Is the Internet Still a Public Good? - Episode 1 of Unbuffered

Christopher Mitchell (00:15)
Let's take a break from the daily assault of digital technology to join together for the first episode of Unbuffered, our new show that will continue our focus on technology here at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance ⁓ and with a heavy focus on telecommunications and information. This is the first episode of our new show, and we're pretty excited to bring these guests to you in a second.

But first, I just wanted to share a few thoughts. I'm Chris Mitchell at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. ⁓ And we've changed our name after, I don't know, like almost 15 years, I want to say, of the Community Broadband Bits podcast and four or five years of Connect This! We are bringing the shows together for some convenience and to try and do a reasonable amount of shows for our staff and capacity.

but also to have a name that I think fits with the subjects that we're going to be covering because Community Broadband Bits was a major focus. And now it is something that feels a little bit pigeonholing because we talk about community broadband and municipal networks and co-ops and the Internet more generally. But we're also going to be tackling additional topics like surveillance where we've been doing that before talking about AI, which we've been doing before, but the name didn't really fit. So we pick Unbuffered. Unbuffered is the new name and

The question is why. So in getting into that, I want to note that I think podcasts are important and they're important because this is a moment when we have the world's information at our fingertips and yet it feels like we're trending towards digital serfdom. As tech achievements and new inventions pile up, we're losing agency over our lives. And we here don't think that's inevitable. We think we have a say in the matter. ⁓

Podcasts are unmediated. Anyone can record a podcast and with an RSS feed, distribute it to people. We don't need permission from the powerful people that own the big networks. Podcasts are important. So pick the name Unbuffered because the goal is to keep talking to people who are honest and aren't spinners. People that have real experiences doing this work, people who are going to share what they think from their heart and not just trying to figure out how to get to the next promotion. ⁓

I also liked the name Unbuffered because of a reference to buffer bloat in telecom, which is this interesting phenomenon that techies are more familiar with. But basically more buffers in terms of how the network works are worse. You have worse performance as you add buffers, but vendors would sell people more buffers in the telecom gear because it allowed them to say they were better with bigger buffers. And so there's an interesting situation with the dynamics of a marketplace, not leading to optimal performance that I really like.

And so the name on buffer to me ⁓ struck me and I could convince other people around me that we should go in this direction. ⁓ So here we are. ⁓ And the last thing I wanted to address is what's going to be changing and what's the same. The name is changing. Everything else should be pretty similar. So we're still going to be talking about ⁓ surveillance and Internet networks mostly and things like that. The show should still be fun. We still crave your feedback.

and we're still gonna do a mix of live shows and ⁓ recorded interviews. So with that, then this first show, we're really excited to kick it off ⁓ with some of the guests that have helped make us successful over the years with our other shows. And so let me introduce, starting with my colleague and someone who's helped me think out a lot of this stuff and has really great ideas for how to make this show better, Sean Gonsalves, who is our communications person on...

our team, Community Broadband Networks at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. Welcome, Sean.

Sean Gonsalves (03:57)
Alright, guilty as charged.

Christopher Mitchell (04:00)
We also have ⁓ Karl Bode who's been writing for us on The Regular for two years now and has been appearing on a number of our shows. We limit him because he's too popular and I feel intimidated by him. So, Karl thank you for joining us for this episode.

Karl (04:11)
You

Hello, don't be intimidated. There's no reason to be intimidated. Thank you for having me. It's nice to see you all.

Christopher Mitchell (04:20)
And if this is your first time tuning in, cause you thought the name was cool, Karl's been doing this work for like 25, 30 years, writing about the Internet and from a perspective of what people need and rather than the big companies. Doug Dawson's been working on the Internet since before there was one. Doug runs Pots and Pans by CCG, which is a industry leading blog. And Doug has worked with more than a thousand ISPs and telephone companies over the years as a consultant. Thanks for coming back, Doug.

Douglas Dawson (04:48)
Yeah, I was the last episode of your last podcast. So here I am right back again. yes. Wonderful to be here.

Christopher Mitchell (04:56)
Yes, exactly.

⁓ Out with the old in with the old. And then we've got Gigi Sohn who is our like dynamic person here coming in with perspective from DC, but someone who keeps a wider angle view of what's really happening out there on all matter of telecommunications and public interest media issues, as well as a variety of other things. Gigi, thank you so much for making time today to join us.

Gigi Sohn (05:00)
you

Well, this is great. And I'm particularly excited because as many times as I've emailed and talked to Karl Bode, I've never actually seen his face. So, Karl's question is true.  So, I'm delighted to be here.

Karl (05:31)
Yeah, it's a first. Bunch of firsts.

Christopher Mitchell (05:32)
See, this is the thing. I'm I'm disappearing.

Sean Gonsalves (05:32)
Alright, you're rude.

Douglas Dawson (05:35)
up.

Christopher Mitchell (05:39)
And Gigi also runs the American Association for Public Broadband, which is a great organization. We often do live events with her. And so whether that's in person in Chattanooga later this spring or ⁓ Sean, what day is the next webinar?

Sean Gonsalves (05:53)
of Thursday, March 19th.

Christopher Mitchell (05:57)
So the day after this show goes live, tune in. All right. All right. So today we're going to be talking about, we're going to start off with this question that's like a motivating question that we will be dealing with one way or another, which is kind of like one way of saying is how do we relate to the technology in our lives? In this case, a question of is tech killing us? Is it all evil? Like how do we respond to this? After that, we're going to be really focused on the Federal Communications Commission. Some of the things that it has been doing.

Sean Gonsalves (05:59)
Yeah, to him. Back to the future.

Christopher Mitchell (06:26)
And whether or not we should be fighting to reform it and fix it or give up on it. So those are going to be two major topics today that really fit this panel. And in future shows, we're going to be talking about a variety of issues that fit the panel or the interviewee. So ⁓ this, this first subject though, this question about is all tech evil. comes from Sean mostly, and Sean had a real sad face recently. And I wanted to make sure we talked about this issue because it seemed like it was getting you down, Sean.

Gigi Sohn (06:54)
Thanks.

Christopher Mitchell (06:56)
What makes you want to talk about this?

Sean Gonsalves (06:58)
Let me twist my mustache. ⁓ Well, first of all, I think it's a little hyperbolic to ask is the Internet evil or is technology evil? It was more coming from my vibe radar because we are definitely in the middle of a tech lash. And I'm probably biased because you might say I qualify as being chronically online, but I'm not really talking about me. So let me clarify and lay it out right quick. So for me, of course, saying that technology is evil is kind of like

blaming electricity for a bad movie, but let me just share some data points. Pew did ⁓ some surveys, we're all familiar with the Pew Research and recently found that more Americans say data centers have a negative effect on the environment, home energy costs, people's quality of life, than have a positive one. Far more people say data centers are mostly bad for the environment. ⁓ So, I mean, it turns out the cloud has a big ass footprint on earth, you know? ⁓

But I thought it was interesting to note that their survey found that 54 % of adults under the age of 30 say data centers have mostly a negative effect on the environment. So young people aren't really buying the tech progress at any cost sales pitch. And then when Pew looked at AI in particular, half of us adults said that increased AI use in daily life makes them feel more concerned than excited. AI experts are more enthusiastic, with a surprise and optimistic.

people that have to live with it are more cautious. But the good news, I think, is in Nature magazine, you know, the prestigious peer-reviewed scientific journal, they did this global 16-year study of 2.4 million people that found that Internet use might actually boost measures of wellbeing, like life satisfaction sets a purpose. Now, social media is a different animal, but it's not the Internet, capital I. But in popular culture, you see people comment all the time, you won the Internet or,

This is the worst thing on the Internet today. So I don't think that the Internet's the villain. It's how the platforms are built really and who profits. So it's really, I think has a lot to do with the algorithms. But lastly, I'll just say this. I think it's probably important that when we talk about Internet access, we paint a picture of how it can be used for like the good of communities and whatnot.

Christopher Mitchell (09:15)
So this question, you focused on the people's thoughts about data centers and things like that. That's clearly, it's a big issue right now. But at the same time, I think perceptions of Google are down. think Meta and Zuckerberg are viewed as the enemy for a variety of reasons for a while now. And so one of the things that I wanted to wrestle with is this question. I feel like people are down on the Internet. And ⁓ the question is, should they be? So who wants to jump in on it? Who's not named Sean?

Karl (09:44)
There was another survey recently from NBC that tried to rank the things American public likes the least. And the top three in order, think, were Democrats, Iran, and then AI was third. So the only two things they hated more than AI was Democrats and Iran. But the animosity against AI is really palpable white hot right now. And I think it's so closely tied to class anger.

Christopher Mitchell (09:56)
You

Karl (10:09)
and anger at these tech companies for cozying up to authoritarianism that they're just impossible to separate at this juncture. You can try to have a nuanced conversation about this stuff, but the anger is very intense out there and it's hard to really get any nuance into the conversation I've found so far.

Gigi Sohn (10:25)
Yeah, you'd think Democrats would get a clue and maybe lump those things together. Look, when you say technology is evil, obviously there's all different kinds of technologies, right? An Internet connection is not the same as an AI chatbot, is not the same as social media. I think you have to kind of look at each of the technologies. Although in my mind, they're all general purpose technologies. The problem is, this is obviously a very DC centric view.

Sean Gonsalves (10:26)
you

Christopher Mitchell (10:26)
Gigi.

Gigi Sohn (10:52)
is they've been allowed to explode completely unfettered by any guard rails. I I can't believe I'm saying this in 2026, March 2026, that we do not have in this country a national privacy law, right? So when people freak out about AI and there's reasons to freak out, ⁓ you have to look under the hood and look at all the things that AI

amplifies and not in a good way, privacy, surveillance, copyright issues, ⁓ know, non-discrimination or discrimination. We're not taking care of the basic guardrails we need in an information society, know, privacy being one of them. Antitrust law doesn't match.

⁓ the information world. mean, that's the only constraint and look how that's working. Not very well. And I don't even blame the administration because the administration has moved forward with some of these antitrust cases bought in the Biden administration, but judges are like, I can't figure it out. know, I'm just, innovation. they, you know, they buy Google and Meta's arguments. So I really blame it on Congress and the States are starting to pick up the mantle, thank God.

to say, look, we can't allow some of these technologies to move forward unfettered. It's interesting to see the fight between the Trump administration, which again, wants AI just to explode with no guardrails at all. And then you have States like Florida and Ron DeSantis saying, oh no, you know, we want to pass a law. And then the administration says, you want your BEAD money? They can't have restrictive AI laws. So there's a real tension between what the States want.

and what the administration wants. again, to me, it's not technology is bad, is that the lack of will from legislators to put adequate guardrails around these technologies is really, is the problem.

Christopher Mitchell (13:00)
Doug, you haven't had a say yet, but I wanted to give you a chance before I jump in again.

Douglas Dawson (13:01)
Yeah,

I'm a hater of the platforms. I don't use them. And you have to work really hard to use the Internet in such a way that you don't deal with these big companies. I I have simply walked away from them all. And it's not easy to do that. So I buy subscriptions to people's writings that I want to read. And I'm very careful picking my news. And I simply don't. I'm not part of.

Meta and I'm not part of Google. I just stay away from other stuff, but that's hard You have to work really hard to avoid these people. So it's it's a dreadful process It's it's for the average person. They're not willing to work as hard as I do at it. So yeah

Christopher Mitchell (13:45)
Yeah, think for me, one of the things that, that I come back to is what's going on in the world. And Karl and I covered this a lot two weeks ago on the show, I think on the previous show, which is gone. And, and one of the more recent things was just that like, was listening to someone, they were pointing out that like the Department of Homeland Security has a post out in which they talk about wanting to do 100 million deportations.

Uh, there's only 46 million foreign born people in the United States. And I don't think most people even have a sense that that's the position of the federal government right now. Right. And like, for me, I actually got into information technology out of, um, college and I was, I was casting around working in a used bookstore in the early 2000s And, and I had this question in my head, which was like, how is it that in the year 2003, people thought Saddam Hussein had bombed the twin towers in 2001?

We have Google, right, at that time. And like, at this point, it's now, you know, 23 years later, and I feel like we have all the information of the world at our fingertips and people won't use it. We have, yes, the mass media, you know, does a mixed job of like good to worse. But like Doug said, you have to work really hard to stay away from Meta. It's not that hard to cultivate some independent podcasts, videocasts.

and magazines and things like that to get views. And to some extent, there's just this question of like, I don't know, like, is this an issue of like giving up and like, and thinking it's as foolish to think that people are going to have a balanced information diet as a, as actually like a diet diet that they eat, you know, like, um, where so many people are unhealthy because they're eating bad foods. we're, have bad information and like, we have to figure out how to force it on people or we can have an open society or am I just, or is this just an overreaction to a technological change? Go ahead.

