We're Back

This podcast is part of the Democracy Group. Hello again, and welcome to an episode of the podcast Another Way. This is Adam Icken, the executive director of Equal Citizens. It's been a while, and I know we've given you a number of promises that we would rekindle this podcast with consistent episodes, but now I can tell you it's real. We're back. I have a number of conversations lined up with folks across the country to tap into where we are as a democracy, the perils we face and the promise of reform. And of course, Larry Lessig, too, will grab the mic to interview a wide range of prominent guests. And speaking of Lessigo, today's episode will be a conversation between the two of us, kind of a candid reflection about the state of democracy, some frank thoughts about feelings of loss, and also what keeps us motivated in a very, very disturbing political time. So let's get right to it. Larry, how's it going?

Well, it's great to be back, Adam. Thanks for kicking us off again. And thanks for inviting me to be your first guest in the kickoff.

This is a rebirth of another way, Larry. We've got a lot to talk about, and I want to jump right into it because I think that the thing that's nagging both of us is this feeling of loss after the Freedom to Vote Act. But let me set you up here, Larry. So from January 2019 to January of this year, as our longtime listeners and supporters know, you and I were laser focused on passing the federal bill, the Freedom to Vote act, before that, the for the People act, and we did lose that fight, at least for now, because of the Senate filibuster. And I think it hit both of us pretty hard, Larry. And I'm wondering if we can start off our conversation by talking candidly for our listeners about that feeling of loss and just how difficult it's been to rebound over the past nine months for us, given that we were so tantalizingly close to winning a bill that we've been working our professional careers for.

Yeah. After that bill went down in January, a longtime friend said to me, I don't get it. I thought this was your point. I said, what do you mean? He said, I mean, wasn't that the whole thing? You had said for the first 10 years of your work that there was no way that Congress was in the normal order going to pass fundamental reform of our democracy, that anytime you would get close, the forces on the other side, seeing how much they were going to lose, would rally and succeed in stopping reform. I had to say that when he said this to me, I was a little bit shocked with myself because, yes, in fact, I spent a huge chunk of my time saying the only way we were going to get fundamental reform was to build an extraordinary kind of movement, not one that just relied on people inside of Washington, but one that did something, some kind of moonshot, to trigger really big transformations. And I think that we were. I was seduced into believing maybe that wasn't necessary by the work that we did, starting in January, of building a series of democracy town halls in New Hampshire, where we basically got every single major party candidate except for Kamala Harris, who had dropped out by the time we were in a position to talk to her, to commit to fundamental democratic reform, to passing for the People act, or better. I think that something about the fact that we had that major commitment and then the extraordinary upset in Georgia giving us control of the Senate, let me dream what the more honest part of me thought wasn't really possible, which was we were going to find a way, the president was going to find a way to get around the filibuster and pass the most important democracy reform legislation, I think, in the history of America. But obviously that wasn't to be.

Yeah. And so how has your thinking now changed in the months since the Freedom to Vote act failed in terms of what is the path forward? What do you see as the avenues for continuing to push the ball forward in the movement for fundamental reform?

