 Good afternoon. Welcome to the future of democracy, a show about the trends, ideas and disruptions changing the face of our democracy. I'm Sam Gill, your host. It's an interesting moment in America for the conservative intellectual establishment. Progressive further for potentially radical state intervention in markets and on behalf of civil rights is as high as it has been in recent generations. And the Republican president has been at times as divisive within the establishment right as he has been across the country at large. Yet this has also been a propitious moment for libertarian and market-oriented thinking. The ascended Silicon Valley elite have a strong libertarian bent and formed and reinforced by an engineering and technology-oriented culture. And belief in the power of free choice and free enterprise to drive innovation and solve problems remains at the heart of the American ethos, even as this world view faces new challenges. One of the most unique and incisive voices in this environment has been Eli Lair. Eli founded the think tank R Street in 2012 and since then the organization has been consistently willing to have an identity all its own. They have been early to technology issues, forceful on science in the climate and aggressive on criminal justice reform. In a moment of soul-searching across the political and policy landscape, it's the perfect moment to get Eli's take on a range of pressing topics. So without further ado, it's my great pleasure to welcome to the show Eli Lair. Thank you so much for helping me, Sam. I'm flattered by that introduction. Thank you for joining us. It's all downhill from here. So thank you. Thank you for coming out of the show. Probably for it since I didn't deserve that introduction. Thank you so much. No, absolutely. So I sort of want to dive right into it because we're months away from a choice about a big choice about what the direction of the country should be. And I'd love to know, as someone who's overseeing a pretty complex policy apparatus, what do you guys see as the really critical short-term priorities for the country? There are any number of short-term priorities that could float to the top. And because of the nerdyness and deepness of some of our expertise, I'd probably have some members of my staff who would argue that electricity policy is really the key future issue. That said, I would point to a few key things. First, of course, the issue very much at everybody's mind is racial justice. That is first in my mind right now, and it is a long-standing wound in America that people on the right as well as the left must do something about. Second, I would point to the fiscal situation facing the country. Second, the long-term problems are fiscal for the country. And the $5 trillion in COVID spending brings a day of reckoning on entitlements far closer. COVID itself and the ensuing economic damage that is done is another major issue that must be confronted. And that has massive implications and may well have spillover effects in all sorts of other areas of policy. So those would be by top three. Let's talk a bit about the moment of racial reckoning. And this is something you and I have talked about a little bit on our own, which is it may not be the case that a commitment to formal equality is in any way a partisan issue in this country. But it absolutely is the case that there are perceptions that there is not bipartisan agreement on some really critical dimensions of what just country looks like, of what a racially just country looks like. And I think it's also the case that there is a really intense debate about this particular administration that I think has inflamed sensitivities and concerns about the future of race. Like as a just sort of reflecting on the sort of ethos of the modern kind of conservative intellectual establishment, how is this moment different for the way that this issue is being talked about and thought about? I think it is. That's a very good question. The conservative intellectual establishment right now has been too shy sometimes to confront and talk about issues of race. After an history that at best I would say was mixed among conservatives during the civil rights era, there came to be a time where people simply did not want to talk about it at all. That had a number of negative implications, including people thinking incorrectly that conservatives in general didn't care about it. You add that to a president who clearly likes to be divisive in general. If you think he's just racially divisive, you have to watch, you have to watch again. The idea that he's primarily motivated by racial divisiveness? No. Because he's divisive on so many other issues too. So he can't be seen primarily as somebody who's trying to divide on race. So he tries to divide on everything else as well. And that in turn creates a very interesting situation. You have a group of people on the right who have some interest in looking more closely at some of these things. Looking at policies and programs and procedures to see what the clearly unfinished work is. And you can see that energy directed to criminal justice towards things like professional licensing reform towards rethinking various social programs. On the other side, you have people who I think are not so much big in as really want to return to the idea of not thinking about it in part because they're afraid I think incorrectly that solutions will be