Offline with Jon Favreau - Ro Khanna is Optimistic About the Internet

Episode Date: May 29, 2022

For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Think about the folks listening to you and how much of your life is digital. How many times do you go and search on Google? How many times do you look on your phone? How many times do you tweet something out? And who is making some of these platforms will be more inclusive of rural communities if their kids were designing the architecture. So you've got a very small group of folks making the decisions for how we're going to live our digital lives that are economically hugely consequential. 90% of the stock market gains were because of tech. $11 trillion of market cap in my district, John. I mean, think about that. And that are extraordinarily consequential in terms of our public life. And people are looking there and they're saying, well, where are we in the picture? I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome to Offline.

Hey, everyone. My guest this week is Congressman Ro Khanna. So I've been avoiding having politicians on offline for a few reasons. First, if you've seen them question tech CEOs during congressional hearings, you know that their level of knowledge about the Internet and social media often ranges from limited to embarrassing. Second, they tend to be a little too on message, which, as a former staffer, I appreciate. As the host of a show where I want people to get introspective about our relationships with technology, not so much. But I'm happy to say that Ro Khanna is quite different than your typical politician, particularly when it comes to the issues

we cover on this show. For one thing, he represents Silicon Valley, with Apple, Intel, Yahoo, and more headquartered in his district. He's thought more about tech and the internet and social media than most people in Washington, even more than a lot of the people who've been on this show. He's even written a new book called Dignity in the Digital Age, where he lays out more solutions than I've ever heard about how we can use technology to create, rather than destroy, both economic opportunity

and a functioning, healthy, multiracial democracy. For a book about technology in 2022, it's refreshingly hopeful. He also has a unique political outlook. As the former co-chair of Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign, he's one of the most progressive Democrats in Congress. But he also thinks it's important for Democrats to talk to and debate anyone, whether it's Ben Shapiro or some asshole on Fox News.

He stopped by Cricket HQ for a great conversation about where some of the tech leaders he represents went wrong, what we can all do about it through legislation and regulation, why he remains a tech optimist, and how he approaches politics in an increasingly polarized era. We talked Wednesday morning, right after the tragic shooting in Uvalde, Texas, and he had some thoughts about that too. As always, if you have any questions, comments, or complaints, feel free to email us at offline at crooked.com. And do please rate, review, and share the show. Here's Congressman Ro Khanna.

Ro Khanna, welcome to Offline. Great to be here. So I've been doing this show since the fall of 2021. You're the first elected official that we've had on this show. I'll try not to mess it up. No platitudes, no boiler point, campaign slogans. These conversations about technology get a little deeper, but you obviously have a much deeper understanding of these issues than most of your colleagues.

You represent Silicon Valley. You wrote a book on this topic called Dignity in the Digital Age. And the first part of the book is about economic opportunity, which we can talk about at some point. I'd love to start with the second part, which is about democracy in the digital age, which is also a topic that's central to the theme of this show. You write, in less than a decade, tech has gone from democracy's great hope to the poster child for the crisis of modern democracy. So my first question is, and I've

been wondering about this since I started the show, why has a technology that was supposed to bring us closer together made true connection and solidarity even more difficult? Because good communication is about more than just being able to talk to each other. So what technology did is it allowed us to talk more, to talk to people we may never be able to talk to. So now you can talk to people around the world. You can talk to your parents or grandparents, even if they don't live in the same place. And there was a sense, okay, if everyone can just talk, that's probably a good thing. And more people are able to talk, right? It's not just the people with established platforms. But then we didn't think, well,

what does it mean to talk well? What does it mean to listen? What does it mean to talk where everyone has an equal voice? And it turns out when you just have everyone talking, it also fuels hate. It fuels violence. It fuels polarization. And I think there just wasn't enough reflection. You know, people have been spending generations thinking about how do we have good communication? What does it mean to have communication that leads to mutual understanding, respect, and truth?