Well, I think that everybody's holding their breath until this next election, because I do think that if this next election is not the disaster that it's supposed to be, if the next election creates a sufficient majority in the Senate for fundamental reform of the filibuster, you know, Sisyphus, like, I think we should grab the rock and push it up the hill once again, because if we can reform the filibuster, at least establish the talking filibuster. I mean, the thing that frustrates me about talk about the filibuster is people are just literally ignorant about what we're talking about, because the word makes it sound like we're talking about something that's been around for 150 years because everybody's always heard about the filibuster. Mr. Smith goes to Washington is the filibuster. But the filibuster we're talking about right now is radically different from that filibuster. The filibuster we're talking about right now was enabled by rules that were changed in 1975, but more importantly, by norms that were changed in 2009 when Mitch McConnell decided his number one job was to make sure Barack Obama was a single term president. And Mitch McConnell changed the norm to make it so that every single bill had to run the gauntlet of the filibuster. And, you know, that inspired crazies like Kyrsten Sinema to say that she wants to establish the 60 vote threshold for everything the Senate does, as if this is somehow a virtue in a democracy. But the point is that filibuster, the one that started with Barack Obama, and then both sides used it. I'm not saying that it was just Republicans that used it, but both sides used it. If that filibuster can be reformed and go back to the norm of invoking it only when it's critical to invoke it to somebody, or if you invoke it, you've got to actually stand on the floor of the Senate and speak, as opposed to just text your leader and go home, or more likely, go to your call center to raise money for your next campaign. If we could get that reform of that filibuster, then I think there's another reason to take a shot at this. And I'm hopeful that we'll see a movement to do it. But I think it's also important. I think there's another part of what was depressing about how that whole fight developed. For anybody who's been watching democracy reform for a long time, and I've been In this for 15 years, there have been people obviously in it for much longer than that. But in the period of time of the last 15 years, what was striking about democracy reform is that it really started as reform of money in politics. John Sarbanes, who was the key architect behind the for the People act, originally pushed forward a way of funding campaigns that would liberate congresspeople from the horrendous reality of spending 30 to 70% of their time raising money to fund their campaigns. I remember when a young congressperson named Beto o' Rourke came to Harvard to be trained. You know, the Kennedy School has this training for new congresspeople. So he called me and said, can we have coffee? And I sat down with him and he was as depressed as I can imagine anyone being. And he said, here, look at this. And he showed me a handout he had gotten from the Democratic Caucus. And the handout was his schedule. And his schedule basically had five hours of call time that he was supposed to engage in every single day, four hours of call time, and then One hour of facilitating the meetings, that would be more fundraising, and that's not even counting dinners or breakfasts. And he was so depressed when he realized. He said, I never thought this was what my job would be, but this is what his job and everybody else's job actually is. And so Sarbanes was really focused on how do you fix that? And the reason he was focused on that question was he knew, as anybody in Washington knows, that if you don't fix that, nothing serious can happen. Because if you don't stop the power of the lobbyists leveraging their fundraising to support the congresspeople, if you don't leave the Congress people, as Buddy Romer used to put it, free to lead, just to do what they think is right or what they think their constituents want, then it really doesn't matter how we elect them or who we elect, they're still beholden to this tiny fraction of the 1%. What's striking is that was the motivation 10 years ago. And of course, at the same time, John Lewis was pushing the voting rights provisions that eventually became part of the for the People Act. But it was Sarbanes who was pushing the idea that this ought to be the commitments of the Democratic caucus. And then it became the commitment of the Democratic caucus. But as it became the commitment of the caucus, the focus shifted more and more away from changing money in Washington and more to the question of voting rights. Now, don't get me wrong, I think voting rights are critically important, and there's no doubt that the way the states have evolved voting systems is a travesty to the ideas of representative democracy. But democracy reform is not just about voting rights. If we don't reinvigorate the recognition that we need both to change the system for electing people and also change the incentives once they get to Washington, we're not going to have any successful change in the way our government fails to work.

Right. And we can also, you know, as we long have done, Larry, point to the success of public financing programs in states across the country, like in Maine, in Connecticut, you know, the creation of Democracy Dollars voucher programs in Seattle. And I think Oakland is going to be voting on it this upcoming November. You know, we can, as advocates, point to these innovative public finance systems to show their effect on just how much it changes those incentives you were talking about of revolution, reducing the burden of fundraising and allowing for more time talking to constituents and actually legislating, which is a radical concept in Washington, D.C. yeah,

