Telecom Then, AI Now — Rethinking the FCC’s Role – Episode 2 of Unbuffered

Christopher Mitchell (00:15)
Welcome to another episode of Unbuffered, the show from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance looking at telecommunications, the Internet and a lot of stuff that has to do with tech and the public good. I’m here today with one of my favorite guests to tackle big issues, Blair Levin. Welcome, Blair.

Blair Levin (00:34)
Thank you very much, Chris. Always a pleasure to speak with you.

Christopher Mitchell (00:38)
Blair, you were the Chief of Staff of the Federal Communications Commission back in the early to mid 90s when the Telecom Act of 96 was discussed and discussed and discussed and then eventually passed and put into practice. This was the beginning of the Internet as we know it. We’re going to talk a little bit about that. And then you also were called back into service to be the person responsible for the National Broadband Plan.

⁓ in the late ⁓ aughts. ⁓ But most importantly, I’ve had you on a bunch of times without explaining kind of why, ⁓ I like having you on in part because you’re not one of these people that then went off and started changing your message because you were working for different employers and things like that. ⁓ You are an Equities Analyst, which I think in some ways forces you to reckon with reality more than others.

⁓ and, and you just have a knack of, I’d like to think when you get things wrong, it’s honesty, right? You’re not getting things wrong on purpose. Like some of other people in the industry.

Blair Levin (01:39)
Alright.

Yeah, no, it’s been a real pleasure. I love working with Wall Street folks, ⁓ partly because I think where capital markets intersect with policy is really interesting. But also, I’ve never had to say anything I don’t believe is true. Wall Street expects me to speak what I believe to be true. Sometimes it happens, it works out that way, and sometimes I guess wrong. But ⁓ there’s a premium on truth, so I appreciate it.

Christopher Mitchell (02:07)
Yes.

Well, and then further than that, I don’t want to sit here and just pretend to lionize the Wall Street ⁓ ethos and whatnot. But like there is a real legal penalty for lying in many circumstances, not every circumstance, but in many circumstances.

Blair Levin (02:14)
I wouldn’t either.

That’s also true. That’s also

true. But if you say something, I had a competitor who was very ideologically aligned with the powers that be at that particular moment. I predicted something, he predicted the opposite. I turned out to be correct. His clients gave my client $60 billion on one day or something. Depends how you do the math. But he’s out of business and he’s a very smart guy and an able guy. But I’ve never let…

my own preference for what I think should be interfere with my view of what I think will be.

Christopher Mitchell (02:54)
So last week we did our first show on this new Unbuffered and ⁓ on it Gigi Sohn and I among with the guests talked about the Federal Communications Commission and whether it’s worth preserving. You haven’t actually heard that show yet, but ⁓ we’re gonna talk a little bit about the last 30 years of the Telecommunications Act and I wanted you to talk a little bit about some of the kind of technocratic decisions that people may not have been aware of.

that really made a big difference. We’re gonna start off the show that way, and then we’re gonna jump more into the future, which is what you’re more interested in, and you’ve recently been thinking about it and writing about it in the context of the last 30 years, what should the Federal Communications Commission be doing, not in the next presidential term, but sort of looking for the next 20 to 30 years into the future. So we’re gonna talk about that, and that’s gonna talk about AI.

Blair Levin (03:24)
Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (03:47)
We’re not going to get lost in AI, but there’s going to be AI discussion within that. So maybe that’ll get us a few more listeners. We’ll see. ⁓ But I wanted to ask you, because I did an interview in December with Richard Shockey and we talked about the telephone system and how it had been gamed and the holes in it and the problems with it, but also the importance of it. And you responded that you felt like it had been overlooked.

that one of the things that had allowed the telephone system and mobile telephony, I think at the time to flourish was that the regulators had forced the landline carriers to play nice. And so that’s one that I was thinking about. And I don’t know if you wanted to pick that one. ⁓ You can certainly start there. Maybe we can talk about one or two others. But what are some of the things that we got right over the past 30 years that have enabled us to have better, more universal telecommunications?

Blair Levin (04:38)
So the first point I would make is that while we focus on the 96 Act, and it was clearly the most important and the biggest thing, there was the 92 Cable Act that had a lot of importance. There was the 93 Budget Act, which gave the FCC authority to auction spectrum. And that really accelerated wireless competition and then wired competition in ways I can chat about. Of course, was the 96 Act. Pardon? Uh-huh.

Christopher Mitchell (05:03)
Can I pause you there? don’t want to derail you all the time,

do want to, friends of mine, feel like they often look at this and they feel like moneyed interests are going to win the auctions and auctions are a bad thing because of that. But I think just one reason that we like auctions is because it prevents kind of the powerful monopolies of today from securing things in the future.

In theory, we think it enables others to have access to Spectrum. They might not have had access to it. Because you mentioned auctions as being important, but I just want people to understand why.

Blair Levin (05:35)
Yeah, so the most important reason why I think auctions were important was if you talk about gaming the system, you look at the prior thing where you had comparative hearings, which are lawyers and FCC. And what happened was favorite interests got the licenses and then turned around and sold them. But what that meant was that the user, the actual person who would invest money into the network to offer the service, they got delayed by five to 10 years.

One of the most important things Reed told me when ⁓ Reed, who was the chair, he said, we need to do these options really quick because what’s happening is you have basically the FCC and the DOJ made a huge mistake in the early 80s thinking that there would only be business for two wireless carriers. Wireless is about to pick up, but we need to do the auctions quick because it’s a lot easier to gain a customer who’s not taking any service.

Christopher Mitchell (06:08)
Reed Hundt

Blair Levin (06:31)
then steal a customer or take a customer from a competitor. So we don’t want the incumbents to get that big of a market share. At that point, there were like 10 to 20 million subscribers. There’s now, I don’t know, 200 million or something. But the point is we wanted to really accelerate the point in time where new entrants could come in. And that’s the value. There’s no question. And various progressive friends of mine have said, you know, Blair, auctions are bad because the incumbents win. And I said, did you actually look at the 94?

auction that we did starting in December, we deliberately designed the auction to have seven national carriers. And the reason we did that was we went to Michael Porter, who’s the nation’s leading expert in competition in Harvard Business School. said, how should we do this? And he said, the market will go down in terms of the number, but you need to pick the number that you think is the most, the maximum, one, n plus one.

That’s how many you want. And then over time, it’ll go down. Now, I think it’s gone down too much. I think four is a better number than three. We can argue about that. But the point is, if you design the auction correctly, you incentivize competition.

Christopher Mitchell (07:44)
Okay, so I corrected, I jumped in. You were listing off sort of major highlights of changes leading into 96, I think.

Blair Levin (07:51)
Yeah, and so you had the 96th Act And the other thing I would mention, in 97, we ⁓ worked out the World Trade Organization agreement that really led to an American dominated Internet for many years. ⁓ And that led to a massive productivity boom, not just in the United States, but in other places. And there was a great productivity ⁓ boom in the United States, great job creation.

We had a balanced budget. ⁓ It was actually a very nice period in retrospect.

Christopher Mitchell (08:25)
that? Was that inevitable

or was that you getting things right? mean, just, you know.

