Representative Khanna on H.R. 1 and the Fight for Reform

This podcast is part of the Democracy Group. This is Larry Lessig. This is another episode of Another Way. Today I'm going to talk with a really special friend, someone I've known for many years. When he left Yale Law School, he came out to California when I was teaching at Stanford. And he worked, helped volunteered in the center that we had for Internet and society. He was a lawyer. And in 2004 he decided to take on the Democratic congressman in our district. And when he took on Tom Lantos, who had been in Congress for as long as Congress, I think, but he took him on because he believed so strongly that a Democrat should not have voted to support the war in Iraq. And though everybody recognized, I think even Roe, the idea of taking on such a powerhouse, such an extraordinary person in so many other ways was not a viable plan for victory. It was a way of marking the character of who Roe was. And so when he in 2016 beat Mike Honda, who had been a eight term congressperson, he had run in 2014 and came a couple points behind him. But in 2016, because of the jungle primary, was able to eventually trounce with 60% of the vote. I think it was a recognition that this was someone much more than just another Democratic politician. And that's who I think of him as. He's a man of ideas and principle and talent, political talent. And he's been one of the most important progressive voices for fundamental democracy reform. You'll hear us talk about that in this conversation. But as well, the Internet Bill of Rights leader in the NO PAC Caucus, which is members of Congress who don't take PAC money, the Stopped Bezos act, you might wonder, why would a congressperson from Silicon Valley be so aggressive in checking the power of technology companies? But you wouldn't wonder that if you knew Ro Kahana. So I'm so happy to have him on our show. So, Ro Kahana, thank you so much for joining us. So we've been talking on this podcast about something I know that's very close to your heart, which is reform of our political system and in particular money and politics. And obviously the House is on the verge of taking up an extraordinarily important piece of legislation. Nancy Pelosi has made it her cause to enact H R1 for the people Act. I just wonder from the front lines, what's your view on where we are on this legislation right now?

Well, first of all, Larry, you deserve a lot of credit and I know you're modest, but you've really put the reform agenda on my Radar on Sarbanes radar on the House Democrats radar. A lot of people, as you know, ran on reform in both 2018 and 2020. It's an issue that cuts across the ideological spectrum. It even cuts across, to some extent. I mean, there is a sense that the system is rigged, that it's not working for ordinary Americans, and that the problem is structural. So this remains the top priority. After Covid relief, I'm optimistic we're going to get every House member on the bill, and then really the question becomes the Senate. And the issues that are the most challenging in the Senate are ones around the Voting Rights act, around some of the reforms on gerrymandering. But the. The issue will really come down to what we can get through the Senate.

Right. So we're going to. I hope we can talk about the Senate in a second, but I just want to make sure that we understand. Obviously, people listening to this podcast have heard about HR1amillion times, and they've heard about the Voting Rights act part. We had a great conversation with Guy Charles about the importance of H R1 as being the first thing to bring, as opposed to HR1, which is an important piece of legislation as well, but maybe less solid from this court's perspective, and so therefore not to be wasted instead of HR1. But you've been central for many years in pushing reform in the way we fund campaigns. You and I appeared in a movie together, kind of a crazy movie about

this, My Brief Moment of Fame,

the first round of that. But you've pushed the idea that obviously people listening in this podcast know I have as well, what our friend Bruce Ackerman refers to as democracy dollars or democracy vouchers. And you had your own bill that was pushing democracy vouchers. HR1 has a pilot program for that. But I, but I wonder whether you've seen more interest in Congress over time for this idea. And whether you think, whether in HR1 or later, we can expect to see a much more ambitious effort to see this as part of how we fund campaigns.

I do, and I think

the structure of grassroots mobilization is changing the conversation in Washington. Let me tell you what I mean. The fact that Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez can go online and raise $5 million for Texas through a few emails and tweets shows the power of mobilizing. I mean, she wasn't doing call time, picking up the phone, talking to big

donors, saying, I need your help.

And so what people are seeing is, wow, there's this alternative model that can be so successful in Raising funds in, empowering people in running campaigns. How do we maximize it? And the challenge is that that's still a very small group of people who are participating. And what Democracy Dollars really does, in my view is makes that model the way that Bernie ran his games, the way that Representative Ocasio Cortez ran Hurricane Pace, the way some Republicans have run their campaigns who are more populous, the defining way of running campaigns. And so I think there is increasing understanding of the power of that being driven by these forces.

