My friend Philip Howard joins Infinite Loops to explain how America’s legal and regulatory system became too complicated to function effectively - and how we can rebuild it around judgment, accountability, and human agency.
We discuss why government has become unmanageable, how thousand-page rulebooks discourage individual judgment, why infrastructure projects can take decades to approve, and how public institutions end up costing more while delivering less.
We’ve shared some highlights below, together with links & a full transcript. If you like what you hear/read, please leave a comment or drop us a review on your provider of choice.
Links
Highlights
The Department of Silly Walks is in Charge
Philip Howard
But the reality is, the situation has gotten worse.Jim O’Shaughnessy
And diagnose it for me — why? I mean, I have pretty strong views on this. I think our current political class is one of the worst, on both sides of the aisle. I’m very bipartisan in my view. But why?Philip Howard
What no reformer has done yet is take on the underlying operating philosophy of modern government, which is basically that we should replace human judgment with either specific legal rules or objective proof. There was no such thing, until the 1970s, as thousand-page rule books. There was no such thing as having to go to a months-long hearing to prove that somebody doesn’t do their job. The Interstate Highway Act, which was in 1956, was 29 pages long. Within 10 years, over 20,000 miles of road had been built. The last transportation bill was almost 1,000 pages long, and it would take 10 years to get a permit for one stretch of road.Jim O’Shaughnessy
It’s almost like Monty Python is running the government — the Department of Silly Walks and all that. But again, I’m going to press you: why?Philip Howard
Well, a lot of people make money on this system. When I went to law school, which was a long time ago, the new orthodoxy was that you can’t trust human judgment. An official might be like Robert Moses and blow through—Jim O’Shaughnessy
I was going to bring him up.Philip Howard
Right. And so we were going to create a government better than people. And we have. Take the worker safety rules — there are 4,000 of them. I’m all for worker safety regulation, but the way they do it is they have 4,000 rules, and rules that say things like “stairwells shall be lit by natural or artificial light.” Now, that’s useful. Then the company has to have a compliance inspector who has a checklist for these 4,000 rules, going around checking the boxes that they do this. That’s a person doing really nothing useful. Then there’s another person who checks the checker. So you have all this bureaucracy building up, and Washington becomes this enormous factory for red tape.And law firms — including the law firm I was a senior partner of — you have these law firms doing really well, making money, and lobbyists, and they all navigate the precise language and they argue over it, and really nothing ever changes. It’s like a perpetual tug of war, and they have no interest in changing it. Everybody’s doing well. I think Washington has one of the largest Lamborghini dealers in the United States — a place where nothing ever happens.
The Freedom to Take Reasonable Risk
Jim O’Shaughnessy
I grew up in the 1970s. We were free-range kids. We could do whatever we wanted, as long as we got home.Philip Howard
Right. And so what’s happened is... A couple of decades ago there was a terrible accident on a sledding hill in Greenwich, Connecticut.Jim O’Shaughnessy
I remember it well.Philip Howard
And someone got a verdict of $6 million. And the result of that was not... I mean, Greenwich is a rich town, it could afford it. The result was that sledding hills across the country closed down.Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. Including that one.Philip Howard
Right, including that one.Jim O’Shaughnessy
I used to take my kids there.Philip Howard
Right. So all of a sudden, because of a lawsuit brought by one person — no deliberate policy choice — the trade-off judgment about whether the risks of sledding outweighed the fun of going out in the winter and the snow was not being made by anybody who’s politically accountable. It was being made by the fact that somebody brought a lawsuit. And there was a similar case in England around the same time, where somebody — terrible accident — dove in a lake and became a quadriplegic. Terrible accident. But there were no hidden dangers there. Sure, you could run into something if you weren’t watching, but people had sledded on that hill for decades—Jim O’Shaughnessy
It was a rite of passage for your kids.Philip Howard
Yeah. And so in England, there was nothing hidden — it was just a freak accident. It was tragic. But the county that owned the lake was so scared of liability, because there were two or three near-drownings a year — a big lake, people swimming, bad things could happen — that they had determined to close the lake down. And then this accident happened. So the court said, “Well, this is foreseeable, therefore we’re going to grant damages to this person.” It goes up to the equivalent of the UK Supreme Court, and they order the case to be dismissed. They say, “It is part of our role” — as the lead judge put it — “to protect the reasonable freedoms of people in society, including the freedom to take risk. Do we require that rivers and lakes close down because of the certainty that some accident will happen? Do we require all trees be cut down because some child may climb one and fall? We will not tolerate a dull and gray safety regime. We are here to protect the reasonable freedoms, including the freedom to take reasonable risk.”Jim O’Shaughnessy
What a great decision.Philip Howard
And it’s called the Tomlinson case. And that’s what we’re missing in this country: no one is drawing those boundaries.
Transcript
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Philip Howard. Finally. We’ve known each other forever — I served on your board at Common Good. I discovered you well before I met you, with your first book, The Death of Common Sense, in 1995. Loved it. have loved all of your books. But I’ve got to ask — that’s 30 years ago, 31 years ago, and things have seemingly only gotten worse.
Philip Howard
Right. I had lunch with a tycoon a few years ago, and he said, “I like what you write, but have you ever accomplished anything?” And I said, “Well, actually, now that you mention it, I have a perfect record of failure.” He said, “That’s what I thought. I’m not giving you any money.” That’s not exactly true — I actually have worked on a bunch of reforms with Congress. But the reality is, the situation has gotten worse.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And diagnose it for me — why? I mean, I have pretty strong views on this. I think our current political class is one of the worst, on both sides of the aisle. I’m very bipartisan in my view. But why?
Philip Howard
What no reformer has done yet is take on the underlying operating philosophy of modern government, which is basically that we should replace human judgment with either specific legal rules or objective proof. There was no such thing, until the 1970s, as thousand-page rule books. There was no such thing as having to go to a months-long hearing to prove that somebody doesn’t do their job. The Interstate Highway Act, which was in 1956, was 29 pages long. Within 10 years, over 20,000 miles of road had been built. The last transportation bill was almost 1,000 pages long, and it would take 10 years to get a permit for one stretch of road.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
It’s almost like Monty Python is running the government — the Department of Silly Walks and all that. But again, I’m going to press you: why?
Philip Howard
Well, a lot of people make money on this system. When I went to law school, which was a long time ago, the new orthodoxy was that you can’t trust human judgment. An official might be like Robert Moses and blow through—
Jim O’Shaughnessy
I was going to bring him up.