And there was none of that. It was just kind of this naivete, let's just have everyone on the same platform talk and somehow everything will work out. We both had the experience of working for Barack Obama, who's credited digital organizing, particularly Facebook, with helping him win in 2008. Do you remember when you first began to realize

that the internet and social media might be making the work of politics and democracy harder? It's a great question. Because I think during Obama, and obviously you were far more involved. I was just involved as a volunteer in 2008. But I think there you had this sense, wow, this is amazing. I don't think President Obama would have been elected if it weren't for social media. So you had the sense that outsiders, people who didn't have the conventional success And so I think it was, honestly, it was really with Donald Trump's election that I started to think, wow, something is going dangerously wrong. I mean, obviously you saw before that warning signs, but that was where it was a wake-up call that this could be organized in terrible ways. And then I saw some of the stuff in India where these platforms have been organized to have right and then i do think between then and trump's election there were signs and then of course in 2016 that's when it really that's when it really went downhill i mean you

know and represent many of the people who run these social media platforms like i doubt that mark zuckerberg or jack dorsey set out to build doomsday machines where do you think they went wrong there's a lack of humility i mean there's a sense uh that uh they knew there was a techno optimism that if we just get everyone connected on these platforms uh everything else will work out and And there was not a sense of, things aren't just that easy. I mean, why would we think that just having everyone on a platform is going to mean that everyone has an equal voice and that there's not going to be racism and that there's not going to be sexism and that there's not going to be violence and that somehow we're going to have an exchange of ideas.

And then there was never a sense. I think the key mistake is they always just pursued profit maximization and assumed that somehow that would coincide with the pursuit of truth and promoting democracy. And there was never a sense that they had an obligation to democracy like a newspaper would or like a broadcast television station would. And so everything their engineers do is to optimize for attention, right? So think about if you were the editor of the Washington Post and every time you wanted an op-ed published, all you cared about was how many clicks it would get. I would never get published. I mean, they'd never, you know, I mean, or every time you had an article, all you cared about is

how many clicks it would get. 90% of the things wouldn't be in the Washington Post. But that's their formula and they've never deviated from it. Yeah. What's good for Facebook is good for humanity, sort of the running. I mean, I'm sure you've talked to some of them about these problems. Like, what do they say? What's their argument? What's their justification? Well, first of all, they say they're changing things. They're always saying they're changing things.

But the change is never significant enough, and it's never structural enough. So what they'll say is, okay, we've appointed now a board, and the board is quasi-independent, and the board is going to look and take out speech that's terrible. But they're still having their engineers maximize attention. They're still not designing these platforms in ways that could be optimizing for other things. You could optimize for civil conversation. You could optimize... Here's a very simple thing. Let's say you're pro-choice. Let's say someone was pro-life. They send you an article saying, hey, John, you got to be pro-life, and you don't know them. It turns out you'll actually dig in to your

pro-choice position, according to a lot of the research. But now if it's a friend of yours who sends you that article, obviously you still will be pro-choice, but you'll actually engage more if it's a friend. So Facebook could say, okay, we're going to expose you in your network of friends to people in your network who have different perspectives so you can have a conversation. This is something that, you know, the political science research shows actually would work. But there's no effort to do that. There are like 100 ideas like this. This is why one time sarcastically I said they need, you know, philosophy majors working for them or philosophers.

And it wasn't like highfalutin philosophy. It's just people who've studied political science and what makes good dialogue and communication, implementing the structures of these platforms. They haven't done that. Yeah. Well, and it does seem that, you know, waiting for them to act in a significant and ever heard, starting with what you call the Internet Bill of Rights. Can you give us, like, the headlines and highlights version of the Internet Bill of Rights? So start with the fact that all of these social media companies are responsible for the growth of QAnon, right? I mean, that's a fact. They actually take people's profiles based on the data they collect, and they target people who they think would like to join groups like QAnon. And you can substitute whatever extremist group you want there.

And they're saying, hey, please join this group. We recommend you join this group. We recommend you join this group. And that's just because the algorithm is saying that when it knows something, when it knows it has enough data on someone, it will say, oh, you look like you might like these kinds of groups. Exactly. And so if someone fits the profile of someone who might like QAnon, they'll just automatically push them there. Yeah. Now here's the scary thing. They may not even need your particular data. They may have enough data to be able to make general assumptions of social profiles that they may not need much the access they had to be able to target, that would make an enormous difference. And you can do that by having affirmative consent. You can do that by saying they have a fiduciary responsibility to not collect data more than they

need. The central idea is they shouldn't be able to engage in all of this data, and they shouldn't be able to target you, certainly based on race or religion or sexual data, and they shouldn't be able to target you, certainly based on race or religion or sexual orientation, and they shouldn't be able to target you in ways that you don't want. Now, you may want to be targeted in some ways, right? Like, you may want to know that the pizza place that you want, you probably don't want one in Fremont, California, you want one in LA. So, you know, there's certain things you may want to have targeting, but that should be your choice, what categories you want to have targeting in. Yeah, I thought it was very interesting that one of the provisions is that we should be able to opt in instead of opting out. Because right now, you know, people go online and then there's some box that pops up once in a while that says, oh, do you want them to track your data across apps?