but I'm a little bit anxious that the reform Movement is not sufficiently aggressive in demanding attention to this. I mean, the Freedom to Vote act had a really aggressive little hack to allow it to continue to have public funding. In the context of the House, there was nothing in the Senate. The reality about what's lost if we don't make that change, I think is seen best in the Inflation Reduction act debacle that we saw right at the very end of the sequence to pass that bill. Remember, inside that bill, there was a provision that really, for people who've been watching Washington for a long time, was astonishing. There's something called the carried interest loophole in the tax system. It's basically a loophole for hedge fund managers or private equity partners that allows them to claim their income at a capital gains tax rate, which means that they pay half the normal tax on their income that the rest of America pays. So, you know, people like Warren Buffett can be paying less tax than his secretary. And this has been around since the 60s. And since the 60s, everybody serious looking at this says it makes no sense. And many people on Wall street say it makes no sense, makes no sense to the underlying economy. But it's always been kept because those who benefit from it are so keen to keep it, they benefit so much, it's chump change for them to pay off the congresspeople to keep it. And I was astonished to see that the original version of the Inflation Reduction act included a substantial modification of the carried interest tax credit tax loophole, and it was architected by Joe Manchin, of all people. But literally the last week before that bill was voted on, Kyrsten Sinema stood up and said she would not support the bill. The most important domestic legislation the Biden administration would put forward the first time when addressed climate change in a comprehensive way. She would not support the bill unless the carried interest loophole was not addressed in the bill. Now, what possible reason was there for her to do this? Like this former radical from Arizona, what reason was there for her to try to benefit hedge fund managers and private equity partners? The only reason was the almost $2 million she receives from those people in campaign contributions. And you take this point and you multiply it a thousand times over. The point is, we will not get any substantial change addressing the critical problems that we need until we find a way to get around this critical corruption of our system.

Yeah, and that story is a perfect illustration. And I think as a reform movement, we do need to do a better job. I think we've done a very good job over the last decade, but continuing at least and in more creative ways, showing that link between inaction and corruption in D.C. and actual policy outcomes that affect people's lives, that we really have to keep hammering that drum. Right. Just keep going there. Because I think that story is completely like a great illustration of that corruption which Larry, as you know, you've been writing about for 11 years now, longer.

15 years.

15 years. But yeah.

And 11 years.

Was it 11 years since Republic lost 2011?

Yeah, it's 2011. That's right, 2011, 11 years old.

I know my Larry Lessig history, my trivia. If we ever do a Jeopardy. Style, I got it, Larry. But let me shift the conversation a bit, Larry, into okay, losing the federal reform bill and seeing the corruption in D.C. is devastating, there's no doubt. But I do always find solace, or at least I have found solace in the fact that state based reforms, as I alluded to earlier, can continue to push that ball forward. You know, we've seen activists win major victories in state courts with ballot initiatives and sometimes even through legislative action. But the Supreme Court is poised, or at least seems to be poised to close off some of these avenues for state based action in Moore v. Harper, a case that some are saying will be a disaster on par with Shelby County v. Holder, which was the case that gutted the Voting Rights act in 2013. You and I have talked about it, but for our listeners, Larry, can you give us a little bit of what's going on in More v. Harper and just how worried you are about it?