unpalatable to them. And you have people of course who are legitimately big. And that group, I want them to leave the Republican Party and the conservative movement. And I think they're just a disgrace. So you could argue about the size of those three factions. I would say that the middle faction is the largest and the last one is the smallest. What do you think about it? So as I've been watching this debate precipitate, I certainly think an important part of this moment has been with regard to the middle faction. This has been a really important moment that strikes me that the middle faction has felt obliged to speak up. And that presages I think change. That's just the nature of social change. This is not a new insight. This is letter from a Birmingham jail. This is the middle faction needs to speak up for change. But as I look at the sort of the right, it seems to me it's been very easy to express, to kind of use the term of the day, allyship around issues of coercive state force. That's a natural for a libertarian. So qualified immunity reform, police violence. The place that it strikes me that it's where I still will be interested to see what happens is part of this moment has been the mainstreaming of an idea that choices made a long time ago can get baked into a system in a way that overwhelm the power for an industrious individual to overcome them, whether it's housing policy or economic policy. That's a really important argument that has become much more mainstream. But how do you think about that, the historical dimension that's an important part from the left of the discussion? I would actually give tremendous credit to the left for raising the issue of structural racism. And I'm firmly convinced that structural racism, a really structural bigotry, is quite real and can have quite significant impacts on individuals' lives. I would argue, however, that much of the structural racism has been exercised through state coercion and removing some coercive powers of the state. And also undoing some damage that they have done. So it is it cannot just be a single thing. It is a major way, perhaps not the only one, but is a major way towards dismantling structural racism. Just to give two quick examples. Professional licensing systems arose, in fact, partly as sort of a Northern version of Jim Crow to keep African Americans out of many of the professions. Now, they aren't very few of any of that explicit intention today, but they still serve that function in some cases. Second, you can look at housing and zoning policy, the tremendous mandates for essentially racial segregation, adverse and new deal housing programs, the mandates are gone, the impacts of the form of things like a mandatory single family zone, which the president, after having an HHS secretary who was against it, is now himself very much in favor of OCDC as a way to divide people. So I see these things as examples of where people from the right can can make a difference. So you look at some efforts at wealth redistribution, at efforts to say that markets are intrinsically racist. Some of these I reject simply as as untrue. Others of them, I am simply very worried about the unforeseen consequences of doing that. I also simply think that it is incorrect, as some thinkers on the left have, have positive, that the mere existence of a disability is by itself proof positive of discrimination. It's certainly a necessary prerequisite for discrimination, to say that discrimination was taken place. But there are reasons that are not insidious, why disparities can exist. And a diverse society will have differences between groups, some of which it may be better to allow them to persist, even if they harm individuals. Yeah, I mean, that was that, let's let's hope in on that though, because I think that's philosophical issue. I mean, I don't I don't think the arguments, the arguments say around sort of issues of disparate impact is, is that it's the it's the evidence that discrimination that comes from a kind of mens rea, you know, an intent exists, I think it's to say there's there's different kinds of discrimination. Some discriminations with intent, some is in the effect. Now, it does mean it does mean that they have an idea of a just outcome, and perhaps you wreck in certain cases, you would just reject that a just outcome is always a kind of parody or a kind of equity, but I it's not all it's not the inscription of intent. No, I don't actually I think what you point to is a very important point and really almost a language problem between left and right. When conservatives talk about racism, they are thinking almost entirely about it. I've noticed that it's almost entirely intentional. And by that definition, it's correct to say that there is a very little racism in the modern United States, some, but not a lot. If you look at things with disparate impact, which can definitely be racist, and again, this is where I think the right always the left, some some significant credit, then you can find quite a lot of things. But the number of people who are actively trying to undermine people because of their skin color alone, it is, I think, quite small. That doesn't mean that racism is not a problem. In fact, it may even mean that it's a bigger problem because intentions are not enough. How do you as someone, you know, one of the themes that has come up in a lot of the conversations we've had about sort of the public