Your Bill had proposed $50 voucher. This is an idea I had pushed in my book in 2011 as well, in the 2016 campaign, 2020 campaign. We saw almost an arms race around that. I mean Bernie importantly came out and supported vouchers too. You were his co chair and I'm sure you had a lot of conversations that led him to that. But we saw others. Andrew Yang supporting hundred dollar vouchers, Kirsten Gillibrand supporting 200 per race. It seems like more people are seeing its importance, but I wonder whether people see its importance in bringing in people who aren't necessarily at the political extremes. I mean, one of the concerns have with a matching fund proposal is will that just amplify the extremes? Because those are the people who are most eager to put their money in. But with vouchers we bring in everybody. And I just wonder whether you've seen work or whether you've had reason to have an intuition about whether this would be a more leavening or broad based way to bring small dollar contributions in than just the matching funds.

I think vouchers would be for the reasons you say, because the matching funds, though I think an improvement, are going to go to people who can afford either $250 or can afford to make sizable contributions on their own. Whereas the vouchers have two purposes. One, they make it far more broad based. So you're taking the donor base from maybe 5% or 10%, I don't know what it is, of America's, to a far larger number. And it's also encouraging participation. I think the biggest challenge of the voucher program is going to be outreach and adoption. It's how are you going to get people to participate. And so it's actually going to require the building of our democracy in a way that Stacey Abrams did in Georgia. And you're going to have far more mobilization. The reason I think it's actually a great time to do it is that I don't know about you, but I think that the heightened activism right now is the highest, certainly in my lifetime. And this would be a time where people would participate in vouchers and get excited about it. And so it seems to be a particularly good time to run with that idea.

And I think you're exactly right about the Stacey Abrams reference, because I think what it's going to take is real innovation on the ground. Obviously, we need an efficient government agency to enable a system like that to work, but it's only going to spread when candidates learn how to bring more people into the process of demanding their voucher or turning their voucher over or doing whatever it takes to make sure it's part of the system. But we have that incentive in the innovation of new candidates and new movements. And so it could grow very quickly if we could at least have it as part of a big pilot or alternative to the existing system for funding campaigns.

You're absolutely right. I mean, I think when you look at Seattle or some of the places it's been piloted, many places it's worked, and the criticism sometimes is, well, was there not enough voter outreach? Was there not enough people using it? And too often, I think the. The reform efforts are theoretical and they make sense, but they don't pay sufficient attention to adoption. You needed the Voting Rights act, obviously, landmark legislation, but then you also needed the activism of so many in the south to actually make voting a reality. And so I think we're going to need just, we need the reform, but

then we're going to need the building

of our democratic capability and getting people engaged and using this in ways that's going to take a lot of work.

So there's work on the ground. There's work in Congress, too. So I was incredibly impressed that you did such an extraordinary job with Bernie, because I saw Bernie at a town hall in New Hampshire give what was the most compelling argument in favor of vouchers, not instead of matching funds, but as a complement to matching funds. And that was obviously a large measure of the persuasion that you had delivered to him in your conversations with others. And I'm eager. You know, you've got an interesting relationship with even people like Matt Goetz. I wonder whether this is an alternative that people on the right can be open to at least, or what is the reason they want to shut it down.

So with Matt, I mean, he's. And he cites me for it, he doesn't take corporate PAC money and he doesn't take PAC money, which is a step. I mean, obviously, I think there's still much more reform. But the big challenge that people Say on the right is they say, well, are you restricting speech? And then I say, no, actually we're not. I mean, the vouchers don't prevent a Bloomberg for putting in $1 billion of his, his own money. They just incentivize him not to do that. And they incentivize and they give people a fighting chance against, against that wealth. But there's still. Because so many of the progressive frameworks were restricting spending, when people hear campaign finance on the right, they still think if it fundamentally is restricting as opposed to empowering. And I think what was so ingenious with your and Bruce's idea is it actually is constitutional under Buckley v. Valeo and the Roberts Court. We can talk about our district agreements or disagreements and I disagree with a lot of those decisions. But you've designed something that Republicans theoretically should get behind.

Yeah. So why do we have a single Republican yet supporting proposals like this on your bill? Did you have any Republican co sponsors?

