Out of Balance

In the season finale of Superhuman, Aaron brings on four guests for a closer look at the cracks in the system, at the incentives that put them there, and why remembering is the first step to fixing them.

Click here to watch a collection of video clips of Avery set to the music from Koyaanisqatsi.

Guests

Danica Noble www.electdanica.com

Brian Boland www.delta-fund.org

Julianna Arnold https://parentsrise.org/

Reiko Callner

Music

Joachim Cooder Various tracks www.joachimcooder.com/

Evelyn Simone Requiem Theme https://evelynsimone.com/ 

Kjartan Abel CC BY-SA 4.0 https://kjartan-abel.com

Chapters

00:00 The Last Concert and Life Out of Balance
06:08 Brian Boland: A Whistleblower's Perspective
08:46 The Algorithm's Impact on Society
11:45 When the FTC did not see CrowdTangle
15:02 Brian's Fight Against Corporate Power
28:02 Danica Noble: The Disparity in Legal Resources
33:09 The Role of the First Amendment
36:01 The Need for New Business Models
39:01 The Call for Action and Change
50:40 The Tragic Case of Coco
54:25 Juliana Arnold: The Power of Survivor Voices
01:00:44 Grassroots Advocacy for Change
01:04:33 The Role of the Criminal Justice System
01:09:14 Reiko Callner: Understanding Legal Frameworks
01:21:28 The System's Failures and Victim Voices
01:27:35 The Extraction Economy and Reclaiming Power

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:14

The last concert my son Avery ever saw was Kwayana Scotzi. He sat with his grandparents in the dark while the Philip class ensemble played live images to a world moving too fast to understand itself. Clouds racing over canyons, cities pulsing with light, highways like arteries, pumping cars through concrete bodies. Avery was 16, his face lit by a world out of balance. That same week, 2,500 miles away, a narcotics task force began investigating a drug dealer who had been targeting teenagers for years. Two months later, Avery was gone. The title Koyanaskotsi comes from a hopi word often translated as life out of balance. And since Avery died, that phrase has stayed with me. Because imbalance is not always one catastrophic event. Sometimes it is the slow tilt, the long erosion, the weight of extraction settling on one side of the scales until balance becomes impossible. The film ends with these words on the screen. You hear that, and you may think strip mines, mountaintop coal, oil sands, the mountains we have hollowed out, the oceans we have pulled dry. I hear something more universal. Power, when it is concentrated enough, will always dig. It digs into mountains, it digs into oceans, and when those are no longer enough, it digs into us, into our attention, into our children's developing minds, into the hours we should be sleeping, into the conversations we should be having with the people right in front of us. That is the world Avery grew up in. Not because one decision, but because of hundreds of decisions made by people who were never asked to consider him. A platform designed to maximize engagement, a regulatory system outmatched by lobbyists, a justice system that allocates urgency according to power. An economy that taught us to trust markets and fear oversight. Over the series, I have traced ways that power became so concentrated. Bernays, the PAL memo, captured regulators, section 230, dark money, media consolidation, legal fictions granted constitutional rights, different systems, different decades, different villains. But again and again the pattern was the same. More power in fewer hands. Oversight turned into a dirty word. Consent made invisible. Extraction made ordinary. This series has been about remembering. Remembering who built these systems and who they were built to serve, remembering the parents who trusted me with their children's stories. Mason, Carson, Annalie, Tanner, Riley, Coco, Sammy, and so many others whose lives ended in a world already tilted against them. And remembering that an imbalance this old, this deep, and this carefully maintained will not correct itself. It has to be named, and it has to be answered. This episode is about the people doing the answering. A former FDC official who spent four and a half years working on the federal antitrust case against Meta, a former Meta executive who became a whistleblower after watching the company kill its own transparency tool because journalists were learning too much. A mother whose daughter was lured to her death by a predator on Instagram, and who has spent the year since working with other parents to build one of the most effective parent-led advocacy networks in this country. And a former prosecutor who now investigates ethical conduct on the bench at a state judicial commission. Four vantage points. Four places where the scales were supposed to hold. This is Superhuman. A show about how the institutions we trust to protect us are not failing by accident. They are doing exactly what concentrated power has shaped them to do.

SPEAKER_01 5:02

Those who manipulate this unseen level of society constitute an invisible government, which is the true ruling out.

SPEAKER_00 5:10

Once the cameras are off, you know, they're heading to the fundraiser and getting campaign donations, and you know, their staffers are getting hired by them, and we don't see that part.

SPEAKER_04 5:18

I truly believe that our parent survivor movement is going to change things. I do think that we have a movement with us, and then also concerned parents that don't want this happening.

SPEAKER_02 5:59

He stayed for 11 years. He helped build the advertising system. He worked with the publishers, with the developers, with the company's earliest external partners. He rose to vice president. And then he left. He left because of what he saw the algorithm doing, not just to teenagers, but to everyone. And he left because of what happened when he tried to get the company to study it.

SPEAKER_03 6:27

Hey, I'm Brian Boland. I spent eleven years at Meta uh as uh ending up as a vice president with a title that was far too long for anybody to have a title that long. It was vice president of partnerships, marketing, product marketing, partner engineering, analytics, and sales operations. And in that job, you know, I spent a lot of time at Meta first helping to build an advertising system. So the seven years that I started at the company, we went from no real revenue in advertising to helping to build the juggernaut that the company is today in the ads business. And then the last four years of my time, I worked in the partnerships group. So helped the company figure out how to work with other businesses that wanted to partner with Meta, folks who wanted to show news on the platform, people who wanted to build games or developers who wanted to build on the platform, the work version of Facebook, internet in Africa, all sorts of things in between was the last bit of work that I did at the company. I started in 2009. It was a very idealistic culture of people who wanted to build things and build around a mission of how you could create products that actually had a positive impact on the world. This idea of being open and connected, that if you got people to connect together, that that openness and that learning about each other would make each other more tolerant and more understanding of each other. And that was a vision that was catchy. And everyone was excited about that. And that was the beginning of what we were building and a lot of aspiration about what we were building. Whether Mark Zuckerberg really believed that or not, I think is an interesting debate to have at some point. But that was the culture that I joined, and that was the reason that a lot of people joined was the idea of a mission-oriented company. You know, and that mission clearly changed over time. Um, not just literally changed, uh, but the reality of it, the way that you saw it play out in the in the company. I think it went from before the IPO to having a moment when the company went public where there was a lot of scrutiny around the company and a quote unquote failed IPO because it didn't return all the day one profits to the finance guys, and became one that spent a lot more time thinking about markets and thinking about the stock price. And and increasingly as the mission changed, it became a mission focused on giving people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. But what I saw inside the company wasn't a lot of talk about community and a lot of talk about measuring how close people were. There was a lot of talk about power. And I've come to firmly believe that the thing that Mark Zuckerberg cared about, the thing that the his inner circle cared about is power. And when he talked about what we were building, it was about the power. That was the shift. When companies of this size do acquisitions, there's a handful of reasons and some newer reasons that that they buy companies and that they acquire companies. You know, historically you think that there's a fit to your business, so you buy some other business that you can just add on to your services, and that's why you buy them. Tech really changed the game in a lot of ways because some of the things that you can buy are data, right? And that you're purchasing a company because the information that they have is particularly useful or interesting. A term that was really created in this era of Silicon Valley is the aqua hire, right? Where you're actually buying a company, not because you care anything about the company. You just want the people. You want the engineers, the tech talent. And so this aqua hire acquiring to hire type approach became a norm in the valley and something that you saw Meta do as well. When you look at uh something like Onavvo, that's a good example of a data purchase. The thing that was interesting about Onavo was that this was a company that would help people's phones speed up, essentially. They install this app and it would kind of preload the phone. But in doing that, you got a lot of data about every app that was on someone's phone and all the things they were doing on their phone. And so it became like an early intelligence signal that you could get a read on the market of what apps and what websites were gonna be popular in a month or two months because the early signals of growth, you had first row seats to that data. And that was used to spot things like Instagram and WhatsApp and other apps that were growing quite quickly that Mark Zuckerberg could quickly look at copying or acquiring and buying to bring in-house. And so that was a critical tool as Mark thought about competition. Crowd Tangle is an interesting example where this was a really interesting startup that was designed to provide visibility into public content on the internet. So the idea that you knew that everyone's feed was personalized, and anyone, if they were on Twitter or if they were on Facebook, you wouldn't really know what everyone was seeing. You would only know what you were seeing, and you wouldn't know what content was actually more popular than other content. So Crowdsangle was created to start to look at public data and public feeds around what was happening on Twitter and what was happening on Facebook, and be able to give publishers and give uh news journalists and uh activist groups a real visibility into the public going-s on Facebook. So you could really see what was popular, what was going viral, why was it going viral? All that really interesting, rich information that wasn't available was available through CrowdTangle. And the company was purchased because we had a group that was working with publishers, like news publishers or entertainment publishers who were creating content for Facebook. And the idea was to make CrowdTangle available for them so that they could learn about the content that was doing well, they could start to do a better job with their content and hopefully get more distribution on Facebook. That was the premise for initially buying CrowdTangle. It's it was an incredibly useful tool. And you started to see different parts of the world, different customer types using Onavo. You would see journalists who really wanted to understand what was going viral, what types of content were people seeing more in their feeds, what were what did the engagement look like across all different types of content? And so journalists were using it to tell different stories. Kevin Roos from the New York Times uh wrote a bunch of articles about certain types of political content that was being shown, or at least seemed to have much more engagement on Facebook than other types of political content. You also had some examples where public interest groups, where uh NGOs and nonprofits were able to use the tool to spot harmful trends and harms in their country and get ahead of them. So there were some really, really great uses of this transparency tool into getting better outcomes for the world. Turns out that transparency is going to lead to tough conversations. And when you're very transparent about what's happening on your platform, people are gonna find things that make you uncomfortable. And the way that I always approach that is I want to know. I want to be the first to know what's going wrong on our platform. I want to be the first to know what harms could be showing up on our platform. And then once I know them, I'm gonna take them seriously and I'm gonna do something about them. Well, not everyone thinks that way, and particularly the leadership and meta does not think that way. They think transparency is a problem. And what was happening was I mentioned that Kevin Roos article, where he was looking at CrowdTangle data and then writing articles about the skew of content on Facebook and that it was not representative of the population, but was probably skewing towards one political direction over another. And the reaction from the executives was an email discussion titled The Crowd Tangle Problem. And the problem wasn't that we may have an issue with our algorithm and the distribution that we should look at. The problem was that there's this nosy journalist who's writing these articles that we don't like because the public is asking questions and the senators are calling. And so the problem with crowd tangle is the transparency. And so the solution is to get rid of the problem. And that's what the leadership team decided to do is they said that this transparency is not good for the business. We don't like the hard questions we get from the press. And so, over the course of a couple of years, they shifted to shut down CrowdTangle. Um, and they've replaced it with some other tools that are nowhere near as good as what CrowdTangle had made available. It's more performative transparency than actual meaningful transparency. So that was an incredibly disappointing uh decision the company made. And frankly, one of the reasons that I started to speak up publicly was I spoke up publicly about CrowdTangle and and their decision to shut it down, primarily to delay them so that they couldn't uh go ahead with their plans. I think I delayed them for a year, maybe two.

SPEAKER_02 15:29

Hold for a moment on what Brian just described. An internal email at one of the largest companies in human history. