced and meaningful way. Their incentives are to sell ads.

The opposite, unfortunately.

Yeah, yeah. And until we change those incentives, until that business model has changed, I don't know what we do now. There are alternatives. I mean, this right here, like a podcast. Podcast. I like to think about the, you know, the slow food movement, which basically says, like, if you just cook your

food, this is like the slow media movement.

Yeah, it's the slow democracy movement. Slow democracy movement. Like, if we do democracy in certain places, we can do it well, and if we do it in other places, we do it poorly. So if you do democracy on Twitter or Facebook, it's no good because you're reacting to the kind of politics of hate and you're being driven by ad incentives and all of that is bad. But if you do politics in like podcasts or long form narrative or town hall environments, then that's more fixed to us as humans. Like, we have a chance to reflect and to think and to hear both sides and to get deep on an issue. And so the question isn't so much whether we blow up Twitter, Facebook. The question is how can we channel more of our political attention into places where the attention span is greater than five seconds? I mean, you must have hit this all the time. You know, UBI is an obvious point once you understand it, but to understand it takes five minutes at least, or maybe 10 minutes an hour to explain it.

Yeah.

And how many, you know, I mean, you know, I'm a professor, so I have the opportunity to force people to listen to. To me, the lecture for an hour. But if you're out there on the campaign trail and you've got, like, 30 seconds to make your pitch, how are you going to explain an idea like UBI in a way that people can understand. But if you can bring them into a place like this, a podcast, where they listen for an hour to a conversation, then ordinary people, anybody can come around to understanding it. So the point is not that you need smart people. You need smart environments. It's not that you need, like, PhDs running government. You just need people placed in a context where they have an opportunity to actually understand before you ask them what they want to do. And we could build that environment. We just have no incentive to build it right now.

I'm a big believer in common sense and the judgment of ordinary Americans. You go to them and you say, hey, if you had a choice between bailing out Wall street or homeowners, which would you choose? Virtually every normal person would have been like, let's keep people in our homes. And, you know, I think that's a superior judgment than the one we actually adopted in 0809 again and again and again.

Yeah.

So I agree with you that you don't need degrees or erudition necessarily. You just need good information in an environment that's actually rewarded for providing you information in a way or judgment or discussion or argument, like in a way that's balanced and reasonable and meant to provide you the tools to participate in your own democracy. So here's the opportunity, maybe here's what I figured out, and this is the big plan I'm going to try and propose. Is that. So all these local papers have gone out of existence. We believe that we need to bring them back. I believe or support the ones that are hanging on. And so what you said about journalism dollars is right, is where I'm going. But the way that we Consume information now is so varied that my thought would be that it would essentially be a micro payment model tied to our attention. So let's imagine that every US citizen had $50 a month that goes to the stuff that they pay attention to. And so then there's. And you know, you can't make it complicated for people. So it's essentially just tied to whatever article I look at, or if I subscribe to something, you know, I can use some of it on that. And then we could end up creating like a positive set of supports for some of the journalism that we want without having to go down this road of like, you can't say this, you can't say that. In other words, you reward the positive without trying to circumscribe communications in other sectors. And you make it so that like, the unreasonable media is more clearly such, shall we say, if you've got like the carnival barker on the side, you know, yelling about things, then you can be like, look, you can yell like, you know, it's your right. It's just, you're not going to participate in this, in this journalism dollars set of incentives and rewards.

Well, so is journalism dollars directed to just the bottom line or is it directed to certain kind of activities that we know we can't do anymore? I mean, like the most important activity journalism used to do was investigative journalism. I mean, the only way to keep local governments honest was for a reporter to show up at city hall meetings or to, you know, go to city hall and talk to people. And now there are no reporters anymore. So the corruption at the local level is exploding. So is journalism dollars driven towards like, supporting particular kinds of journalism or it's just we're going to give based on the number of eyeballs that you happen to attract.