Blair Levin (08:29)
It was a lot of people getting things right. People have asked me what I miss most about that time. And one is tech optimism. It was a lot more fun to believe that tech would make life better for our children and our grandchildren. I don’t think people leave that today and they are not wrong to be skeptical because what we’ve seen in the last 10, 15 years ⁓ is the tech community actually ⁓ producing results which are very problematic for the next generation.

But the other thing was, I hesitate to say this, people were much more serious in those days. I went to conferences of conservative think tanks. I never felt they were acting in bad faith. I thought their criticisms, I didn’t agree with a lot of them, but I thought their criticisms were valid in the sense of raising legitimate points. I can’t tell you the number of times I went back to read and said, you know what, this thing, I didn’t know how to answer this one effectively because I think they’re right.

I thought that the give and take in those days with, between Democrats, Republicans, between long distance and local, between cable and broadcasters, it was just, you know, a lot better. Now you have an FCC that’s engaging in totally partisan, we pick winners. It is the most anti-free market FCC I think we’ve seen in our lifetime because they just want to pick winners and losers. And the winners are defined by who’s friendly to the President.

And I could give you lots of examples. That’s not what the purpose of the programming is, this program. But I don’t think people are serious about what is the thing that will make life better for as many Americans as possible in the next five to 10 to 20 years. And I believe sincerely that in those days, that was the

Christopher Mitchell (10:11)
So what is one of the things

No, and I think you’re right. I think there’s been a, and this is a culture shift that we’ve experienced that’s quite unfortunate. But what are some of the things like, so for instance, what did the regulators do to make sure that after the auctions happened, the telephone landline companies could not strangle the wireless companies?

Blair Levin (10:36)
The most important economic bottleneck in those days is what is called the terminating access charge. At that time, I think 98 % of all voice communications terminated on a wireline, because very few people had wireless, and most of the time you were using wireless, you were calling a wireline phone. And what the wireline monopoly, the local monopoly, do,

was they could charge a terminating access charge of like 15 cents a minute. And that meant that wireless rates were really high. What we did was we said, now, can’t do that anymore. You got to charge your actual cost. your actual cost? It’s really zero. Your incremental cost, ⁓ zero. Immediately after we said that, AT&T, which was then separate from the local company, it was a long distance company and a wireless company.

But AT&T Wireless announced the one rate plan, which was 500 minutes at a much cheaper rate and suddenly subscriptions for wireless. It went from being a luxury product of doctors and plumbers and construction workers who needed on the road. ⁓ know, I as a young lawyer in North Carolina was on the road a lot. Twelve hundred bucks a month for my wireless phone. It was worth it for the firm, but it was really expensive. So.

They was a reasonable rate, became a consumer mass market product. We did that with wireless. We also did it with data. One of the most amazing things is that if you look at the top 10 companies by market cap, the only one in communications was AT&T. It was like a couple of oil companies, a couple of drug companies, Walmart. Now, if you look at the top 10, seven of them are totally dependent on communications. They’re not communications company. AT&T isn’t there.

But it’s Google and it’s Microsoft and it’s Amazon and Apple, et cetera.

They, if we did the same thing with data that we did with wireless, we said, you can’t charge for terminating data. If we had not done that, the benefit would have gone to the incumbent local phone companies. Now, you could argue with on your manipulating markets, but what we understood was there was essentially a monopoly that wanted to be paid for history, not for innovation.

Christopher Mitchell (13:03)
Well, this is what I’m curious about because you can sit here and on a podcast, tell me that the costs for them terminating was zero cents a minute. But I’m sure that they had very great reports. I’m sure they had like, you know, in-depth discussions with rate models showing that their costs were real and they were extensive. And so you had to make a determination, right? And this is one of the things that I hope, I always want people to have a sense of is how complicated these systems are.

Blair Levin (13:21)
Huge. Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (13:31)
And it’s not new, right? mean, like the railroad academics claim that even today we can’t figure out what it costs the rail company to move a pound of cargo, you know, 150 years ago, because like these things are all complicated and there’s decisions you have to make about if you put $10 into a product and that product facilitates five different business lines, how do you allocate the costs of the investment across those business lines? And so it’s the same thing today, only with technical complexity. So

Blair Levin (13:50)
Ha!

Christopher Mitchell (13:59)
Was there a sense that you might lose the argument or was there just a like, hey, this is really important and we recognize it. how did internally, how did you have those discussions about steamrolling the landline carriers?

Blair Levin (14:12)
Well, first of all, we had the benefit of a couple of brilliant economists. One was a guy named Michael Katz. Then when he left, a guy named Joe Farrell came in. They’re both brilliant. They went on to great things, very highly regarded. So we ⁓ were outgunned in some ways, but we were not out IQ’d, if you will. And we were able to make the necessary arguments. Where it was much more problematic was kind of at the core.

So the 96 Act was really about voice competition. There were a lot of other things involved, but fundamentally it was how do we allow the long distance companies and the so-called competitive local exchange carriers to compete with the incumbent local exchange carriers, the baby bills. And what Congress said was we want the new guys to borrow the existing networks.

at some price for some period of time until they can build their own networks. Well, then you’ll have to get into that kind of accounting of what’s the fixed capital cost, what’s the incremental cost. came up, Michael Katz came up with this total element long run incremental cost formula, tell Rick, which was highly debated and was argued about in the courts. And I’m not sure we got that.

entirely right. In fact, think what history says is that that, I mean, it might have succeeded and it is what Congress asked us to do. But when Michael Powell essentially pulled the plug on it in 2004 or five, the long distance guys sued for peace and they got bought by the local guys. And that was the end of that kind of competition.

Christopher Mitchell (16:05)
So you’re saying if ⁓ John Kerry

had won the election, we could have a whole different world right now with a different market structure? Okay.

Blair Levin (16:11)
I think it might have been too late by then because of

some other things Michael did. look, and I think Michael was acting in good faith. I certainly disagree with some of the stuff he did. But what people don’t understand is part of my own logic for doing the broadband plan and part of the logic for the legislation that created the broadband plan that I may have had something to do with was we needed to move telecom policy from being about voice to being about broadband.

And that was in terms of, you could think of it as traditional universal service types of things. How do we get networks everywhere? How do we get everybody on? How do we get faster networks? In a voice world, you worry about the quality of the voice a little bit, but you don’t worry about speed. In a broadband world, one of the things that we looked at was how do we make sure that the speed does not suppress innovation? And at that point, the average download speed was four, which would absolutely suppress innovation.

A lot of elements went into increasing that speed. I think it’s like 250 or 300 now. ⁓ Google Fiber was a really important part of it. Interestingly, it really wasn’t about regulation. It was about the competition that Google Fiber started. ⁓ But that gets us away from the 96 Act. But I would say determining access charges, another really critical thing that was very technocratic was wireless number portability.

We understood and explained to Congress that if the companies owned the phone number, people could not shift, that the so-called friction of shifting would be too great. And therefore, you had to be able to shift your number to.

Christopher Mitchell (17:56)
Yeah, just to give you an example of that, I was trying to find someone that I knew more than 20 years ago, who because of my address book, I play Pokemon Go with, weirdly enough, remotely, and I interact with this person a little bit, but that game kind of walls off interactions in part, I think, to protect miners, which is really smart. But I was trying to figure out, and I used the phone number that I’d had for this person 20 years ago.