culture of democracy on this show, with both frankly with guests who are extremely progressive and guests who are extremely conservative, has been the challenge of polarization and the purity standard that it imposes around deliberation. And so I think of two examples that we've just talked about, criminal justice reform and housing policy reform. There used to be a paradigm that would say someone like you or R Street might say, we think inclusionary zoning is good in the sense that we think we should dismantle some structures of zoning that actually restrict choice and result in discrimination. And so a progressive think tank might say we want that and we also want substantial state investment in housing opportunity for a number of people. And there used to be a paradigm that said that's what parliamentary systems are for, working that out. You don't, what we seem to live in a moment where if the, if, if both sides don't adopt in total, you know, the self-same agenda, then it's hard to move forward. That's at least been my perception. So as someone who's actively working on these issues, how have you guys experienced some of these debates in real time? We certainly have. I have been, somebody at a foundation told me that a position we held on an issue nothing to do with their portfolio was a reason that they would never work with R Street. So this has happened. And there are cases of an enormous purity task imposed by people. And it's particularly bad when you come to certain people in an elected office. Within the intellectual world, there is still a willingness on the part of many, although not all, to work with people who are only sometimes going to agree with them and work towards some mutual goals. And that's how progress under the institutions we have always gets made. It's why we managed to have significant criminal justice reform under this administration and many states, more probably in states with Republican controls and in states with Democratic control. And that has been one example of people who made disagree on a lot coming together. But the extreme polarization and the fact that, you know, we govern the platform today would be well to the right of the Democratic Party. And, you know, and for that matter, the Republican platform for 25 years has been well to the right of say, what, Nixon rise and however. So it's certainly been a it's certainly been a polarization of both parties with Republicans going first. And that I believe is leading to to people essentially rejecting the idea of loyal opposition, which is key to a democracy. It's why, despite having an enormous problem with the president, one of my biggest concerns is that he loses and is prosecuted criminally. I think that would be the type of thing that would destroy the possibility of democracy. If disagreeing with people and having bad policies is a criminal act or people are brought up on charges for doing it, then who is going to want to serve and how will peaceful transitions of power be possible? So that tomatoes at the root of democracy. I mean, is the issue though there is the issue so much that people won't want to serve is that it's just norm eroding. Because I mean, Trump presents a particular problem because there's a chance that he may, he may, he may both be someone that many disagree with and someone who has committed criminal acts, right? That's part of the vexing dimension of Trump, right? Yeah, I am. No, I agree with that. I would simply say that it's certainly that nobody wants to serve could be seen as an overstatement. But yeah, it destroys the norms of peaceful transition of power at minimum. That's the enormous, that's been the enormous strength of our system. It's why we have the oldest single document constitution in the world by a lot. And, you know, that that is seriously in danger by efforts to consider the very fact of the other side of the legitimate. And it's growing on both sides. It's council culture is a mutual thing. Well, I think I talked actually a little bit about this with Mary Ann, the legal scholar Mary Ann Franks in a technology context. And, and, you know, what I would sort of argue is like, I look, I think the zone of deviance can evolve. So I think it is possible to say, like there are certain mutual commitments we did. So I think, for example, you know, in the way that, for example, that you talked about policy differences that you may have about particular reforms with regard to race, you also made really clear that you think racism is a problem, right? So that some it can be important to declare what the parameters of the sort of acceptable moral zone are. Part of what we talked about was, you know, what are the consequences for disagreement? Are they retributive? You know, are they restorative? You know, and so it strikes me that part of the challenge in our political system is that these are institutions particularly designed to foster debate. Not every institution is designed for that, but these are institutions particularly designed to facilitate negotiation and horse trading. And so whatever consequences there are for deviance, are they consequences? What I'm hearing you say that sort of ultimately undermine the warrants for even having the institution in the first place. Yes, that's what I think is the enormous problem. If simply disagreeing becomes grounds for a problem, that was one of the big triumphs of the American Revolution. The