So the initial thought and part of the reason why I like being paid based on your attention is I'm also concerned that we have a creative atmosphere that is increasingly impossible for musicians, artists of all kinds, as well as journalists. But I agree with you that there's some fundamental public purpose to journalism. One of the things I suggested on the campaign trail was that we publicly fund a number of investigative journalists per congressional district, with the thinking being like, you know what? If you have a congressional district, I'm sure there's important stuff going on there. And so you have these journalism fellows that you can. It's a great idea and we had it. It's like the same number as like congressmen you get. It's federally funded. They're there. Like you would probably knight someone from within the community. It'd be like this big honor we essentially have to make journalism this publicly valued profession. And I got into this giant. Not giant. It was like a minor Twitter spat on this issue where I was like, look, journalism's dying and we need a new model to fix it. And then some journalists took issue with me and said, journalism's adapting and we're turning this a new thing. And then I just went on this mini diatribe. I was like, look, thousand plus local papers out of existence. I've been to those towns. People are. Are devastated by their loss. Every journalism, every journalist knows hundreds or thousands of colleagues who've lost their jobs over this last period of time. If a young person comes to you and asks about going into the field, you try and scare them off. You're like, this is not the field you want. You want to go into. You have major media outlets like Time magazine or. Not Time. Yeah, Time being bought by media moguls. No, sorry, tech moguls, as like trophy property. You know, Washington Post, you know, like, bought by Bezos. And so we have this market distortion of journalism that is going to make, in my opinion, a functional democracy, impossible to resuscitate, rejuvenate.

Well, I think it's a really important idea for creativity in general. I don't know if you know of my colleague Terry Fisher, who wrote this really wonderful book called Promises to Keep about copyright, and his idea for copyright was, you know, copyright used to be obsessed with controlling copies. In the digital age. That makes no sense. Instead, what we ought to do is just make it totally trivially easy for people to copy things all over the place. But then artists get paid based on the frequency with which their content gets consumed. So, you know, if you happen to be an incredibly popular artist, like we're tracking who's consuming what, and you get paid based on the fact that people want to listen to you 10 times more than Lyle Levitt. I'll never understand that, but that just seems to be the reality of music. So that's a way of encouraging people to create and encouraging the sharing of creativity, but also guaranteeing that artists get paid. And I think that would work for a good chunk of the journalism part. But I do think that the other idea you were talking about is really critical. You need journalists who in some sense, are not thinking about the bottom line. The great thing the New York Times can do is that it can say to a investigative journalist, like, take a year. Just think about this for a year. And at the End of it. If we've got something, we got something. If we don't, we don't. But I'm not going to. Your job is not going to hang on whether you get a Pulitzer Prize winning article at the end. And so I think these fellowships is a really great idea. Like, ProPublica supports the idea of basically creating effectively fellowships in journalism. We could multiply that. I love the congressional district because you want to really drive it into the local jurisdictions and say, like, there are 10 Journalist Fellow ProPublica Fellows in every district, and then let these people be judged locally about whether they're doing good work. But at least you'd begin to drive attention to an area which right now there's no return for. Like, why would you ever talk about it?

Yeah. So there are so many things we need to do in media sector in particular. It's funny. And you were ahead of me on this as well. You know, your last book talked about a lot of these issues. I kind of lived it. I lived my version of it. But I'm convinced changing the incentives for media has to be part of the puzzle or part of the process, because at this point, people are getting their information in very limited ways. And when you talk about podcasts, too, this is like a thing that I'm very sensitive to. It's like, podcasts work for folks like you and I that have a following, but it's not like a real replacement. Like, do I love podcasts? Yes, I do. You know, obviously we're on it. And that was one of the things that some folks in the media came back to me about where they said, like, look, like we have these podcasts. And I said, well, you have that podcast because you're a big deal journalist and you actually can get audience. But it's not like the format does not replace other forms of journalism. It certainly doesn't replace the investigative journalism you're talking about.