23 years ago maybe and it didn’t work and I was surprised that that person did not still have the same phone number right because I have assumed number portability at this point

Blair Levin (18:28)
Well, I think everybody now uses the number portability, but it was somewhat controversial. And I will say my friend and a person I respect deeply, Tom Wheeler, who later became chair, was then head of the wireless industry. And he just, he lobbied us against it, way too complicated, it’ll never work, blah, blah. And he said to me, that was the one I felt worst about. know.

But you gotta forgive Tom. That was in the interest of… One of the things I came to appreciate is you should never judge somebody by their clients. ⁓ They’re gonna do their best job for your clients, but it is your job to hold their feet to the fire and to say, ⁓ And so we did what we thought was right and I think history demonstrates absolutely.

Christopher Mitchell (19:22)
One of the things that I recall from Reed’s book about those times was ⁓ people coming in and saying, I just want to, I want fairness. And, and he didn’t, never really appreciated that. He was like, nobody wants fairness. I assume that went around the office quite a bit.

Blair Levin (19:34)
No, but I, one of

my favorite lobbyists because he was bizarre, not bizarre, he was really honest in a way and he came and said, Blair, all I’m asking for is a level playing field where my team gets to run downhill. What, can’t you do that? Like, yes, I appreciate that. And that’s what everybody wants who comes in and that’s what their job is. That’s what they get paid to do.

Christopher Mitchell (19:58)
And that’s what sometimes I will say that in my 20 years almost now of working in this, there’s times where I’m like, like we really need to have a level playing field. And then I’m thinking, no, you know what? Like we actually recognize there are positive externalities. We need to put our thumb on the scale for the positive externalities. Right? Yeah. We want.

Blair Levin (20:12)
As well, should argue. then

I assure you the other side will argue the opposite.

Christopher Mitchell (20:19)
Right, although they’ll put it in terms of that, right?

Blair Levin (20:22)
Right, Now, nobody

pays the fees of the lawyers and the lobbyists to get fairness or justice. You want, as one of my senior partners at a law firm, if you’re paying our rates, you want a little extra justice, premium justice.

Christopher Mitchell (20:40)
All right. So you’ve turned your attention, ⁓ for some time now, but more recently in a, in a particular response to the 30 year anniversary, ⁓ looking toward the future. And, ⁓ and some of that discusses Universal Service Fund. We are not going to do that because you and I have talked about that a lot. And I just, I don’t have the energy for it today. So, we’re going to ignore the Universal Service Fund while agreeing super important would really love to see serious people take a serious whack at it. trying to make it better.

⁓ you do talk about, ⁓ AI and, ⁓ and I wanted to challenge you. I thought it’d be fun here in the middle of the show to just jump right in and to say, everyone’s talking about AI talking about data centers. They’re talking about these tools, talking about layoffs, talking about truck drivers losing their jobs, whether or not Musk is going to deliver one robots or any of this other stuff all tied into AI. And at the same time, I listened to The Verge podcast with Nilay Patel, which I think is amazing. And.

⁓ and he was just recently pointing out that like, think it’s pretty clear now from the marketplace that, that no sizable number of people want to pay, ⁓ out of their own pockets for AI, right? Like consumer products, AI, OpenAI, Sora, stuff like that. People aren’t paying for individual subscriptions. looks like businesses are right. And so the strategy of going for that business enterprise market, seems to be working out well, but we don’t actually know what the future of that is that may.

turn out to be illusory that like a lot of the firms that are digging into it may find they’re not actually getting the return on the investment. And so it may turn out that AI is just best at justifying layoffs and getting Wall Street more excited about laying people off from their jobs. And so I wanted to ask you like, you know, why if that is true, if we believe that for a second, why is AI important to be talking about?

Blair Levin (22:17)
Yeah.

Yeah, so first, I think everybody needs to be a little bit humble because nobody really knows. I think one of the things that has proven most true is in the short term, two to three years, change is always underestimated. I mean, it’s overestimated and then in 10 years, it’s underestimated. So if you ask the question today, it’s very different. Let’s do this again in 10 years and we’ll know more of the answer. Secondly, every…

major general purpose technology, and this one is similar but different, whether it be electricity or massive new investments like cars, railroads, canals, computers, there’s always a hype curve and there’s always over investment and there’s always a bubble and there’s always a bust. And then we see what happens. I will say that I have had three kind of moments where I go, my God.

as to a technology. One was when I first used Netscape. The second was when I saw the iPhone presentation that Steve Jobs did. And the third was when I first used Chat GPT. But I’m not a technology futurist. Having said that, where I think these are not dumb people who are investing trillions of dollars, I think trillions of dollars into data centers and other things. Because you can see a number of different ways where, whether it be in healthcare or education,

Or in, you know, I’ve talked to lawyers who are talking about how it completely changes the nature of what they do. In financial services, I think we’re just at the cusp of changing what it does. And by the way, I think reducing the number of people doing the kind of things my colleagues do by a lot. ⁓ The ability to essentially channel the wisdom, whatever that means, of huge databases just has infinite number of uses.

And what I would say when I was trying to communicate in communications with the FCC about what they should be doing is, OK, we started in a world of voice. And that’s what the 96 Act was. In some ways, the 96 Act would have been better if it was done like four years earlier or four years later, because there was some stuff about the Internet in it, but it really wasn’t about that. But then we shifted to Internet and I think shifted to broadband.

and the broadband plan was in a way an effort to now move policy toward broadband, it’s gonna be an AI-dominated ⁓ policy environment because it raises so many questions about what is the public good and what are the externalities, both positive and negative, that we need to address. ⁓ So there are any number of different issues and I think that communications,

The funny thing about AI is it’s driven the market value of Google and Microsoft and Amazon and Apple , Meta up tremendously. There’ve been a little bit of correction, but it drove it up for several years. It didn’t really have the same impact on the communications network, but every time a bit goes to a data center, a request goes to a data center, and then come back.

comes back, it’s riding on that network. I don’t know what that means for the future of the networks. If we had a serious FCC, they would be asking that question.

I

Christopher Mitchell (26:08)
Yes.

Yes. mean, especially the universal aspect is very important at this point, right? I mean, it’s one thing for a child not to be able to use Wikipedia, which I feel like 15 years ago would have been a punchline, but now is actually like a repository of it’s a wonderful place to start off a research project. ⁓ But, but, but even more so, like it’s yet more supercharged when it’s not able, you’re not able to ask the, these agents of the future, these questions. ⁓

Blair Levin (26:28)
Yeah, right.

Christopher Mitchell (26:38)
You know, I think there’s a positive and a negative or like a, you know, ⁓ like a sort of a constructive and a deconstructive aspect to it. One is that I feel like we have to pay attention to this because it is, it represents the single most centralization ⁓ threat, the single, like it’s more of a risk of centralizing power and information, which are very similar, you ⁓ know, than anything else that we faced. ⁓

the ability of someone I think to just look at everything you’ll think that I published and to find, you know, 10 ways in which I just contradicted myself to make me look foolish, right? I mean, just any number of things that one can do with this if you’re this old person. Right, I may be forced to reckon with it, it may make me make me a stronger thinker, which is probably long term good for me. ⁓ But I do feel like there’s this sense of like,

Blair Levin (27:20)
Good thing are bad.