This happens on the iPhone. And so you say no, but like a lot of it is just, first of all, there's like a ton of fine print and you don't know what you're clicking. But this would be that like you have to affirmatively say, no one's collecting any data on me unless I specifically say, yes, please collect some data on me. Exactly. And you have to specify all the parameters right up front as opposed to continuing to click on the boxes.

But your point is a good one. It's why the GDPR has not been effective. GDPR is European regulation on data privacy because they require a lot of consent. And so these tech companies, what they've done is they have dark patterns. They will make the box bigger. They will make the color brighter. And 90 plus percent, they will get you to consent without your knowing it. And so they're running circles around these regulators and their forum shopping in Europe. They'll go to the place that has the least enforcement, the least fines. I often joke that the interns at these companies probably don't pay attention to the European fines.

So this is why American leadership matters. We've just been absent. Have you found any bipartisan support for this bill, for the Internet Bill of Rights? In theory, in principle, people keep saying, why can't Congress do anything? Because President Obama actually started with the Internet Bill of Rights with people like Megan Smith and Todd Park, why has it not gone anywhere? And the central debate is this. The Democrats' position basically is that we don't want to preempt states like California that have higher standards. Yes, we want a national standard, but if California wants a higher standard, we want a higher standard. The Republicans are saying, no, we want one uniform standard, and it's going to be a low standard. It's not going to be the California standard. We want a higher standard. The Republicans are saying, no, we want one uniform standard and it's going to be a low standard. It's not going to be the California standard.

My view of the whole thing is, okay, let's just get a compromise and get something done. But that's what the debate has been because the business interests want one standard, understandably, but we don't want a standard that's federal, that's going to be lower than some of the states. And then you're actually making privacy less secure than it is in states like California. How fiercely are the tech companies fighting against this idea of opting in for data? Because I'm sure for them, they're probably saying, this is how we make money. Yeah. They're somewhat opposed to it. I mean, the details matter. They'd probably say, how do you define exactly what it means to opt in? But I think where they're far more opposed is some of the antitrust legislation than on the privacy legislation. I think that they view as a more existential threat. And I support a number of the antitrust bills, but where the opposition for them is much more an antitrust than privacy. I think privacy, they would go along with a pretty robust standard. Can you talk about some of these antitrust bills too? Because I think one solution you hear is, oh, we got to break up these tech companies. And I think that solves some problems, but not others.

So what are you in favor of when it comes to antitrust and what would that do? So I'm in favor of some common sense reforms, such as you shouldn't be able to advantage your own products on your own platforms. So what does that mean? It means that Amazon, for example, shouldn't be able to say that Amazon made products finish first in the search. They need to be more neutral. And same thing, you could apply with Google or Apple. I mean, I don't want to pick on Amazon. And they shouldn't be able to discriminate against sellers, right? Like Amazon, if I'm criticizing Jeff Bezos, they shouldn't suddenly be able to say, okay, like we're not going to have Ro Khanna's book on Amazon, right? And so they have those kinds of powers. And the app store, you store, yeah, we want to make

sure they don't have Parler if they don't want Parler, but it can't just be arbitrary. Here's the challenge. A lot of times people view, and I trust and I support a number of the bills, as this silver bullet. And it's not in the sense, I mean, maybe just on the economic opportunity. I was in Galesburg, Illinois recently talking about the book and mom at college. And they said, hey, Roe, can you get some pizza with these Maytag workers who were at the factory in 2003? President Obama spoke about this. That was my first speech that I wrote with. Wow.

So this is relevant. So I get there with 20 folks, right? Think about this. 20 years later, 20 folks show up for pizza for a guy they've never heard of. You know, it's a tech guy in Silicon Valley. And they say, you know, the jobs went offshore. Our community was destroyed because we knew our uncles, our aunts worked there. We used to celebrate Christmas together.