No, because campaign finance has become such a hot button issue that they think campaign finance Democrat and they think this is a public spending proposal. And that's really where they say, well, why should taxpayer money be going to fund Roe's views on being pro choice or being proud gay marriage? And why is tax dollars going to. So partly it's just scaring people. It's sort of like the foreign aid budget. People don't know that the total amount of whether it's 6 to 10 billion and that's being generous, assuming we wanted to match or actually double total election spending, is, you know, a little bit about 1% of our defense budget. So this isn't going to break the bank. But when you go out and you say, do you want $6 billion of federal money to fund politicians? It's a clever line. And secondly, this idea that tax dollars are funding speech, and so that's really the ideological opposition or the bridge we have to cross to get Republicans on board.

So if we pass HR1, obviously it'll have a pilot program in it. I wonder how optimistic you are about the bureaucratic infrastructure to make it, that this pilot program would really have a shot, or whether you think we ought to consider expanding or becoming more aggressive in building a democracy infrastructure that could test ideas and see what works and develop best practices that might guide reform in Congress.

Yeah. No. So what would a democracy infrastructure look like, Larry? I mean, flesh it out a little bit.

Well, so I just published a little piece, not that you would read every one of my pieces immediately when it was published.

I read A lot of them. I read a lot of them.

There's a thing called the Administrative Conference of the United States, which was launched at the birth, in a pilot way, at the birth of the administrative state, because basically people realized they didn't know how to do the administrative state. But what it is is a kind of organization that takes academic and professional reviews of how the administrative state works and like proposes reforms and changes to make the system more efficient and more effective. And so you can imagine an equivalent democracy conference of the United States. And, you know, you wouldn't want it inside of Congress or inside the White House because you wouldn't want it to be tied directly to one political party or one. One branch. But it too could become systematic in looking at ideas and what works and in what different systems around the country are effective and which ones are not, and give Congress a really effective way to evaluate which of their reforms are having the effects that they would want to have. It's kind of striking we don't have that kind of clearinghouse right now, given that we kind of think of our democracy as something that's central and important and something we do well. But it would seem that this is exactly the pilot program around. The vouchers would be exactly the example of a context where having real capacity could be really advantageous to Congress and obviously to the effectiveness of these reforms.

Absolutely. I mean, I think that makes a tremendous amount of sense. And more generally, I think we have to figure out how to have greater experimentation and innovation in Congress. I'll tell you what I've been most surprised by. I mean, everyone knows the impact of special interests and lobbyists, and there's no doubt in my mind that vouchers were there, and if we diminish that money, we would solve something. But it is not the only barrier. I mean, there's a bill that I have. I don't want to go into too much details because I don't want to give away folks, but you have a case where a lot of the political leadership is behind it and there's some staffer on some committee who's opposed to it, and they can hold it up. And so you have basically this town where There are about 50 different people who can kill an idea, and it takes almost a miracle to get all of them operating in the same direction. And I think this was designed because we were of just total risk aversion that we were so concerned of change. And we're the leading country and we're a powerful country and don't let people Mess it up. And of course, now, not only do we need to be more innovative, but we have this huge structural inequality. But there's something beyond just money in politics. There's something about the system that makes it very, very hard to get things done.

Fukuyama calls the United States a vetocracy.

That's a great phrase.

Yeah. So we've, like, we have all of these places where change can be vetoed, and obviously money layers onto that to make it worse than even the constitutional design. But the framers plainly wanted something like a vetocracy. But when we're in this moment where we need to be able to make some kind of reform or some kind of change, it's incredibly dangerous to be unable to make any move at all. But it's interesting.

Think about the vitacracy point on this, which it just is so absurd when you step back and you say, okay, $15 minimum wage. It's passed overwhelmingly in these states. President Biden campaigns on it, wins on it. The House campaigns on it. The Senate majority leader wants it, the speaker wants it, the president wants it, people want it. And what is it gonna come down to? It's gonna come down to the decision of a Senate parliamentarian who's unelected about whether it is in reconciliation or not. So you're telling me that one Senate parliamentarian theoretically could kill veto a wage race for Americans. Now, technically, the Senate president could overrule the parliamentarian, but as a practice, we've given that parliamentarian so much authority and like that. There are staff directors and people you would never even think of who've been given authority. And whether they're intentionally doing the bidding of lobbyists and special interests or they have just been acculturated into that framework, it is an incredibly difficult thing for us to overcome.

The culture here is really important. When I did my book Republic Lost, the most startling statistic I came across, I can't remember, it's 73 or 74. But in one of those years, the average salary of a staffer was the same as an average. The average salary of a lobbyist. And so what that means is, like, if you wanted to affect policy, why would you be a lobbyist? Why not be a staffer? And of course, now the lobbyist salary is an order of magnitude more than a staffer. And there's this, as Jim Cooper puts it, a kind of farm league for K Street describes maybe Congress and also staffers in Congress. So your concern, I think, is a really important one. If you've got a staffer who's like looking down the road literally to K Street and thinking, what's going to make this transition effective? Being on the right side of key players inside of a firm might be in a really effective way to make sure that that transition happens.

Absolutely. And so I think that there is the mercenary or the career interest, and then there's just a sense where if you've had staffers doing something for 20 years thinking about something in the same way. So, for example, there are probably staffers on the Hill who have spent 20 years thinking that deficits really matter more than now. The new economic theories say they do. And Paul Krugman's changed his view, Larry Summers has changed his view, but it hasn't necessarily permeated all the way down to the committee staff or making the decisions or even the cbo. And so now you've got this ideology that has been in folks for 20 years. These new electeds are, say, coming through. You know, Mondir Jones and Jamal Bowman, they're talking about the current moment. But then they get into Congress and they realize, wow, the governing institution is 20 years old. And here's the challenge. Look, this happens in academics all the time, right? When you wrote code as well, I mean, I don't know, maybe your reception was an instantaneous hit or maybe, you know, when John rolls the justice, you know, usually what happens is, is, you know, it takes 15, 20 years and then people say, wow, that was really brilliant. Or people now say, wow, Rawls is great. But it wasn't initially. The thing is, in the academy, we can afford that. We don't have to recognize brilliance the minute is there a change. But in politics, there's a real consequence. It's human lives. So if you're not recognizing change and it's taking 10, 15 years, there's a real problem with that. And that to me is as big an issue. It doesn't get talked about, the cultural stagnation, but to me it's as big an issue as the lobbyists and the special interests.

That's a great point. Let's talk a little bit about the Senate. Obviously, it seems the House has the votes to be able to pass H R1. And then the question in the Senate is much more complicated. First, there's like a motivation question. It would seem that for the Democrats recognizing redistricting and given the court has now signaled there's no constraint to partisan districting, that the redistricting in after this cycle is going to be an order of magnitude worse than the districting in the last cycle, it would seem that the Democrats would be extremely motivated to try to layer onto this process the nonpartisan redistricting that HR1 would require. S1 would require. Now, is there any way to imagine parts of this getting through the reconciliation loophole or. I don't know if it's a passageway or wormhole, whatever the conceptual thing to conceive of, to see it as. Or is all of this going to have to hang on whether you can get around the filibuster or. Or get an exception?

I think most of it's going to hang around the filibuster. And the reason is we're having a tough time even arguing minimum wage should be in reconciliation. So to argue voting rights and others is a harder lift. Second, you can only do reconciliation a couple times on budgets, and so we'll get three times for the midterms. And I my sense is that Biden is going to use the next one around infrastructure or something related to that kind of spending. So you have this situation where you really need to get around the filibuster. And Adam Jettison has a brilliant book on the filibuster, which I didn't realize, and you probably do because you taught con law, but I didn't realize that Calhoun had come up with the filibuster and really was a tool for slave states and then states that were opposed to the civil rights movement in the 50s and 60s. And so you really have this relic of Jim Crow governing modern day America and making determinations of whether we should have voting rights.

But do you feel like there's movement to shut it down generally or shut it down in particular a wider class of cases than just reconciliation?

To shut what down? To shut down the filibuster? I think there is movement, but we're probably a few senators away and

it's

going to take something dramatic. I mean, it would take President Biden coming out and saying this is really stymieing my agenda and I'm done with it. And so far he's not there. And he's temperamentally. I don't think that's his. You know, that's not the Senate he remembers is different than what the Senate has become. But I don't think right now we're there. And so it's unfortunate because without that, the structural reform parts become very difficult.

Well, okay, so let's take two structural reforms, one being campaign funding. Wouldn't a campaign funding bill be easy to fit through reconciliation? I mean, if you're spending money on matching funds or on vouchers. Isn't that just at the core of what a budget reconciliation should include?