Christopher Mitchell (27:33)
When you mentioned that in the late nineties, people were hopeful about technology. think that’s because the same people who we now see in some ways as hoarders of, of wealth and power. And, we’re at that time, we felt like they were liberating us from the hoarders of the last generation. And, and this sense now that, ⁓ that if I’m not able to afford a house, what, how, what, what is the story I tell myself as to why that is? And I do feel like it’s because well,

my work doesn’t get me the same share of the national income that it did 30 years ago. didn’t for my parents, for instance. and so that’s the story to tell. And when you have people sitting on top of the greatest wealth disparity of all time, including like the Kings, like Louie and, and whatnot, ⁓ you know, I feel like there’s a, there’s an issue there and, that I’m dancing around. And so there’s like, there’s that aspect of it of, of just like allowing a few people to have way too much power.

⁓ but the other is, is that this idea that I do think this technology could be the thing. it’s, it’s, it’s, again, it’s almost like a punchline for some people, but I think most of the technologies that will allow us to, ⁓ get through the worst of climate change that’s coming, it’s going to come from computers that are going to be figuring out how to modify things, ⁓ organisms to sequester more carbon. It’s going to be building process improvements. There’s going to be a lot of things in this technology is actually really important for that.

even if I’m not using it on the regular to compile my shopping list, right? It will be super important, I think.

Blair Levin (29:06)
Yeah, so two quick things. Number one, I deeply regret that when we were doing the National Broadband Plan, we didn’t focus on potential harms. Now, Jonathan Haidt who is a fantastic public intellectual and I think has led many states to doing very positive things about keeping phones away from kids during the school day and stuff like that, says it really started showing up in 2012. So I don’t feel that badly about it. I wasn’t, but still, if I’d been more visionary,

Or if others around, you know, it’s like, it was coming and we didn’t do that. I don’t want us to make the same mistake now. Cause AI is just going to make it so much worse. And there’s a big trial going on in California. It’s sad to me that it’s private lawyers who are trying to remedy the problem instead of public policy makers. But here’s another thing. And it goes to your point. Occupy Wall Street.

probably the most progressive movement of its time. When Steve Jobs died, put a little memorial where they were doing their protesting to Steve Jobs because they admired Steve Jobs and respected Steve Jobs. There is not a single tech leader, I think in the country, who now is respected or trusted. And one of the things, I think when I was doing the National Broadband Plan, it’s not credit to me, it just was a reality. There was tech optimism, but also tech trust. And that trust has been broken.

We could go into why that is, but if you think that the American public largely trusts Mark Zuckerberg, I don’t think you’re looking at the same numbers I’m looking at, or Elon Musk, and given the number of things that they have said that turned out not to be true, American public’s not wrong about

Christopher Mitchell (30:52)
Well, we’re gonna move on to the next topic in a second, but I wanna say that I wanna bring things back to ⁓ the public good or public goods in general, which is to say that I don’t know that I know exactly what’s good best for the public. But I will say that I’m deeply concerned when I see the level of anti-techness creeping into the left and the right.

⁓ When I was in grad school, there was a person who was there, you many of us were in our mid-20s and ⁓ for public policy studying technology, information technology and that sort of thing. I was more focused on energy policy, but it was all lumped together at the great Minnesota, ⁓ the University of Minnesota, Humphrey Hubert, what is now the School ⁓ for Public Policy as opposed to the Institute for Public Policy. ⁓

At any rate, this person would just constantly say technology is killing us. Like it’s awful. I mean, you know, and they’re thinking about like the fact that, ⁓ that we get cancer from, dioxin that’s put in the environment by companies that have been using scientific, ⁓ breakthroughs, in an irresponsible manner, perhaps. And thinking about climate change as being driven by technology. And I just feel like, and we see right now, we see it with the vaccines to some extent, people questioning this technology, which is like a fundamental technology for why.

so many children live to adulthood and not just live but able to have fulfilled lives in which they’re independent adults and not, you know, stuck with having had a brain hemorrhage when they were young from the various measles ⁓ complications that come about when you have millions of children getting it. And so anyway, like I just, I was just flabbergasted that a person could say that because I was just like, again, look at the results. Like we live longer.

more healthy lives than at any other point. like, granted, it is not evenly spread about, but our lives are, we have more issues that we’re concerned about in part because we’re not dying from cancer at the same rates we were even 30 years ago. I mean, there is not more cancer. I run into this all the time from people. The cancer rates are declining except for two types of cancer. And like, you can dig into them. I’m to talk about it, but like, this is a minority. Like we are conquering the things that are dangerous. And science and technologies are,

are more responsible for the good than the bad, think. And so I just, I’m deeply despairing when I hear a group saying, we need to shut down all data centers. And I’m just like, do you have any idea what that would do to the hospitals? Like the people within them, if you did that? I mean, people have no sense of what technology, I think that that’s transparent.

Blair Levin (33:23)
Well, look, I agree with you. And I think I’ll make this prediction that in 2028, the most important policy issue will be around AI. And on both the right and the left, Republicans and Democrats, it’s going to get ⁓ debated in ways that people like you and I will go, well, it’s actually a little more complicated. ⁓ Tom Nichols’ book, The Death of Expertise, I think is kind of a seminal text of our time. And one of the things about

Christopher Mitchell (33:52)
man, I hated that book when

it came out. was like this freaking guy, this freaking guy who doesn’t respect like the common man. And he’s just like, boy, does he going back good arguments. Anyway, I didn’t mean to cut you off, but like I’ve

Blair Levin (34:03)
Yeah, no,

and I certainly I disagree with them on a lot of political stuff back in the day. ⁓ But the kind of stuff we were doing, like if you tried to tweet out, we’re lowering terminating access charges, like I think maybe three people would have retweeted it or something. And the notion that. Yeah, right, right. I.

Christopher Mitchell (34:23)
You

Two of them, ironically.

Blair Levin (34:31)
I despair again because of the nature of the process going forward about how we’re going to do it. There is a lot to be done that would make… The question you’re raising is exactly the right question, which is how do we make AI work for the common good and not just for the bank accounts of 10 people, right? That’s the question we should be asking. I assure you, even though I have not been in the room.

that in the White House, every conversation with the AI guru, David Sacks, is about how do I make more money for me? And that’s a really disturbing thing. if you think I’m being unfair to David Sacks, fine, you can argue that. But I think if you look at the track record, that’s 100 % of what’s going on. There’s not a sense of the common good. And in fact, I would say that my 53 years of politics, my first campaign was 53 years ago.

Christopher Mitchell (35:09)
Yes.

Blair Levin (35:30)
One of the things really striking to me is that the real divisions are not liberals, conservatives, not Democrats, Republicans, but universalists who ask, what does this policy mean for the common good? And tribalists who ask, what does this mean for me or my family or my tribe, however you define that. And what’s happened is the AI tech leadership has lost the trust of the public because it is obvious to them.

that they don’t really care about the common good. And they are only interested in buying another island off of Hawaii or a $85 million mansion in Florida or something.