Philip Howard
Right. And so we were going to create a government better than people. And we have. Take the worker safety rules — there are 4,000 of them. I’m all for worker safety regulation, but the way they do it is they have 4,000 rules, and rules that say things like “stairwells shall be lit by natural or artificial light.” Now, that’s useful. Then the company has to have a compliance inspector who has a checklist for these 4,000 rules, going around checking the boxes that they do this. That’s a person doing really nothing useful. Then there’s another person who checks the checker. So you have all this bureaucracy building up, and Washington becomes this enormous factory for red tape.
And law firms — including the law firm I was a senior partner of — you have these law firms doing really well, making money, and lobbyists, and they all navigate the precise language and they argue over it, and really nothing ever changes. It’s like a perpetual tug of war, and they have no interest in changing it. Everybody’s doing well. I think Washington has one of the largest Lamborghini dealers in the United States — a place where nothing ever happens.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, I was just down there and saw as many fancy cars as one might see in Greenwich, Connecticut. And it seems to me that the source might have been the idealism of the 1960s. And by that I mean: we can make things better. But I think it counted also on this idea that we are born as a tabula rasa — as a blank slate. And we are not born as a blank slate.
Philip Howard
Right. Well, first of all, we are not born as a blank slate. And I think there was some idealism. There was a kind of naïveté that, with modern technology on the rise — and that was the era of IBM 360s, stuff like that — they could do it. But the real driver was guilt. We woke up in the 1960s to segregation, to pollution, to unsafe cars, to locking up disabled children in horrible places.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
We were doing some horrible shit.
Philip Howard
Yeah. And so the establishment had a record of neglect of many groups that should not have been neglected. It was one thing to change the values, which we did do — with environmental laws and civil rights laws, and all that was good and necessary — but they wanted to make sure that they could never happen again. And the way to make sure there were no abuses of authority was to get rid of authority. And so—
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Excuse me — get rid of individual’s authority.
Philip Howard
Individual’s authority.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
The regulation was going to become the authority.
Philip Howard
You’d have a legal system that would tell everybody what to do. Eric Foner is a very distinguished historian from Columbia University. He wrote a book they call The Future of Freedom, where he said that in the 1960s the governing idea was the elimination of all authority — so freedom would be enhanced if no one had authority. Now, it turns out that’s upside down. If the person running a firm, let’s say, doesn’t have the authority to uphold mutual standards and values, then there isn’t going to be mutual trust, and in fact everyone loses their freedom. There’s nobody to go to and say, “I’ve got a good idea, let’s change the way we do things.” Authority is actually critical to everyone’s freedom. You need red lights and green lights in any society and any institution.
But we’re still trapped in this kind of quicksand of law that we created, where no one can make a judgment. And then the result is that people who don’t respect law — like the current president, for example — can get away with murder, because they just simply ignore it.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And one of the things that I always come back to — you mentioned all of the abuses that were being solved. I was 100% in favor of everything you just mentioned: the Civil Rights Act, the Clean Water Act. The rivers around this city used to be so polluted that you risked your life jumping into them. And they got a lot cleaner. So all of those initial rules and regulations and new laws, I think, actually did really good things. And then what you’re talking about started to happen, and we became a society... I had a guest on who was basically comparing the US and China, and he goes, “The US has developed a lawyer society. China has developed an engineer society.”
Philip Howard
Right. Dan Wang.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. And when I was on the board of Common Good, all of the ideas you came up with, and the other board members and associates — I thought they were brilliant. But how do you get that into people? Because I’m not a Democrat or a Republican. Maybe I’m kind of like you: a radical centrist.
Philip Howard
Yeah. Well, again, I’ve been working on specific reforms. I was very involved in a bunch of environmental permitting reforms in Congress a few years ago. We developed this project, you’ll remember, for expert health courts, and got everybody for it. Obama agreed to support it — for medical malpractice, it’d go to an expert court without juries, and it would make health care better and also relief quicker for people who were really injured by mistakes. We had a pilot project in the Affordable Care Act that Obama supported, and funding for it. And the day before the vote, the Democratic leader of the Senate, Harry Reid, had it pulled. Because the trial lawyers — they make all their money on extortion. “You may be liable for $20 million for this tragedy, therefore you’d better pay us 10,” or something. Even though the doctor may have done nothing wrong — it may just have been a sick person getting sicker.
So it’s been hard to make change. But one does feel that times are changing. Politics have become more extreme on both sides.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yep.
Philip Howard
The left is more left, and the—
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, we were just talking about it before you got here. It’s like, wow — when did this happen?
Philip Howard
Yeah. And the right is... So there’s clearly more of a mood for change. Two-thirds of the country is dissatisfied with both parties, don’t like the way things are. Also, close to two-thirds of the country fundamentally agree on basic values — the golden rule, honesty, all that kind of stuff. It’s not like diversity has driven us apart. People still believe in the same things.
It does seem there needs... I’m talking to some former attorneys general now. I just hosted a three-day workshop three weeks ago to try to come up with a new political narrative. The idea is not to start a new party — not even, at least for now, to start a movement — but just to change the conversation. So we’ve come up with an idea for a new narrative. It’s in writing. We’re in the process of trying to get some leading citizens to sign on to it. I was just talking to former governor Mitch Daniels yesterday about it, so he’s on board — and getting a group of people to start talking about it.
This new narrative is not about policy, it’s about how things work: how you run a school, how you get a permit, how you’re allowed to act honestly with each other in the workplace without fearing a lawsuit — that sort of thing. It’s really about operating systems. So we have a name for it, we have a narrative that we’re working out, and I think it’s good. It took a lot — I had a bunch of marketing people and press people in this workshop.
And so we’re going to try to roll it out slowly, with just leading citizens — maybe yourself — talking about it with different groups of people, and begin to say, “Isn’t it time that we actually overhauled the system so that people can act, so that Americans can roll up their sleeves and act like Americans?” That’s what people no longer feel comfortable doing, and the law is what’s gotten in the way. It’s just legal quicksand. So it’s about re-empowering human agency.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, which is something I deeply believe in. And also, when you look at the history of this country, you have things like... You have a book on this — I think it was probably your most controversial — and that was public unions.
Philip Howard
Right. Not Accountable.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Right. Not Accountable. Great book. And as I was reading that book, I remembered that FDR himself said that would be the worst thing to ever let happen. Many people consider FDR one of our most progressive presidents, and yet he was like, absolutely not. And yet it happened.