Karl (15:36)
It's a s-

Sean Gonsalves (15:40)
No

Karl (15:40)
⁓

It's a skill to be discerning in your media consumption. I think there's sometimes an assumption that people just know what source of information to go to, to be informed. I see that a lot. Like, we have more choices than ever. It's entirely your fault if you don't understand what's going on. And I think that's a violent misread of the situation. know, Finland, they start teaching kids as young as three years old to identify propaganda coming across the border and identify unreliable narrators and train the brain to be discerning in the information you're consuming. You can see

all across media and especially like the new Netflix documentary about manfluencers captures this really well. ⁓ The way that these guys have just targeted in and just catered to everybody's lowest impulses and created a mass fortune. You have to train people. I think there's education standards. It's a very complicated conversation and it ties into what Gigi was saying about needing some structural ownership guardrails as well, right?

Sean Gonsalves (16:15)
Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (16:34)
And I think

it's important. Go, Sean.

Sean Gonsalves (16:36)
Have you seen that meme that says, remember when people said that access to information was a problem? That ain't it. ⁓ But are ⁓ we really making the guns don't kill people but for the Internet argument?

Christopher Mitchell (16:52)
Well, I think the question is that, this one of okay, let me, let me say this first of all, like what Karl is saying, cause I want to make it clear. We're not saying everyone should be reading the Daily Kos or like lefty stuff. Like this is a show and I think we are going to be bringing on people with, different political opinions. Cato Institute, which I disagree with on the regular is very consistent and it's very reputable. I get stats from there all the time. Right. And so like,

There's all kinds of places. think Gigi could name any number of people out in DC that she disagrees with on the regular who are honest and like you could get their newsletters, right? But like they don't rise to the top because of the algorithms, right? And that's ultimately, I think what the issue is, isn't it Sean? Which is to say it's not the tools. And so I don't think your analogy works with guns, but like it is algorithms and I don't know how to fix it. Cause I don't like, I mean, I'm very libertarian in that, like I'm nervous about the federal government starting to like intervene on

Donald Trump or not, like I just, don't want no, I don't want the government necessarily intervening with algorithms. I don't know how to do it in a way that fits with 250 years of Liberty. Go ahead, Gigi.

Gigi Sohn (17:56)
was just going to say, you know, think Karl makes a really good point. When I talk about media literacy, people kind of poo poo it, but you know, actually knowing it's not media literacy anymore, right? It's technology literacy, knowing how to shut off the defaults and make them, you know, on privacy and make them what you want them to be or defaults on that. You know, there are ways to change your algorithm. I mean, I think people need to learn that kind of stuff. They may or may not use it. Look, I think we need to understand.

Disinformation in this country is as old as its founding. Okay. I mean, there were newsletters that had, you know, ⁓ disinformation in it, you know, at the time of Hamilton. So the notion that we're somehow going to get rid of misinformation and disinformation, I think is a fantasy. And the only way you deal with it is basically teach people how to get a welter of information. Maybe they don't want it.

Sean Gonsalves (18:30)
If you

Gigi Sohn (18:52)
Right? You have to admit, have to be, there are some people that all they want to do is watch Fox News all day. That was my in-laws. I don't want to watch, you know, when I was going through my confirmation hearings, I was like, you must watch MSNBC all day. I'm like, no, I hate that stuff. Right? I hate CNN. I hate the screaming chyrons. I want to, you know, I want to get a whole bunch of different sources. Some people are just going to be preternaturally drawn to their own opinion. So you can't force feed people, but you can teach them.

Douglas Dawson (19:09)
All right.

Gigi Sohn (19:21)
ways to kind of protect themselves from the social media platform's desire to keep you angry and keep you pushing those links constantly.

Sean Gonsalves (19:32)
If only we had a Digital Equity Act that was designed to teach people all this stuff.

Karl (19:36)
Hehe.

Gigi Sohn (19:38)
Imagine that.

Christopher Mitchell (19:38)
Doug.

Douglas Dawson (19:40)
Yeah, I don't know, because the people on this group are discerning users of the Internet. we're almost sounding superior here, because how does the average person learn how to do this? I have the slightest idea. People are already down the wrong rabbit holes. I don't know how we pull them back out of it. ⁓ back to Sean's original question, for most people, I think the Internet's a bad thing. I think most people are going in all the terrible.

Christopher Mitchell (19:57)
Right? It's not a matter of them being stupid, right? Like this is

Douglas Dawson (20:07)
horrible places and that's a big problem.

Christopher Mitchell (20:12)
And that's just, don't want to sound like I'm underestimating people, right? There's people out there that can tell you, like give you like five or 10 minutes off the cuff on like how you switch from a nickel to a dime package in certain offensive or certain defensive situations in football, right? And like there's people who understand complicated rules about all kinds of things they're interested in, right? So like, I want to eat donuts more than I want to eat vegetables. Like I get this like dynamic. And the question is,

Douglas Dawson (20:17)
Yeah.

Sean Gonsalves (20:27)
Right.

Christopher Mitchell (20:41)
How do we go about doing it? Now, I think we're gonna be, we're gonna jump out of this topic here. Let's wrap it up.

Gigi Sohn (20:42)
I thought

donuts were now at the top of the food pyramid, right? Donuts go to the top, vegetables went to

Christopher Mitchell (20:48)
I mean, I mean,

if you pause for a second, like there's this issue that also, which is just one of timing, I think, and I don't know how much of it is technology related, but like, people don't know why polio was a big deal anymore, right? Unless you've read the history books, you probably don't know anyone, know, Mitch McConnell's death, one more person who actually dealt with it in childhood, you know, as he gets closer here, it's sort of.

And so like this issue with technology isn't just the Internet. The Internet is supercharging the vaccine thing, right? But like, there's all kinds of people questioning these things. And I guess it comes back to Chesterton's Fence of like, of trying to be smart about if you're going to take down a fence, you should know why it was put up. And, and so there's some of that coming into this as well, I think, which is other tech that isn't just the Internet.

Douglas Dawson (21:38)
Unfortunately, I grew up with two kids with polio, I remember.

Karl (21:38)
Yeah, I generally don't view tech itself as a negative. I see tech as a window.

I don't see tech itself as inherently evil. think we're seeing human beings be human beings through the technology. know, the tech is a tool, it's a window, it's an intermediary between humans just doing very ordinary human things. And my problem with AI is generally not the technology. You know, it sometimes work, it sometimes doesn't. It's the people who are dictating the application and the shaping and the use of that technology. It's the insurance companies that are using it to deny.

Christopher Mitchell (21:44)
Sorry, Karl

Douglas Dawson (21:44)
Yes.

Me either.

Karl (22:11)
automated Medicare rejection notices with a 90 % error rate, know, stuff like that is where, so that's a very human issue. That's not the tech itself.

Sean Gonsalves (22:16)
Right.