We used to know each other, know the families. It wasn't just the loss of jobs. It was the community being destroyed. And let me tell you something. President Obama spoke about it, but presidents have come and gone. Congresses have come and gone. Our kids are still leaving. We have no jobs. Nothing has changed. And the question I think for the country is how do we deal with that? Antitrust isn't going to solve that, right? I mean, and so to me, it's, and we could discuss what may, but that I think sometimes people just say,

okay, let's have antitrust and that's going to democratize access to these companies. And I wish it were that simple. Yeah. And it's not going to take care of a lot of the algorithmic and privacy issues that we were just talking about as well. If you were Joe Biden right now, because so much of this legislation is very difficult to pass in Congress at this point, are there any executive actions you think he could take or regulations he could put in place that would give us a healthier, saner internet that he hasn't acted on yet? Look, he's done a lot, but he could empower the FTC to go after low-hanging fruit on

regulation, let's say on kids, right? I mean, on Instagram, for example. The fact that you have data by these companies that people using this are more likely to have suicide, more likely to have eating disorders. I mean, the FTC could regulate that just as a consumer product violation. He could require these companies to be much more strict in not allowing people under 13 on these sites. So I think he could go after these companies more on just basic consumer protection. But a lot of it does require legislation. So you mentioned QAnon. On last week's Offline, we talked about online radicalization in the wake of the Buffalo massacre. We're talking this morning, a day after the worst school shooting

in a decade, where some of the early reporting says the killer used social media to post pictures of the AR-15s he used, along with other hints that he was going to do this. Most obvious move here is to pass new gun laws, obviously. Most effective move as well. But your Republican colleagues and two filibuster-loving Democrats are still refusing to do that. What are your thoughts, though, on how we can protect free speech on the internet while still protecting each other from speech that incites violence and extremism. What is that balance?

Well, first of all, it's horrific as a parent, just what happened yesterday. I mean, and you look at the glorification of violence and guns and the culture that we've created and your heartbreaks as anyone who has kids. But what can we do on the online context? Because, I mean, I appreciate your saying that the simplest thing we need to do is pass a universal background check, pass red flag laws, which have passed the House and don't pass the Senate over and over again. But here's what we could do. Let me give January 6th as an example.

Facebook had specific time and place posts saying, we're going to assassinate Vice President Pence on January 6th. Those posts were there. Facebook's private security flagged these for Zuckerberg. They sat on them. They didn't report them to law enforcement. They didn't pull those posts down. Under Section 230, they had no obligation to do that. Even though there are posts on these social media sites that violate the Brandenburg test, right, because you can't have imminent incitement of violence, there is no obligation for social media companies to pull down third-party posts that are illegal. What on earth is Facebook's excuse for sitting on those posts? Well, they weren't our posts. They'll probably say it wasn't imminent enough in terms of a threat

of violence. Ugly Truth, it's a brilliant book by two New York Times journalists that actually document all this. I'm not making this up. I mean, they can look at their actual reporting to verify it. Here is something that's so simple. You should, if you can go to a court and get a judge to say that a post is incitement of violence and violates the Brandenburg test, means under our current First Amendment law, it's not protected speech, then social media companies should be forced to remove it. People say, well, isn't that obvious? Well, yeah, but you would at least get the nonprofits and others monitoring the site, going to a judge, and you would start to remove some of these posts. What's a harder case is this shooting

in Texas, right? Because there is this 18-year-old, obviously terribly disturbed individual. He posts pictures of guns. He posts pictures of magazine clips. It probably does not cross a threat or incitement of violence. And so then there, I think you need sort of more better community monitoring places that could raise this and intervene. But it's hard to say that that would be something you can regulate based on the facts that have come out now. Yeah, well, I mean, and now we're moving sort of beyond regulation to sort of like how you call it like a new social media paradigm. You write a chapter about this and you briefly mentioned this earlier, but you could have platforms where tech companies don't just optimize for attention with like and share buttons, but also optimize for engagement with a wide range of perspectives. And you even propose including a public social media option. Can you talk about what that might look like in practice? Yeah, well, one, it could be local, right? I mean, folks who have ever used Nextdoor, which is basically a site where you can have conversation with community members and about local football games, local baseball games, theater. I think it could be a really robust thing if you had a public forum in a local community that people can participate in about their community.

