Philip Howard - How to Bring Common Sense Back to America (Ep. 324)

Summary

INFINITE LOOPS Episode #324: Philip Howard — How to Bring Common Sense Back to America
Date: July 23, 2026
Host: Jim O’Shaughnessy
Guest: Philip K. Howard

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Episode Overview

This episode features a candid, wide-ranging conversation between Jim O’Shaughnessy and Philip K. Howard, founder of the non-profit Common Good and long-time advocate for reviving common sense and personal agency in American governance. Howard discusses America’s proliferation of legal rules, regulatory overreach, the death of managerial authority in government, and why the return of discretion, narrative, and core shared values is essential for the future of the country.

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Major Themes & Purpose

• The consequences of replacing human judgment with legalistic, rules-driven bureaucracy.
• The historical roots of America’s regulatory explosion and its impacts on both governance and individual agency.
• Concrete pathways for reform, including new operating systems for government, re-empowerment of local agency, and the crafting of a new public narrative.
• Philip’s ongoing efforts to ignite change through collaborative action and thought leadership.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Explosion of Law and the Loss of Judgment

• Legal Bloat:

  • Philip: “The Constitution with all amendments is 7,500 words. The current system of federal law and regulation is 150 million words. It is beyond the capacity of any human understanding and even AI can't make sense of it.” [00:00]
  • Result: Government becomes “unmanageable,” public money is wasted, and services falter.

• Origins of Over-Regulation:

  • The trend began in earnest during the 1960s–70s, driven by guilt over past abuses (segregation, pollution) and the quest for control.
  • Philip: “The real driver was guilt. We woke up in the 1960s to segregation, to pollution, to unsafe cars... so it was one thing to change the values, which we did…but they wanted to make sure that could never happen again. And the way to make sure there were no abuses of authority was to get rid of authority.” [05:27]

• Resultant Bureaucracy:

  • Process replaced purpose, with thousands of compliance rules and multiple checkers checking the checkers.
  • Legal and lobbying industries benefit from this status quo, incentivized by complexity.

Bureaucracy vs. Agency: The Erosion of Human Responsibility

• Enshrining Process Over Substance:

  • Regulatory systems focused on “objective proof” and checklists rather than outcome or intent.
  • Notable Moment: The Clean Water Act and Civil Rights Act did great good, but subsequent regulatory creep produced a “lawyer society” versus China’s “engineer society.” [08:11]

• Individual and Institutional Paralysis:

  • Philip: “Half of New York City schools are operating at barely over half capacity… But the teacher unions got a law… which requires that it never reduce its budget unless tax revenues go down… laws that literally require us to burn money…” [13:56]
  • Anecdote: In 40 years, a top NYC school official “had never seen anyone terminated for performance.” [18:26]

Why Reform Efforts Fail—and Why Change May Be Coming

• Entrenched Interests:

  • Attempts to reform (such as expert health courts) are stymied by powerful lobbies, like trial lawyers and unions.

• Growing Dissatisfaction:

  • Philip: “Two thirds of the country is dissatisfied with both parties... Also, close to 2/3 of the country fundamentally agree on basic values, the golden rule, honesty, all that kind of stuff.” [11:01]

• Need for a New Narrative:

  • Howard and allies are developing a new, non-partisan narrative focused on operating systems, managerial authority, and re-empowering human judgment—starting with leading citizens, not policy or party politics.

Restoring Agency, Innovation, and the American Character

• Principles-based Reform:

  • Law should be a framework protecting against clear harms, not prescribing micromanaged behavior.
  • Philip: “Law is not supposed to be central planning. Law is supposed to be a framework that protects people from bad things. Within that, it’s supposed to safeguard an open field of freedom.” [27:58]

• Examples from Abroad:

  • Australia replaced nursing home rulebooks with 31 general principles—outcomes improved as staff internalized values, not rote checklists. [31:50]

• Mechanisms for Real Change:

  • Citizens assemblies or juries as sources of moral authority.
  • Philip (citing George Kennan): American government could benefit from a “council of state”—citizens with no direct power, only the authority to comment on government performance. [43:19]

• Successful Models:

  • Base closing commissions for the military leveraged non-partisan expertise to cut costs and inefficiencies. [45:17]

AI, Technology, and Law

• AI as a Steam Engine Moment:
  • AI can help translate and organize legal code, but final authority must remain human.
  • Philip: “AI can mimic values. But it can’t really have values… ethics can’t be applied in advance, it’s always situational.” [50:16]
  • Suggestion: Use AI to clarify, not replace, human discretion.

Five Concrete Steps for Change

Jim asks Philip for his “First Five” if given the authority to reform:

1. Redefine Lawsuits: Narrow standing and focus judges on drawing boundaries for reasonable dispute. [57:58]
2. Restore Managerial Tools to Elected Leaders: Allow governors and mayors meaningful say in staff, resource allocation, and adaptation.
3. Streamline Infrastructure Approval: Drastically simplify permitting for critical infrastructure through clear authority paths.
4. Re-empower Local Communities: Encourage decentralization for innovation and agency at the local level.
5. Systematic Legal Simplification: Launch a commission (like the Napoleonic Code’s creation) to reduce and rationalize overlapping, contradictory regulations nationwide.

American Character, Conformity, and Freedom

• America’s True Strength: Not just diversity, but “tolerated diversity of conformities”—clusters of like-minded, self-organizing groups. [68:55]

• What’s at Stake:

  • Losing agency leads to “learned helplessness,” undermining the very spirit that made America innovative. [65:58]
  • The need for a new civic “operating system” that combines AI-enabled tools with traditional values and agency.

• International Perspective:

  • Stories highlight that even in highly regulated, prosperous countries like Switzerland, the thirst for agency and freedom can cause an exodus. “That which is not compulsory is forbidden and that which is not forbidden is compulsory.” [71:57]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “We created a system that's fundamentally discordant to the American spirit.” – Philip [41:02]
• “What no reformer has done yet is taken on the underlying operating philosophy of modern government: replace human judgment with legal rules. That’s a mistake.” – Philip [02:12]
• “Law is supposed to safeguard an open field of freedom... the open field is now a minefield.” – Philip [28:18]
• “Our incentive...is to keep the system complex. And that explains a ton.” – Jim [17:04]
• “There are 23 million people in the U.S. working for government. That’s over one in seven in the workforce; they are not managed sensibly in any way…” – Philip [21:30]
• “You get straight jacketed… held back by these conventions… We are so repressed by… an anti-invention philosophy where being yourself is a danger instead of an opportunity.” – Philip [39:14]
• “Any free society, you must be free to follow your star.... You are not alone... you're responsible to your community.” – Philip, on his two universal directives [74:24]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:00–03:18 | Legal overload—the evolution from brief constitutional principles to unreadable regulatory labyrinth
• 05:27–06:41 | 1960s guilt, good intentions, and the elimination of individual authority
• 13:16–16:50 | Public unions, barriers to managerial authority, and the price of inefficiency
• 18:26–21:30 | Paralysis in public schools; teachers can’t be managed or dismissed
• 27:53–31:27 | How law shifted from protecting freedom to prescribing action; the nurse home principles story
• 41:02–43:08 | The core of the American spirit—why Philip perseveres despite setbacks
• 45:17–46:34 | Base closing commissions—a rare bipartisan success
• 48:08–50:46 | Can AI help? Tech as a clarifier, not a replacer of values and accountability
• 57:58–61:00 | Philip’s “First Five” reforms for restoring functionality to government and society
• 68:55–70:57 | America’s “diversity of conformities” and why bottom-up innovation works

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Takeaway: A Call for Common Sense and Re-empowered Agency

Philip K. Howard forcefully argues that the bloat of procedural, legalistic government has smothered the innovation, adaptability, and agency that once defined the American project. The path forward is not policy-by-policy tinkering, but a reimagining of how government operates, a renewal of narrative, and a return to principles—frameworks for freedom and managerial discretion. As the episode’s title suggests, bringing “common sense” back requires deliberate narrative work, institutional bravery, and a recommitment to trusting people with responsibility—locally, communally, and nationally.

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For further reading, check Philip’s books “Saving Can Do,” “Not Accountable,” and the upcoming “Burning Money.” His Free Press series “Reboot (Almost) Everything” launches in August 2026.

Transcript

[Philip K. Howard]

The Constitution with all amendments is 7,500 words. The current system of federal law and regulation is 150 million words. It is beyond the capacity of any human understanding and even AI can't make sense of it. It's like a giant short circuit. So you pile up all this stuff over year after year after year. And after a while, government's unmanageable. It doesn't deliver, it wastes money.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

My guest today is my friend Philip K. Howard, the founder of Common Good, a non profit advocating the return of common sense and individual decision making to government. A very bracing conversation about all the things that we could do to make the way our government in the United States work better. Please enjoy my conversation with Philip Howard. Philip Howard, finally. We've known each other forever. I served on your board at Common Good. I discovered you well before I met you with your first book, the Death of Common Sense. 1995. 1995, right. Loved it. Have loved all of your books. But I gotta ask, like that's 30 years ago, 31 years ago, and things have seemingly only gotten worse.

[Philip K. Howard]

Right? Right. I think I have a. I had lunch with a tycoon a few years ago and he said, you know, I like what you write, but have you ever accomplished anything? And I said, well, actually now that you mention it, I have a perfect record of failure. He said, that's what I thought. I'm not giving you any money. That's not exactly true. I actually have worked on a bunch of reforms with Congress. But the reality is the situation has

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

gotten worse and diagnose it for me. Why? I mean, I have pretty strong views on this. I think our current political class. Class is one of the worst on both sides of the aisle. I'm very bipartisan in my view. But why?

[Philip K. Howard]

What no reformer has done yet is taken on the underlying operating philosophy of modern government, which is basically that we should replace human judgment with either specific legal rules or objective proof. And so there was no such thing until the 1970s as thousand page rule books. There was no such thing as having to go to a months long hearing to prove that somebody doesn't do their job. The Interstate highway act, which was in 1956, was 29 pages long. Within 10 years, over 20,000 miles of road had been built. The last transportation bill was almost 1,000 pages long and would take 10 years to get a permit for one stretch of road.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

I mean it, it's almost like Monty Python is running the government. Right? Like the Department of Silly Walks and at all. But again, I'm Going to press you. Why?

[Philip K. Howard]

Well, a lot of people make money on this system. I mean, it was when I went to law school, which was a long time ago. The orthodoxy, the new orthodoxy was that you can't trust human judgment. An official might be like Robert Moses and, you know, blow through.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

I was going to bring him up.

[Philip K. Howard]

Right. And so we were going to create a government better than people. And again, we have. I mean, like the worker safety rules. There are 4,000. I'm all for worker safety regulation, but the way they do it is they have 4,000 rules and they have rules that say things like, stairwell shall be lit by natural or artificial light. Now, that's useful. Then the company has to have an inspector, a compliance inspector who has a Checklist for these 4,000 rules going around checking the boxes that they do this. That's a person doing really nothing useful. Then there's another person who checks the checker. So you have all this bureaucracy kind of building up and Washington becomes this enormous factory for red tape and law firms, including the law firm I was a senior partner of. And you have these law firms doing really well, making money and lobbyists, and they all navigate all the precise language and they argue over it and really nothing ever changes. It's like a perpetual tug of war and they have no interest in changing it. Everybody's doing well. I think Washington has one of the largest Lamborghini dealers in the United States. A place where nothing ever happens.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Yeah, I was just down there and saw as many fancy cars as one might see in Greenwich, Connecticut. And it seems to me that the source might have been the idealism of the 1960s. And by that I mean we can. We can make things better. But I think it counted also on this idea that we are born as a tableau, you know, as a blank slate. And we are not born as a blank slate.

[Philip K. Howard]

Right. Well, first of all, we are not born as a blank slate. And I think there was some idealism. I think there was a kind of naivete that with modern technology on the rise and, you know, that was the era of IBM, 360s, you know, stuff like that, they could do it, but the real driver was guilt. We woke up in the 1960s to segregation, to pollution, to unsafe cars, to locking up disabled children in horrible places,

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

like we were doing some horrible shit.

[Philip K. Howard]

Yeah, yeah. And so we had. The establishment had a record of neglect of many groups that should not have been neglected. And so it was one thing to change the values, which we did do with environmental laws and civil rights laws and all that was good and necessary, but they wanted to make sure that they could never happen again. And the way to make sure there were no abuses of authority was to get rid of authority. And so the historic, excuse me, get

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

rid of individual authority.

[Philip K. Howard]

Individuals, authority.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

The law was going to become, or the regulation was going to become the authority.

[Philip K. Howard]

You'd have a legal system that would tell everybody what to do. So Eric Foner is a very distinguished historian from Columbia University, wrote a book about they call the Future of Freedom, where he said, In 1960s, the governing idea was the elimination of all authority. Freedom would be enhanced if no one had authority. It turns out that that's upside down, that if the person running a firm, let's say, doesn't have authority to uphold mutual standards and values, then there's not going to be mutual trust. Then in fact, everyone loses their freedom. There's nobody to go to say, I've got a good idea. Let's change the way we do things. So authority is actually critical to everyone's freedom. You need red lights and green lights, right? In any society and in any institution. But we still are trapped in this kind of quicksand of law that we created where no one can make a judgment. And then the result is, is that people who don't respect law, like the current president, for example, can get away with murder because they just simply ignore it.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

And one of the things that I always come back to is you mentioned all of the abuses that were being solved. I was 100% in favor of everything you just mentioned. The Civil Rights act, the Clean Water Act. Like, the rivers around this city used to be so polluted. Like, you risked your life jumping into them, and they got a lot cleaner. So all of those initial rules and regulations and new laws, I think actually did really, really good things. And then what you're talking about started to happen, and we became a society. I had a guest on who basically was comparing the US And China, and he goes, the US has developed a lawyer society. China has developed an engineer society.

[Philip K. Howard]

Dan Wong.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Yeah, and when I was on the board of Common Good, the thing like all of the ideas you came up with in the other board members and associates I thought were brilliant. But, like, how. How do you get that into people's like, yeah, we really should do this because, you know, I'm not a Democrat or a Republican. I just like, can. Can maybe I'm kind of like you, a radical centrist.