Douglas Dawson (22:18)
Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (22:19)
Well, and that's what if we wrap up by talking about AI, I think that would be a smart way to transition out, which is that like, I feel like a lot of people are very anti AI. I think AI is going to make very important contributions to a variety of social problems, medical, climate change, and things like that. That's not to justify the ridiculous exuberance of these different companies building these hyperscale data centers irresponsibly and, and everything else. And so there's a, you have to be nuanced about this. think Gigi, had a point.

Gigi Sohn (22:20)
I think it's.

No, it's okay. Move on.

Christopher Mitchell (22:52)
Sean, anything else on the AI before we roll out?

Sean Gonsalves (22:55)
No, no, there's a lot to talk about with the FCC I suppose.

Christopher Mitchell (22:59)
So the Federal Communications Commission gets into a lot of this now. ⁓ And I thought about it earlier because Gigi mentioned the national privacy law. We had national privacy protections briefly. Gigi, I think you were involved with the creation of those at the end of the Obama administration, right?

Gigi Sohn (22:59)
Yes.

It was just for ISPs, yes, but they were very strong and I was very proud of them and Congress thought it would be a good idea to reverse them. So they used the Congressional Review Act and got rid of them.

Christopher Mitchell (23:29)
And I think that's important because the thing that drives me crazy about this show is that I don't want people to walk away feeling like both parties are equal, either in like the destruction that they're doing or the positives that they're doing. ⁓ Because here we have a situation where many Democrats are undermining the chances of having good privacy protections, but ultimately Democrats made it happen. And then the Republicans took it away.

And no one's replaced it. So that's where we are right now. And I want to try to, over the course of these shows, I want to call that out and be honest about it not be uncomfortable with some of the politics. ⁓ Yeah, right. Exactly. So the latest thing that as we're recording this that we thought we'd bring into is we're going to talk about Chairman Carr, who keeps impressing us with...

Sean Gonsalves (24:05)
That's right Chris, get Unbuffered.

Christopher Mitchell (24:21)
the knowing no bounds to the shamelessness of using the Federal Communications Commission power to try to intimidate. And, and so the latest one is this issue of threatening the broadcast licenses of, of ⁓ news ⁓ broadcasters. So the broadcasters are companies that have licenses to transmit over the airwaves and their news shows are broadcasting coverage of the Iran war that people in the administration don't like. Now that includes where

Pete Hegseth, the Defense, or sorry, the Department of War or Defense, whatever you want to call it, gets up and says, we are now bombing more. Today we are starting a greater bombing campaign. And then CNN says they're intensifying the war. And he says, I don't know why you would say that. This is fake news. And it's just like, I don't know what to believe. And that's the sort of thing that is going on. There's all these issues in which the Trump administration will say multiple things. And when those are reported, it will be claimed that this is fake news.

despite the fact that we all saw them say these things. So this threat is nigh unprecedented, I feel like. So Gigi, you are our FCC expert ⁓ and someone who knew Carr before people knew that he lost his mind. You and I talked in a previous show. From the minute that I saw that man speak, which was much later than you did, I thought that he was a pandering fool. And I just really had an instant dislike for someone that I just viewed as being totally fake.

You knew him before that though, and had a much better interaction with him before now looking at what he's become.

Gigi Sohn (25:55)
Yeah, I want to recommend an article written by Kelsey Griffiths at Bloomberg about basically what a shape-shifter Brendan Carr has become. He's not the man that I was very friendly with when I worked for Chairman Wheeler and he worked for Commissioner Pai He was just kind of like a normal Republican doing normal Republican things, deregulatory, more deregulatory than me and my boss, understandably. ⁓ But I would say kind of...

midway into Chairman Pai's term, he clearly started to ⁓ promote himself as possibly Donald Trump's next chair. Right? he was a ⁓ staffer for Pai when I was there, then he became general counsel under Pai, then he became a commissioner. All thanks to Ajit Pai, kind of put him in place to become a commissioner.

Christopher Mitchell (26:39)
2017-2018 timeframe.

Gigi Sohn (26:54)
And that's when, you know, cause, chairs only really serve if they serve for four years, that's a lot. So, you know, thinking that maybe Donald Trump would get reelected in 2020 really started saying, staying things to pander to the President. The President at the time hated TikTok. The President at the time wanted to have the FCC interpret section 230 of the communications act, which deals with platform immunity.

from lawsuits, right? He was saying the FCC can handle that. In fact, I had a debate with him in 2019 about that. So, and he continued to pander throughout the Biden administration and he got the position. And I think the way to understand him is that every single thing he does is to please the President. There's no two ways about it. Like the hyper focus on media. What's been amazing over this last couple months is I've had to like,

pull all this media, the law and knowledge out of the recesses of my mind that I haven't used for 20 years because he's decided that, you know, Donald Trump cares deeply about how he's portrayed and his policies are portrayed in the media. The FCC does regulate broadcasters, doesn't regulate much of anything else in the media. so now Brendan Carr is doing whatever he can to catch the President's attention from hearing from very good sources that is that the President loves him. He just

Why understanding when golfing with the President last weekend, he's ⁓ written tweets for the President on those truths or whatever they call it on Truth Social. So, you know, and he knows that if he wants to keep his job, he's got to keep on doing that. So what does that mean? I mean, it's not only, I think, a crisis because the broadcasters for the most part are bending the knee, right? We saw it with Jimmy Kimmel.

Christopher Mitchell (28:22)
I you got a pair of shoes.

Sean Gonsalves (28:24)
Haha

Karl (28:25)
Three sizes too big, yeah, that'd be great.

Gigi Sohn (28:49)
We saw it with Paramount when they wanted their ⁓ merger with Skydance to not only pay the President, but also bring in an ombudsman from a conservative think tank and all the companies that have gotten rid of their DEI ⁓ policies. it's not like the, this is not the Pentagon papers where the New York Times said, make me, this is the broadcast media saying, make me do anything you want, I'll do it for you.

Sean Gonsalves (29:01)
Thanks

Gigi Sohn (29:19)
⁓ And that's, you know, that's unfortunately where we are right now. And it is a crisis because when, I mean, look, he's not going to be the first, Trump is not the first President to complain or the first, you know, high level policymaker to complain about media coverage. Obviously Nixon did the same, but he is the first who has an FCC chair willing to do his bidding. And that's what's scary.

Sean Gonsalves (29:23)
Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (29:44)
Well, one of the things that has come to the foreground, and this I think is something that I don't even know if President Trump is all that interested in, is bringing the call centers back. Doug, you've written about this and Karl, I know you wanted to talk about this specifically, but this is the kind of like government interference in business that we've been told only Democrats do, and it's a terrible idea. So how do you react when you are reading about Carr's proposal to require call centers for the telephone companies to come back to the United States?

Douglas Dawson (30:14)
I was flabbergasted because that just I can't see any possible way the FCC has any jurisdiction over that the you know Aside from the fact that part of that is a desire to get more US jobs. I understand the motivation behind it It's also a it's also a way to discriminate against foreigners. I mean, it seems to be the thing to do but but you know

Deep in the order where they're talking about doing that, they've made a few claims that I think they're going to rely on. They said some foreign call centers are the places where all the spam is originating from. Well, they have the authority to block those places. I mean, that is part of their purview. And they could say, you know, got to get rid of this place. But he wants them to bring all call centers back. I believe, as I thought about it, I think that this is a move to

Sean Gonsalves (30:52)
Mm-hmm.

Douglas Dawson (31:04)
Eliminate jobs and move these folks to AI call centers and not even have people at all and and so first They'll eliminate the overseas folks and then they'll eliminate the end in country folks who end up with a lot less employees I think I don't know that that was the genesis of it, but I can tell you that's where it's going But but he has no authority to do that this this is deep in the day-to-day operations of ISPs the ice FCC doesn't regulate

Sean Gonsalves (31:10)
Yeah.

Douglas Dawson (31:28)
I mean, unless you can think of something, unless Gigi can think of some rule in there that I've never heard of, I just don't see the authority for that. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Christopher Mitchell (31:28)
Doug, you also said

No, it's purely power.

Gigi Sohn (31:35)
Well, Brendan Carr has no problem going outside his lane, right? When he was talking about making TikTok illegal or interpreting section 230, that's

never been, and you know, unfortunately, sometimes the bully pulpit is good enough, again, if corporate actors are willing, even if it is outside their jurisdiction, like, my God, Brendan Carr said X and, you know, and X happens.

Douglas Dawson (32:00)
Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (32:02)
Well, I want to go to Karl for a second. Doug, you made

Douglas Dawson (32:02)
What happened to light touch regulation? Yeah.

Karl (32:05)
Yeah, right.

Christopher Mitchell (32:06)
one other prediction I wanted to make sure we surfaced, which was that you predicted if anyone was successful in bringing call centers back, it would not create American jobs. What would happen?

Douglas Dawson (32:16)
No, no, they're going to be AI jobs. I mean, we're not creating that new jobs here. I can promise you it'll never happen. So yes, this may have been prompted by the ISPs for all we know. Yeah.

Karl (32:25)
I've covered car.

Yeah, I've covered Carr for as long as maybe anybody alive and he does not just blankly do anything in the public interest because he feels good about the public interest. He doesn't do anything that doesn't really serve either Trump or the major telecom monopoly. So my presumption with the call center stuff is that he's been sitting down with telecom companies who are preparing mass layoffs or another wave of mass layoffs since they had historic layoffs last year.

Douglas Dawson (32:50)
Yeah.

Karl (32:52)
Most of that, or a lot of it is AI, but a lot of it is also the result of consolidation that Carr likes to rubber stamp because he loves telecom consolidation. So I suspect that the telecoms are preparing to ⁓ do a bunch of layoffs. And this is kind of a patriotic, even white nationalistic cover for that. know, we didn't fire those 20,000 people. This was, you know, a patriotic effort to do this. know, the news outlets that they like, these right wingers aren't going to tell them the real origins of this. They're just going to hear.

Sean Gonsalves (33:07)
Right.

Douglas Dawson (33:10)
Yes.

Sean Gonsalves (33:14)
Right.

Karl (33:21)
This was a patriotic noble effort to save American jobs. What's fascinating about Carr, like Gigi says, is that when the FCC either has all the authority in the world to do whatever he wants or none at all. So if it's consumer protection issues, suddenly the FCC is the most powerless creature, just hapless and capable of doing anything. But if he wants to reign in TikTok or help Trump sell it to his billionaire buddies, then suddenly, magically, the FCC has authority over companies it doesn't actually regulate. So he's...

He really is a very much a chameleon whose principles and legal understanding ebbs and flows based on power dynamics and not ever based in the public interest really that I've ever seen.

Douglas Dawson (33:54)
Cough cough

Sean Gonsalves (34:00)
It definitely feels more like culture politics and consumer protection, but it's also like, gives you like an insight into the sort of like the Machiavellian evil genius of like finding like a cultural issue that people relate to, know, frustration of talking to people on call centers and you can't understand the rap or whatever and turning it to these like, you know, for these other purposes. It's just incredible, man.

Karl (34:25)
That's what's so frustrating about Trumpism in general is they had an opening caused by our failure to reign in corporate power or to reign, whether it's MAHA, you know, the health stuff, whether it's, you know, they had an opening there too, that was created in part by Democrats failing to stand up to monopoly power, right? So then populist authoritarians come along and say, we're going to fix all this with our sweeping fixes. And people don't have reliable media to tell them that was false.

Christopher Mitchell (34:25)
Let's let's be clear.

Karl (34:52)
And here we are, you I think we created this monster in some ways with our apathy towards reigning in corporate power.

Christopher Mitchell (34:59)
One of the things that is true, whether we see that with the war with Iran or any number of other things related to media issues that are popping up or what they're doing is that Carr is not Machiavellian. He is like, ⁓ he's like stumbling from like short-term goal to please Trump to short-term goal. Like he's not been successful. would disagree with you a little bit Gigi on like the corporations didn't fire Kimmel, right? They like, for whatever reason now, now the local broadcasters, I don't know what the conversations were and you probably have.

some background on it, but like, I do feel like he's not been successful generally. He's just made a spectacle. And, and as we get into this larger question of the Federal Communications Commission and, how, what form it should take, I feel like once again, we are protected by his like incompetence. He has not been good. think his like overreach on, on the product on this like treason issue and war coverage is, is preventing anything from really happening. Whereas if he had been sneaky and smart about it, he probably could have

gotten more out of it? Or am I just over-reading that?

Gigi Sohn (36:03)
the Kimmel thing got reversed because people went crazy, okay? And you wonder how much energy people have to continue to fight this stuff. I'll give you an example. I've had several organizations and others wanna hire me to help lead the march against the Paramount Warner Brothers merger. And I would love to do it, but I can't do it for free. And the energy, there's so little energy.

There was a lot of energy around Netflix buying ⁓ Warner Brothers, interestingly, which I didn't like that one either, right? But here's Paramount, which would consolidate so much power into one family that absolutely has already in the CBS, right, the Paramount Skydance merger, has already done so much of the President's bidding, has turned the Tiffany network into the copper network, and then maybe coppers do I, right?

with Barry Weiss and trying to please the President. mean, to me, that's even more dangerous. Yet you can't find the energy for anybody to fight it. And ⁓ I think it's like how many battles can you fight? And this is the brilliance of the Donald Trump administration. It's like, what Wheeler used to call the Normandy, Normandy theory is that you just keep dropping bombs and you just can't

Karl (37:09)
Backed by Saudi money as well, right?

Gigi Sohn (37:29)
block every single one. I've generally been displeased with Democrats' response to some of what Carr has done. I I've found it to be really meek. And the oversight hearings, the way he spoke to them, I can't even imagine if I had spoken, I mean, I've testified like almost two dozen times, if I had spoken to senators or members of Congress like the way he speaks to them, I would have been like spanked out of the room. But they just let it happen.

Sean Gonsalves (37:31)
Right, right.

Douglas Dawson (37:42)
Yeah.

Sean Gonsalves (37:55)
Mm-hmm.

Gigi Sohn (37:57)
So, you know, it's, just think it's, have to figure out how many, you know, how many bombs you can catch before they, you know, blow the place up.

Sean Gonsalves (38:06)
Right, yeah,

Christopher Mitchell (38:06)
So I'm gonna to Sean.

Sean Gonsalves (38:07)
I was gonna say, Chris, I take your point in that, ⁓ you know, there is a level of incompetence that you see and the effectiveness of certain things definitely, you know, leave a lot to be desired, I guess, if that's one of those things that you're pursuing. But to me, the scarier thing is that this isn't

oversight. is like intimidation dressed up as policy language. It's like turning, how do you turn a watchdog into a lapdog? It's government, it's not governance, it's coercion. And that fits a larger pattern. And to me, that's what's most alarming about it.

Douglas Dawson (38:41)
I think the public is going to have the last talk here because already on CBS News they've lost three million daily viewers. I think people are just going to not watch media news. And then who gives a damn what they do in there? I think they're going to lose all their viewers. mean, when they're no longer relevant, people won't watch it. Yeah. So,

Christopher Mitchell (38:57)
Well, I asked Karl that last two weeks ago.

Karl (39:01)
Well, the problem is that

the Ellison family and Elon Musk are also buying Twitter, they're buying TikTok, they're going to fuse them into one apparatus that's not just limited to broadcast TV, not just limited to cable, it's going to be one entire massive right-wing propaganda machine, right? And that is really backed by Saudi money, which, you know, as...

Douglas Dawson (39:07)
Yeah.

which comes right back to

original discussion of how do we stop people from buying into that conglomerate. That's the issue.

Karl (39:25)
And I agree

with Gigi. I thought it was really funny how upset the Republicans and the press itself were about the Netflix merger, but then suddenly the Paramount merger with Warner Brothers, which is actually worse because there's all these duplicated studio assets. There's going to be much more debt. There's going to be much more layoffs. You've got Saudi money running through the whole thing in these non-transparent ways. So it's actually a much worse merger and it saw much less scrutiny, which was bizarre.

Christopher Mitchell (39:51)
I mean, for me,

this has been an education over the past 10 years ⁓ of someone. just feel like sometimes like, you know, for a smart guy and I'll just, I'll, I'll say that I feel like I'm, like, not the, I've never been the smartest guy in the room, but I'm a smart guy. Like I've learned a lot. And, and one of the things is like, it is amazing to me how I truly believed and the number of the people who would say that like if Gigi wanted to force Comcast to post their prices in a database that could, be compared

with others so that people in a market that were making decisions about what to buy, that seems like a reasonable policy. And Comcast would say that is socialism, that is the government running amok. Now we have the government saying, we're gonna install our people into your business to watch your operations, and we're gonna tell you where to put your call centers, and we're gonna like take a stake of your company. And these companies are there for it. And it is understanding that asymmetry of like, this is not.

Douglas Dawson (40:31)
Yes.

Christopher Mitchell (40:49)
The Trump administration is not forcing them to do things that they're opposed to doing so much, right? They're concerned somewhat about what comes next, but understanding the power of the very large corporation and the fact that it lends itself to authoritarianism. I had read it in books, but I did not understand what it meant until recent years. And I will say that I'm...

Sean Gonsalves (41:09)
Mm-hmm.

Christopher Mitchell (41:11)
I'm like a naive waif that is continuously surprised as I look around me and see these conversations happening. I feel like I'm alone on that. like, the rest of you are these wise people who are like, yeah, Chris, we've been trying to tell you.

Karl (41:22)
You

Sean Gonsalves (41:22)
Well,

Benito Mussolini, the father of modern fascism, did say that fascism should more properly be described as corporatism. And I think we're the merger of corporations in the state. And you see that, except that, you know, of course they're going to drop their broadband nutrition label as far as forcing them to do stuff.

Douglas Dawson (41:23)
you

But there is an alternative. can go, the AI that they're all talking about, I can go to AI and say, what's the cheapest broadband in my town? Compare all the providers and it'll give me that answer. I don't really need the government to do that anymore. It's actually there, it's all there. yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (41:53)
That's interesting. Yeah. We'll have to see how long

that actually works. I'll be curious to see when, ⁓ right. So Gigi, I want to call the question then of like the Federal Communications Commission. ⁓ we've been protected, I would argue by, we've been harmed by what it's been doing. What, why shouldn't we basically work with conservatives to just get rid of it at this point? Many conservatives, not all, many of them do want to get rid of it.

Douglas Dawson (41:59)
They will block that. They will block that.

Christopher Mitchell (42:20)
And I feel like there is danger if the right person comes along and uses these tools. And even when we have Democrats in power, we're not able to use those tools very effectively for the things we want to see. So what is the case for being able to reform the FCC?

Gigi Sohn (42:36)
Well, if we didn't have the FCC, you'd have massive, you're worried about oligopolies, you're worried about consolidation, then you're just dishing it up. Frankly, I think a lot of what's going on with Carr and the FCC and bastardizing the public interest standard is in order to get rid of it. Okay. And in order to get rid of the agency, I think this is actually the conservatives plan. Okay.

Christopher Mitchell (42:59)
So Gigi, can you a time out for a second and just

explain to people why that is? Why is the FCC a bulwark against further consolidation of the media system?

Gigi Sohn (43:08)
Because the Communications Act of 1934 as amended by the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and the Cable Act of 1992, know, sets limits on, you know, on how much consolidation there could be. It gives the FCC the power to review license transfers. So it's not only broadcast licenses, but also licenses for mobile wireless and for satellite and for other things to determine whether those transfers are in the public interest.