That's an interesting argument, but. So you would say just splitting that part up from the rest of the voting rights and the rest of the reforms, at least. Yeah, yeah. I don't know if we'd have the ability to do that within the House caucus. I mean, it's certainly worth considering. Can we have something smaller through reconciliation and then attach it to the next president's bill? But understandably, I mean, the Voting Rights act is probably the key component in part of the caucus. I mean, everyone believes in that. So. And you know, it would still be making an argument through reconciliation. I mean, I'm, I'm willing to try it and work with. I'm sure Sarbanes would support such an effort, but it's going to, it's going to require telling the House caucus why we need to split it up and then making the case to the parliamentarian.

But even with the voting rights. And again, this is the, this is the HR1 voting rights, not HR4 voting rights. But even with the voting rights, to the extent you're spending money to get them to change their procedures, like just as this is just money being spent, it seemed that too could be framed. I mean, I believe in the $15 minimum wage argument for reconciliation, but still, that's a macroeconomic argument. This is not a macroeconomic argument. This is a. Government checks are being written and sent out to people, so therefore it's clearly part of budget. Why wouldn't that, you know, framing the voting rights much more around spending of the federal government's money to get states to comply with a bunch of standards be a strategy to get that through reconciliation, too?

Wouldn't that. Then why wouldn't you be able to get through reconciliation? I mean, I, I like that idea, but.

Well, I'm not sure. Well, well, I mean, unfortunately, I think for the Democratic Party, one of the most critical parts. I don't see how you can get through reconciliation. That's gerrymandering. Right. So. Or districting. Right. Because, I mean, maybe I would hope you're working out what the exposure is here, but if you start looking at the way these districts can be redrawn in the next cycle without any constraint on partisan gerrymandering, it's almost an existential threat to a majority party. Right. I mean, this is the dynamic of democracy. People don't quite grasp yet that we have all of these institutions to guarantee that the minority wins. And once you release any threat of political constraint on gerrymandering. There are so many ways that they can play games to assure that the minority becomes the majority. And it would seem that the party should be desperate to figure out how to deal with that. I don't see how you deal with that through reconciliation. Even though I think article one, title one, and, and title five with the campaign funding is something you definitely should be able to deal with through reconciliation.

Yeah, no, so that's an interesting argument. I mean, basically anything that involves government spending, government funding, that we ought to be pushing for that as part of the budget and reconciliation. I mean, it's a, it's a unconventional, though probably true approach, and it's not something that we discussed and candidly in the House. But I think, I know you know John as well, and I think getting Sarbanes behind such an approach is gonna be critical to getting it to succeed.

So when you think about past the period since the president has come in, you know, obviously you were pushing for a much more radical. I don't like the word radical because I feel, I mean, I support the agenda you were pushing, but you were pushing for an agenda that's not framed in the same way that Joe Biden's agenda has been framed. But have you felt like he's been all the president we need in the context of pushing for these types of issues and change?

He's off to a solid start. He's had a focus on the Defense Production act and producing vaccines. He's made a $1.9 trillion proposal that has extraordinary measures on anti child poverty with the child allowance. The $15 minimum wage, assuming it stays in there, is good. He's delivering on the checks, is delivering on state local aid. He's stopped being our complicity in the war in Yemen. So he's off to a good start and he's saying he's not going to wait around for 60 Senate votes. But the hard question is going to be, are we going to be able to make structural changes? If we end up with a Covid relief package that has the checks and has the vaccines and has the one year child allowance, we should celebrate that because people are hurting, they're suffering, they need to do it. President Biden is showing leadership in getting us back on track, but that's not structural change. The first structural change in this bill is the $15 minimum wage. The question is going to be, I think, both in a domestic policy and foreign policy, is the president, are all of us going to be able to get structural changes or is it Going to be just belief, competence, which is desperately needed, but we're not going to be able to make much of a dent in the structural problems.

So that depends a lot, obviously, on Congress you've had. It must have been a traumatic experience. January 6th must have affected fundamentally how you thought about the place you worked, especially because before January 6th, you were quite famous for trying to reach across the aisle and form coalitions where there are coalitions to be formed around foreign policy issues, about ending the perpetual war, about reform. I wonder how you reflect on how you think about the institution after the events of the 6th.