Yeah, I don't think it replaces it. All I'm trying to think about is like, how do we get. Yeah. How do we get people into the right context for the kind of question we want them to think about? I mean, this is. I think what's interesting here is I just think this is the sort of problem we never had to worry about before. Like, serious problems were in context where you had serious attention to think about it. You had time to think about it, and now we got to make sure that's possible instead of, like, imagining people are going to make a judgment about who the Democratic nominee is going to be. Based on their Twitter feed or their Facebook news feed. Like, how do we get them into a place where they have a better opportunity to think about the range of people? So, you know, you experience New Hampshire an extraordinary context where people meet people face to face over the course of two years. By the end of that two year period, everybody knew who Andrew Yang was. Everybody knew your character. They didn't know you through your ads on, I don't know if you had television ads, but they didn't know you through ads.

Yeah, we spent approximately, I think it was something like 4 or 5 million on TV in New Hampshire alone.

That's great. But that's not how they. But not just because of that. The point is they could see you face to face and know your character. I mean, I remember that town hall where, you know, you appeal to our children and like, what are we leaving our children? And you, your eyes welled up and I looked out in the audience and people were weeping. That was because New Hampshire puts politics at a personal retail level. And so people have a deep understanding of the character because of the place that they begin to meet them. And we got to think that way about these problems generally. Like, you know, it's okay to think about what brand of toothpaste you need to be consuming at the kind of Twitter level attention span. Like, you don't need to worry about that so much. But who the next president should be or like whether UBI should be at the center of any economic plan. That takes real thought, not smart thought. It just takes, as you were saying, common sense thought, but common sense driven by people who have an opportunity to understand both sides and to reflect on it in a way that gives them confidence.

Okay, so at this point we've enacted some level of democracy reform among people in financing elections. We've somehow fixed the media, and then now we're at the top of the chain and you have these legislators who are there and they're getting nothing done. They're dialing for dollars just to feel good about themselves. People are in despair over what the heck we can do to change the culture in Washington. So one of the things I came out for was term limits in part because I think that government service ought to be a term of service and not a multi decade long career. And I think your institutional, institutionalization goes up over time. And D.C. i don't know how much time you spent in D.C. but D.C. is such an institutional town. Like you get there and you can almost feel like that these like, scales forming, like around, like yourself where you just become more like part of the environment. So what can be done at that top level to help improve legislator incentives?

Well, I like the idea of term limits, but only if it's tied to changing the way we fund campaigns. I think it does no good at all if we continue to fund campaigns in the same way. Because whether you're a fifth term or a tenth term person, if you're still getting money from the same people, you're still responding to the same incentives. But I think what's striking, especially in our party, is how hard it is to make this argument at a really practical, personal level. So, you know, in my state, there's a Democratic primary being fought right now between Joe Kennedy and Markey, who's like, you know, a really. Is a really great senator who's been in Washington for 40 years now. Ed Markey. Ed Markey's votes, except for his vote on Iraq and his unwillingness to discipline President Obama and his more hawkish moments, I think practically every one of Ed Markey's votes, I love. But the point is, there's something weird about the Democratic Party that it allows itself to be filled with these people who think that they should go to Washington and just stay. I mean, the average age of the Democratic leadership is 72. The average age of the Republican leadership is 58. So there's this huge difference between the parties. And we need a way to articulate the idea, do your term of service, as you put it, I think nicely, and then go home. Not because you failed or not because we don't like you, or not because in some sense this is a punishment, but because we need a party that encourages new people to come in and to feel like there's a place for them to come in and for something for them to do, especially the Democrats, because, as you know, the most important demographic are people under the age of 30. If we can't get those people to turn out and vote at the same percentage that people over the age of 65 vote, we never win. And yet seems to be the way to do that is begin to bring generations in who are at least aware or closer to this generation. And one way to do that is to whether it's formal term limits or just a kind of norm, you've been there long enough, all praise to you for your service, but it's time to move on.