Philip Howard
Right. Well, it’s funny you mention that. I’m just finishing a book called Burning Money, and it’s a book that tries to describe the harm of government that’s become unmanageable. It’s very hard proving a negative. But I teach at Harvard Business School sometimes, so I have a lot of business school professor friends, and they sort of help me out. It’s funny — there’s a vast library of books on how to manage businesses better. There is not one book on what happens if you lack managerial authority. It’s just like breathing — it’s like what happens if you don’t breathe. If you don’t have somebody who can actually direct resources here or there, decide who’s good at what, adapt when something unforeseen happens — all the things that have to make anything work in any institution require managers. Well, guess what? Government no longer has managerial authority.
So, more or less — particularly in the big cities and big states, New York, Illinois, New York City — we’re getting about half the product at twice the price, and we can’t afford that anymore. There are a lot of public needs, and there are a lot of serious policy issues that need to get addressed — income inequality, all kinds of stuff. Meanwhile, we’re burning money. We’re literally burning money. There’s a school in Chicago that has capacity for 1,000 students that has 27 students in it, and no one has the capacity to close down the school and transfer the students to a nearby school, because the teachers’ unions have made it so that no one can close a school. Half of New York City schools are operating at barely over half capacity because of declining demographics. But the teachers’ unions got a law — called maintenance-of-effort laws — which requires that a district never reduce its budget unless tax revenues go down. Because the teachers’ union got an agreement.
So for 50 years, since they got collective bargaining power, year after year, they’ve gotten more and more requirements like that built into the codes. These are laws now — laws that literally require us to burn money. Almost no one appreciates that. I’ve hired lawyers. I have a partnership with the public interest law firm in Chicago that just won the tariff case against Trump, and also won the Janus case. So we have a draft complaint in federal court to challenge the constitutionality of public union controls, ready to go. But I don’t want to do it until I write this book that explains why it’s so harmful that we can’t manage government.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And you mentioned earlier that what we really need is a new operating system. And in operating systems, incentives kind of rule everything around us. Right now, as you’ve just outlined, our incentives... For example, if I were the head of the public teachers’ union, man, I would be calling for more of those laws, because I’d be highly incentivized to do so. And so it’s easy and disingenuous, in my opinion — it’s easy to scapegoat everybody. Let’s just stop doing that. Let’s look at the underlying system and the incentives that result from it. That explains a ton. I remember one time you told me about the law here in New York City where a public school teacher may not — if a child is in distress, remember this? — the teacher may not touch the child. In other words, one of the most basic human instincts, if an adult sees a child in distress, is to comfort them. That’s just so part of the human OS.
Philip Howard
Right. But we have this precautionary system of government, of law, now, so that anything that might go wrong is forbidden. So, it is possible a weird person could touch a child inappropriately.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, of course.
Philip Howard
Because that is possible, and not that unusual — you know, Catholic churches and priests and all that — so they make a rule that you can’t touch a child. But that’s equally weird. And so the only way to square the circle is to have a system where the people in charge are allowed to use their judgment about who’s a good person, who maybe is a little odd, and be able to remove the odd person from that teaching job. But you can’t remove anybody. I interviewed a former commissioner in New York recently who said that in his 40 years of being a top official in New York City, he had never seen anyone terminated for performance.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Wow.
Philip Howard
Never. So you have a system where you can’t terminate the weird person just because you say they’re a little weird — you have to prove they’re weird. Well, how do you prove someone’s weird? Most of the things that are... I think it was Einstein, or someone like that, who said if it can be measured, it’s not that important.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
In investing: once a target becomes a measurement, it’s no longer useful as a target.
Philip Howard
So we have this system that assumes that right and wrong can be proved objectively. That is manifestly false. How do you prove someone is selfish? How do you prove somebody has good judgment at this but not such good judgment at that? How do you prove who works hard, who cooperates well? How do you prove what’s a good product, what’s not a good product? None of this stuff is provable. It’s tested in the marketplace of human relations, in the marketplace of values, in the marketplace of products — but it’s not provable. This system is built on a false premise, and we need to basically go back to a human system.
The Constitution, with all amendments, is 7,500 words. It includes principles like no unreasonable searches and seizures, and freedom of speech. It does those things in a couple of words. It doesn’t define them, but they become defined over time as issues come up. People have a general sense, from those principles, of what the boundaries are. And we feel comfortable going to bed at night that the police can’t just arbitrarily barge in and throw us in jail or whatever. The current system of federal law and regulation is 150 million words. It is beyond the capacity of any human understanding. And even AI can’t make sense of it, because it’s not consistent — it’s like a giant short circuit of all these laws piled on top of each other.
Going back to the teachers’ union: a couple of years ago, the Citizens Budget Commission in New York City counted 21 bills that passed the legislature to enhance union benefits and rights in one year — 60 years after they got collective bargaining power. Now, not all of them ended up making it into law, for one reason or another, but they are relentless. And so you pile up all this stuff, year after year, and after a while, government’s unmanageable. It doesn’t deliver. It wastes money. By the way — you’re a money guy, right? 23 million people in the United States work for the government. 23 million people. That’s over one in seven people in the workplace. They are not manageable. They’re not managed sensibly in any way. They cost about $3 trillion — in total comp and benefits. And they spend, in a discretionary way, or oversee, another four to five trillion dollars. So we’re talking about not quite, maybe, a third of the GDP being spent by a system that is no longer manageable — and it’s not delivering public services very well, either. And there are all these new needs. So why do we tolerate that? We tolerate it because we don’t understand it.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
It seems to me — I always argued... I’m a big fan of philosophy, and you don’t need to be a pure Platonist or Aristotelian, you need both. Because if it’s pure Plato, you get the Republic, and you get the philosopher kings, and, oh, they’re going to do a great job. What you need from Aristotle is: wait a sec, that might not work out like that.
Philip Howard
Right. The happy mean, right?
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. And what I was always struck by in our many conversations is, I just can’t believe... We know that the majority of Americans intuitively understand this. We know, as you mentioned earlier, that if you looked at Americans of all races, creeds, colors, sexes, et cetera, we share much more in common than divides us. And yet here we are.
Philip Howard
Right. So we need a new... And by the way, neither political party will solve this problem. If you project out five or 10 years, there’s nothing on the horizon that is even conceivable that could end up solving this problem. The Democrats get most of their resources from the worst of these groups. By the way, I happen to be a registered Democrat. I’m for environmental protection, I’m worried about climate change, I’m for taking care of people who need help — I’m for all those things. They will never solve this problem. And the Republicans see government as the enemy. Both parties do just fine running against the extremes of the other party.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Right.
Philip Howard
They collect a lot of money. The Democrats collect it from the people who can’t stand Trump, and the Trump people collect it from the people who can’t stand AOC and Mamdani. So you have this system where both parties are profiting by extremism and leaving the vast middle, as you described, behind. We have to come up with a new narrative first — a new narrative and a vision — and then let it turn into something.
I was talking to a former attorney general — I won’t mention him, because I don’t have permission, but a very prominent attorney general. We were having a discussion. I didn’t know him; he was introduced to me by the president of an insurance company. I said, “Well, do you know why we’re talking?” He said, it was on Zoom, “No, I have no idea why we’re talking.” So I said, “I don’t think either party’s going to solve the problems of this country. We need a new narrative that actually addresses the problems people see with a government that doesn’t function very well and doesn’t let people be themselves. We go to video trainings that tell us, basically, don’t be yourself, don’t tell a joke, don’t be candid.” So after about six or seven minutes, he starts finishing my sentences. And then, at the end of our half hour, he says, “Okay, here’s what we do. You come up with the framework of principles about what this new vision looks like, and we’ll go find 8 or 10 or 12 really prominent citizens to start talking about — we don’t have to agree on everything — start talking about why this is directionally what’s missing in our public discussion. And then we start... maybe we have some public events, then we start talking about it.” And he said, “I think it’s possible that we could get one or more people running for president in 2028 to talk this way. Because everybody, just listening to you — of course you’re right. This is exactly what’s... Of course you’re right. Everybody knows you’re right. Just nobody’s saying it.”
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And that’s the exact point that always frustrates me. There’s that great quote — I can’t remember who said it — but it’s like, “If you give me the ability to write the stories of a country, I care not who writes the laws.” And he was really onto something there. That’s why I’m really happy to hear that you’re developing the narrative. Because the system we operate under right now assigns you the bin you’re going to be in. If you can attribute all of my political or social positions from hearing one of them, I am brain dead. I am flatline. And yet that’s what they do, right?
Philip Howard
Yeah. The thing people don’t appreciate with this modern mutation of law is that law is not supposed to be central planning. Law is supposed to be a framework that protects people from bad things — no pollution, no discrimination, no cheating, whatever. Within that, it’s supposed to safeguard an open field of freedom.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yes.
Philip Howard
So what’s happened in the last 60 years is that the open field of freedom has become a legal minefield. Instead of proscribing what was bad, for 60 years or so since the ‘60s, we started prescribing how to do everything — and also giving anybody who doesn’t like your decision-making a legal right to challenge it.
I wrote something for The Free Press recently. I had a series on great Americans who are not political leaders, leading up to July 4th. I did one on an early management theorist named Mary Parker Follett, who died in 1933. She was a prominent management theorist before women could vote, so she was really a rather unusual character. One of her points was that as modern democracy is evolving, we have freedom all wrong. It’s important to have democratic elections, but democracy is all about just going in one direction or another — it’s about the herd, it doesn’t affect your freedom. And then there are other people — John Stuart Mill and others — who talk about the importance of individual rights: you can do whatever you want to do. She said, talking about the individual, that it’s like breaking a branch off a tree and expecting it to live. We don’t live alone, individually; we live in groups. And it’s within groups that people innovate and find meaning and fellow feeling, and develop their values and apply their values. It’s in group activities.
And one of the things I think she could not have foreseen was that this modern, post-’60s idea of law — that tells you exactly how to do everything — means that people really are no longer free, that groups no longer have the capacity to innovate and do things their own way. People running a school can’t run it: “Let’s try this.” Can I tell a regulatory success story? A couple of decades ago, Australia had terrible nursing homes. America, by the way, is terrible — do not go to a nursing home. And they’re regulated by thousand-page rule books that tell you when the meals are and how much they have to weigh and how many ounces of vegetables, and all this kind of stuff — just crazy. But they were terrible nursing homes. So someone had the bright idea of scrapping the rule book and replacing it with what ended up being 31 general principles: have a home-like setting, respect the dignity of the residents, that sort of thing. So they did it. And all the legal scholars had scoffed — “these nursing home operators are going to get away with murder; if you don’t tell them exactly what to do, they’ll abuse the residents.” They went a year later to look at how it was going, and what the scholars found is that the nursing homes were twice as good. They looked into why. One reason is that now the nurses’ aides came to work, instead of with a checklist of a thousand things to check off, having internalized these principles. They looked at what the residents wanted. Instead of telling nursing home owners exactly how to do things, they let them do it themselves. One nursing home has a gardening theme, another one has a different theme — they have completely different themes. They can innovate, they can do it in their own way, and take pride in the uniqueness of their creation. Humans need agency. We need to be able to make a difference. This vast legal system has snuffed it out. No wonder everybody’s going crazy and voting for extremists on both sides — because we’re not allowed to be ourselves.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Particularly for this country. There’s a book called The Hypomanic Edge — Why America has a Little Craziness But a Lot of Success. The thesis is: well, look at who made up the population of this country. They had to be willing to say goodbye to everything they knew — their families, their friends — often with no money in their pockets, and come over here. And so what do you get? You get that type of person.
Philip Howard
And you get people who have to invent. In the old country, you were born the way you were — and that still, to a certain extent, affects the cultures of the old countries.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, I agree.
Philip Howard
You’re the son of a carpenter, you became a carpenter. In this country, you move over to the wilderness, the frontier, and if you don’t watch out, somebody’s going to come scalp you. So you really have to take care of yourself.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yep.
Philip Howard
And people just invent. Americans invented themselves. Modern — Elon Musk, or Thomas Edison. Thomas Edison’s so smart about this. Here’s a guy with a third-grade education. Great lines. “Nothing any good works by itself. You’ve got to make the damn thing work.” So you imagine him developing sound, inventing the electric light bulb, and all that kind of stuff — but by tinkering.
There was a great book by Harry Evans — God bless him — who was the former head of the Times of London and then became the head of Random House. He bought The Death of Common Sense when it came out; he ran Random House, which published The Death of Common Sense. Oh, it was so much fun. The first time I met him, I was so scared, because I’d never written a book before, and here’s the editor-in-chief of Random House. And he’d say, “I’m so excited about your project. It reminds me of this and that.” He’s completely into it. And years later — we stayed friends — he wrote a book, a coffee table book, which I really urge people to read. It’s called They Made America. It’s a coffee table book of 5,000- to 10,000-word essays about Americans who innovated one way or another, and what their character was and who they were.
So, the Wright brothers. Everyone knew, with the internal combustion engine and all that kind of stuff, and the idea of wings and stuff, that it would be possible to achieve manned flight. And you had the leading physicists in the world, all over the world, trying for some big prize for who could first achieve manned flight. Literally the smartest people in the world, the most educated — they’re all doing experiments and having these things take off on the Potomac and become submarines immediately, that sort of stuff. And then you have these two bicycle mechanics in Dayton, Ohio, who start pedaling around with little foils to test wind flows on their handlebars to see how they work, stuff like that. It’s like Edison, just tinkering. And these two boys, the bicycle mechanics, do it. And after they do it, no one believes them. No one believes them. So they go to Paris. Nobody believes them — this is five years having gone by since Kitty Hawk. They go to Paris, people still don’t believe them. And everyone fills the big stadium, and the French papers are completely making fun of them. It’s some French phrase — the American bluff, or something. And so their little plane takes off from the infield of this racetrack — it’s like Bourget, I think, Le Bourget — and they take off, and people kind of gasp. And then it starts coming toward the grandstands, and people start to panic — this thing’s going... And then it turns, and people just could not believe it. It is such a great story.
Anyway, Harry has his Goodyear in there — sitting there making his family sick by vulcanizing rubber in his kitchen, stuff like that. So these are all basically predecessors to Jim O’Shaughnessy. All these people in the book, making their family sick by bossing them around and making them do all this stuff. It’s a great book, They Made America. It’s about the American... it’s about “well, let’s try this, let’s try that, let’s do the other.”
Jim O’Shaughnessy
You know, Bill Bryson has a great book, America, One Summer. It looks at the ‘20s, and that was the America you’re describing. Like Coleridge...
Philip Howard
Coolidge.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Coolidge — I’m thinking of the poet. Coolidge was vacationing near Mount Rushmore when the guy was making it. He had no idea he was doing it. His aide said to him, “Hey, there’s some crazy guy up there who’s carving the presidents’ faces into this mountain.” And Coleridge was like, “Cool, let’s go look.” He didn’t ask for any funding. He didn’t go up there and say, “You can’t do that.” He just was like, “Wow, that’s really cool.”
Philip Howard
Cool.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And back to your tinkerer thing — like Claude Shannon, one of my heroes. Really, because that’s all he did. For those who don’t know, Claude Shannon came up with information theory. He should be, in my opinion, as famous as Einstein. And yet he was just a really, incredibly colorful character. He worked on whatever was of interest to him. So you got a lot of trumpets that shot fire out when you hit a note, you got mechanical chess games, you got all of that — but also you got information theory. And I definitely think... I’m also vehemently opposed to this whole generational “oh, this young generation doesn’t know anything, blah, blah.” That’s total bullshit. These are incredibly talented people, who I just feel intersect with your thesis, because they’re straitjacketed.
Philip Howard
They are straitjacketed. And I think they’re held back by these conventions. We look back at the Victorian age and laugh at how stultifying it was and stuff. Victorians have nothing on us — I mean, they were like hippies compared to us. We are so much more...
Jim O’Shaughnessy
More brothels per square mile in London during the Victorian age than at any other time.
Philip Howard
We are so repressed by, really, a philosophy — a kind of anti-invention philosophy, where being yourself is a danger as opposed to an opportunity. I was thinking about this. I’m asked sometimes by people, “Well, you’ve been at this 30 years, you’ve really had a lot of failure. So...”
Jim O’Shaughnessy
But you’ve been very persistent.
Philip Howard
Well that’s what they say. “So why are you so persistent?” And this has cost me a lot of money. I deemphasized my law career and everything, because I really believed in it. And it’s not like I’m a saint. I don’t wear hair shirts. I enjoy life. I like — like you — fun. I’m playing in a golf tournament this weekend, or whatever. But the reason is that I know, and you know, and the attorney general I was talking to knows, and a bunch of other people who are on my board now, that I’m right: that we’ve created a system that’s fundamentally discordant to the American spirit.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yes.
Philip Howard
When I was in college, I got lucky. My family had no money, and I got a job at a federal poverty program at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Somebody saw that there was this kid going to an Ivy League school, and so they plucked me out and made me the gopher to a Nobel Prize winner.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
The creator of the multiple-worlds thesis of quantum physics, right?
Philip Howard
Right. And so I spent three summers as the gopher to a Nobel Prize winner.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
How cool is that.
Philip Howard
I ended up publishing papers when I was a teenager on post-nuclear-war recovery and stuff like that. But the thing I learned — we were in a little small group at Oak Ridge, a civil defense group, about a dozen people, an interdisciplinary group: economists and physicists and chemical engineers. What I learned about them is that they thought things through for themselves. And when they thought they understood something, they didn’t let go of it. It wasn’t a question of whether it was accepted or not; it was whether they felt they understood whatever the issue was, whatever the dynamic was, and it became their truth. And they wouldn’t give it up because somebody disagreed, unless the person who disagreed came up with a compelling reason why it was wrong. And I sort of feel that way. I feel that what we’re talking about is true. So why would I give it up? It’s incredibly important.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. The principle of parsimony basically tells us that... It’s Occam’s razor by a different name. It works a lot of the time when you apply it to groups and things like that. I was thinking of somebody I had on in the early days of this podcast — Nick Gruen.
Philip Howard
Yeah, I was just on a Zoom with him.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Okay. And he really sold me on this whole jury idea, which—
Philip Howard
The citizens’—
Jim O’Shaughnessy
The citizens’ jury.
Philip Howard
The citizens’ assemblies.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. Why aren’t we trying those? My attitude is: let a thousand initiatives bloom.
Philip Howard
Yeah. Because it’s going to work, and get new ideas, and create... Another thing about society we don’t really understand is the role of moral authority. Citizens’ assemblies, for example: you don’t have to have power to be influential. You could convene a citizens’ assembly on the issues we’re talking about, and have them come up with their own interpretation and comment and so on. And it would have power — not because somebody can push a button to make it happen, but because real people got together and came up with that conclusion. George Kennan, the diplomat, toward the end of his life said he thought American government needed a fourth branch of government. He called it a council of state, but it was really sort of a council of citizens. His fourth branch would have no power. Its only job would be to comment on how the other branches were doing.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. Well, you know, didn’t we used to have that in the so-called fourth estate? Journalism has descended right along with government. Because I was a real junkie for — okay, really outing myself as a nerd here — but during the Watergate hearings, I was 13 years old, and I spent all summer watching them. And that feels like a profound loss to me, because — nothing, of course, was perfect — but journalists sort of became the fourth estate that served that function.