It was such a sad day for democracy. You know, I was thinking about, actually a conversation I'm about to with my grandmother. My grandmother's in India. And when I first decided to run for Congress, which you knew about because you were involved as a Stanford professor. And I was in 2004, and I. And I remember my mother talking to my grandmother and my grandmother saying, please tell him not to do it. I can't believe he was supposed to go become a professor or something. I can't believe he's going into politics. And her concern literally was that I could get shot or that I could put my. Would put my life in danger. And I remember getting on the phone vividly and saying, nani, which is what I called her. That's not American politics. Non modern American politics. That may be politics in some places in India, maybe in other places in the world, but modern day American politics, it's not violent. They may be attack ads, but there's no violence. And that actually played through my mind as I was in the Cannon office building. And I was not concerned personally for my safety. I mean, my office was locked and I fortunately had not gone into the Capitol. I was walking towards the Capitol and staff frantically said, go back to Cannon. And even though Cannon had been evacuated with a bomb threat, we all went back and I was there. So I wasn't at personal danger, but I felt that. I do feel colleagues of mine, particularly some of the higher profile women of color, are in danger. And I feel like we're now living in a democracy where I have to go through a metal detector to get into the House floor because there's a concern of other members of Congress being a threat where if you come on the Capitol, we're in a fortress with barbed wire fence. It's just such a sad moment. How did this happen in 10 years or something, or 15 years? How did our democracy fall to this state? And to me that, that there's Just a feeling of sadness at what's happened and a question of how do we get, get back to a much better place.

So how did it happen?

RO well, I mean, that's, you know, there are people who are. Francis Fukuyama or someone can try to answer that question. I mean, I, I think it's complex. I think there's been a growing sense where our democracy failed. Ordinary Americans, working class, middle class Americans of all races, and there was this concentration of wealth and communities were being decimated and we didn't notice. I think on a more positive side, what we're trying to do is very hard. There hasn't been a major multiracial, multi ethnic democracy in the history of the world. Canada is still 70% some white. Britain I think it was in the 80s and Australia is in the 80s. We're 60% white and we're accelerating to becoming a majority minority nation. To think that we're going to transition to that without challenge is, it was probably naive.

Okay. But all those things are on the outside. I'm interested in what's going on on the inside. I mean, you know, you work with people who say things that they know and you know and you know that they know are just not true. Right. I mean, that's gotta be different, isn't it? I mean, like, you know, you came to Congress in 2017 as a member. Could you have imagined in 2017 that you would have that many members of the House stand up and say an election was stolen when there was zero evidence of fraud to the level necessary to affect the results?

I couldn't have. By 2020, I could have because I saw the impact Trump had or still has, but I couldn't have imagined it when I came. And it has, you know, it has made it, I guess, tougher. I mean, it's tough. I mean, I don't know if it's, it's partly Covid so you're not interacting with, with anyone. But there is probably, there is an awkwardness and unease with, with interactions that have just become so much more toxic, so much more defined on where, where do you stand? I mean, right. I mean, there's no, you can't compromise with someone who believes that the election was stolen.

Right.

Where do you go from there? I mean, they believe that they're talking about impeaching Kamala Harris and Joe Biden and you think this was craziness. And so it's such a fundamental disagreement that it makes it hard to say, well, let's create tech jobs in rural communities. I mean, I'll do it. Let's try to come to consensus on foreign interventions. So it's, it's a tough environment. From that perspective, I guess the question is how do you rebuild trust? And I don't have a silver bullet for that. I mean, I don't know.

Well, but is it trust? I mean, obviously the, you know, the dynamic of the Republican party in the House through this insurrection was quite startling. I mean, look at Kevin McCarthy who was quite vocal in his criticism of what happened on the 6th and now, you know, for all intents, seems to have backed away to the opposite position. That's not because of a lack of trust. It's because the dynamics driving the party have become so poisoned. And so the question is, when you think about how you would ever cure that or fix that, I mean, you know, we can, we can dream about structural reform, but is structural reform changing the way we fund campaigns gonna make it so that people don't believe in QAnon? I mean, what is it that's a remedy there if that's gonna be such a fundamental part of what the problem with our republic is?