Well, I'm open to things other than term limits. There was an Onion headline that I found hysterical, but also it made me think it was the American people hire their own Lobbyist to go to Capitol Hill. And then there's a person being like, I represent the American people of Congress. So term limits, I know, is a relatively dramatic measure, which I am for. For a number of reasons. I agree with you that you couldn't do it independent of democracy reform in the ideal world. In my mind, you have democracy dollars, where everyone gets $100. So you have very much candidates funded by the people. And then you had terms of service where people came and went. And so you could speed up a lot of what's happening in D.C. in my opinion, the best congressman I spoke to, I've spoken to a lot of them, but he said, I'm just trying to get something done so I can go home. You know, like, that's actually the best attitude you can have. And he was true to his word. He did go home. So Eddie didn't get anything done. So he did half of what he set out to. So I'm for these things, but I recognize that they're relatively dramatic, and I'm open to things that could move the needle in D.C. that are things that people could adopt sooner, rather than doing something as dramatic as having term limits for members of Congress.

Yeah. And I think it's norms that are so important. I mean, I think we're seeing this on the dark side of Washington right now, that one of the most dramatically destructive dynamics with the Trump administration is their destruction or failure to recognize basic norms of governance, like the appropriate way to respond to Congress, the appropriate way to tell the truth. And, you know, and I think norms are a really important regulator here. And I think that the Democratic Party just began articulating a norm. You know, we're going to give you a really important party after You've served for 20 years in Congress. And we're going to say you've been an amazing public servant, and we're going to build a.

Have a statue, the take a hint retirement party. It's like the new. Like, congratulations, you did it. And then everyone ignores you the next day when you come in, it's like 20 years in one day. Everyone, like, shoves you. The new Norman.

God, you don't need any constitutional amendment for do that. We could do that tomorrow. Yeah, maybe we should.

It sounds like the kind of thing like various strange social clubs do. So that there was. So that there is a suggestion in this direction of restoring earmarks, which I am for as well, because I looked up and said, okay, I can't get anything done. And at this point, I am more rewarded by seeming Like a strident warrior to my people, regardless of whether or not anything gets done. And it drives everyone to despair. And so in an era of earmarks, you could say, look, I got you this pork museum. I got a museum for pork. Like, I sort of combined two ideas there. But I funded school improvements, we funded this bridge restoration we actually needed. And so there's this feeling like, that members of Congress are trying to bring home the bacon for their districts, and then that got attacked as a source of corruption and wasteful spending. And the rest of it.

Well, again, it depends on how you're funding campaigns. If you fund campaigns in the way you're talking about funding campaigns, I don't think there's any problem with earmarks. Why not? There's a question of how efficiently government resources get allocated. Because it's a hard question. My congresswoman, Jackie Speier, when I lived in California, created a citizens commission to make recommendations to her about earmarks. We held hearings and we had people come in and present all their ideas. And, you know, some were ideas like, we need this park reconfigured. Other were ideas like, we have a brand new way to deal with antibiotics to make it so that they're no longer drug resistant. You know, and it's a kind of question which nobody on the panel had any qualification to make a judgment of. But, you know, this guy needed $50,000 or $100,000 to get this idea going. So I have some skepticism about the process, but if there were no fear about corruption because you weren't funding campaigns indirectly through earmarks, they're fine. The problem with earmarks in the old system was that you would find people basically doing an indirect quid pro quo. So the earmark would go to a foundation in the district, and the members of the board for that. Foundations in the district would contribute large amounts of money to the congressperson.

To your campaign. That's not true.

Yeah. To your campaign. Yeah. So you gotta make sure that there's no chance for that. And if you just have public funding of congressional campaigns, there's no chance for that. So, fine, fix that problem. Then you can have earmarks, just like fix that problem. Then you can have term limits,

the earmarks. The citizen commission seems like genius to me because if you can imagine a member of Congress being like, hey, I'm going to bring home this money. What should we do with it? And then folks coming and being like, we should do this for this park. We should do this for. It was really inspirational or whatnot. I would love it. You can even imagine that becoming really fun and engaging. Because now with technology you can say like, hey, I'm Congressperson X, like what do you think we should fund in our district? These are not results, but I'm just interested in what you all think. And then people would be like, huh, what do I like?