Speech and Debate Clause and the Constitution saying that you could basically do anything you wanted as an elected representative of the people, say anything you wanted, at a time when the First Amendment, which wasn't even available at that time, was read much more narrowly, that at least when it came to discussing stuff on the floor of Congress, virtually nothing you said could be used against you. That is an enormously important norm. And if it comes to the point that simply saying things becomes a reason to destroy somebody's career, which obviously it should be in some cases. There are certain things which people in certain careers should not say and deserve to have their careers destroyed for them. But if it becomes generally, if any unacceptable statement ever becomes a problem, then it becomes an enormous problem, even absent a formal censorship regime. And that really collapses the norms on which deliberative Republican democracy are built. So it strikes me, one dimension of this that I know you've been thinking about is, if one challenges sort of norm erosion because views are evolving, then one solution is either to sort of seal off the institution from evolving views. The other institution is that the apparatus of policymaking, political parties, et cetera, they sort of realign. And so they come to better reflect what the social norms are and then legitimate debate can happen. And one of the questions we're getting in the chat is about how the conservative establishment is or should be reacting to demographic changes that are happening in this country, clearly changes in our sensibility. And so I know you've thought a little bit about the question of realignment, but what's like the optimistic take on what you just said? Like what are the ways that our system looks a little different so that we can maintain our democratic norms while evolving as a country? Political scientists generally say that we've had six different versions of party alignment since the daughter of the Republic. And it seems to me like we're probably switching towards a seventh one. And if that tradition and if that transition can be pulled off smoothly, then we'll probably be okay. And there's generally been a fair amount of turmoil. I mean, the sixth party system is the project of the civil rights movement, the one that we're currently in is a direct result of the civil rights movement. And I think that we may see a realignment of the parties in one way or another and the factions that belong to each parties. I think it's unlikely, but it's possible even one of the parties could cease to exist at that same time and be replaced by something else. But I think the factions are going to move and that parts of what now makes up the conservative movement will find themselves in different places than they are right now. Can I attempt you to speculate more? Like what do you think it could look like? Well, let me let me preface this by saying that conventional wisdom speculation on these things is wrong. If you pull somebody in 1954 that the long-term effects of the sixth party system that would emerge from it would be that, in fact, congressional committees would still be chaired when the Democrats controlled the House, largely by old men running in safe districts of the South. If you told them that, they'd say, oh, so nothing's going to change. But if you told them all of these old men will be African-Americans, you'd think they were insane and from the South, which is basically the case. We still have old Southern Democrats in safe districts, that's what I got. It's simply that they're progressive African-Americans, rather than Jim Crow supporting once. So I think that it's a very recipe to do. I see that saying that I'm probably wrong. I think I see two scenarios that seem plausible to me. The first to consider the more pessimistic one is that we end up with two varieties of populist party. We end up with left populist cluster to the Democratic party and right populist cluster to the Republican party. Both parties are generally anti-civil liberties for the most part. Neither of them are that good on anything. They both claim to speak for the people, both consider the other a legitimate. The Republicans move well to the left in economic issues. The Democrats move somewhat further to the left and largely and people like an ardent civil libertarians become increasingly uncomfortable with the Democratic party. The likes of Ron Wyden become very uncomfortable with the party. That's probably the pessimistic one. You have two populist parties between left and right populism. It's roughly where the UK is now. Both parties are sexually populist. The more optimistic scenario, I would say, is probably something closer to a class party divide, which might not be altogether bad. That one party, which could as well be the Democrats than the Republicans, becomes more the party of people who generally are doing pretty well. Becomes more libertarian in its patterns and is not socially oblivious to things, but is still on the side of pro-business in general and pro and somewhat supportive of the safety and so forth. The other party moves in a somewhat more populist direction, becoming more of a downscale party. It's up for grabs, which one is which. I think in that, you end up with two relatively ideologically diverse parties in fact, because there are more possibilities there. You have people who attach