There's some things, I mean, there's the low hanging fruit, which is that social media has made the situation worse. I don't think it's made the situation situation. I don't think they're the only ones to blame. But the fact that you have now thousands of pieces of data about you and you're constructing profiles and fed information and recommendations based on what is going to be most sensational is problematic. And at the very least, we need robust opt in consent. Recognizing, by the way, that Europe has largely failed. I mean, I get that there ahead of the game. But you know, people in the valley, a lot of them laugh at it when Italy is levying a $7 million fine on Facebook. I mean that, you know, I don't even think interns at Facebook would notice. Notice that. And then, and then you had this brilliant study, I forget who the authors are, who basically said that Facebook and Google and others figured out how to design things so that people would kick, click consent because they made the accept or consent buttons bigger and they knew where to place them. So part of it, people say, you know, when Europe says we're going to lead in policy innovation and you can lead in other innovation, I don't think the two are separated. It actually goes back to your original point about the architecture of code. Like we need the people who invented this stuff to be regulating it. We need the FTC and FCC to have people who understand dark patterns and manipulation and how savvy these folks are and rethink things. And I guess, you know, Jack Dorsey has been more thoughtful than others. But part of it is what a thin read about human nature, right? To think that you can create spaces and that just having conversation unregulated and just exposure to whoever you want is going to lead to world peace and mutual understanding. It's like, why even have political philosophy? I mean, why do you need, like, Habermas or why do you need history if it was that simple? And I think that it's the naivete that really galls people, the sense that these folks thought, wow, I've created this thing that started as a site to rate women at Harvard, and now I'm going to be talking about how I'm bringing world peace and just having a little bit more humility about what we don't know, which to me is actually the purpose of a liberal arts education. And that's what I say to the folks in the Valley. If you just came and said, we've created something, it could be awesome, but we don't know a lot about it and we need help figuring it out, I think it would be much better received.

I think one of the problems here is that people are sloppy and thinking about what, quote, the Internet is. You know, there was the Internet that was circa, you know, 2,000 prior to advertising, and then there's the Internet of today. And I think the vast majority of the poison that you see in the system is driven because of this business model of advertising. And, you know, so long as the they make money, the more attention and emotion and sharing that they induce, they're going to do whatever induces sharing and emotion and attention. And it just turns out it's the worst possible stuff that does that. And so just like, you know, the fast food industry discovered that bad food was good profit, so too in the information industry, this kind of poisonous information is the best profit. But it's because of the advertising model.

Model.

If it weren't for the advertising model, there wouldn't be an incentive to maximize craziness or maximize ignorance or partisan ignorance. And I just. When you think about it as driven by a business model that has become so ubiquitous, all the money in the world behind this business model, it becomes even harder to imagine what you're going to do to intervene to affect it. Especially if we don't have campaign finance reform that makes it so that the money that's being, you know, and I

don't want to be too academic. But I. Because Harvard Mars has written all about communication. There was an interview, I read about it, which it was a staggering comment, but he made. He said, in the history of sort of inventions about media and communication, whether it's a printing press or radio, there's never been one that has been sort of financialized right from the outset in that way and then not used for sort of improving civilization. And it was a simple observation, but it really struck with me. And I think that's really what's happened. And it's unfortunate because that wasn't the original vision.

Well, this is a hard question, Ro. We're gonna have to talk about it again. I'm extraordinarily grateful that you would take some time. I know that you're doing a lot. You're very busy being a central leader. I'm incredibly proud to have known you from the very beginning to be such an important leader in Congress and for the ideas of people in Congress.

You did know me, Larry. You helped shape me. So for better. You don't have to take blame for the bad parts, but, you know, you've been certainly helped by thinking. And I think you're working. Work is just so important on reform and your work, you know, I mean, I think I still go back to the work at Interconnect. I mean, I know you're well beyond that in other pursuits, but, you know, the issues you were tackling back then are sort of now front and center in where ordinary Americans are coming up and saying, wow, we're really being governed by some of the architecture that was created, which we had no idea by. So I look forward to continuing to get your insights, guidance on structural reform, and also what we need to do with this new digital architecture.

I'm grateful and thanks very much for taking some time. This is Larry Lessig, and this is another episode of the podcast Another Way. These podcasts are Produced by Equal, EqualCitizens US. You can find us on the web at Surprise, Surprise, Equal Citizens US. And find this podcast at EqualCitizens US AnotherWay. There's a place there where you can share this podcast and give us your feedback and ideas and suggestions, especially in this series for people that we should talk about. And what is this series? This series is both about the prospects for fundamental reform, HR1 and S1. But included within those prospects is the prospects for rebuilding a conversation that can reach beyond partisan walls. What is it that would be necessary for us to have the ability to talk to people who are not in our own party? Again, we had the beginning of that conversation with Frank Luntz, and we're going to continue that next week with Rob sand from Iowa, who has had experience in the red blue divide. And the red blue divide, I think, is a central part of the problem that we're going to be talking about in the conversations about how do we bring about fundamental reform. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for sharing. Thank you for your support for this podcast and for equal citizens. Until the next episode, this is Larry Lessig. Thanks for joining.