Yeah, no, again, institutional design is really important. So I love the idea of the citizen commission, but make sure they're randomly populated because if you have a regular citizen commission, then again you have the incentive for corruption. So if I'm on the citizens commission and you know that you've got to please me, then in order to get the earmark, then you'll find other ways of pleasing me to make sure that I want to help you get that earmark. But if we could use, you know, there's a big experiment going on around the world right now of these randomly selected panels or sortition methods for making citizen decisions. Like Belgium has created almost parallel parliament that is just randomly selected citizens making recommendations with some force. France is experimenting with the same idea. Ireland did it, Iceland did it. For drafting a constitution. I think we should be doing this much more, not so much to make decisions, but at least to make recommendations. Because if you have a well represented sample, so randomly selected representative of a public relatively large with a chance to deliberate and being given information, I would bet 99% of the time that judgment will be infinitely better than what politicians would make or anybody else would make.

I tweeted at the height of my frustration over what's going on in Congress. I said, there are times that I think that we could pick citizens at random and make them our leaders and wind up with a superior result than what we are getting. And it got something like 100,000 likes because everyone's, yeah, everyone's feeling the same thing. And a lot of people suggested sortition. They said like, you know, why don't, why aren't we just selecting folks? I agree with you. Having them as recommenders would be awesome because you'd end up with like a perspective and voice that you wouldn't have otherwise. You probably do want to have some kind of check or authority. One of the reasons why I am so for earmarks is just I have a sense of how you try and get decisions through large bodies of people. And if I was a legislator and like I go against you, like you or I'm for you, then it's like, well what happens? Like what, what do I get or not get, you know, and like it and, and if you have incentives Particularly who have, during mentor districts that you have incentives. It's like, you know, it's better for me to take this extreme position and, and then I'll be rewarded for it because I won't be primaried. Rather than have this stretch and say, okay, what could I get on board with? And then if the leadership comes to you and says, look, you get on board with this and I will offer you this for your district, I do not think that's bad. Personally, I feel like that's like a necessary element of having a functional legislature.

It's such an important point. Such an important point because we have this conception of Congress where everybody is supposed to be an ideologue and everybody's supposed to remain uncompromised in their position. So that like, if you ever vote in a way that doesn't reflect perfectly your extreme right wing or extreme left wing position, you in some sense are a sinner. That's not how deliberative bodies work. The whole idea of a Congress, you know, let me say that I'm a left winger and I'm going to Congress and I will try to represent my left wing views, but I gotta work with people who are not left wingers, they're right wingers. And we gotta make a decision for the nation as a whole and we gotta have a mechanism for allowing us to come to an agreement, a compromise, like, I'll give you this, you give me that. And so I agree with you. You could imagine earmarks being another tool to facilitate this compromise. And that's how they were used. So long as they're not also tools for corruption. And again, the simplest way to do that is just fix campaign finance.

Yeah, so I've been trying to figure out, because when I was running for president, my great fear was that you'd get to Washington and not be able to get anything done. So I was looking for structural changes you could make that would actually enable you to get something done. Because the dark thing is that the folks in Washington in my mind are not really getting rewarded for getting things done anymore. They're getting rewarded for accruing resources, making the moat nice and deep and wide so no one can challenge them, and avoiding any headline making scandals like that. Those seem to be like the main incentives. And if you do those things, then you'll be fine, you'll get to stay in D.C. and what happens to the people is not actually tied to your fate. So I was looking for ways that we could change that up. One thing I'm passionate about, which I'D imagine it's a little further afield. But it goes back to the media element, is that I was staggered by the lack of measurement and discipline around the conversation we're having about various things where you say, hey, is this working? Is this good? Is this not good? And then it's literally just an argument. It's like, this was great. No, it's terrible. And you're like, okay, like, what happened there? You know, it's like you just look around and be. And be like, well, is it working? You know, like, to me, some of the things that got me to run were the fact that, like, we're spending twice as much on our health care to worse results in other countries. Well, that doesn't seem to be very effective, or our life expectancy is declining, or drug overdoses have surged to record levels, or, you know, like things that objectively you look at and say, well, these are not signs of a healthy society. There are all of these things around. Democracy reform, too. My great fear, Lawrence, is that the parties, and this is a guy, an author named Philip Howard said this is that the parties will just play. You lose, I lose, you lose, I lose over and over again. While, like our towns sink into the ground like the feedback mechanism between our lives and our leaders. Fortunes, like the link has been severed and so now it doesn't matter. And then more and more people, as their lives disintegrate, will then give up hope, not vote, not participate, not donate $20. Because they just don't believe that the systems, systems designed to care about them.

And they're right. I mean, you know, there is an important, powerful group in America who benefit if the government does nothing. And they want the government to do nothing. And the easiest thing to get in Washington is to stop the government from doing something. So doing nothing is extraordinarily profitable to a huge class of lobbyists and people in the private sector. And they win because we've built already. We inherited a constitutional design with checks and balances that made it extremely hard to get anything done. Francis Fukuyama's work about the vetocracy, which is what we've got right now, where so simple. To veto any substantive change means that we basically are stalemated. We can't do anything. And so for stalemated, there's no climate change legislation. The healthcare industry can continue to charge whatever it wants for whatever it serves. Pharmaceuticals get to do whatever they want. There's no. All of these public goods that we need some way to address. We can't address.

Can you anything.

Big tech. Yeah. And all of that is not accidental. It's because we've. They've allowed the system. We've allowed the system to become one where if you're powerful, you can always block something. And so what we need is a system where that's no longer true. And one way to make that happen is to cut this. Cut the incentive connection by making it so congressmen are not worried about what the Jeff Bezos equivalents want. They're worried about what their ordinary citizens want. So if they go home and their citizens say, where is the health care that's affordable? And they know that that's what matters to them, raising money and getting elected, then they'll be responsive to it. It's not. It's not rocket science. It's about getting the right incentives into the system.

Everyone has negative power. You're right, Lawrence. And our system is designed for inertia. Congressman came to me, or I came to him, and he said to me, when he arrived in D.C. he said, it's like the marble columns are there to remind you that nothing will change. So we have this. This unfortunate kind of mini drama of, like, rising and falling while nothing fundamental gets fixed and nothing fundamental changes. And there are extraordinarily wealthy and powerful corporations that just benefit from nothing big changing.

Yeah, yeah. And yet we find a way to get ourselves worked up and angry about every kind of issue without focusing on the fact that there's no capacity to basically steer, you know, the ship. So, you know, we're arguing on the deck about, like, you know, what we're eating for dinner without thinking about the fact that still we can't steer the ship, and the ship is eventually, you know, going to run aground. And, you know, this year, 2020 has been as close to running in the ground as I could have imagined, you know, and, you know, I just read an article about Europeans looking at the United States and saying, you know, as we imagine 300,000Americans dying from this pandemic, the huge proportion of which caused by our own governmental ineptitude. And this article was about Europeans looking at us saying, we just can't believe it. Is there no recognition of the cost in humanity? Like humanity forward, for God's sake? Right. The absolute human costs that have been suffered because of this ineptitude and a willingness to do something about it. Yet here we are still wondering whether this man will be reelected or whether, you know, the election will be so marred with corruption and ineptitude that he has a capacity to stay in power even Though I can't believe the majority of Americans would want this man to be their president.