Well, someday somebody will write the definitive history of just how disastrous the case of Bush v. Gore was for the history of the United States. You just kind of think about what the world would have looked like if that case hadn't happened. Quite plausibly, when the New York Times and other news organizations did the postmortem from Florida and asked the question, what would have happened if there had been a statewide recount of all the ballots? They concluded without doubt, Al Gore would have won the state. And Al Gore winning the state means he would have been president, which means climate change would have happened 20 years ago, climate change legislation and the Iraq war would not have. I mean, all the things that followed from that ridiculous decision on the surface are obvious, but underneath it's even more invidious because the Chief Justice Rehnquist, joined by Justice Thomas and Justice Scalia, began to germinate a theory which has been called the independent state legislature's doctrine. What that theory basically says is when the Constitution uses the word legislature, they mean in contradistinction to the executive and the courts, they basically mean the legislature has a superpower. There are a couple contexts in which the legislature is mentioned that might be significant. One is in the selection of presidential electors. Article two says that the state legislatures will set the mode by which the electors are selected. If you're a believer in the independent state legislature doctrine, you believe that means that the legislature, acting alone, without the courts or without the governor, can decide how the electors are going to be chosen. Now, some people, I think, exaggerate the risk of this part of the decision because they say, well, if it's true that the legislature can do whatever the hell it wants, it must follow the legislature can do whatever it wants whenever it wants. So in 2000, the Florida State legislature was considering seating the Bush electors after the election, just voting and saying, these are the electors from the state of Florida. And some people think that's what the independent state legislature doctrine must mean, so that if there's an election and the legislature doesn't like the results in their state, they can vote for a new slate of electors, and those are the electors that will be counted in the electoral college. I don't think that's actually possible under the law as the constitution as it's written, because the constitution, while giving the state legislatures the power to set the mode by which the electors are selected, also gives Congress expressly the power to decide whether when the electors have to be appointed. And so Congress has said they have to be appointed on election day. Early in our history, the states had a period of time, like 40 or 50 days to select the electors, but to avoid fraud, they said, okay, we're all going to do it on the same day. So it's election day when the electors are selected, which means under the Constitution, it couldn't be the case that the legislature, after the election, decides to pick a new slate of electors. That would just violate Congress's decision about when the electors are to be appointed. The independent state legislature doctrine certainly would give the legislatures the power to say, we're not going to have an election, or whatever the result of the election. We say that on election day, we're going to pick one slate or the other. I think those are certainly powers which the legislature would have if the court embraces the independent state legislature doctrine fully, but they wouldn't have the power to muck about with who the electors are after the election day. Now, here's what they could do, which is actually at the center of a book that Matt Seligman and I are publishing at Yale Press next year. This is a terrifying implication of the supreme Court's decision in the electors case. While the constitution wouldn't allow the state legislature to pick a new slate of electors after election day, what the Cefalo case says is that the state legislature has the power to tell the electors how they must vote. More troublingly, as the Baca case, the companion case, held, they can set up a procedure where if the elector doesn't vote the way the elector is told he or she must vote, then the elector can be removed in a new elector appointed. So whereas the constitution would stop a state legislature from appointing a new slate of electors under the Cefalo decision, the state legislature could, after the election, pass a resolution that says the electors shall vote for the following candidate, and if they don't vote for that candidate, they will be removed until we find somebody who does. So I think that's not the independent state legislature doctrine. That's just the consequence of the supreme court getting the electorate case wrong. But that's, I think, a consequence that we should be worried about in 2024. The other part of the independent state legislature doctrine argument, though, I think is much more significant for reform. And that's because there's been a long standing argument on the supreme Court of when the. When the constitution says that the legislature has the power to set the boundaries of the congressional districts, does that mean that the legislature has to do it? Or can you hand that job off to an independent redistricting commission, as many states have? The court 5, 4 held that though the constitution says legislature, there's nothing wrong with the legislature basically delegating this to a body it doesn't control. And so, yes, independent commissions are constitutional. That was the Arizona legislature case. But if the independent state legislature doctrine is endorsed in more, then it would follow that states don't have the power to set up independent districting commissions, at least ones that the legislature doesn't ultimately ratify by their own vote. That means that the most important success in fighting gerrymandering in the period since Dave Daly wrote his wonderful book about rat fucking about the 2010 election, the biggest success we've seen since 2010, motivated largely by people like Dave Daly, has been the drive to get independent state legislature districting commissions. And, you know, here is heroes like Katie Fahey, who built a movement in Michigan to set that up. All of those efforts would be wiped away and we would be back to a world where the legislature alone gets to decide how to draw these districts. Now, what could be done about that? Well, again, one thing that could be done is if the legislature sets up an independent commission but then commits to itself at least that it's going to adopt whatever the commission does, then that's not a problem. The other thing is we don't have to leave districting to states the Constitution. As Chief Justice Roberts in the Rucho case, which is the case that held that the Constitution doesn't prohibit partisan gerrymandering. Robert said, if you don't like the consequences of partisan gerrymandering, Congress always retains the power to draw their own districts. If the states continue to be as crazy and underrepresentative as they are, many of them are, then we could just imagine Congress deciding to draw districts in a different way. My favorite solution is the Fair Representation act, which when I was trying to be a candidate in the Democratic Party primary for president, this was one of my three commitments, the Fair Representation Act. That act would basically say we'll have multi member districts and instant runoff voting. Imagine five congress people in a district. You vote and rank your choices and then you pick the top five that come out of that to be the congresspeople. That would create much more diversity in Congress and it also would reduce significantly the burden that districting would bear in the process. So that's another solution Congress could adopt. But both of these are, I think, problems which the Supreme Court is teeing up for us after 2024.

Yeah, and we'll dedicate a full episode to more v. Harper because this is going to be all over the news and something that reformers are going to have to grapple with one way or the other. So we'll be sure to do a deep dive in that soon. So. So this is just a brief dip into the waters here, but I don't want to leave the Supreme Court yet, Larry, because not to get even more depressing, but the Supreme Court is clearly getting incredibly reactionary on not just some democracy issues, but it seems like all democracy issues. The conservative justices now seem poised to further gut the Voting Rights act, this time giving a major pass to racial gerrymander pandering. On a scale of 1 to 10, how much should we be worrying about the future of the Voting Rights Act?

Well, I think that the wild card was flagged by Justice Brown Jackson. She and her questioning was quite aggressive in pushing the lawyers to articulate what she called, what it's been called the progressive originalism of the Civil War Amendments. I think that what she's doing is exactly the right response to the conservative Majority's current strategy. The conservative Majority likes to paint itself as deeply principled in its commitment to originalism. Now, whether you like originalism or not, as a matter of first principles, and there's lots of reason to be skeptical of it if that's what they're going to do, at the very least, they ought to be consistent about it. I think a very fair criticism about the way originalism has lived since it was born in the Reagan administration is that it's been deployed for conservative purposes and has been invisible when the purposes might be something other than conservative. I remember when I argued the Eldred case, which was the challenge to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension act, our whole argument was grounded in a kind of originalist argument about the nature of congressional power. I remember thinking, I just don't understand how the conservatives avoid the conclusion we were advancing if they applied their principles in a consistent way. It didn't even occur to me that they just would be silent that the majority was written by Justice Ginsburg, who obviously didn't care anything about originalism, so she didn't have any reason to be concerned about the consistency with other originalist cases. The dissents were written by Justice Stevens and Justice Breyer, who also didn't care about originalism. At that point, the five conservatives who were committed to originalism were just happy to stand in the background and let this conservative result happen, even though it was inconsistent with originalism. But I think the most dramatic context where that conflict exists is in the Civil War Amendments. I've spent the last five years teaching classes on the Reconstruction Amendments. I think there is no way to overstate just how dramatically the Court has distorted the original meaning of those amendments. Everything from the state action doctrine, which basically says the state has no obligation to do anything. It's only if it does something bad against you that it can be held responsible. That doctrine, the idea that Congress has no role in specifying the privileges or immunities of United States citizens, a whole range of these doctrines that people take for granted now as what the Civil War Amendments established are just lies, literal lies. They just have nothing to do with what the framers of those amendments were on about. Justice Jackson's questioning oral arguments about the affirmative action cases, I think, brings that out precisely. She was drilling home the points that the framers of those amendments were not colorblind. They were crafting what they did with a sole purpose of trying to achieve equality that had otherwise been decimated by 150 years or 250 years of slavery. The notion that now we should somehow imagine that none of that can matter in government policy. Is. Is, from an originalist perspective, crazy. So I think the real question will be how do the conservatives respond to that? Because if the conservatives take up the challenge, and maybe they don't necessarily agree with her, but they do engage in that question, like, what is the original understanding and how does it apply to the case? I actually think there's a lot of opportunities. So here's one we've been pushing. People who have listened to this podcast will also know that we've been trying to litigate the question of whether super PACs can be regulated. Our strategy has been a kind of progressive, originalist strategy because we know at least two justices. When we began this, there were clearly four justices, but now there are two justices on the record who would say, yes, you can regulate super PACs. Justice Jackson has not taken a position on that, so we'll see where she is. But the conservatives, the originalists, have written opinions that make it sound like there's no way Congress or any legislature could regulate super PACs. But Justice Thomas has increasingly been pushing the position that we should interpret the First Amendment the way the framers would have interpreted it. The question he said in reviewing, for example, the famous case of New York Times versus Sullivan question, he said again and again is, I would approach this by asking what the framers of the First Amendment would have done for the question presented. Well, if you ask that about campaign finance regulation, there's just no doubt what the answer is. The framers of our Constitution would have had no problem with the regulation of super PACs. Absolutely none. And there's wonderful work by a former student of mine, a guy named Judd Campbell, about the original first amendment and how the original First Amendment was understood and what they did. So if Thomas is consistent, Thomas would have to say, well, you're right. We should be able to regulate super PACs. But even if you don't take the extreme position Thomas has taken, that you just basically ask the question, how would the framers have interpreted super pacs? If you take the more moderate originals position, which is the Supreme Court has said you can regulate when there's quote, unquote, corruption, how do we interpret what the word corruption is? Because there are many conceptions of corruption. If there are many conceptions of corruption, an originalist, one who's concerned to make sure the judges just don't have the discretion to pick and choose the answer to their question, the originalist should say, we should adopt the original conception of corruption. Well, There again, the framers of our Constitution were deeply concerned about what we could call dependence corruption. That corruption is exactly the corruption that these huge contributors to Super PACs are creating. There again, the framers would have had no problem, or this conception of what the framers were doing. One they could regulate corruption, would have no problem regulating this dependence corruption too. There again, I think that we have an argument that a principal originalist should be willing to allow the regulation of at least these super PACs. So that strategy follows from exactly what Justice Jackson is doing. And I think we'll see from how the conservatives react to her assertion here whether this is a fertile ground to continue to try to sow.