[Philip K. Howard]

Yeah, well, I mean, you know, again, I've, you know, I've been working on Specific reforms like, you know, I got, I was very involved in a bunch of environmental permitting reforms in Congress a few years ago. We developed this project, you'll remember, for expert health courts. We got everybody for it. Obama agreed to support it. And where for medical malpractice, you'd go to an expert court without juries. And it would make healthcare better and also relief quicker for people who are really injured by mistakes. And we had a pilot project in the Affordable Care act that Obama supported and funding for it. And the day before the vote, the Democratic leader of the Senate, Harry Reid, had it pulled because the trial lawyers, they make all their money on extortion. You may be liable for $20 million for this tragedy, therefore you better pay us 10 or something. Even though the doctor may have done nothing wrong, it may just have been a sick person getting sicker. So it's been hard to make change. But one does feel that the times are changing. I mean, politics have become more extreme on both sides.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Yep.

[Philip K. Howard]

You know.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Yep.

[Philip K. Howard]

The left, left is more left. And the.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Yeah, we were just talking about it before you got here. It's like, wow, when did this happen?

[Philip K. Howard]

Yeah. And the right is. So there's clearly more of a mood for change. Two thirds of the country is dissatisfied with. Both parties don't like the way things are. Also, close to 2/3 of the country fundamentally agree on basic values, the golden rule, honesty, all that kind of stuff. It's not like diversity has driven us apart. People still believe in the same things. It does seem there needs. So I'm talking to some former attorneys general now just hosted a three day workshop three weeks ago to try to come up with a new political narrative. And the idea is not to start a new party, not even, at least for now, to start a movement, but just to change the conversation. So we've come up with an idea for a new narrative in some writing. We're in the process of trying to get some leading citizens to sign onto it. So I was just talking to former governor Mitch Daniels yesterday about it, so he's on board and get a group of people to start talking about it. And this new narrative is, is not about policy, it's about how things work, how you run a school, how you get a permit, how you're allowed to act honestly with each other in the workplace without fearing a lawsuit, that sort of thing. It's really about operating systems. So we have a name for it, we have a narrative that we're working out and I think it's good. It took a lot I had a bunch of marketing people and press people in this workshop. And so we're going to try to roll it out slowly with just leading citizens, maybe yourself talking about it with different groups of people, and begin to say, isn't it time that we actually overhauled the system so that people can act, so that Americans can roll up their sleeves and act like Americans, you know, and that's what people no longer feel comfortable doing. And the law is. What's gotten in the way is this legal quicksand stuff. So it's about re. Empowering human agency.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Yeah. Which is something I deeply, deeply believe in. And also, when you look at the history of this country, you have things like, you have a book on this. I think it was probably your most controversial. And that was public unions. Right.

[Philip K. Howard]

Not accountable.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Right. Not accountable. Great book. And as I was reading that book, I remembered that FDR himself said that would be the worst thing to ever let happen. Many people considered FDR one of our most progressive presidents, and yet he was like, absolutely not. And yet it happened.

[Philip K. Howard]

Right. Well, democracy. Well, it's funny you mentioned that. I'm just finishing a book called Burning Money, and it's a book that tries to describe the harm of government that's become unmanageable. And it's very hard proving a negative. But I've, you know, I teach at Harvard Business School sometimes, so I have a lot of business school professors, friends, and they sort of help me out. But, you know, it's funny, there's a vast library of books on how to manage businesses better. There is not one book on what happens if you lack managerial authority. It's just like breathing. It's like what happens if you don't breathe, if you don't have somebody who can actually direct resources here or there, decide who's good at what, adapt when something unforeseen happens. All the things that have to make anything work in any institution require managers. Well, guess what? Government no longer has managerial authority. So we more or less, particularly in the big cities and big states, New York, Illinois, New York City, we're getting about half the product at twice the price, and we can't afford that anymore. I mean, there are a lot of public needs and there are a lot of serious policy issues that need to get addressed. Income inequality, all kinds of stuff. Meanwhile, we're burning money. We're literally burning money. You cannot. There's a school in Chicago that has capacity for 1,000 students, that has 27 students in it, and no one has the capacity to close down the school and transfer the students to a nearby school because the teachers unions have made it to. So that no one can close a school. Half of New York City schools are operating at barely over half capacity because of declining demographics. But the teacher unions got a law called maintenance of effort laws, which requires that it never reduce its budget unless tax revenues go down because the teachers union got an agreement. So for 50 years, since they got collective bargaining power, year after year, they've gotten more and more requirements like that that have been built into the codes, into. These are laws now that are laws that literally require us to burn money, require us to burn money. Almost no one appreciates that. I've hired lawyers. I have a partnership with the public interest law firm in Chicago that just won the tariff case against Trump and also won the Janus case. So we have a draft complaint in federal court to challenge the constitutionality of public union controls ready to go. But I don't want to do it until I write this book that explains why it's so harmful that we can't manage government.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

And you mentioned earlier that what we really need is a new operating system. Right. And in operating systems, incentives kind of rule everything around us right now, as you've just outlined our incentive. Like, for example, if I was the head of the public teachers union, man, I would be calling for more of those laws because that would. I was highly incentivized to do so. Right. And. And so it's. It's easy and disingenuous, in my opinion. It's easy to scapegoat everybody. And I think, like, let's just stop doing that. Let's look at the underlying system and the incentives that result from it. And, you know, that explains a ton. I remember one time you told me about the law here in New York City where a public school teacher may not. If a child is in distress, remember this? Yeah. The teacher may not touch the child. That child. In other words, one of the most basic human instincts if an adult sees a child in distress, is to comfort them is to. I mean, that's just so part of human os.

[Philip K. Howard]

Right. But we have this precautionary system of government, of law now, so that anything that might go wrong is forbidden. So it is possible a weird person could touch a child inappropriately.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Yeah, of course.

[Philip K. Howard]

So. Because that is possible and not that unusual. You know, Catholic churches and priests and all that. So they make a rule that you can't touch a child, but that's equally weird, you know, and so you don't. And so the Only way to. To square the circle is to have a system where the people in charge are allowed to use their judgment about who's a good person, who maybe is a little odd and be able to remove the odd person from that teaching job, but you can't remove anybody. 99.9 interviewed a former commissioner in New York recently who said in his 40 years of being a top official, New York City, he had never seen anyone terminated for performance. Wow. Never. So you have a system where you can't terminate the weird person because you say they're a little weird. You have to prove they're weird. Well, how do you prove someone's weird? Right. You kind of. Most of the things that are. I think it was Einstein or someone like that said, if it can be measured, it's not that important.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Right. Investing. Once a target becomes a measurement, it's no longer useful as a target completely.

[Philip K. Howard]

So we have this system that assumes that right and wrong can be proved objectively, that is manifestly false. How do you prove someone is selfish? How do you prove. Prove somebody is good judgment at this, but not such good judgment at that? How do you prove who works hard, who cooperates well? How do you prove what's a good product, what's not a good product? None of this stuff is provable. It's tested in the marketplace of human relations, in the marketplace of values, in the marketplace of products, but it's not provable. And this system is built on a false premise. And we need to basically go back to a human system. The Constitution, with all amendments, is 7,500 words. It includes principles like no unreasonable searches and seizures and freedom of speech. It does those things in a couple of words. It doesn't define them, but they become defined over time as issues come up. And so people have a general sense from those principles of what the boundaries are. And we feel comfortable going to bed at night, that the police can't just arbitrarily barge in and throw us in jail or whatever. The current system of federal law and regulation is 150 million words. It is beyond the capacity of any human understanding. And even AI can't make sense of it because it's not consistent. It's like a giant short circuit of all these laws that are piled on top of each other. Going back to the teachers union. A couple of years ago, Citizens Budget Commission in New York City counted 21 bills that passed the legislature to enhance union benefits and rights in one year, 60 years after they got collective bargaining power. Now, not all of them ended up Making it into law for one reason or another. But they are relentless. And so you pile up all this stuff over year after year after year. And after a while, government's unmanageable. It doesn't deliver. It wastes money. By the way, you're a money guy, right? 23 million people in the United States work for the government. 23 million people. So that's over one in seven people in the workplace. They are not manageable. They're not managed sensibly in any way. They cost about $3 trillion tax rate. That's in total comp. And benefits. They spend in a discretionary way, or so they oversee another four to five trillion dollars. So we're talking about not quite maybe a third of the GDP that's being spent by a system that is no longer manageable. And it's not delivering public services very well either. And there are all these new needs we need to. So why do we tolerate that? We tolerate it because we don't understand.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

It seems to me that I always argued in, you know, I'm a big fan of philosophy and like, you don't need to be a pure Platonist or Aristotelian. You need both. You need both because if it's pure Plato, you get the republic and you get the philosopher kings and, oh, they're going to do a great job. What you need from Aristotle is. Wait a sec, that might not work out like that.

[Philip K. Howard]

Right? The happy man. Right?

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Yeah. And what I was always struck by in our many conversations is I just can't believe that we know that the majority of Americans intuitively understand this. We know that as you mentioned earlier, if you looked at Americans of all race, creed, colors, sex, et cetera, we share much more in common than divides us. And yet here we are.

[Philip K. Howard]

Right? Right. So we need a new. And by the way, neither political party will solve this problem. If you project out five or 10 years, there's nothing on the horizon that is almost conceivable that could end up solving this problem. The Democrats get most of their resources from the worst of these groups. By the way, I happen to be a registered Democrat. I'm for environmental protection. I'm worried about climate change. I'm for taking care of people who need help. I'm for all those things. They will never solve this problem. And the Republicans see government as the enemy. Both parties do just fine running against the extremes of the other party. They collect a lot of money from the people who. Democrats collect it from the people who can't stand Trump. And the Trump People collect it from the people who can't stand AOC and Mamdani. Right. So you have this system. That's where both parties are profiting by extremism and leaving the vast middle as you described behind. So we have to come up with a new narrative first. A new narrative and a vision, and then let it turn into something. I was talking to a former attorney general. I won't mention it because I don't have permission, but a very prominent attorney general. And we're having a discussion, and I didn't know him. He was introduced to me by the president of an insurance company. I said, well, do you know why we're talking? He said, zoom. He said, no, I have no idea why we're talking. So I said, I don't think either party is going to solve the problems of this country. And we need a new narrative that actually addresses the problems that people see with the government that doesn't function very well and doesn't let people be themselves. We got a video training that tells us basically, don't be yourself. Don't tell a joke, don't be candid. So after about six or seven minutes, he starts finishing my sentences. And then at the end of our half hour, he says, okay, here's what we do. You come up with the framework of principles about what this new vision looks like, and we'll go find 8 or 10 or 12 really prominent citizens to start talking about. We don't have to agree on everything. Start talking about why this is the kind of directionally what's missing in our public discussion. And then we maybe we have some public events and we start talking about. And he said, I think it's possible that we could get one or more people running for president in 2028 to talk this way, because everybody just listening to you, of course you're right. I mean, this is exactly what's. Of course you're right. Everybody knows you're right, just nobody's saying it right.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

And that's the exact point that always frustrates me. There's that great quote. I can't remember who said it, but it's like, if you give me the ability to write the stories of a country, I care not who writes the laws. And he was really onto something there. And that's why I'm really happy to hear that you're developing the narrative because, like, the system we operate under right now assigns you the bin you're going to be in. Right. If you can attribute all of my political or social positions from hearing one of them, I am brain dead.

[Philip K. Howard]

Right.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

I am flatline. And yet that's what they do, right?

[Philip K. Howard]

Yeah. You know, the thing that people don't appreciate with this modern mutation of law is law is not supposed to be central planning. Law is supposed to be a framework that protects people from bad things. No pollution, no discrimination, no cheating, you know, whatever. Within that, it's supposed to safeguard an open field of freedom.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Yes.

[Philip K. Howard]

So what's happened in the last 60 years is the open field of freedom has become a legal minefield. Instead of proscribing what was bad for 60 years or so, since the 60s, we've started prescribing how to do everything and also giving anybody who doesn't like your decision a legal right to challenge it. You know, and so I wrote something for the Free Press recently, had a series on kind of great Americans who are not political leaders. Leading up to July 4th, I did one on an early management theorist named Mary Parker Follett who died in 1933. She was a prominent management theorist before women could vote. It was really unusual character. One of her points was as modern democracy is evolving, we have freedom. All wrong freedom. It's important to have democratic elections. But democracy is really, that's all about just going in one direction or another. It's about the herd. It doesn't affect your freedom. And then there are other people, John Stuart Mill and others who talk about the importance of individual rights. You can do whatever you want to do. She said, talking about individual, it's like breaking a branch off a tree and expecting it to live. We don't live alone individually, we live in groups. It's within groups that people innovate and find meaning and fellow feeling and develop their values and apply their values. It's in group activities. One of the things I think she could not have foreseen was that this modern post-60s idea of law tells you exactly how to do everything means that people really are no longer free, that groups no longer have the capacity to innovate and do things their own way. People running a school can't run it. Oh, let's try this. Can I tell a regulatory success story, please? So a couple of decades ago, Australia had terrible nursing homes. America, by the way, has terrible nursing homes. Do not go to a nursing home. And they're regulated by 1000 page rule books to tell you when the meals are and how heavy, how much they have to weigh and how many ounces of vegetables and all this kind of stuff, you know, just crazy. Someone had the bright, but they were Terrible nursing homes. So someone had the bright idea of scrapping the rule book and replacing the rule book with 31. What ended up being 31. General principles have a home like setting, respect the dignity of the residents, that sort of thing. So they did it. And the scholars, all the legal scholars had scoffed, these nursing home operators are going to get away with murder, blah, blah, blah. If you don't tell them exactly what to do, they'll abuse the residents. All this stuff comes out. So they went a year later to look at how it was going. And what the scholars found is that the nursing homes were twice as good. And they looked into why. One reason why is that now the nurses aides came to work. Instead of A checklist of 1000 things to check off, they had internalized these principles. They looked at what the residents wanted. Instead of telling nursing homeowners exactly how to do things, they let them do it. One nursing home has a gardening theme. Another one has a different theme. They have just completely different themes. They can innovate, they can do it in their own way and, and take pride in the uniqueness of their creation. So humans need agency. We need to be able to make a difference. And this vast legal system has snuffed it out. No wonder everybody's going crazy and voting for extremists on both sides, because we're

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

not allowed to be ourselves, particularly for this country. Right. There's a book called the Hypomanic why America has a Little Craziness But a Lot of Success. Right. And the thesis is, well, look at who made up the population of this country. They had to be willing to say goodbye to everything they knew, their families, their friends, often with no money in their pockets, come over here and so what do you get? You get that type of person, right?

[Philip K. Howard]

You get people who have to invent.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Yeah.

[Philip K. Howard]

So in the old country, you were born the way you were, and that still to a certain extent affects the cultures of the old countries, Right?

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Yeah, I agree.

[Philip K. Howard]

You were son of a carpenter, you became a carpenter, right? In this country, you move over to the wilderness, the frontier, and if you don't watch out, somebody's going to come scalp you. So you really have to take care of yourself. And, and people, just people invent Americans, invented themselves. I mean, modern Elon, Russ Musk or Thomas Addison. Thomas Addison was so smart about this. Here's a guy with a third grade education, great lines. Nothing any good works by itself. You gotta make the damn thing work. So you imagine him developing sound and developing, inventing the electric Light bulb and all that kind of stuff. But by tinkering. There was a great book by Harry Evans, God bless him, who was former head of the Times of London and then became the head of Random House. And he bought the Death of Common Sense. When he came out, he head of Random House, which published the Death of Common Sense. And oh, it was so much fun. The first time I met him, I was so scared because I'd never written a book before. And here's the editor in chief of Random House. And he would say, I'm Sid. I'm so excited about your project. It reminds me, right, of this and that he's completely into it. And years later, and we saved friends, he wrote a book, coffee Table Book, which I really urge people to read. It's really called they Made America. And it's a coffee table book of 5 to 10,000 word essays of Americans who innovated one way or another in what their character was and who they were. So the Wright brothers. The Wright brothers. So everyone knew with the internal combustion machine engine and all that kind of stuff that it would be. And the idea of wings and stuff, that it would be possible to achieve manned flight. And you had the leading physicists in the world, all over the world, trying for some big prize for who can first achieve manned flight. Literally the smartest people in the world, the most educated, they're all doing experiments and having these things take off on the Potomac and become submarines immediately, that sort of stuff. You have these two bicycle mechanics in Dayton, Ohio, who start pedaling around with little foils to test wind flows on their handlebars to see how they work, stuff like that. I mean, it was like Edison just tinkering, right? And these two boys, the bicycle mechanics, do it. And after they do it, no one believes them. No one believes them. So they go to Paris. Nobody believes them. This is five years have gone by, right, since Kitty Hawk. They go to Paris. People still don't believe them. And everyone fills the big stadium. And the French papers are completely making fun of them. It's called the French for the American bluff or something. Was the. And so their little plane takes off from the infield, this racetrack. And it's like Bourget, I think, Le Bourget. And they take off and people kind of gasp. And then it starts coming toward the grandstands. And then people start to panic. This thing's going to run. And then it turns and people just could not. They could not believe it. I mean, it is such a great story. I mean, it's just. Anyway, Harry Evans, it was a good year, sitting on, making his family sick by vulcanizing rubber in his kitchen, stuff like that. So these are all basically predecessors to Jim o'. Shaughnessy. All these people in this book, anyway, making their family sick by bossing them around and making them do all this stuff. It's a great book. They made America, but it's about the American, it's about this. Well, let's try this, let's try that, let's do the other.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

You know, Bill Bryson has a great book, America one summer. And it looks at the 20s and that was the America you're describing. Like Coolidge. Who was Coolidge? Coolidge, Coolidge. I'm thinking of the poet. Coolidge was vacationing near Mount Rushmore when the guy was making it. He had no idea he was doing it. His aide said to him, hey, there's a guy, some crazy guy up there who's carving the President's bases into this mountain. And, and, and Coolidge was like, cool, let's go look. He didn't ask for any funding. He didn't go up there and say you can't do that. And he just was like, wow, that's really cool. And back to your tinkerer thing, right? Like Claude Shannon, one of my heroes really, because that's all he did. And for those who don't know, obviously these are all because Claude came up with information theory and he should be in my opinion, as famous as Einstein. And yet he was just a really incredibly colorful character. He worked on whatever was of interest to him. And so you got a lot of trumpets that shot fire out when you hit a note. You got mechanical chess games, you got all of that. But also you got information theory. And I, I definitely think I'm also vehemently opposed to this whole generational. Oh, this young generation doesn't know anything, blah, blah, blah. That's total. The like these are incredibly talented people who I just feel intersect with your thesis because they're straight jacketed.

[Philip K. Howard]

They are straight jacketed. And I think they are held back by these conventions. I mean we look back at Victorian age and laugh at how stultifying it was and stuff. Victorians have nobody. I mean they were like hippies compared to us. I mean we are so more brothels

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

per square mile in London during the Victorian age than at any other time.

[Philip K. Howard]

But I mean we are so repressed by really a philosophy. It's kind of an anti invention philosophy where you can't, where being yourself is a danger as opposed to an Opportunity. You know, I was thinking about this. I'm asked sometimes by people, well, you've been at this 30 years. You've really had a lot of failure.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

But you have been very persistent.

[Philip K. Howard]

Well, why are you so persistent? And, you know, this has cost me a lot of money. I mean, I de. Emphasize my law career and everything because I really believed in it. And it's not like I'm a. Well, either a saint or, you know, I'm not somebody. I don't wear hair shirts. I enjoy life, you know, I like you. I mean, yeah. You know, so I fun. I'm playing in a golf tournament this weekend or whatever. But the reason is that I know and you know, and the guy who is the Attorney General knows who I was talking to and a bunch of other people who are on my board. Now that I'm right, that we've done. We created a system that's fundamentally discordant to the American spirit.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Yes.

[Philip K. Howard]

And when I was in college, I had the lucky. I got lucky. I got a job at a federal. My family had no money. I got a job at a federal poverty program at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. And somebody saw that there was this kid going to an Ivy League school, and so they plucked me out and made me the gopher to a Nobel Prize winner.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

The creator of the multiple worlds thesis of quantum physics.

[Philip K. Howard]

Right, right, right. And so. And so I spent three summers as the gopher to a Nobel Prize winner. I ended up publishing papers when I was a teenager on post nuclear war recovery and stuff like that. But the thing I learned, we were in a little small group at Oak Ridge that was a civil defense group. There were about a dozen interdisciplinary group, economists and physicists and other chemical engineers. What I learned about them is that they thought things through for themselves. And when they thought they understood something they didn't let go of, was not a question of whether it was accepted or not, was whether they felt they understood whatever the issue was, whatever the dynamic was, and it became their truth. And they wouldn't give it up because somebody disagreed unless the person who disagreed came up with a compelling reason why it was wrong. I sort of feel that way. So I feel that what we're talking about is true. And so why would I give it up? It's incredibly important.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Yeah. The principle of parsimony basically tells us that, you know, there are a lot of. It's Occam's razor by a different name. Like, it works a lot of the time when you apply it to groups and things like that. I was thinking of somebody I had on in the early days of this podcast, Nick Gruen.

[Philip K. Howard]

Yeah, I was just on a zoom with him.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Okay. And he really sold me on this whole jury idea, which.

[Philip K. Howard]

The citizens.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

The citizens jury.

[Philip K. Howard]

The citizens assemblies.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Yeah. And like, why aren't we trying those? I just think my attitude is let a thousand initiatives bloom and get ideas

[Philip K. Howard]

and get new ideas and create and people really another thing about society, we think everything has to be in a thing we don't really understand. Also the role of moral authority. Citizens assemblies, for example, you don't have to have power to be influential. You could convene a citizens assembly on issues we're talking about and have them come up with their own interpretation and comment and so on. And it would have power not because somebody can push a button to make it happen, because real people got together and came up with that conclusion. George Kennan, the diplomat George Kennan, toward the end of his life, said he thought American government needed a fourth branch of government. He called it a council of state, but was really sort of a council of citizens. And his fourth branch would have no power. Its only job would be to comment on how the other branches were doing.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Yeah, well, you know, didn't we used to have that in the so called fourth estate? I mean, journalism has descended right along with government. I mean, and it. Because I was a real junkie for like, okay, really outing myself as a nerd here. But during the Watergate hearings, What? I was 13 years old and I spent all summer watching them. And that feels like a profound loss to me because nothing, of course was perfect, but journalists sort of became the fourth estate that served that function.

[Philip K. Howard]

Walter Cronkite, I mean, Chet Huntley, I mean, these people had moral authority and credibility. If they said something, you believed it.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Yes.

[Philip K. Howard]

And we just don't. So we've lost the moral authority. One of the innovations that has worked in few in the last 30 years in America, with the idea of base closing commissions, it was politically impossible to close down unnecessary military bases. So one of the recommendations of the Grace Commission under President Reagan was to create independent commissions appointed with so many by the minority leader and so many by the majority leader. But they weren't partisan. They were retired generals and such. And they would come up with a set of proposals about which bases to close. So in the 2005 Base Closing Commission, which happened to be run by a guy I went to school with, they came up with recommendations to close or consolidate 50 bases, saving tens of billions of dollars a year. And Congress had the power to vote it up or down, but that's it. And so there's none of this bickering going back and forth. And so the congressman had plausible deniability. I'm sorry that the base was closed here, but I couldn't do anything about it. It's all part of a package, right?

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Yeah.

[Philip K. Howard]

Great. Well, that's kind of an innovation. That's good. Right. But the base closing commissions had moral authority. They came up with the right. So we need. I think we need. And I want to run it. I want you to appoint me to run. You run for president, then appoint me.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

What did Sherman say? If nominated, I will not run. If elected, I will not serve.

[Philip K. Howard]

Right. And I want you to appoint me to the recodification Commission. To methodically go through every area of law and turn 50,000 pages into a thousand pages and not do away with anything. Just make it work. Make it a principles based system, more like the Constitution. And give people define authority frameworks, have courts not second guess it, but only decide whether someone transgressed their authority. That should be the role of courts, not second guessing. I mean, are the benefits of the transmission line worth the harm of building it through a pristine forest? That's not a legal question.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Right.

[Philip K. Howard]

I mean, that's a policy question and ultimately a political question. And, you know, so somebody has to make that decision. Otherwise we don't. Today we don't have the transmission line, so we can't get the power from renewable sources to the cities or to the data centers or whatever, you know, because. Because the process goes on for a decade. It's crazy. It's crazy.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

My company, o' Shaughnessy Ventures, is doing a lot with AI what do you think about that? What do you think about humans who, you know, as you mentioned, not even AI seems to be able to make sense of all of these laws, but it probably is going to do a better job serving a human. By that I mean, have every regulation put in there, have it translated into English, show where it conflicts with other rules and regulations so that at least, like a human, not even a committee of humans could do it. AI, it's trivial, but not as a ruling as here. Here's what you're dealing with now. You humans figure this out?

[Philip K. Howard]

Yeah, yeah, completely. So I think the closest analogy I can think of to AI is the steam engine. You went from manual labor to now a machine that could really do powerful things and could be harnessed on detractors or whatever. So I have some senior AI people writing for my Free Press series that's coming out called Reboot, Almost everything. It's a 20 part series. It's going to come out in August. And so they're talking about uses of AI. Reed Hastings talking about how every student can now have a tutor. It's fantastic. There are all these fantastic opportunities with AI. I mean, ultimately though, someone has to be accountable for tough choices.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

I agree.

[Philip K. Howard]

And AI is not accountable. So someone needs to.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

The human running the AI needs to be accountable.

[Philip K. Howard]

It needs to be accountable.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

I agree.

[Philip K. Howard]

So we're going to need to come up with. So senior person Google is writing an article on what they view as the proper AI oversight. So, you know, so I've got, you know, it's really interesting. It's really a brave, it is a brave new world. But the opportunities are fantastic. But it, but the challenges of coming up with human oversight because values. AI can mimic values.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Right.

[Philip K. Howard]

But it can't really have values. And so, I mean there's a lot of ethical theory about how ethics can't be applied in advance. You always have to be in the situation, situational. It's always situational. And so somebody has to be overseeing AI and somebody has to make ultimate calls. And coming up with those structures, it's going to be challenging too.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Yeah, I think that one of the things that I can do splendidly is to take those millions and millions of words and boil them down to, and put them in plain English. And by the way, I think they should do it for business agreements too. Right. Like you can't use anything online without agreeing. I don't know. Do you know anyone who's met, who's read the terms and conditions?

[Philip K. Howard]

My favorite is when you go to doctor's office and they say okay. And they have a little thing there above the receptionist desk. They say, okay, now sign here and you never see the agreement. And they say, okay, now here comes another one. Now sign here and you sign here's. You never. They don't even go through the pretense of showing you the agreement. You're just signing stuff. I mean it's truly, it's like the reductium absurdum of kind of modern Legal Life. Crazy.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

So tell me a little bit about the series that you're doing for the Free Press.

[Philip K. Howard]

So the series is called Reboot, Almost Everything. And it harkens back to our discussion about the need to change operating systems. So it's not about policy. And so we go area by area and we have an expert set up in, give or take 500 word essays these are like one page kind of essay, very short essay, but with prominent people like Reed Hastings or Mitch Daniels and say, here's the problem. Government has become unmanageable. It has all these harms. Here's the solution. We have to give change civil service systems and get rid of union controls and do this. I've written. I've written one on litigation, said, here's the problem. We have an impartial system of litigation in this country. That's a good thing. And people trust it to be impartial. But it draws no boundaries of who can sue for what. So where's the law part? It's kind of sue for anything rather than law, not lawsuits, but sue for anything, suits or whatever. And so we're missing something. And the harm of that is not just that you get these occasional crazy verdicts, but that people don't feel free in daily. They won't let the kids go out and play alone because they might. If there's an accident, you might be. You might be liable.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Our staff here is quite young, and before you got here, we were talking about. I grew up in the 1970s, like we were free range kids. We could do whatever we wanted as long as the parents, as long as we got home.

[Philip K. Howard]

Right. And so what's happened is, is a couple of decades ago, there was a terrible accident on sledding hill in Greenwich, Connecticut.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

I remember it well.

[Philip K. Howard]

And someone got a verdict of $6 million. And the result of that was not. I mean, Greenwich is a rich town. It could afford. It is that sledding hills across the country closed down.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Yeah. Including that one.

[Philip K. Howard]

Right, including that one.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

I used to take my kids there.

[Philip K. Howard]

Right. And so. And so you have. So all of a sudden, because of a lawsuit brought by one person, no deliberate policy choice, the trade off judgment about whether the risks of sledding outweighed or not, the fun of going out in the winter and snow were not being made by anybody who is politically accountable. Being made by the fact that somebody brought a lawsuit.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Yeah.

[Philip K. Howard]

And there was a similar case in England about the same time that, where somebody. Terrible accident, dove in a lake, became a quadriplegic. Terrible accident. But. But there was nothing. There were no hidden dangers there. It was a little bit like the greatest lawsuit. I mean, there was sure you could run into something if you weren't watching, but, you know, but people had sledded on that hill for decades. Right. You know, without a rite of passage for your kids. Yeah. And so in England, there was no hidden. It was just a Freak accident. It was tragic, but the county that owned the lake was so scared of liability because there were two or three near drownings a year. A big lake, people swimming, bad things could happen, blah, blah, blah. They had determined to close the lake down, and then this accident happened. So the court said, well, this is foreseeable, therefore we're going to grant damage to this person. It goes up to the equivalent of the UK Supreme Court, and they order the case to be dismissed. And they say it is part of our role as the lead judge to protect the reasonable freedoms of people in society, including the freedom to take risk. Do we require that rivers and lakes close down because of the certainty that some accident will happen, then people will be enjoyed? Or, as one judge said, do we climb? We require all trees be cut down because some child may climb one and fall down. And we will not tolerate a dull and gray safety regime. We are here to protect the reasonable freedoms, including the freedom to take reasonable risk.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Ah, what a great decision.

[Philip K. Howard]

And it's called the Tomlinson case. And that's what we're missing in this country, that no one is drawing those boundaries. And so I've written one of my pieces in the Free Press talks about how you would do that. And so you could write it. You could have a state pass a statute that says the judges shall have the responsibility to draw the reasonable. To draw the lines of reasonable dispute in any lawsuit. And in any case that might affect the freedoms of people not in the courtroom, the court shall make a legal ruling on the boundaries of acceptable risk.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

See, you know, I'm a big fan of the book the Beginning of Infinity, and he talks a lot in that book about the precautionary principle. And he links the excesses of the precautionary principle to essentially the death of societies because they can't innovate anymore.

[Philip K. Howard]

And what happens if.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Yeah, that's David Deutsch, right? And I read it when it came out, and I liked it a lot. But then when I reread it, it just mapped over to what you're talking about. So. Okay, let's play a game. I am not the President. That will never happen.

[Philip K. Howard]

Come on. I like it. President o'. Shaughnessy. But think of all the trouble people have spelling it.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Exactly. When I'm in Asia, they just simply call me mister.

[Philip K. Howard]

Oh, yeah, good.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

But I can influence the president, and he assigns you to this role that you've asked me to assign you to. What are your first five. What are the first five things that you're going to promulgate.

[Philip K. Howard]

Well, the first thing will be to liberates people's freedom to be themselves by drawing the lines of who can sue for what and making judges, even though it's hard, draw these boundaries so people can do that. The second thing I would do is I would say for democracy to work, the elected executives have to have the basic managerial governors and mayors, basic managerial tools. They have to have the authority to decide not only what to do consistent with legislating, but who's good at doing what. How to allocate money, how to balance this crazy, how to adapt to new circumstances. All the managerial choices that I'm writing about in this little book is going to come out in January called Burning Money. So I would do that. I would unleash Americans infrastructure was built by our great grandfathers. I mean literally water mains and power line, rickety power lines all over the northeast. It's crazy. You would unleash that by creating a really simple authority structure. For starters, I would say I'd write a law that says notwithstanding any other law or regulation to the contrary, for the next five years. Pick it. Transmission lines shall be approved in the following process. There will be a notice of proposal. There'll be an environmental review of not more than 50 pages to be completed within three months only talking about major impacts. There'll be a chance for the public to comment in short period. And then these designated officials shall have the authority to make trade off judgments consistent with this. Their decision can be second guessed by this designated official, the president, whoever it is. And the role of courts will only be to determine whether in any of these steps they've transgressed the boundaries of their authority. You have essentially a one page document that allows for transmission lines or whatever we're talking about to be built. And you could do that in. It would be a slightly more elaborate process for a new nuclear plant. But it wouldn't be 30 years, which is more or less what it is today. You would simply go piece by piece and you would create authority structures and you would also. I would to the greatest extent possible re. Empower local communities to do things in their own ways. Whether it's running schools, doing their parks, you know, decentralized as much as possible so that people can wake up in the morning and feel they can make a difference.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

You got my vote. I think maybe we'll run you for president.

[Philip K. Howard]

No, I just want to run this reclatification commission. I really do. I think I'm, you know, I'm getting a little old, but you know, I'm still vigorous enough for now. And so Napoleon appointed four judges to redo all the laws of France. Criminal laws, property laws, estate laws, tax law, everything, everything was run by a prominent judge named Portales. And in six months, six months, they came up with new frameworks for all of the laws that affect France. Then they were debated in the legislature. And Napoleon actually presided over a bunch of those. They were enacted and what was the result was the Napoleonic Codes, which are still the basis for civilized law in half the world. In the 1950s, a committee from the American Law Institute run by a guy named Carl Llewellyn, a very prominent professor. Professor said it's ridiculous that we have what was in 48 different states, 48 different contract laws, so that anyone doing interstate commerce has to hire 48 sets of lawyers to comply with stuff. This is crazy, right? So let's create a uniform commercial code. And they devised it, they came up with it. It has, it has all different chapters in it that have to do with security, interest and commercial sales, or different chapters for each one didn't take them that long. And versions of it were adopted by virtually all the 48 states. And that was one of the things that stimulated the post war boom was that everybody had the same set of principles when they were doing contracts. Well, we just need that for society in America.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Yeah. And it's funny too because I was thinking a lot about World War II. It plays a part in my fictional thriller that I was telling you about. It spans, it ends in 2027, it starts in 1939, so it's quite the epic.

[Philip K. Howard]

Wow, cool.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

But I was thinking about America back then and the thought struck me and then I saw other people talking about it as well. If you, if you buy into this, the American empire, which I don't, the idea that for a brief period at the end of World War II, we had a weapon that could colonize the entire world if we so chose to do so. What did we do? The opposite. We did the Marshall Plan, we rebuilt Germany, we rebuilt Japan. And so like I feel very patriotic about that, that, that America could have, like if you look at every other so called empire in history, if they had that weapon, they're gonna run the entire world. That was never in our DNA.

[Philip K. Howard]

And if Donald Trump had been in charge. Right, right. So that's why I think Americans intuitively know that's bad too, that, I mean, he really has accurately scoped out many of the idiocys that we've talked about. He doesn't really have a vision on how to fix them, but we are. America is a place where people not only wanted to do good for themselves and innovate and to have agency, but they also wanted to do good. And I think that part of America is really important. We've obviously our moral authority is significantly diminished under the current administration. That's the thing we need to come back to. But part of what I'm talking about, when you have a principles based operating system, it is activated by people acting on their values and their judgments, not just using their common sense, which is important, but also their values. What's the right thing to do here? And so America's missing that. There's no reason why we can't get it back. But we have to have a legal operating framework that allows us to act on our values. It doesn't tell us how to do things. I think there's a historic moment. I mean, I really believe this. There's an historic moment waiting for us right now and is to correct course and face the future with new tools. AI but with old values and an old sense of responsibility.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Yeah. Because the effects of the current system are also not difficult to see. You create a group of people who feel no sense of agency, who feel infantilized, who almost get trained into learned helplessness. And that is. So at least my version of America is the opposite of all that.

[Philip K. Howard]

Right. Well, I'm going to speak, I'm going to speak at Notre Dame in October and a bunch of people and I'm going to Purdue at the same time, which Ms. Daniels has gotten roped into running again. And, and I've actually been targeting this of Catholic universities because I think that what you just said is something that the Catholic theology deeply believes. Subsidiarity, agency. People own themselves, they own who they are. And that's something. So we need to build a cohort, you know, in support of that.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

And, and I think at least in America, it's Catholic with a small C. In other words, it's universal in this country. And, and you know, I don't know whether you watched any of the reactions of the Europeans in the United States for the World Cup. They're absolutely delightful because they're like, I thought America was just crime ridden and horrible. And you know, they're, they're blown away by costumes. Costco.

[Philip K. Howard]

Right, right. But I'm blown away by Costco. I mean any, anytime I can get 50 pounds of peanut butter crunchy, I'm there, you're there.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

But the point is that when, when Regular people are allowed to experience something and then share that experience. You again are reminded that for the most part, most of what is the civilized world share a lot of values

[Philip K. Howard]

in common with one another completely. So let us be that. Give us a framework that allows us to be ourselves and allow us to do things in groups differently than other groups. And does it force us into a. You know, I've always had people say, well, America's all about diversity. Actually, I think America's all about conformity. You know, you know, the Swedes go to Minnesota and the Hasidic Jews are in Brooklyn and you know, the intellectuals are on the Upper west side, you know, and the techies are all in the Silicon Valley, you know, it's about conformity. What America did that was really different is it tolerated a diversity of conformities?

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Yes.

[Philip K. Howard]

And so there were all these different communities, but all with these core values that they shared. Reciprocity and living together in the same community. Fantastic. I mean, it's a great thing. And all the innovation that comes out of all these different groups doing things in different ways. Well, let us do that again.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Yeah, and I love the line about conformity because there's so much truth to it. You know, of course, in both investment theory and social theory, there is this notion of the clustering effect and like seeks loud like. But okay, fine, let's grant that as an axiom. You've got to allow your view where, yeah, you can have your values and there might be very, very different than this groups over here, but if you have an underlying framework that allows for that to happen and people to take control and like your idea about local city ordinances or state ordinances and the attempt to create a monoculture. Monocultures always die. If you know anything about evolution. Right. Monocultures die.

[Philip K. Howard]

Right. They don't grow, they don't innovate. Whereas when you have these cells of like minded people, one, innovating in their own way, two, competing with other selves in their own way, then all of a sudden you have this movement all the time and you get this great stuff, you know, happening. So, you know, I think the American character is there. Obviously you do too, but it needs to get unlocked. And so that's going to require a new narrative and a new vision. And I'm roping you into it.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. Well, Philip, I love your work as you know, served on your board for many years. I hope this is the time because, you know, I've got six grandchildren now and I don't want them to grow up in this giant squid of regulatory morass. And, you know, we had a driver in Switzerland once and it turned out it was his last day, he was retiring and, and sometimes I enjoy just chatting with a variety of different people. And so I started a conversation, I'm like, so tell me about yourself and everything. And the first thing he led with was, I'm born and raised in Switzerland, this is my last day of work and tonight I am getting on a plane and I'm going to Australia. And I'm like, wow, okay, why? And he goes, as beautiful as Switzerland is, as much as I love Switzerland, he said, I can no longer be in a culture where that which is not compulsory is forbidden and that which is not forbidden is compulsory. And, and so it made me think, it's like in the old days and even now, like we do a lot of investing in startups and things like that. The number of incredibly talented people, and I mean off the charts talent, they still want to move work and live in the United States. And, and that to me seems like just such a huge asymmetric and unfair advantage that this country has and we're going to squander it, which is insane to me.

[Philip K. Howard]

So look at what's going wrong. We have to change it. I mean, it's just so obvious. People just have to wake up to the reality that this framework that we're laboring under is broken for no good reason.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

And not only broken, it's the wrong framework.

[Philip K. Howard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's wrong. So, so, so give us back the freedom to be ourselves again. Roll up our sleeves. I mean, look, so, so that's needed. It's going to take a new movement. It's got to be invented. It won't be, won't happen because somebody else does it.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Right.

[Philip K. Howard]

It's only going to happen because we do it.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Yeah. Well, as always, I love talking about all of the. I could go on for hours. But I know that we both have other engagements. We have a tradition here and you're going to get, you might like this because you don't even have to be a czar, you don't even have to be appointed. We're going to give you a magical microphone and for one day you are emperor of the entire world. Not just America, but you can't put anyone in a re education camp and you can't kill anyone. But what you're going to be able to do is incept them. You're going to speak into that microphone. Two things. And the entire population of the world is going to wake up whenever their next morning happens to be and they're going to say, I just had two of the greatest ideas I've ever had. And unlike all the other times, I'm actually going to act on these two things. What are you incepting in the world?

[Philip K. Howard]

Oh, interesting. In any free society, you must be free to follow your star. That's number one. The second thing I would say is you are not alone. You exist in a community and a culture and it's your responsibility to be a responsible member of that culture.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

I love both of those. You've written tons of books. You can find them everywhere, Amazon, in bookstores, et cetera. And when is the new book coming out?

[Philip K. Howard]

The new book's gonna come out in January. It's called Burning How Public Unions Made Government Unmanageable.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

That's a loaded title.

[Philip K. Howard]

The book, my most recent book is called Saving Can Do. How to Restore the Spirit of America. And it's about the whole idea of striving and what's in here.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

No, I read it.

[Philip K. Howard]

The Idea of Striving.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Yeah, it's really, really, really good.

[Philip K. Howard]

But these are short books. I've taken to writing 100 page books.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Just like the revolutionaries. Right. They're more like the pamphlets. The pamphlets. The Federalist Papers. Yeah, they Common Sense. They had a lot of impact. So, Philip, I wish you absolutely the best of luck.

[Philip K. Howard]

Great to be with you.

[Jim O'Shaughnessy]

Thanks for joining.