Christopher Mitchell (36:15)
Yes. Yeah, no, it’s, it’s, it’s remarkable. And that’s one of the things that we’re seeing right now is that a lot of people have adopted a support for President Trump, ⁓ but also other figures. And I would include Bernie in this to some extent because they’ve totally lost faith in others. Now they’re finding out those who put their faith in the Trump, many of them are recognizing that, that he’s not actually the person he claimed to be. And that he’s also looking out for himself primarily something that many of the rest of us felt was true for a long time.

⁓ but there’s this question of what happens next because people have felt that there’s lots of people not looking out for the common or for the community good. And I will say some of them were, but they were really bad at telling their story as to like what they were doing and that sort of a thing. anyway, we’ll be talking more about that in the future. I do want to talk about the future of the Federal Communications Commission. and so telecom crucial for AI, AI exists to basically like.

pull information into, whether it’s data centers initially just for the development of the AI, where then under some conditions you can have a local AI instance working for you that is somewhat intelligent. But for the most part, the data sets are all distributed and the computing power is distributed. And so you need wireless and wireline connections to be able to make it work. So this makes it the purview of the Federal Communications Commission.

as well as there’s other aspects of it that also make it ⁓ in their kingdom, for lack of a better word that’s coming to my head right now. You point out something that this is so near and dear to my heart, which is that the Federal Communications Commission should make it a focus to provide accurate and timely information to the public on a variety of things. ⁓ This has been something that I am obsessed with for many years. ⁓ Many others have pointed out that we don’t even know

⁓ How many people have good Internet access or why? And the Federal Communications Commission has worked hard to make sure that we did not have that information. Designing program after program for more than 20 years to make sure we did not have that information. So ⁓ what is the case for, why should the FCC ⁓ really, I think, recontextualize, and maybe I’m going overboard, but should take as a model the National Weather Service.

which has amazing data that it makes available to many scientists and people can study it and slice and dice it. Why should the Federal Communications Commission take that as a model?

Blair Levin (38:43)
⁓ So I think of myself as being part of the capitalist wing of Antifa, by which I mean Antifa is now defined as anyone who disagrees with Trump. So yeah, I’m part of the capitalist wing of that. I mean that in a somewhat ironic way. Capitalism only works if there are transparent and open markets and public policy only works if it’s based on good information. I’m particularly sensitive to this because I work on Wall Street, which is totally reliant on accurate information.

And Wall Street has much better information than I had when I was in the policy, doing policies.

Christopher Mitchell (39:18)
Right, often because they’re

paying, I mean, often because they’re paying tens of thousands of dollars per year for subscriptions to like curated information that is not released to the public, right?

Blair Levin (39:27)
Well, yeah, though a lot of it is released to the public. But here’s the important point, Chris. They’re making billion dollar bets based on that information. Policymakers make billion dollar bets as well. They should be on equally valuable information. So my big point is the Bureau of Labor Statistics was incredibly important for markets.

to act successfully because people trusted the bureau, whether they trusted. Now, interesting question, the most recent productivity numbers where they changed one of the inputs. But here’s my big point, putting aside kind of the Trump view that if statistics don’t support them, they’re fake news. The FCC should be the place where markets and policymakers can rely on good information about the information economy, which will be dominated by AI.

And the FCC, they’re required to do these annual reports and blah, blah, are you talking? I mean, the information’s out there. AI can collect it. You just need to create various mechanisms that you trust, get real statisticians out there, and give, you know, it could be done on a daily basis, a weekly basis, whatever. But this notion of the annual reports, the annual competition reports, that is so paper and pen, you know?

What? mean, every quarter Wall Street is telling us what the state of these things are. My firm, that is the question they’re being asked all the time.

The information is out there. The FCC does not do a great job of ⁓ collecting and disseminating that information. And I think that’s job number one, actually. Because if you don’t have that, then what are you basing your decisions on other than who do you want to win? Which is actually the worst reason to justify a decision.

Christopher Mitchell (41:23)
So I think there’s.

Right, we don’t want that. ⁓ The Federal Communications Commission, right now I feel like their expertise is in part interpreting the data. And to some extent, I feel like you might be saying we need both interpretation, but also we need to have data we can trust that then we can then use for the raw inputs into models and things like that.

Blair Levin (41:49)
Yeah, look, interpretation is a difficult thing. The reason why every day on Wall Street, people in DC always are saying markets hate uncertainty. No, they don’t. Every day there’s an uncertainty and trillions of dollars are traded because people interpret data differently. So that’s fine. But if you don’t start with good data, you’ve already lost.

Christopher Mitchell (42:14)
So one of the things that I’m curious about is whether we’ll get to a point where you can just have an AI that’s just assessing things and it’s just telling you what’s happening. Assuming we could trust it for a second, it didn’t have some kind of ulterior motive. I’m curious, because I go back to Hayek. so I feel like there’s this question. And this comes up to me whenever I say, and you said earlier the case for capitalism, and I’m sure some of the listeners are like, ⁓ capitalism doesn’t work for a variety of reasons.

whenever someone tells me they’re a socialist, the first thing I always want to ask is how much wheat should we plant next year? And I feel like I’m not a true Hayekian, but like I really came to appreciate what his insights were that a single person or a single department in a government could not put together all of the information that was needed to answer questions like that. I don’t think AI will either, but I’m curious your take on it, if whether or not.

the best AI will win on Wall Street because it will be able to make the best predictions and corner markets and things like that.

Blair Levin (43:16)
It’s a great question. I think the answer is no. I think I will live long enough to discover whether that’s true, which is to say sometime next 10 or 20 years. would, you know, like if you have perfect predictions, you really don’t need Wall Street because everybody will value everything exactly the same. I mean, one of the things that’s funny to me about Wall Street is most of the people I talk to, the clients, they always start by saying, I’m a contrarian.

Christopher Mitchell (43:37)
Right.

Blair Levin (43:44)
So like if Wall Street’s going one direction, I’m the other, and I’m going, that can’t possibly be true that 90 % of you are contrarians. ⁓ But the point is AI may provide a accurate assessment of what the value of a stock or a bond is. And if it ever gets to that, then massive unemployment on Wall Street. I worry about unemployment of other people much more, but ⁓ I don’t think data will ever give us perfect answers.

but imperfect data will give you the wrong answer almost every time. that’s really what I’m saying. And the way the FCC collects the data and all this, I mean, it’s a new world. Why aren’t we responding to it? The FCC should be the most sophisticated agency about AI because of who its stakeholders are. And I see none of that nor terribly much interest. The chair seems to have other priorities on his mind.

Christopher Mitchell (44:42)
Yes. And I think I’ll be curious to see if the Democrats take it seriously because that’s one of the things we saw under Biden was two years with rudderless leadership. ⁓ And no majority is what I’m trying to say there. That wasn’t an intentional swipe at Chairwoman Rosenworcel.

Blair Levin (44:59)
Well, I will because you know who also never had a majority? Reed Hundt.

Christopher Mitchell (45:05)
really? I wasn’t aware of that.