It's a heartbreaking, devastating time. I'm sure people around the world are looking at America in disbelief. And for me, I have family members who left this country to go to other places that had managed Covid better where they can live normal lives and their, you know, friends who are in other countries who aren't coming back. One, I think because they might not be allowed to come back. But two, they're like, hey, my kids can walk around outside here in a way that, you know, like. Or we can go to restaurants, more appropriately because we can go outside. Yeah, it's. It's a tragic, terrible time. And when you talk about no one's steering the ship run aground, I mean, this is it, you know, like, we have taken the ship and crashed into shore and hundreds of thousands are dying. Millions, tens of millions will be out of work. We can't agree on cash relief. The only hope I have is that the pendulum will swing dramatically when we're in position to try and rebuild the country. Certainly your ideas are so core and key. You definitely moved democracy reform up for me from wherever it was to something like 1A or 2 after universal basic Income. Because obviously I'm like the universe Basic Income guy. You and I can alternate. But the thing that I love, Lawrence, is that you ran on your heart and your values in 2015, 2016, and then if everything goes well, you may get a lot of your vision accomplished five years later, if HR1 passes and I ran on Universal Basic Income, and hopefully it will not take five years for us to pass it, because I don't think we have five years. I might have thought we had five years a number of months ago, but now we don't have five weeks. We need to make big moves.

Well, I think we should recognize our party is going to be tested. I think there's a really good chance that we take control of Congress and the presidency and then we'll see who our party really is. Because one part of the party, the part that I want to believe in, is the reformer part. The part that says ideas like ubi, ideas like fundamental democracy, reform is what the party stands for. Let's do it. Let's just make it happen. And they say it will happen. But there's another part of the party that I think is still stuck in the old ways. And they say, well, public funding for campaigns, who knows whether that will really work? Let's just have more transparency or like, tiny little tittles on the corners of nothing. And I really fear that if we take over and the Democrats don't go through with these fundamental reforms, then we really will be in a catastrophe. So it's bad enough right now, given the disaster for the President and the control of the Senate, that we don't have these changes, but if we actually gain control of Congress and they don't deliver, then. Then I think it's time to talk about the next stage in this revolution because obviously the ordinary democratic process has not worked.

I agree. There is a need and a challenge for the Democratic Party to go big and solve some of these meaningful structural problems so that Americans can see that they're not just crouching there and making some window dressing marginal actions. And they don't recognize it, I fear, because some of them have been there for a long time and their lives are very, very disconnected from the lives of most everyday Americans at this point. But they need to rise to the challenge in a very, very big way. We need to. If you include the two of us, we're the reform element. The Democratic Party hopefully is the vessel for that reform. But if it is not, oh my gosh, will there end up being like a whole massive collision? Hopefully that need is clear to them.

Yeah. Because if they don't deliver, I mean, then we're going to have to have another podcast and talk about what the next structure is, because it's not going to be this party.

I agree with you, Laurids. Let's put a pin in that. We'll check back in a little while and see whether HR1's passed, whether the party's rising the challenge. But this conversation has been awesome and edifying. I learned so much from you, and your ideas are vital to the future of our country. We need to make them a reality as soon as possible. And I appreciate your patriotism and service by stepping up five years ago and helping show me and many others the light. Seriously, I donated. I was like, this guy's a genius and correct and he's highlighting something that most of us are not thinking enough about.

I appreciate it, Andrew, and thank you so much for running. You were such an inspiration to so many great people and you brought them back. You brought them into politics and that was the most important contribution you could make.

Oh, thank you. It means so much to me. Were your kids Yang Gang? Was that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yes. That's all I wanted.

My oldest was a little surprised that I knew Andrew Yang. I told him and he said, no, come on, you don't know. Andrew Yang. I said yeah.

Oh, you can talk to him. You can be like and Andrew Yang, or like this, which we are. I mean, I feel grateful to know you, and I'll continue to pick your brain and learn from you every step of the way. Great.

Me, too. Great to talk to you, Andrew.

You too. Be well, Lawrence. All the best of the family.