And Larry, we have teed up a case that will attempt to make this argument. I don't know, I mean, we've already written a little bit about it publicly. But I mean, if you want to take a couple minutes just to explain the past couple months, in a little bit of time we have remaining. Right.

Well, so we in Massachusetts, equal citizens in Massachusetts, is beginning to work with a bunch of groups to think about an initiative in Massachusetts that would, that would address the question of democracy reform for Massachusetts. So, you know, even though Massachusetts for Democrats at least looks like a ideal state because it's basically a one party state, actually there's a lot of weaknesses to Massachusetts democracy. And there's a real opportunity to get Republicans to like the idea of reform because a lot of these reforms would make the state more representative. And it turns out there are more than Democrats in the state. But one of the measures we've been trying to push is consideration of super PAC regulation. We're teeing up the initiative for that and the attorney General has denied us the right to have that initiative on the ballot because she says it violates freedom of speech. We're in the process of setting up litigation about whether it violates the freedom of speech. Again, that argument will deploy the progressive originalism that Justice Jackson has deployed and we'll see how far it gets. But I think that it's going to be harder and harder for the conservative majority to deploy originalism on one side. And I think that means it's more and more incumbent on us to try to develop understandings of what originalism across the board might look like, either to resist it or to deploy it, or to use it where we can see it achieves ends of justice more effectively.

Right. So stay tuned. We'll definitely be talking more about that. So, Larry, last question and then I'm going to let you go I want to end on a little bit more of an uplifting note here. What gives you hope? Because for so many, the rise of these election deniers, the conservatism of the Supreme Court, the Democrats failure to pass the Freedom of Freedom to Vote act, these are all reasons to give up on the possibility of reform. So why are you still here? Why are you continuing to dedicate yourself to an organization like Equal Citizens and continuing to use your platform to keep up this fight after 15 years?