themselves to one or the other. I think that will bring you more ideological diversity within the parties and within the country than you would. Those are the two scenarios I would consider like. Under one, the Democrats become the big business party. Probably the Republicans also move to the left economically, but become, but also, but the Democrats answer that by moving to the right on many important economic issues. That's interesting. And has COVID shifted this? I mean, you alluded to the kind of fiscal policy that we've backed into as a result of COVID. There's a good argument that we'll have to back into a similar fiscal policy around the climate that it'll just happen naturally. And certainly progressive Democrats have leapt on that. I mean, they are eager to argue not only that COVID merits this kind of fiscal intervention, but that it is the proof that we've been waiting for that, you know, call it neoliberalism has vulnerabilities. So has COVID changed anything about what you think is at least possible? Oh, I think it definitely has. I think it's actually resolved some issues. You know, I've been fine with the idea of paying family leave myself, even though I'm, even though I cannot really ideologically justify it, but I think it's a good idea. You're a human being, Eli, it's not. But the, you know, that which we've established is not going to go away, obviously. And the soon, and the increasing soonness of the fiscal reckoning for our Bayford entitlement programs reduces the chances that we can come to agreements that resulted the type of means testing that could significantly do it. So that does mean a future with a government that's at least somewhat bigger. The question is, can we, there's no necessarily inconsistency between enhancing the welfare state and freeing the market? And that is still up for grabs, I think, to some extent. And it doesn't necessarily follow that even a high-tax society cannot have very free markets. That's so for the Nordic countries. They're in fact some of the most free market countries in the world, and they have some of the highest assets. So it's two different things. And you could end up with that. That government will permanently be bigger, I think, is almost a certain thing. I'm not crazy about it, but I would say it's almost a certain thing. And it's necessary simply by keeping the promises of the entitlements, which are going to be politically impossible not to keep. Government will grow as a percentage of treaty pay. The question is, will it have more or less coercive power over people? I can see a future where coercive power is in a more or less. And that, I think, would be the future of tribe life to live, whether the taxes are high or low. I mean, so let's talk about that for a minute, because one of the things I absolutely can't let this conversation end without touching on is the sort of new vector of coercive power, which is the major technology companies that are in our midst. And I know this is something that you've been doing a lot of thinking about. So I guess starting with just like a big picture question, like we're certainly in a kind of moment of tech lash. But analytically, what do you think are or aren't the real policy problems, social and political problems that we face around technology? Sure. I have an article in The American Entrust that looks at this. But I would say briefly, the two big problems, which have to be dealt with by public policy, are disinformation and custody of personal data. I think that if those two can be dealt with, are existing structures and institutions combined with reasonable evolution of market processes should be able to solve the problems under a pretty laissez-faire paradigm, at least laissez-faire, which will guarantee the status quo. Not necessarily laissez-faire overall. So those are the two problems I think need to be confronted by public policy and cannot be solved solely through market, through sort of natural evolution of market mechanisms. And I believe briefly that ethical codes, similar to both medical and legal ethics and the code imposed by the comic book industry itself offer a way to deal with both of those things. I've read the piece, we'll send it around to all the readers, but say more about the comic book code because a lot of folks who aren't familiar with comics will say, really? I mean, disinformation feels to me like a crisis and comics feel to me like a form of leisure that can be more or less salutary. So help unpack for our audience what you've been thinking about in particular and why you think it's a great analogy. So going back to the mid 1950s, comic books were absolutely progressive as part of youth culture. Even though TV was the great majority of American homes, more people, more young people, spent time reading comics than watching TV. Among male youngsters, they were by two to three comics a week on average. Female youngsters about one. So it was just an enormous part of media. And by the mid 1950s, crime was actually rising quite quickly. Exactly some of the fastest crime increases we've had in history were the early fifties, particularly juvenile crime. And there was a sense that comics had something to do with it. Whether or not this is right is a different story, but very serious people, including Fred Wertheim, who was the chief witness in the Brown case actually on the desegregation side, believed that this was a very serious social problem. There were congressional yards, and the comic book industry responded with a code based somewhat on the Hayes code that applied to motion pictures that set standards for what comics should be. It was, in some ways, you would consider some parts of it really dated, but actually it was well thought out ahead of its time in some ways. It was a time when things that we'd consider obscene were part of children's counting rhymes that forbid all racial prejudice to comics, for example, which was quite widespread in the early fifties. And it created something that was safe for children, which was the intended audience for almost all comics. Now it was revised over time, and they realized that a total prohibition at any drug use meant that they couldn't tell an empty drug story, for example. That was revised. And a variety of things were made in the late eighties when the gay rights mover was just getting off the ground. It also was ahead of its time in prohibiting anti-gay stuff in comics. It eventually became defunct by the fact that comics became a serious literary medium, which was marketed mostly to adults, and it just wasn't relevant anymore, as it was designed for kids. But it had enormous commercial success for the comic book industry, and dealt with something that was widely perceived as a harm, and clearly could not have been good. And the same is so, by the way, about so much disinformation in particular. Is the Internet Research Agency the Russian control term itself, necessarily, scientific elections? Probably not. But it still obviously cannot be a good thing. And it was widely socially desired to do something about it, and these types of codes can have a significant role in helping people and doing it without a direct state censorship at all. And widely adopted, they can change the entire media. Now, there'll still be corners there, but that's the point. That's one of the reasons why it's good that they're private. So how would it work exactly? The companies would come together and formulate standards around acceptable... They'd effectively harmonize their content moderation policies. What would it look like? They would. The way I saw... They deal with both issues, obviously. How they take custody of data and content moderation. I envision that the data custody would be almost entirely harmonized, that the content moderation might be, to some extent, determined by what users wanted. Users might even have the ability to pick from a list of content moderators funded by the platforms. Could be one way of doing it. So that you could decide, I don't want any adult content on my platform, and anything that might be sexual explicit. I just want to off. And you could pick a content moderator that would do that. Or you could decide, yay porn. And you could have all of that you wanted, but you'd still have... You'd still... If there was obvious disinformation, you'd still have the web flagging that. So it could be decided out by individuals. And there would probably be some universal standards. For example, things produced by foreign governments should obviously be flagged on any platform. Things that are incitements to violence. Speech that's clearly illegal. Child pornography. Child sexual exploitation should obviously be illegal on all of them. These are already standards, although they could be truly harmonized. Because they obviously aren't between the platforms. So I'd probably envision it as something like that. And perhaps platforms could. Could you even say this is a totally family safe platform? So like Facebook doesn't allow any real sexual explicit material. Could make that promise. And there would be a definition of exactly what that meant. So we're more complex than the comic book code. More like the MpAA system in practice. One of the sort of obvious kind of arguments I'm sure you thought about would be... Look, the whole problem with the internet is that you don't transact over... There's not a movie with a rating. It's that you go to what you think is a G-rated movie. And the imperative of the platform to keep you engaged leads you into an R-rated movie without even knowing it. And you leave the experience being pro whatever the R-rated content was. How have you... I mean, I'm not saying that's an accurate argument, but that's certainly a sensibility about internet regulation. How do you react to that? So it's an interesting question. And I would say that first the proper content codes would in part do exactly that. They would say what you see is what you get. And in fact, one of the real teeth behind this are the FTC's title five powers against generally unfair credit practices, which were used against companies that claim to use the comic book code but did it. There was one case where they threatened to use it. The company stopped doing it. So it never went into full enforcement action. But that happened once with the comic book code. And it's been done once with the MpAA code. All of that was also just trademark stuff as well. So there are cases of this being done. And the answer is that if that happened to somebody, if they said we're R-rated, you ended up in R-rated content or whatever it was, then that's clearly illegal under current law if it's clearly advertised as such. Courts have been unwilling to reach this issue because of CDA 230. But I think that if there were a widely agreed upon universal code, regardless of what 230 says, people who advertised they were following the code, courts would weigh in on that. It just strikes me as obvious that they would if that were the case. Because how could they not? It's clearly, they're clearly violating any number of norms and laws if they do it that way. So I think that there would be legal protection if there were a voluntary industry-wide code, which is one of the, which is, as somebody who wants to keep CDA 230 very much intact, that's one of the downfalls that I see right now is that the courts have basically said we're not going to weigh in on anything. And under the language of the law, they might be right. But if there were an industry-wide code, then they would start weighing in. And you'd end up with a body of case law that might turn some of it into statutes or overrule it with statutes over time, which is I think the way these things should evolve. Professional ethics can take a very long time to get into statutes. Informed consent for medicine has only been in statute for about 20 years now, even though it, even though you can find parts that date back to ancient Greece. So it's been in statute at the UK for I think five years. So you can have things that are widespread practices, but aren't necessarily statutory or are a matter of common law. So I want, I mean there's a lot more we could, we could talk about on this, but we're running low on time and I, so I want to give you a chance before we go to, you know, throw a bone to your utility regulation folks or someone else on staff. What's the biggest long-term policy issue that we don't talk enough about in your view? That's a good question, actually, because I tend to be interested in just about, just about everything. I think that it's the burden of harmful behaviors, generally, that is imposed on our health system and what we can do about them. The, we've been talking more about opioids, but probably not enough, given the increasing, increase in deaths of despair. We're doing nothing about a rising suicide rate, particularly among women. There's been no federal action on that. And you have a wide range of behaviors and my own analysis is that we're, both sides end up being too hung up on abstinence only approaches, rather than saying if you're doing something harmful, you could do it in a less harmful way, maybe get benefits without costs. Now, the left mostly gets this when it comes to sex and drugs. And the right mostly gets it when it comes to tobacco, in my judgment. And those are, and basically tobacco is number one for killer. Opioids are number two. Sexual behavior with the, with protease inhibitors is a very distant third, but obviously has other, has other negative consequences. And we have tremendous knowledge that people engage in this range of behaviors because they get some benefit or utility on them that they perceive and that they want to. And people for a variety of hang-up reasons have decided that we should push that if people can't stop doing these things entirely, send messages that you're bad or sinful or awful, if you don't stop doing these things entirely, you know, you must quit or die, basically. And you have, you know, AA has a 6% success rate, which is a quit or die program, knowing that it's free and it's helped millions. I don't, AA is fine, but it's probably not hurting anybody. But abstinence-only approaches, when it comes to dealing with harmful behavior, have been an enormous burden on society as a whole. And if we can move away from abstinence-only for everything and say basically people will do things that we know are harmful and they'll do them because they want to, we can tell them about it. We can educate them. And some people will avoid doing these things if they're educated. Some will not. And we need to figure out ways to make them less harmful because we cannot stamp out and never have managed to entirely stamp out any harmful behavior that people find utility in. And I'm going to, well, thank you. You can follow Eli on Twitter at EliLayerDC and you can follow our street at RSI. As always, we'll send these two right after the show. We'll send out the American Spectator article as well. We put it in the chat. Eli, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. It's been fantastic talking. Thank you for everything. Take care. Take care. All right, everyone. We've got some great shows coming up the next few weeks. On September 3rd, we'll have legal scholar Olivier Sylvain, law professor at Fordham University. We'll pick up right where we left off with Eli in discussing issues of harmful content on the internet. On September 10th, we'll have Nicole Austin-Hillary from Human Rights Watch to talk about civil rights and voting. And on September 17th, we'll welcome Professor Kathy Cohen from the University of Chicago, an expert on race in America. As a reminder, this episode will be up on the website later. You can see this episode in any episode on demand at kf.org. You can also subscribe to the Future of Democracy podcast on Apple, Google, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Email us at fdshow at kf.org. Or if you have questions for me, just send me a note on Twitter, at the Sam Gill. Please stay for 30 seconds to take a two-question survey. And as always, we will end the show to the sounds of Miami singer-songwriter Nick Cooney. You can follow and check out his music on Spotify. Thanks so much for joining us. Have a great week.