Broadcasters have to renew their licenses, both radio and TV, every seven years. And the FCC is supposed to, I'm not saying they do it, give a really hearty review to make sure that those broadcasters are serving their local communities. So that the Communications Act, which I think is a great act, and I'm a big fan of the 96 Act, which just had its 30th anniversary, keeps those guardrails up. The 1996 Telecommunications Act adopted Section 222.

which is the privacy law, right? Which requires ISPs to protect certain customer premises networked information. And it was based on that, that the FCC, when I was there with Chairman Wheeler, we talked about that, passed the strongest privacy rules for industry that ever existed. ⁓ So, that's what keeps the FCC being a protector, again, in the right hands. Now, why hasn't it been that awesome under Democrats, first of all?

I have a whole list of things we did when I worked for Chairman Wheeler. think he was the best chair that ever existed because he was 69 years old and he didn't give a damn. He had worked both for the wireless industry and the cable industry when they were the new upstarts, saw them becoming, you know, monopolies and duopolies. And then he's like, what the hell is this? So we did net neutrality, we privacy, we improved Lifeline and E-rate, which are universal service programs. I can go on and on. We blocked mergers.

Karl (44:34)
You

Gigi Sohn (44:59)
You know, he told Sprint and T-Mobile, get the hell out. You're not merging. So, you know, in the right hands, it can do a lot. The problem is, is that industry, and I unfortunately know this very well from personal, you know, experience, has a very big say in who becomes the chair or becomes a commissioner of the FCC. And Tom was acceptable because he had worked for industry. And boy, did the industry regret that he got confirmed.

Karl (45:12)
Hm.

Gigi Sohn (45:28)
And I obviously had a reputation as a consumer advocate and no way in hell was, you know, Hollywood, where the broadcasters, same thing, and Comcast and AT&T going to allow Gigi Sohn to become a commissioner on the FCC. So that's the problem.

Christopher Mitchell (45:45)
Right there.

They are more afraid of you acting in the public interest. One vote vote among five there. That's more intimidating to them than losing their licenses to the Trump administration.

Gigi Sohn (45:56)
Yeah.

Sometimes I want to kind of ask some of the folks like, do you kind of regret not confirming me? You know, I wouldn't, you know, they called me a censor cause I criticized Sinclair cause they lied to the government. But this is like so beyond the pale of anything that anyone I think could have ever imagined an FCC chair would do. And again, I wasn't nominated to be the chair. wasn't nominated just to be a commissioner. So yeah, it is sometimes I want to ask, you know, like the head of the NAB and

You know, some of the other, the broadcasters like, do you really think you made the right decision there? But it's also, you know, not just one thing, but Democrats and Republicans, they take a boatload of money from those same companies that didn't want me seated. And until, you know, look, to me, the root of all evil is money in the political process. And as long as that is allowed to flourish and you have these, you know, dark money groups who spent millions of dollars to block my nomination.

Christopher Mitchell (46:30)
All right,

Sean Gonsalves (46:47)
Mm-hmm.

Gigi Sohn (46:54)
It would be very, very hard to get anyone other than congressional staffers or people who have absolutely no profile on these issues.

Christopher Mitchell (47:02)
Right, and let's be clear that you're not saying we need to get all money out, like that's an impossibility. It'd be wonderful if you could do it. But ⁓ the point is, is that we are awash. It is unbalanced to historic norms. So I don't want to get into that argument about like free speech and everything else. It's just unbalanced. Go ahead, Doug, I think you are up next.

Douglas Dawson (47:03)
What?

We, yeah.

We have an amazing situation going on. We're beyond regulatory capture. mean, the big companies simply do what they want by telling the FCC what they want. And the ultimate example to me is that instead of getting the FCC to do ⁓ policy on spectrum, which they actually have done very well over the years, they just went to Congress and the Big, Beautiful Bill and they said, give the Cellular Carriers 800 megahertz of spectrum, FCC go implement it. That completely upends the entire spectrum.

Allocation process so the cellular carriers have won all the sweet spectrum in the middle of the other bands are going to end up in the hands of the cellular carriers In the past the FCC was actually very deliberate in that spectrum and now they can't be Congress got involved. That's the ultimate regulatory capture. I mean, it's amazing when you sit here and watch what's going on. So

Karl (48:12)
I do think it's important to use the word corruption more often generally when talking about this stuff, because it is corruption. know, and the Supreme, some of these Supreme Court rulings have really decimated the regulatory process. You know, if you, you try to do literally anything that AT&T doesn't like, you're probably going to wind up in the Fifth Circuit, Sixth Circuit and have your, effort voided. But I, my, my point is I think there's a coming, there's a coming price for that. As you start to see these percussive failures of systems that people take for granted, you know, all these systems that the regulators, that people took for granted that were kind of invisible.

Douglas Dawson (48:16)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (48:27)
Well, not just that.

Douglas Dawson (48:28)
Yeah.

Karl (48:41)
I think you'll start to see systemic failures happen. think you'll eventually start to see a public backlash to that. And I think there's a possibility there at that point, whenever that is, for bringing back a little bit of reform. But it's going to be an ugly ride until we get to that point.

Sean Gonsalves (48:56)
Yeah.

Christopher Mitchell (48:57)
I mean,

I want to note that just, Sean, I'll hand it off to you in a second, but the corruption drives me crazy, right? The Supreme Court, this isn't just a matter of these isolated cases. The Governor of Virginia, former McAuliffe, Menendez, like the Senator, no, from New Jersey. Like these people, seems like the Supreme Court and other courts have gotten to the point at which like, they're like, well, yes, we have a contract in which you said, I intend to take this $100,000 and use it corruptly.

but there's no date on it. And so we don't know that it was actual corruption. And it's just, it is unreal to me the extent to which we have wandered from like the issue that the founders of the United States of America considered one of the greatest threats was like corruption of foreign foreign or domestic like power centers, basically. And I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna say these people were great, right? Like there's, had many faults, but they got the threat of corruption. Our country was built.

Douglas Dawson (49:30)
You

Christopher Mitchell (49:52)
I'm trying to avoid corruption and the Supreme Court at this point has so twisted that it's gross. Sean.

Sean Gonsalves (49:58)
I was just gonna say that for me, the bottom line is, that yes, we do in fact need a federal agency that actually does what that 1934 Act intended to do, which is to oversee and regulate the telecommunication industry. We do need that. So my question to you, Chris, is if some progressive foundation comes along and asks you to write the Project 2028 chapter on how to dismantle the Department of Education like Heritage did with... ⁓

this administration? you going to write that chapter?

Christopher Mitchell (50:28)
I'm gonna see if I can subcontract that out to Gigi, I think.