Well, there is a place that gives me hope. We haven't talked about the full range of reasons to be hopeless. We've talked about why the government fails so badly. We could have spent another hour talking about why we fail so badly. A striking fact to recognize is the same number of people today believe the election of 2020 was stolen as believed it was stolen on January 6th. Despite living in a free speech society, despite having access to more information than humans have ever had access to, still we have a world where we're sorted into our partisan bubbles and we're fed the information we want to hear. And the more we're fed that information, the more we believe it, whether or not it has anything to do with reality. And that's an incredibly depressing fact because you can't do democracy if we're living in different worlds. Democracy is all about. It's the machine for reaching common understanding and common agreement. That depends on us living in the same factual world, epistemological world, if you want to be fancy about it. We don't. How could you begin to solve that problem? Well, another project we've helped, Stand Up Equal Citizens, has been working with a group called the People to Stand Up, a project called Deliberations, which facilitates small group zoom, like deliberations about complicated topics. The first topic we did was the Electoral College. Participants basically watch short videos we know nobody reads. So they watch five to six minute videos, three of them. Then they're surveyed about their attitudes about reform of the Electoral College in this case, and then they're thrown into these rooms with a mix of people and they deliberate for an hour on these different reforms and then afterwards they're surveyed again. And this is not an attempt to be a poll. We're not trying to say this is, you know, X percent of America believes something and Y percent believe something else. But it is an attempt to see how that deliberation helps people evolve in their understanding and their belief about certain issues. Because we're doing it on a platform called Chasm. We can have a million of These six person deliberations happening at the same time. It's small group deliberation, scalable to an endless number of people participating. What we find when we see the result of these deliberations is people change their, their mind. You know, if you're a political advertising specialist and somebody said to you, I've got an ad that's going to move the population one point, like after this ad, I can statistically significantly say, with confidence, say we've moved the view by one point, you'd say that's pretty good. You know, because ads don't have much effect in the world. We see people moving by 20 points. We see the process of just giving them a chance to slow down, face each other in a safe environment. And that's one thing zoom gives you the chance to do. I mean, you're sitting in your living room, you're sitting in your bedroom, but you're engaging with people face to face in this environment. When people do it like that, they can actually understand each other and they can actually do democracy and in an effective way. The analogy I like to think about is, I don't remember the movie Independence Day. And in Independence Day, these aliens are attacking and taking over the world. Of course they're monitoring all of our communications. At a certain point, somebody has the brilliant idea to use Morse code because they reason that the aliens don't know Morse code. And of course they don't know Morse code. And so they can use Morse code to get around these AI like invaders. Well, I think it's a perfect analogy because, you know, social media is like the AI invader, right? It has taken over our minds and it's driven us into polarized pockets focused on hating each other. It's destroyed the capacity for democracy and we need to find our own Morse code. And like slowing down and pulling us out of these Twitter feeds or TikTok feeds of content and just allowing us to face people human to human is our Morse code. It is a way for us to do what humans can do well without being susceptible to the poison of these digital platforms. So I'm optimistic that if we can find ways to leverage and grow this experience, that we could build an alternative. We're never going to shut down social media, but if we can build an alternative which is edifying, people have more confidence in kind of like the Wikipedia of public political attitudes, where people have a reason to have confidence in it because they've seen how well it works, I think that that's a way to begin to push back against the alien AI invaders. And my dream is, imagine a show like 60 Minutes that does an episode about some complicated subject. People have watched it, and then 60 minutes says, okay, now jump into a deliberation about this. And after 100,000 people deliberate on it, 60 Minutes is able to say, well, the more liberals talked about this, the more they thought this, the more conservatives talked about this, the more they thought that. You begin to see people demonstrating that we actually can do democracy if you just do it at human scale and at human speed. You could call it the slow democracy movement. And I'm a big believer.

And it's funny, Larry, because the slow democracy movement is actually what led you to begin or to create another way. I mean, this podcast owes its roots to your kind of thinking through slow democracy. So I'm with you, Larry. I'm excited about it. We'll do an episode. Maybe we can bring on Katie and the deliberations team and really dig into it, and maybe we can even get some guests who have gone through it. That would be fun. So we should do that. But, Larry, wonderful talking to you. Really quite optimistic. I didn't think when I asked you that last question we'd get an Independence Day reference and some AI and aliens thrown in there, but every conversation with you, Larry, brings it in new directions and makes me think about democracy in a new way. So, Larry, thanks so much for joining me today in this conversation to our listeners. I'm telling you, I promise we're back. We're gonna make this a consistent thing every week. I'm really excited about it. And we're here to continue fighting for democracy alongside you because it's gonna need all of us to get the reform that we need. So, Larry, I will talk to you soon.

Thanks, Adam.

All right, this has been another episode of Another Way, and I'll see you. Sa.