Philip Howard
Walter Cronkite. Chet Huntley. These people had moral authority and credibility. If they said something, you believed it.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yes.
Philip Howard
And we just don’t... So we’ve lost the moral authority. One of the innovations that has worked in the last 30 years in America is the idea of base-closing commissions. It was politically impossible to close down unnecessary military bases. So one of the recommendations of the Grace Commission under President Reagan was to create independent commissions, appointed with so many by the minority leader and so many by the majority leader — but they weren’t partisan, they were retired generals and such — and they would come up with a set of proposals about which bases to close. So in the 2005 Base Closing Commission, which happened to be run by a guy I went to school with, they came up with recommendations to close or consolidate 50 bases, saving tens of billions of dollars a year. And Congress had the power to vote it up or down, but that’s it. So there’s none of this bickering going back and forth, and the congressman had plausible deniability: “I’m sorry that the base was closed here, but I couldn’t do anything about it, it’s all part of a package.”
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah.
Philip Howard
Great. That’s kind of an innovation. That’s good. But the base-closing commissions had moral authority — they came up with the right answer. So I think we need... and I want to run it. I want you to appoint me to run it. You run for president, then appoint me.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
What did Sherman say? “If nominated, I will not run. If elected, I will not serve.”
Philip Howard
I want you to appoint me to the Recodification Commission — to methodically go through every area of law and turn 50,000 pages into a thousand pages, and not do away with anything, just make it work. Make it a principles-based system, more like the Constitution. And give people defined authority frameworks. Have courts not second-guess it, but only decide whether someone transgressed their authority. That should be the role of courts — not second-guessing. I mean, are the benefits of the transmission line worth the harm of building it through a pristine forest? That’s not a legal question. That’s a policy question, and ultimately a political question, and somebody has to make that decision. Otherwise, today we don’t have the transmission line, so we can’t get the power from renewable sources to the cities or to the data centers or whatever — because the process goes on for a decade. It’s crazy.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
My company, O’Shaughnessy Ventures, is doing a lot with AI. What do you think about that? What do you think about humans who — as you mentioned, not even AI seems to be able to make sense of all of these laws — but it probably is going to do a better job serving a human? By that I mean: have every regulation put in there, have it translated into English, show where it conflicts with other rules and regulations, so that at least — like a human, not even a committee of humans, could do it, but for AI it’s trivial. But not as a ruling — as in, “Here’s what you’re dealing with. Now, you humans, figure this out.”
Philip Howard
Yeah, completely. So I think the closest analogy I can think of to AI is the steam engine. You went from manual labor to a machine that could really do powerful things, and could be harnessed onto tractors or whatever. I have some senior AI people writing for my Free Press series that’s coming out, called Reboot Almost Everything. It’s a 20-part series, coming out in August. And so they’re talking about uses of AI. Reed Hastings, talking about how every student can now have a tutor — it’s fantastic. There are all these fantastic opportunities with AI. Ultimately, though, someone has to be accountable for tough choices.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
I agree.
Philip Howard
And AI is not accountable. So someone needs to—
Jim O’Shaughnessy
The human running the AI needs to be accountable.
Philip Howard
It needs to be accountable.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
I agree.
Philip Howard
So we’re going to need to come up with... A senior person at Google is writing an article on what they view as the proper AI oversight. It’s really interesting. It really is a brave new world, and the opportunities are fantastic. But the challenges of coming up with human oversight — because values... AI can mimic values.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Right.
Philip Howard
But it can’t really have values. And there’s a lot of ethical theory about how ethics can’t be applied in advance — you always have to be in the situation.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Situational.
Philip Howard
It’s always situational. And somebody has to be overseeing AI, and somebody has to make ultimate calls. And coming up with those structures is going to be challenging, too.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. I think that one of the things that AI can do splendidly is to take those millions and millions of words and boil them down and put them in plain English. And by the way, I think they should do it for business agreements too. You can’t use anything online without agreeing... I don’t know — do you know anyone who’s read the terms and conditions?
Philip Howard
My favorite is when you go to a doctor’s office and they have a little thing there above the receptionist’s desk, and they say, “Okay, now sign here.” And you never see the agreement. And they say, “Okay, now here comes another one, now sign here.” You never — they don’t even go through the pretense of showing you the agreement. You’re just signing stuff. It’s truly the reductio ad absurdum of modern legal life. Crazy.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
So tell me a little bit about the series that you’re doing for The Free Press.
Philip Howard
So the series is called Reboot Almost Everything. It harkens back to our discussion about the need to change the operating system. So it’s not about policy. We go area by area, and we have an expert set up, in give-or-take 500-word essays — these are like one-page, very short essays — but with prominent people, like Reed Hastings or Mitch Daniels, saying, “Here’s the problem: government has become unmanageable, it has all these harms. Here’s the solution: we have to change civil service systems and get rid of union controls and do this.” I’ve written the introduction, and I’ve written one on litigation. I said, here’s the problem: we have an impartial system of litigation in this country — that’s a good thing, and people trust it to be impartial — but it draws no boundaries of who can sue for what. So where’s the law part? It’s kind of “sue for anything” rather than law — not lawsuits, but “sue for anything.” And so we’re missing something. And the harm of that is not just that you get these occasional crazy verdicts, but that people don’t feel free in daily life. They won’t let their kids go out and play alone, because if there’s an accident, they might be liable.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Our staff here is quite young, and before you got here we were talking about... I grew up in the 1970s. We were free-range kids. We could do whatever we wanted, as long as we got home.
Philip Howard
Right. And so what’s happened is... A couple of decades ago there was a terrible accident on a sledding hill in Greenwich, Connecticut.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
I remember it well.
Philip Howard
And someone got a verdict of $6 million. And the result of that was not... I mean, Greenwich is a rich town, it could afford it. The result was that sledding hills across the country closed down.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. Including that one.
Philip Howard
Right, including that one.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
I used to take my kids there.
Philip Howard
Right. So all of a sudden, because of a lawsuit brought by one person — no deliberate policy choice — the trade-off judgment about whether the risks of sledding outweighed the fun of going out in the winter and the snow was not being made by anybody who’s politically accountable. It was being made by the fact that somebody brought a lawsuit. And there was a similar case in England around the same time, where somebody — terrible accident — dove in a lake and became a quadriplegic. Terrible accident. But there were no hidden dangers there. Sure, you could run into something if you weren’t watching, but people had sledded on that hill for decades—
Jim O’Shaughnessy
It was a rite of passage for your kids.
Philip Howard
Yeah. And so in England, there was nothing hidden — it was just a freak accident. It was tragic. But the county that owned the lake was so scared of liability, because there were two or three near-drownings a year — a big lake, people swimming, bad things could happen — that they had determined to close the lake down. And then this accident happened. So the court said, “Well, this is foreseeable, therefore we’re going to grant damages to this person.” It goes up to the equivalent of the UK Supreme Court, and they order the case to be dismissed. They say, “It is part of our role” — as the lead judge put it — “to protect the reasonable freedoms of people in society, including the freedom to take risk. Do we require that rivers and lakes close down because of the certainty that some accident will happen? Do we require all trees be cut down because some child may climb one and fall? We will not tolerate a dull and gray safety regime. We are here to protect the reasonable freedoms, including the freedom to take reasonable risk.”
Jim O’Shaughnessy
What a great decision.
Philip Howard
And it’s called the Tomlinson case. And that’s what we’re missing in this country: no one is drawing those boundaries. So one of my pieces in The Free Press talks about how you would do that. You could have a state pass a statute that says the judges shall have the responsibility to draw the lines of reasonable dispute in any lawsuit; and in any case that might affect the freedoms of people not in the courtroom, the court shall make a legal ruling on the boundaries of acceptable risk.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
See, I’m a big fan of the book The Beginning of Infinity. And he talks a lot in that book about the precautionary principle, and he links the excesses of the precautionary principle to, essentially, the death of societies, because they can’t innovate anymore.
Philip Howard
What happens if.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, that’s David Deutsch, right. I read it when it came out and I liked it a lot, but then when I reread it, it just mapped over to what you’re talking about. So, okay, let’s play a game. I am not the president — that will never happen.
Philip Howard
Oh, come on. I like it. President O’Shaughnessy. But think of all the trouble people have spelling it.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Exactly. When I’m in Asia, they just simply call me “mister.”
Philip Howard
Oh, yeah, good.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
But I can influence the president. And he assigns you to this role that you’ve asked me to assign you to. What are your first five... What are the first five things that you’re going to promulgate?
Philip Howard
Well, the first thing would be to liberate people’s freedom to be themselves, by drawing the lines of who can sue for what — and making judges, even though it’s hard, draw these boundaries so people can do that. The second thing I would do is say: for democracy to work, the elected executives — governors and mayors — have to have basic managerial tools. They have to have the authority to decide not only what to do, consistent with the legislation, but who’s good at doing what, how to allocate money, how to adapt to new circumstances — all the managerial choices that I’m writing about in this little book that’s going to come out in January, called Burning Money. So I’d do that.
I would unleash — American infrastructure was built by our great-grandfathers. I mean, literally, water mains and rickety power lines all over the Northeast. It’s crazy. You would unleash that by creating a really simple authority structure. For starters, I’d write a law that says: notwithstanding any other law or regulation to the contrary, for the next five years, transmission lines shall be approved in the following process. There will be a notice of proposal. There’ll be an environmental review of not more than 50 pages, to be completed within three months, only talking about major impacts. There’ll be a chance for the public to comment in a short period. And then these designated officials shall have the authority to make trade-off judgments consistent with this. Their decision can be second-guessed by a designated official — the president, whoever it is. And the role of the courts will only be to determine whether, in any of these steps, they’ve transgressed the boundaries of their authority. So you have essentially a one-page document that allows for transmission lines, or whatever we’re talking about, to be built. It would be a slightly more elaborate process for a new nuclear plant, but it wouldn’t be 30 years — which is more or less what it is today.
So you’d simply go, piece by piece, and create authority structures. And I would also, to the greatest extent possible, re-empower local communities to do things in their own ways — whether it’s running schools or doing their parks — decentralized as much as possible, so that people can wake up in the morning and feel they can make a difference.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
You’ve got my vote. I think maybe we’ll run you for president.
Philip Howard
No, I just want to run this Recodification Commission. I really do. I’m getting a little old, but I’m still vigorous enough for now. Napoleon appointed four judges to redo all the laws of France — criminal laws, property laws, estate laws, tax law, everything. Everything was run by a prominent judge named Portalis. And in six months, they came up with new frameworks for all of the laws that affect France. Then they were debated in the legislature — Napoleon actually presided over a bunch of those — and they were enacted. And the result was the Napoleonic Code, which is still the basis for civilized law in half the world.
In the 1950s, a committee from the American Law Institute, run by a guy named Karl Llewellyn, a very prominent professor, said it’s ridiculous that we have — what was then — 48 different states, 48 different contract laws, so that anyone doing interstate commerce has to hire 48 sets of lawyers to comply with stuff. This is crazy. So let’s create a uniform commercial code. And they devised it. It has all different chapters — to do with security interests and commercial sales, different chapters for each one. It didn’t take them that long. And versions of it were adopted by virtually all 48 states. That was one of the things that stimulated the postwar boom: everybody had the same set of principles when they were doing contracts. Well, we just need that for society in America.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. And it’s funny too, because I was thinking a lot about World War II — it plays a part in my fictional thriller that I was telling you about. It spans... it ends in 2027, it starts in 1939, so it’s quite the epic.
Philip Howard
Wow, cool.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
But I was thinking about America back then, and the thought struck me — and then I saw other people talking about it as well: if you buy into this idea of the American empire, which I don’t... the idea that for a brief period at the end of World War II, we had a weapon that could colonize the entire world if we so chose to. What did we do? The opposite. We did the Marshall Plan. We rebuilt Germany, we rebuilt Japan. And so I feel very patriotic about that — that America could have... If you look at every other so-called empire in history, if they had that weapon, they’re going to run the entire world. That was never in our DNA.
Philip Howard
And if Donald Trump had been in charge... So that’s why I think Americans intuitively know that’s bad, too. He really has accurately scoped out many of the idiocies that we’ve talked about. He doesn’t really have a vision on how to fix them, but America is a place where people not only wanted to do good for themselves, and innovate, and have agency — they also wanted to do good. And I think that part of America is really important. Obviously our moral authority is significantly diminished under the current administration. That’s the thing we need to come back to. But part of what I’m talking about — when you have a principles-based operating system, it is activated by people acting on their values and their judgments. Not just using their common sense, which is important, but also their values: what’s the right thing to do here? And so America’s missing that. There’s no reason why we can’t get it back, but we have to have a legal operating framework that allows us to act on our values — that doesn’t tell us how to do things. I think there’s a historic moment. I really believe this. There’s a historic moment waiting for us right now, and it is to correct course and face the future with new tools — AI — but with old values and an old sense of responsibility.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. Because the effects of the current system are also not difficult to see. You create a group of people who feel no sense of agency, who feel infantilized, who almost get trained into learned helplessness. And my version of America is the opposite of all that.