Gigi Sohn (50:33)
Well, clearly the guardrails between the executive and the administrative bodies have got to be shored up in legislation. Right? The fact that the FCC chair got in front of a panel of members of Congress and said the FCC is not an independent agency was just mind blowing. Right? But, you know, I think it needs to be made clearer and there needs to be, you know, greater consequences if you cross that line.

Sean Gonsalves (51:02)
Right.

Gigi Sohn (51:03)
because

Sean Gonsalves (51:03)
Killing.

Gigi Sohn (51:04)
I've even heard Democrats say the FCC has become so political that we should just fold everything into the NTIA. And that's again, because the guardrails have not been constructed, the lines have been crossed, and we have to protect against that. And I do think it is, again, the FCC is supposed to be accountable to Congress. So one would think that Congress would want to protect their oversight capability. But as we've seen,

They haven't even protected their power of the purse. So, you know, again, a lot of this falls, you know, on Congress to like, you know, doctor heal thyself.

Christopher Mitchell (51:44)
Sean, ahead.

Sean Gonsalves (51:44)
I'm just going

say that, you know, the referee isn't the answer. The fixing the rule book is.

Christopher Mitchell (51:48)
No, but I mean, I do agree. Like the larger issue with our issues actually comes back to something that I come back regularly. George Will wrote, not a person I agree with all the time, but like he said, you know, we're not electing a king here. It's a President. Congress is broken. Congress needs to be more greedy about its power. Congress needs to do stuff. And like we shouldn't have the President doing a bunch of things. There's a bunch of stuff Biden did that I don't talk about because it's not related to telecom that upset me that I thought were overreaches. Congress should be acting like that's what we need is Congress. That's where our system is supposed to work. So.

⁓ It is a major issue. As we wrap up, my goal is, and I'm not always going to be able to do this, but I want to wrap up with something fun. And so I wanted to ask Karl in relation to some of the discussions that we're having, particularly about media elites and the mergers, the term Brunchlord appears fairly frequently in your amazing social media feeds. And Brunchlord is like such a great title that evokes just the right feelings.

Douglas Dawson (52:36)
You

Christopher Mitchell (52:45)
And I just wanna know, why do you keep using this term? Why does it work so well?

Karl (52:49)
It's my only lasting contribution to the discourse, I think. ⁓ Yeah, I did. I even got written up by some academic who talked about how I coined it. It's to capture just kind of those failing upward, fail-sun types that just keep failing upward into positions of responsibility. The Germans actually have a word I can't remember because it's over long, but it's called breakfast director, right? Which is basically somebody who takes charge but then doesn't know what they're doing at all.

Sean Gonsalves (52:52)
Hahaha

Gigi Sohn (52:52)
You

Christopher Mitchell (52:53)
And that's original. You came up with that term?

Karl (53:15)
But the German word lacks the class consciousness, I think, of Brunchlord. It captures kind of like the playful, senseless trust fundiness of some of these folks like we see at CBS. Barry ⁓ Weiss and the Ellison kid, didn't get there through any sort of skill whatsoever at their particular professions. They got there, they just kept failing upward. So I think it captures a certain ⁓ sensibility and anger people have at the current class issues that are going on.

Christopher Mitchell (53:44)
I think it's important to understand the incentives. And this is one of my criticism. I Gigi, I wanted to shout preach when you're talking about not wanting to watch the screaming chyrons and CNN and MSNBC and all that. Those people are good at being on TV. I'll say this, the five of us, like I think Gigi's okay about being on TV, but none of the rest of us are any good at being on TV. Like I can't figure out what I'm doing with my hair from show to show. Like, and this is important for being on TV. I can't figure out how to keep looking into the camera.

Douglas Dawson (54:08)
you

Christopher Mitchell (54:12)
Those are the skills you need to be on TV. And so like some background knowledge is helpful, but ultimately being on TV is about looking good, looking the part, convincing people that you know what you're saying, even when you don't, know, having an opinion when you have no idea what you're talking about, like because you're on the spot, those are the skills they're selecting for. is not, it is not the skills of like being an analyst in the war or any number of other things. So I think it's just important for people to realize that when they're thinking that they're getting news from the television.

Karl (54:32)
Mm-hmm.

Douglas Dawson (54:33)
Yes.

Christopher Mitchell (54:43)
Any last comments before we wrap?

Sean Gonsalves (54:46)
I'm feeling fast and Unbuffered and yeah, good stuff.

Karl (54:49)
You

Douglas Dawson (54:51)
I like the new format. like the show. This was a good first edition.

Christopher Mitchell (54:58)
Excellent, yeah, future things like this we'll have, we'll be live. But for this one, we wanted to record it and get the logos down and everything else and set it up for the future. Gigi, go ahead

Gigi Sohn (55:07)
Well, I just think we're going to be talking about this stuff for a really long time. And I just, I hope we have a free and fair election in 2026. That's actually all I care about at this point. I mean, I still care about everything we talked about, but you know, to me, that's the most important thing. And if people are not worrying about that, they need to start worrying right now. And I don't care what party you're in. It's about the future of the Republican. And we cannot have ICE agents standing a hundred yards away.

from polling places, cannot have federal troops, we cannot have seizures of ballots and voting machines. And trust me, there are people in the administration thinking about that right now and we've got to guard against it.

Sean Gonsalves (55:50)
Mm-hmm.

Karl (55:52)
No, agree 100%. I don't think any of these policy, these more nuanced policy debates matter if we can't untether authoritarian's fangs from the government. If we can't do that, I think everything's lost. So I think the priority is the midterm elections and moving on from there. Yeah, absolutely.

Christopher Mitchell (56:07)
Yes, and so I wanna thank you all for coming on. I wanna thank people for listening. ⁓ One of the things that I just think about as we wrap up is ⁓ this trend in which people often talk about how things are going well in their neighborhood. They like the immigrants around them. They like their schools. And then if you ask them about how the country's doing, they'll say, it's terrible, it's falling apart. And how is it that everyone locally is basically okay with what's happening and you're even happy with it? It's because of media perceptions. There's major issues that go around this that then...

that warp what we don't actually experience ourselves. So keep that in mind. We're gonna be back with weekly episodes of Unbuffered and I don't even know what's coming next for the outro but stay tuned for that.

Jordan Pittman (56:51)
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Unbuffered Podcast. We have transcripts for this and other episodes available at ILSR.org/podcast. While you're there, check out our other podcasts from ILSR, including Building Local Power, Local Energy Rules, and the Composting for Community Podcasts. Email us at podcast@communitynets.org with your ideas for the show. Follow us on Bluesky. Our handle is @communitynets.

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