Blair Levin (45:07)
Jim Quello, who was the nominal third Democrat, actually was a Republican, became an independent so that Richard Nixon could name him. He ran Democrats for Nixon and then Nixon named him. And I liked Jim and he served honorably. But he was a Republican. His staffers were Republican. They leaked everything we gave them to the Republican staff. But look, it was easier in those days because there was more bipartisanship.

serious.

Christopher Mitchell (45:38)
There was seriousness. mean, you

can’t look at what’s happening and think that it’s serious when ⁓ you have people who one day will say that government pointing out to Twitter, and maybe I’m understating it, but let’s just say, let’s take the most serious job-owning case under the Biden administration was that they asked the companies to suppress information and had no kind of a quo for the quid. ⁓ And…

⁓ on the other hand, now those people who said that was an overreach of, of constitutional history, history now literally threatening companies if they don’t change their war coverage to, don’t even know what, I mean, to some impossible standard that they’re going to lose their broadcast licenses. So yeah, I mean, there’s just no seriousness when you have people, I mean, I always use the, you’re just nailing jello to the wall. You can’t do it. So yeah, I mean, I just like.

But we very clear on it. The FCC is not serious right now. So, so the last thing I wanted to talk to you about was you call for the FCC to be doing more long-term planning. It’s crept into some of the things you’ve mentioned here. It seems to me that like the first thing that has to happen is the FCC would need someone that would have to come in, break through this noise to have some credibility to be able to say, all right.

I’m about to be accused of picking winners and losers because that’s like this charge that comes about no matter what anyone says at this point. ⁓ How are they going to do that? How do you have a FCC chair and majority that can regain some faith here? To me, it seems almost impossible to imagine. Do you see a path?

Blair Levin (47:15)
Yes, I don’t think it’s that hard. That being said that, it’s not going to be the current chair. His priorities are different. His priorities, and I think he’s proud of this. His job is to make Donald Trump’s job easier and to help elect Republicans. Can I tell you something that just like totally cracks me up? They just approved the next star merger with Tegna We could talk about a lot of problems with the order that did it, but here’s the one that really cracks me up.

Christopher Mitchell (47:17)
Okay.

Blair Levin (47:44)
In paragraph 74, they say basically there’s no risk of this deal causing rate increases. In paragraph 75, they say Nextar has agreed not to raise rates until what date? Can you guess what the date is?

Christopher Mitchell (47:58)
⁓ 2029? 2028?

Blair Levin (48:01)
No, late November, 2026.

Christopher Mitchell (48:04)
⁓ right. I was thinking I was thinking too long term. ⁓

Blair Levin (48:09)
That’s right. They don’t care about that. Yeah, it’s not going to happen. ⁓ He’s not a long range thinker. By the way, there are certain things they’re doing, like I think in the satellite of the space bureau that I think are good. Some of the delete, delete, delete rules that should have been undeleted. So I wouldn’t say that everything he does is wrong. But his fundamental agenda is help Donald Trump.

Christopher Mitchell (48:13)
Well, and similarly, yeah.

Blair Levin (48:36)
That’s not really what the agenda of the FCC is. And by the way, the Supreme Court is likely to rule by the end of the term on a case called Humphreys, overturning a case called Humphreys Executor, that the FCC is totally subject to the win of the President, which is, in my opinion, very bad for business. Because you get, it just becomes like another arm of the White House in terms of the way they debate issues, which is only what’s good for the

Christopher Mitchell (49:05)
Right,

Blair Levin (49:06)
One person.

Christopher Mitchell (49:07)
you quipped earlier that markets don’t like uncertainty. ⁓ And yes, there’s a lot of uncertainty. But I think that phrase comes about from the idea that if the Federal Communications Commission says, you know, Verizon won this auction, the market wants to believe that in five years, Verizon will still be in control of that license of Spectrum and not that the President has decided that someone else is going to get it because they need to make.

Blair Levin (49:27)
Okay.

Christopher Mitchell (49:30)
a multi-billion dollar investment that is going to take longer than five years to pay off and they can’t do that if there’s no sense of property rights, which is the direction that we’re heading right now.

Blair Levin (49:38)
No, 100%.

Yeah, and there’s another case pending where the Trump administration is arguing that spectrum licenses do not create property rights, which if you take it seriously, and a lot of people don’t, but if you take it seriously, if that’s true, and then Trump could say to Verizon, know, your executives gave two thirds of the money to me, but one third to Democrats, that’s not the right ratio. The right ratio is 100 % to me.

and none to the Democrats. Therefore, the Department of Defense is now going to be using your spectrum. Have a nice fucking day.

And under the argument that the Trump administration is making, they could do that.

Christopher Mitchell (50:21)
Yeah, I think you just dropped the first F-bomb in the history of the show, which is remarkable. I’ve been so restrained. But it’s well worth it when considering the enormity of these arguments and the potential effect on what things we take for granted. But let me ask you, so President Mark Cuban is 2029. We don’t even know what party you’re a part of.

Blair Levin (50:25)
⁓ My mother would be so upset. A blessed memory. passed away a couple years

Yeah.

Ha! ⁓

Christopher Mitchell (50:47)
But

you’ve been tasked with figuring out how to get credibility back at the Federal Communications Commission. What do you do?

Blair Levin (50:55)
Number one, I do what I recommended, which is become a trusted, responsible place that provides timely, accurate information about the information economy. That’s number one. Number two, start a series of proceedings about how the FCC policies need to adjust to economy dominated not by voice services, not by broadband, but by AI. So how do we help the network providers and how do we assure, and this really goes to the universal service.

How do we make sure we have the right networks everywhere, that everybody can afford to be on them, that we have the institutions? One of the most important things about the 96 Act was the way it expanded universal service to include institutions, education, healthcare, libraries, receiving modern tools of communication. ⁓ So you do that. How do we address cybersecurity, which is going to be increasingly a big issue?

How do we protect kids? I’m not sure the FCC is the right agency, but the right agency to ask the question. Because no one else seems to be doing it. So they should go ahead and ask that question. Yeah. So look, I think these things are not partisan. When I started doing the National Broadband Plan, a lot of people said, what are you going to do? I said, I don’t know. We’re going to ask a lot of questions. And we’ll see what the answers are. And then we’ll do our best. And they said, yeah, Blair, I know you have to say that. But we’re old friends. So you tell me, what are you really going to do? And I said,

Christopher Mitchell (52:02)
And to provide data. Right, to provide an… But also to provide impartial data, I think.

Blair Levin (52:25)
We’re going to ask a lot of questions. Look, Brendan Carr thinks he knows everything. And he says things like, you know, no regrets and all this. I have lots of regrets. ⁓ My point is the people in government should start from a position of what’s the right question? And then what do we need to know to be able to answer that question appropriately? So that’s what whoever Mark Cuban or some other President appoints.

That’s what their job is, ask the right questions and get the right information.

Christopher Mitchell (53:00)
I think one of the things that ⁓ is related to all this is that issue of how do you push the decision making down too? Because on a number of these issues, I think we should be having more localized decision making, which doesn’t necessarily mean the level of the city or the neighborhood, but states, I think we need more variance between the states. I think that would suck if you live in a state that doesn’t do a good job, you And so…

I sure wouldn’t want to be living in the Delta of Mississippi where the state seems to have no interest in improving people’s lives. ⁓ but I do, I do think that, you know, we should have more authority in Minnesota. I’m tired of living under dumb federal rules when we do better in Minnesota. So I don’t know. I I don’t, I use, use that as an example because I don’t want to, I don’t want to gloss over the hardness of that.

Blair Levin (53:41)
Yeah. No, look, I think that’s a really good point.

Yeah, but it’s, you know, the other day, a conservative guy who I respect greatly and who was a big critic of ours in 96 said, you all did a great job implementing the 96 Act because you preempted the states. I put aside that he wasn’t really such a fan of ours and said, no, we didn’t, Congress did. And I think the Trump attempt to preempt states will fail because it’s clearly unconstitutional.

But look, we could have a very legitimate argument about that. there are certain things only the national government can do. For example, I think on cybersecurity and some of those things gotta be national standards. But on a lot of other stuff, I tend to agree with you. And my views on that have changed over time, but I think it’s all. I don’t have a unified theory of what should be federal and what should be state. But when I look at your state in particular, and the most inspiring.

thing of this year as you and I have talked about is how the city of Minneapolis, Minneapolis, St. Paul responded to what was effectively a federal invasion with joy and with love and.

I mean, for various reasons, it brings me to tears. So I now trust local people who know who their neighbors are and defend and protect them much more than I would trust the federal government on a variety of fronts. And I think it’s interesting. I wouldn’t have predicted this. The various community broadband networks, they do much better. I think there was a recent study on this in terms of speed and stuff like that.

Christopher Mitchell (55:24)
from Ookla

Blair Levin (55:28)
But this is again where I think it’s time for a fresh start. 30 years is a long time. There have been a lot of changes. I hope that the next government, however you define that to be, and I said, the information, ask the right questions, get the information. And I should have added a third point. Then say, what is in the common good? Not what is the best thing for Mark Zuckerberg, the best thing for Elon Musk.

Christopher Mitchell (55:53)
Mm-hmm.

Blair Levin (55:57)
best thing for John Stanky at AT&T, but rather what is in the public good.

Christopher Mitchell (56:01)
Well, this gets back to something you said earlier, I think, which is providing transparent data that’s accurate, provides an opportunity for different people to make different decisions. And you mentioned Jonathan Haidt, who has clearly moved many legislatures and government bodies around the world. If you read Tech Dirt, ⁓ it’s pretty clear that he gets some of his science really wrong. And that’s not to say that he’s wrong in his overall conclusions, but I might.

We might appear in Minnesota, we might make one judge set of judgments from the data that we’re seeing in terms of the harm that young women are facing. And in Wisconsin, they might make a different decision. And one of the things that I think is important in the United States of America is allowing that to happen because that gives us a chance to learn faster, you know, where things ⁓ really stand.

when it’s not clear, because a lot of times there’s so many different variables that it’s very hard to really draw the one answer out of things. So I like the idea of having data sets that are clear and open and where we have an understanding of where they’re from, letting researchers go at it and people can make different conclusions from it. I much prefer that model to wild swings of agencies that are increasingly polemical.

Blair Levin (57:20)
No, look, I think it’s a very worthwhile debate as to what things should be federal, what things should be state, what things should be local. I don’t see any serious debate about that in DC. And that is deeply, I regret, there is in Congress, part of the reason we don’t have a privacy bill is because you can’t resolve those issues about whether the FCC should, I mean, the federal government should be setting a floor, setting a ceiling. So there is some debate about those things, but.

not in a way that I think is likely to resolve the problem or move the country forward. you know, Trump says we’re going to lead in AI. I don’t know what he means by that. I would like to lead the world in AI. I would like America to do that. ⁓ I’d rather have America do it than China. But not at the cost of a generation being wrapped up in chatbots that tell them, you know, to do all kinds of things that are harmful to them.

Christopher Mitchell (58:19)
or publish nude photos of their children. It’s just, it’s horrific.

Blair Levin (58:22)
Right. I think

that’s a bad thing too. And as far as I can tell, the Trump administration does not think about that at all.

Christopher Mitchell (58:31)
No, and that’s, I mean, I will say that it is a challenge and there’s a different mentality in terms of responsibility when you’re thinking about the worst case scenario if you’re in the private sector where you’re focused on a business case versus if you’re in the government where you’re literally charged with protecting the most vulnerable people. So, well, wanna, there’s a lot of more things to discuss. We’ll talk about those in the future, but I wanted to wrap up by just.

saying that Blair, ⁓ you’re one of a couple people that have encouraged me to just perhaps do a show on Minneapolis to try and talk more about what we saw ⁓ here on the ground in Minnesota. Obviously it’s centered on Minneapolis and I Minneapolis provided the initial real ⁓ inspiration that led to other communities across Minnesota, including small towns where many of us were like, really, that town?

That town stepped up. Okay, you know remarkable ⁓ lessons and and I’ll say I thought it hard most of the people that have been involved ⁓ Have a kind of distrust. They’re nervous about what’s coming next. They kind of don’t want to tip their hand although I kind of come at this from a little bit of a perspective of ⁓

of, uh, I don’t want to say it. I don’t think it’s nihilist correctly, but it’s sort of like a, um, like a deterministic, like, I feel like the government knows what we’re doing. Like, don’t think it’s really that big of a secret. And I think we can talk about it fairly openly without spilling the tea. So, but I wanted to ask you to just share Blair, and this is not technical, you know, this is not, not about technology so much. This is about how humans relate to each other, but you, you’ve recognized it in ways that I feel it in my bones that this is important. And I wanted to ask, why is this important? Do you think?

what’s been happening here in Minnesota that’s elevated around the world. The fact that we’re leading news, we’re leading news broadcasts in the entire world was remarkable. Why, what was going on? Why is it important?

Blair Levin (1:00:22)
So ⁓ we could really go down the rabbit hole and I wish we had a whole other hour to do this, but I’ll try to do it quick. One of the worst things said this year was by Stephen Miller, who said, we live in the real world where power is what matters. And it is the only thing that matters.

Power matters, but.

3,000 years ago, there was a guy named Moses who confronted the Pharaoh and said, there’s something that matters more than your power. There were the midwives that the Pharaoh commanded to kill the Jewish kids, including Moses himself. And those midwives engaged in an Act of civil disobedience because it was a more important thing. There was a power. you could say this in a theological way, but I believe, but I’m going to do it from a humanistic way, that how we treat each other as human beings is more.

So the Pharaoh had all the power Moses won. Later, there was a rabbi in what you might think of as Palestine, who said, render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, render unto God what is God, and said that there are certain rules in the way we treat each other that are more important than Caesar’s power.

Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, treat the stranger as yourself. know, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The power of that message is so profound and makes life worth living. And what Stephen Miller missed is that’s a much more powerful thing than any gun he can shoot. And yeah, he has a lot of guns. And as we see in Iran, you can have a lot of power and you still don’t necessarily win.

And so what Minnesota and Minneapolis demonstrated to me in the most profound way is the power of neighbors protecting each other is the most powerful thing and the most beautiful thing that we’ve really seen this year, I think. I come at this as a Jew born in 1954. The Holocaust has a lot, you know, at a certain age you get obsessed by these things and you start to wonder,

What were the neighbors of the Jews thinking as their neighbors were being sent off to concentration camps? And you’re horrified.

Christopher Mitchell (1:02:50)
Yeah, it wasn’t a secret.

They knew it. They knew what was happening.

Blair Levin (1:02:53)
Yeah, yeah. You you watch the movie The Lives of Others, you understand what’s going on. But what Minnesota did was it protected them. And by the way, there were certain Jewish communities in Bulgaria and Albania and Denmark. They were protected and they were not sent off. So in any event, from the perspective of, you know, what is the thing that gives you hope? Minneapolis is that that is the thing that in 2025, 2026.

that gives us the most hope. Maybe the no-kings rally next week ⁓ will be another sign of it, but what Minneapolis did was so much more.

Christopher Mitchell (1:03:32)
Right, it’s non-compliance, I feel like, and that’s something that I think people miss, is that our lives depend on the compliance of other people. And compliance doesn’t even really work with cooperation.

Blair Levin (1:03:42)
Can I say, I’m going to re-articulate that compliance with a higher law, compliance with the law of love your neighbor.

Christopher Mitchell (1:03:50)
Right. But also I think

like the reason that highways work is because nobody just decides to like park perpendicular to the roadway. And because even then, you know, a half hour to like get a wrecker in there and to move it out and everything else, like you’ve, ⁓ you’ve, you’ve destroyed everything, you know? And so like, is remarkable how a few people, ⁓ can, and so I think we take sort of compliance and cooperation as a, as a granted in, in Minneapolis is idea of like,

of we’re going to follow people around. We’re going to create databases of your license plates. We’re going to, you know, like engage in this activity. I just, I feel like it was one of those things that, no, I shouldn’t say no one person. Some people obviously gave up a tremendous amount, some of which are on the news, some of which weren’t, but like, ⁓ I think it was a sense of like, you can make a difference. And that’s what we need right now is this sense. Cause I mean, I will say,

it is remarkable to watch on TV and be like, wow, those people are making a difference. And then I would go and do my thing. I’d be like, I don’t feel like I’m doing anything. I don’t feel like I’m doing enough. so, you know, it’s like human psychology is a weird thing. But I want to talk about it with some other folks and like we would try to like publish it, you know, ⁓ as a, as a sort of like a dendem or, or something else in these, in this feed, just so people could, could share about it. But I will say that like most of the people that have been involved don’t want to talk about it. And it’s not because they’re worried for their own safety.

They want to figure out whatever they can do. They don’t want to say something wrong publicly that would put their neighbors at risk. And so I can appreciate that. But we’re still trying to figure out how to do it in a way that, like I said, a lot of this stuff is not a secret. Like, I mean, I would go out to these areas and I would be like, I’d be like, all right, like I’m going to cover my face because it’s negative 20 degrees. But like when I go back out there and it was 10 degrees, I would not have my face covered because at the end of the day, they have a drone camera that can count my nose hairs. They know who I am. It doesn’t matter if I’m…

Like, at this point, I feel like there’s certain things that are secret and certain things that are not.

Blair Levin (1:05:51)
Yeah, yeah.

No, there was a certain humbleness to it. People were being very heroic, but not seeking a claim as a hero, which is kind of the opposite of what most people in D.C. do. But it is so moving and so dramatic. And by the way, I am sure that everybody felt I could do more. was kind of like that scene at the end of Schindler’s List where Schindler is saying I could have done more, whether that actually occurred or not. Interesting question. But I think the emotion and the

the kind of the commitment to serve others so much greater than anything else so moving. And you won.

Christopher Mitchell (1:06:31)
Yeah, and I guess the way to wrap it up, think,

is Cowardice is courageous, but so is courage. And I feel like it’s remarkable how

when people saw what their neighbors were doing, you know, like they were like, I can do that too. You know, you know, people who people are still like, you know, drive around at, at a bus drop, pick up and drop off time. People are out there doing it constantly because they saw their neighbors doing it. Not because they like are getting paid. Not because they, know, not because they’re, ⁓ they’re, I mean, there is a fear of it, but like they’re acting on a courage and they’re seeing what other people are doing that they can do something. And I feel like

When we have a system, this is what gives me hopes about the Internet to bring it all back, is that we need to elevate the courageous and the best parts and have those things go viral and have algorithms that put their thumb on the scale for that instead of just this bit of whatever Mark Zuckerberg thinks will get me to sit there like a zombie and see three more ads. And that, I think, will give us a better sense of what the human spirit is capable of. When we are challenged, humans tend to do really well.

Blair Levin (1:07:31)
Yeah, some humans.

Christopher Mitchell (1:07:36)
think it’s when the stakes are low that humans are poor. When it comes down to a parking spot, people are going to be their worst, bitter, terrible people. When it comes down to like a meteorite blowing up a parking lot and having people that need first aid, everyone’s going to be pitching in. Like it’s just, it’s a weird quirk of us.

Blair Levin (1:07:40)
I would just note Minneapolis so showed up the law firms, the media companies, the higher education institutions that just violated that rule of do not capitulate in advance. People who knew that if they went to court, they would be fine, but capitulated because of just for a variety of reasons. And look, I’m sympathetic in a way. I work on Wall Street after all. I know how people

focus on the short term, not the long term. ⁓ you know, it’s interesting to me that the Kennedy Award for Courage is going to the city of Minneapolis, Stephanie Deserved and Jay Powell. ⁓ Because in both cases, neither of them wanted to do what they did. But they felt it was the right thing to do. I happen to know Jay, known him long time. ⁓ We were the same law firm in one summer.

And I’m not a close personal friend, but I know him well enough to know the last—he just wanted to be Fed chair and do the technocratic thing. He didn’t want to confront the President. But what he did was the institution was more important. And there was leadership of other institutions in this country who didn’t understand what Jay did, didn’t do that two-minute video that he did—so effectively, by the way. And if they had, we’d be looking at a different world right

Christopher Mitchell (1:09:22)
Well, that, thank you so much, Blair. It’s been wonderful talking with you, wandering around a bit here at the end, especially. And we’ll have you on future shows to talk more about the past and the future. ⁓ And hopefully, we’ll be doing some work if I can find the right people to talk a little bit more about Minneapolis.

Blair Levin (1:09:32)
I always appreciate being on with you and I look forward to that show even more than this show, because I think I know what I said. But I’m really looking forward to being moved by your friends and colleagues in that city.

Christopher Mitchell (1:09:53)
Thank you.

Blair Levin (1:09:54)
Thank you.

Jordan Pittman (1:09:56)
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Unbuffered Podcast. We have transcripts for this and other episodes available at ILSR.org/podcast. While you’re there, check out our other podcasts from ILSR, including Building Local Power, Local Energy Rules, and the Composting for Community Podcasts. Email us at [email protected] with your ideas for the show. Follow us on Bluesky. Our handle is @communitynets.

You can catch the latest research from all of our initiatives by subscribing to our monthly newsletter at ILSR.org While you’re there, please take a moment to donate. Your support in any amount helps keep us going. Unbuffered is produced by Christopher Mitchell with editing provided by me, Jordan Pittman. Special thanks to Riverside for providing the song Caveman. Until next time, thanks for listening.

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