Philip Howard
Right. Well, I’m going to speak at Notre Dame in October, to a bunch of people. And I’m going to Purdue at the same time — which Mitch Daniels has gotten roped into running again. I’ve actually been targeting Catholic universities, because I think that what you just said is something that Catholic theology deeply believes: subsidiarity, agency, people own themselves, they own who they are. So we need to build a cohort in support of that.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And I think, at least in America, it’s “catholic” with a small C. In other words, it’s universal in this country. And I don’t know whether you watched any of the reactions of the Europeans in the United States for the World Cup. They’re absolutely delightful, because they’re like, “I thought America was just crime-ridden and horrible.” And they’re blown away by Costco.
Philip Howard
Right. But I’m blown away by Costco too, by the way. Anytime I can get 50 pounds of crunchy peanut butter, I’m there.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
You’re there. But the point is that when regular people are allowed to experience something and then share that experience, you again are reminded that, for the most part, most of what is the civilized world shares a lot of values in common with one another.
Philip Howard
Completely. So let us be that. Give us a framework that allows us to be ourselves, and allows us to do things in groups differently than other groups — that does not force us into a... You know, I’ve always said, people say, “Well, America’s all about diversity.” Actually, I think America is all about conformity. The Swedes go to Minnesota, and the Hasidic Jews are in Brooklyn, and the intellectuals are on the Upper West Side, and the techies are all in Silicon Valley. It’s about conformity. What America did that was really different is it tolerated a diversity of conformities.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yes.
Philip Howard
And so there were all these different communities, but all with these core values that they shared: reciprocity, living together in the same community. Fantastic. It’s a great thing. And all the innovation that comes out of all these different groups doing things in different ways — well, let us do that again.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. And I love the line about conformity, because there’s so much truth to it. Of course, in both investment theory and social theory, there is this notion of the clustering effect, and, you know, like seeks like. But okay, fine — let’s grant that as an axiom. You’ve got to allow your view, where, yeah, you can have your values, and they might be very different than this group’s over here, but as long as you have an underlying framework that allows for that to happen, and for people to take control. Like your idea about local city ordinances or state ordinances. And the attempt to create a monoculture — monocultures always die. If you know anything about evolution: monocultures die.
Philip Howard
Right. They don’t grow, they don’t innovate. Whereas when you have these cells of like-minded people — one, innovating in their own way; two, competing with other cells in their own way — then all of a sudden you have this movement all the time, and you get this great stuff happening. So I think the American character is there — obviously you do too — but it needs to get unlocked. And so that’s going to require a new narrative and a new vision. And I’m roping you into it.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. Well, Philip, I love your work. As you know, I served on your board for many years. I hope this is the time, because I’ve got six grandchildren now, and I don’t want them to grow up in this giant squid of regulatory morass. We had a driver in Switzerland once, and it turned out it was his last day — he was retiring. And sometimes I enjoy just chatting with a variety of different people, so I started a conversation. I’m like, “So, tell me about yourself,” and everything. And the first thing he led with was Switzerland: “I’m born and raised in Switzerland. This is my last day of work, and tonight I’m getting on a plane and I’m going to Australia.” And I’m like, “Wow, okay, why?” And he goes — as beautiful as Switzerland is, as much as he loved Switzerland — he said, “I can no longer be in a culture where that which is not compulsory is forbidden, and that which is not forbidden is compulsory.” And so it made me think... In the old days, and even now — we do a lot of investing in startups and things like that — the number of incredibly talented people, and I mean off-the-charts talent, who still want to move, work, and live in the United States... That, to me, seems like just such a huge, asymmetric, unfair advantage that this country has. And we’re going to squander it. Which is insane to me.
Philip Howard
So, look at what’s going wrong. We have to change it. It’s just so obvious. People just have to wake up to the reality that this framework that we’re laboring under is broken for no good reason.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
And not only broken — it’s the wrong framework.
Philip Howard
Yeah, it’s wrong. So give us back the freedom to be ourselves again, to roll up our sleeves. That’s what’s needed. It’s going to take a new movement. It’s got to be invented. It won’t happen because somebody else does it.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Right.
Philip Howard
It’s only going to happen because we do it.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah. Well, as always, I love talking about all of this. I could go on for hours, but I know that we both have other engagements. We have a tradition here, and you’re going to get... You might like this, because you don’t even have to be a czar, you don’t even have to be appointed. We’re going to give you a magical microphone, and for one day you are emperor of the entire world — not just America. But you can’t put anyone in a re-education camp, and you can’t kill anyone. What you’re going to be able to do is incept them. You’re going to speak into that microphone two things, and the entire population of the world is going to wake up whenever their next morning happens to be, and they’re going to say, “I just had two of the greatest ideas I’ve ever had, and, unlike all the other times, I’m actually going to act on these two things.” What are you incepting in the world?
Philip Howard
Oh, interesting. In any free society, you must be free to follow your star. That’s number one. The second thing I would say is: you are not alone. You exist in a community and a culture, and it’s your responsibility to be a responsible member of that culture.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
I love both of those. You’ve written tons of books — you can find them everywhere, Amazon, in bookstores, et cetera. And when is the new book coming out?
Philip Howard
The new book’s going to come out in January. It’s called Burning Money: How Public Unions Made Government Unmanageable.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
That’s a loaded title.
Philip Howard
My most recent book is called Saving Can-Do: How to Restore the Spirit of America. It’s about the whole idea of striving.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
No, I read it.
Philip Howard
The idea of striving.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Yeah, it’s really, really good.
Philip Howard
But these are short books. I’ve taken to writing 100-page books.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Just like the revolutionaries, right? They’re more like the…
Philip Howard
Pamphlets.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
The pamphlets, the Federalist Papers.
Philip Howard
Common Sense.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Common Sense. They had a lot of impact. So, Philip, I wish you absolutely the best of luck.
Philip Howard
Great to be with you.
Jim O’Shaughnessy
Thanks for joining.