And you could do something nationally like a PBS. Now, for the internet, where you can have conversation. Now, the best model of this is Audrey Tang in Taiwan. So they have thousands of people that actually participate in ranking different legislation and then expressing their views and build a consensus of what the legislation should be. And here we can't even get the bills online. You know, I can't read the bills because you know how much power the leadership has. I don't get the bill like 24 hours before and none of it goes online. And it's absurd, you know, because there's no transparency. In Taiwan, they're actually engaging. One of the reasons I think people are spending hours and

hours and hours on social media, liking things, tweeting things, is they feel so disempowered. It's like they can't do anything in government. They're not feeling that they have an actual voice. And so all they can do is spout off on social media. Now, if there were actual forums in this country where people said, you know what, my ranking stuff is something, and my expressing my view is something Congress is actually going to consider, as opposed to just leaving a voicemail for Roe's mailbox or writing a letter that some staffer is going to send a form letter back. They may be more engaged. They may be less willing to spend hours and hours and hours on social media.

It's almost it's sad. It's sort of disempowering. Now, I don't think we only need these public forums because there's time for anger. There's time for outrage, right? And public forums like a town hall, they have to have reasonable time, place, manner restrictions. Well, after George Floyd, I don't think that should be the only kinds of speech or after what happened yesterday. If people want to curse and go speak in a more passionate way, they should be allowed. So I'm just saying, but there should be that alternative of having reasonable dialogue as well, which is missing

today. You said something earlier that stuck with me, which is that perhaps there could be a sort of social media platforms where the incentives are to sort of read and engage with material that we may not agree with like maybe a friend sends out something do you think there's a or like what gives you hope that there's a market for engagement with a wide range of perspectives as opposed to people just wanting to stay in their own echo chamber like i certainly like that i feel like that makes me a little old and out of touch at this point. And I can't tell if it's like, I mean, obviously there are incentives in social media that we're resistant to debating different points of view, arguing with people on the other side in a real constructive kind of way. I don't know.

What do you think about that? I think that's definitely true in sort of the national media environment and social media. But when you go to actual communities and you have actual conversations, people are actually pretty civil and you have an actual debate about ideas. And I think one of the problems, and I believe this in terms of our critique of, if anything, of our own party, and certainly the right does, is this inability or unwillingness to engage with other perspectives and think that somehow we have a monopoly on the truth. I think that's very unhealthy. I mean, I think we ought to be going to places and actually listening and respecting people who may disagree with us.

And I think that there's a hunger there actually in the country for that. And you've seen this. I mean, you saw this sort of, we've talked about this in the past with Beto O'Rourke when he went to Texas and all these different places. Part of it was just showing up. Or John Fetterman, just showing up. I'm sure there are people on the other side who do it. I think that in the actual country, people want that. They want people who listen and engage. But somehow social media just doesn't bring that out. It incentivizes you not to do it.

I mean, look, if I were to post I was in Maytag, in Galesburg, Illinois, and I had these conversations over pizza. And here's what I said and here's what they said. It'd get like 30 likes. And people would be like, what the hell? Right? That's the reality. And so there's no incentive to do that in terms of the Twitter and social media. And then people say, well, Twitter aren't voters.

Yeah, but they are focused on the public sphere. They are defining a lot of modern conversation. They're only going to get more and more influential. You can't just say, well, it doesn't matter. Just ignore it. What you should say is how do you make it better? Yeah. I mean, when people always ask me like why I'm so obsessed with Twitter, it's like, look, if every journalist in the world wasn't on Twitter,

whatever, we could maybe ignore some of it. Right. But like what happens on Twitter is setting the agenda in newsrooms, in media institutions, and then it's being broadcast out to everyone else. I think you're a unique political figure in this regard. You know, you're one of the more progressive Democrats in Washington, co-chaired Bernie Sanders campaign, endorse progressive challengers to more conservative Democrats, Medicare for all, Green Deal, free college, $50,000 student debt relief, all that. But you're also one of the few elected Democrats who will talk to anyone, Fox News, Ben Shapiro, Christian Broadcast Network. Like, what do you say to Democrats who argue that's just lending legitimacy and support to right-wing propaganda? Because I'm sure you must get shit for that.

I do. I'd say Fox News doesn't need Rocana to have legitimacy in an audience. I'm not saying I'm taking their audience from 3 million to 3.2 million or something. I mean, the reality is, first of all, that a lot of these audiences exist. Secondly, some of the folks who go on Fox News, I mean, or others, they say, well, how do we win? How do I get the better of the argument? Actually, that's not even my purpose. My view of going on there is just like, maybe they can think, okay, he's a patriot, a decent guy, even though I don't agree with him, Here's where he's coming from. But if we don't even try to have that conversation, there are two problems.

One, you're not reaching millions and millions of Americans who may actually agree with your view. Two, you may have blind spots in your own perspective. Like, don't be so sure that everything we're for is exactly the truth. I mean, and I think people respect folks who go on, and a lot of times it makes me rethink things. One person said to me, well, why can't you just do focus groups? Why do you have to go on Fox? Why can't you just have your staff do mock debate? And I was like, because it's not real. When you're out actually meeting people in a community,

when you're out actually meeting partisans, when you're seeing the language they use, the passion they use, it just gives you a better sense of the country. Yeah. I also think that fundamentally democracy rests on the ability to persuade one another, right? It's a country of 330 million people and we're all stuck here together. And we both in the last election, both sides turned out just about everyone they could find, right? Highest turnout ever. So like we're doing a pretty good job mobilizing our side. And of course we still have to work on that. I believe that every voter is a persuasion voter, whether you're a base democratic voter or a swing voter, right? You have to convince people to get off their couch and go vote for you. I do worry a

little bit that if we assume that every Republican voter or potential Republican voter out there is just like Mitch McConnell or Donald Trump, and they're not necessarily. Some of them have complex views on different issues and they're winnable. And it's not just like we want to win them because we think it's like it makes us feel good and makes us feel reasonable. But like for the health of democracy to like win majorities, we you know, we have to actually go win people over. And I do think that like exposing people who don't usually hear our views to our views is it can't hurt. I agree. We have to understand their argument in its best form. Now, look, Trump is a xenophobe. But when he went around, at least in 2016, he said they sent your jobs. They sent millions of your jobs offshore in places like Galesburg. They sent your jobs offshore to China and Mexico. Rose District is doing great. They're making all this money. What happened to you? You belong in the American story too. I'm going to bring back your means of living. Now, he sold a total lie. But if we don't understand the anger, the motivating

impulse, then how are we going to address it? And partly also, I'm more of an optimist about America. You look at mammoth odds. I was telling a friend about this. I don't know if I should say it, but I will because I believe it. And I said, America is becoming more multiracial in spite of ourselves. When I was growing up, I was born in Philadelphia. The idea that a person named Mammoth Oz, who's a Muslim American, would win the Republican primary for anything would have been crazy. Now you have Donald Trump who wanted to ban Muslims from coming to America from certain countries, endorsing Mohammed Oz because that's the culture and he's winning the

Republican primary. And I hope John Fetterman beats him decisively, but your diversity is oozing out of this country and Donald Trump can't stop it. And so the question is, look, John, what we're trying to do is very hard.

The counter argument that you always hear is especially after Trump was, OK, everyone's trying to understand more predictive of how these people, how a lot of people in the country were going to vote for Donald Trump, and that there are white people who don't have high levels of racial resentment, who were non-college educated, working class people who didn't vote for Donald Trump. And so how do you deal with these, how do you deal with the racial resentment in the country, in addition to the economic anxiety? Sometimes both of them are, you know, mixed up together. Well, I think it's both, but you don't do it without talking to folks. When my family was moving in in Tabux County, there was chatter

on the street. Why are the Kanas moving in? Now, my parents could have just said, okay, we're not going to talk to the neighbors. But my dad said, no, I'm going to find out. And it turns out because we're Hindu, there was concern whether we would put the paper bag lights out on Christmas Eve or whether the street lights would be broken because the Kana household wouldn't have the lights out. And my parents grew up in India. They celebrated Christmas as Hindus. We put out the lights. It wasn't a big deal. And we invited our Christian Christmas celebrating neighbors to Diwali. My point is not that the decision my family took was the right decision. I think having a conversation, engaging people, engaging people, not just starting with judgment, is a better way of becoming a multiracial democracy. Look at every

Republican speech, John. They start with, you're losing the America you love. You're losing America. You're losing your way of life. That is their fear. And the reality is, look, when my parents came to this country, immigration was 90% European in the 1960s. It's 15% European. People say Canada, Australia, Britain, give me a break. They're 80 some percent white. We're 60% white, non-Hispanic. No country has ever done this. And the idea that there would be a linear line from President Obama onto a multiracial democracy was naive. So we're doing something unprecedented. The only way we're going to get there is having a conversation. And I think a conversation without starting with judgment is our best shot. That doesn't mean that economics

is the only thing, but economics is something. I mean, look, I mean, when you have communities that have been totally left out through no fault, I mean, it's not, I don't blame one individual. There's a lot of benefits to globalization. But if you were living there, I mean, you've been there and it's 20 some years later and your life is terrible. Your kids are leaving. They're calling it a brain drain. What my parents faced in India, wouldn't you want to change the system, vote for something new? Yeah. Well, and globalization is obviously the economic component. And as you split the book up into economics and digital democracy, I also think that the digital side widens the divide as well, because now you have people in these communities who have lost their jobs, who have all this resentment, who think that the world is changing too fast around them.

And then now they can see on the internet, on Twitter, on Facebook, on Instagram, sort of all of these wealthier people in Washington or in Manhattan or in San Francisco or in LA living wonderfully fabulous lives. And they all happen to be, more often than not, Democrats. Yeah. And whose grandparents, like mine, probably didn't serve in World War II, right? So there's a sense of, well, our parents, our grandparents, our great-grandparents built America. Rose didn't. Obviously, I disagree.

My grandfather was in Gandhi's independence movement. There are a lot of things that contributed to America. But I think that there is this sense of the Internet makes it more acute. And one of the things I did after Gettlesburg is a very small thing. I called up Google and they're creating this program at Carl Sandburg Community College. They're 20 kids get $5,000 stipends. They'll get 18 month course and a job. But there's also the sense that they're not the architects of the modern digital age. Think about the folks listening to you and how much of your life is digital. How many times do you go and search on Google? How many times do you look on your phone? How many times do you tweet something out? And who is making all of these decisions? They're folks sitting in Silicon Valley. I'm convinced Clubhouse would not be as racist and sexist if there were more black people and women designing the architecture. And I'm convinced Clubhouse would not be as racist and sexist if there were more black people and women designing the architecture. And I'm convinced some of these platforms would

be more inclusive of rural communities if their kids were designing the architecture. So you've got a very small group of folks making the decisions for how we're going to live our digital lives that are economically hugely consequential, 90% of the stock market gains were because of tech, $11 trillion of market cap in my district, John. I mean, think about that. And that are extraordinarily consequential in terms of our public life. And people are looking there and they're saying, well, where are we in the picture? So what's your thought on the Democratic message to counter all this? You know, I saw you did an NPR interview saying that Democrats can be a little too preachy.

I hear that. And then you've talked about sort of patriotism and reclaiming patriotism. And I've been thinking about this a lot because Donald Trump has given the Republican Party a sharper message. And it's a message that's not the, look, when we ran against Mitt Romney in 2012, it was an easy message. Mitt Romney. You ran a brilliant campaign. But also he was like, he was the corporate raider. And we ran a much more economically populous campaign than I think we even did in 2008. And I think it was very successful against Mitt Romney, partly because of who he was. And he picks Paul Ryan and they're cutting Medicare and they're cutting taxes for rich people. Donald Trump has given the party this sort of ethno-nationalist autocratic message, which is somehow appealing to people, not just here, but we're seeing it in right-wing governments and autocratic governments all over the world.

Did you say they had a conference in Hungary? Yeah. I mean, it's... Yeah. It's happening right in broad daylight all over the world. And I wonder, like, what is the multiracial, multiethnic, democratic, small-D democratic message that beats that, that fights that? What's the story that also sort of wraps in American patriotism? Yeah, let me answer that.

Let me first say this, that this is why I fear Trump. A lot of my colleagues are like, oh, yeah, let's have Trump. He's much easier than DeSantis or something. Give me a break. I think we'd crush DeSantis. I think Trump is a 10 times scarier candidate than someone like Mitt Romney. And it's because he appealed to folks feeling left out of the jobs. And he said, you built America and I'm going to give you your place in America. In some sense, I thought it was almost the flip side. If President

Obama said, you know, people like Ro Khanna with the skinny kids, funny names have a place in America. Trump's saying, what about us? Where's our place in America? I think our message is two things. One, I think we'd say every Democrat should start out if they really believe it, and I do, saying this is the greatest country in the world, and we're doing something that no country in the world has ever done. There is no country that has people from every part of the world and is going to be a great nation with every person committed to common principles of equality and liberty and democracy. We're the only country in the world who's going to do that. And by the way, there's a reason millions of people still want to come to America. They're not going to China.

They're not going to Russia. They're not going to Canada. They're not going to China. They're not going to Russia. They're not going to Canada. They're not going to France. They want to come here because we've got the greatest possibility of making something of your life. And so the question then becomes is, do we want to continue this direction where people, regardless of their background, regardless of their heritage, can come and be part of this great nation that allows everyone to flourish? Or do we want to have sort of a parochialism, nationalism, sort of shallow patriotism? That, I think, would be the overarching message. And then with Trump, I think we should say, look, for 40 years, this country screwed over a lot of people. We sent jobs which we shouldn't have,

and it was policies that were broken. Okay, so you voted for Trump and what did he do? His answer to that was, we're going to have corporate tax cuts and we're going to have tariffs in China. I actually summarize what he says. Don't distort it. That's what he said. Did that work? Did that really re-industrialize America? Or do you think what we really need to do is have massive government mobilization with the private sector to make sure we have re-industrialization in this country? You know what? I was in Chicago and I was talking to this black steel worker at a union and he said, you know, it was sad to me because he said growing up he thought he had more prospects than young black kids in Chicago today because he could get $30 jobs with pensions. Now people are going to get $16 jobs. He said, you know, why don't you guys listen to Elon Musk and the gigafactories? What are you doing? And I said, you realize Elon's anti-union. And he said, yeah, but I don't care. At least he knows what he's doing. It seems like

you guys don't know what you're doing. A government can mobilize with the private sector, the new industrialization of this country. And if I was, I'd say this to the president all the time, you know, go to the factory towns, get the private sector, revitalize it. You know, Pat Gelsinger, the intel thing is, this is something that really upsets me because $20 billion has come into Ohio because of President Biden's policies, because of the CHIPS Act and President Biden. Gelsinger will tell you this. And DeWine ran ad after ad after ad taking credit for Intel. Fine.

He did something good, too, to the point that Pat Gelsinger joked the headline should have been Gelsinger reelects DeWine governor. But why does the country not know that President Biden and the policies of the Congress are having $20 billion coming into Ohio to revitalize Ohio, reindustrialize Ohio. Like Donald Trump got 600 jobs and the whole country knew about it. Get Tim Ryan in there, right? I mean, so I think part of it is going to these towns, having an economic revitalization message, standing with plants, standing with opening up new factories and saying, not arguing with the diagnosis of the problem, actually saying, yeah, we screwed up,

but saying that the solutions just aren't correct. So you're not going to get reindustrialization by tax cuts and just tariffs on China. Yeah, well, part of it is getting that message through the clutter that the internet has given us in the news media environment, which is tough. Last question I'm asking all of our guests. What's your favorite way to unplug?

Well, it's one like family. I don't talk about it often, but that's watching Paw Patrol or other. Yeah, Charlie has started with Paw Patrol. I've seen that. That is definitely, it's a great joy, either that or with friends. But that is definitely the joy of my life. Are you a phone addict? What's your relationship with your phone like?

I see you tweeting a lot, but that's. I am a phone addict. And finally, my wife had to put the foot down, which was the best thing I ever did. And she said, look, you travel. I don't care. You do anything. When you're here with the kids or anything, no phone. And so I literally will leave my phone in the room.

I don't have the self-discipline to have the phone. Nor do I. Nor do I. So I literally leave it in the room and then I am with uh with the kids or with at dinner and i never uh and that is that's that's the only way so i am definitely uh too addicted to it i will say i was looking through your tweets in preparation for this interview and i saw like a couple weeks ago some some account with like 18 followers was like i don't want to vote for rokhana again and here's why and you replied and you're like what could I do to earn your vote?

And I was like, you know what? Didn't try to fight him, was very polite just asked for his vote. I'm like, that's a good congressman right there. Well, look, I had to be an incumbent to get there and anyone who had to do that, you have to go door to door and this is digital door to door. I used to do that on when I was campaigning. My staff said

oh, don't waste your time on Facebook and I used to look and if they were in my district, I used to actually engage them in a conversation. There you go. Rokana, thank you so much for joining Offline. Really appreciate your time. Thanks for having me. Really appreciate it. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, John Favreau. It's produced by Austin Fisher. Andrew Chadwick is our audio editor. Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis, sound engineer of the show.

Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Tanya Sominator, Michael Martinez, Andy Gardner-Bernstein, Ari Schwartz, Andy Taft, and Sandy Gerard for production support. Thank you.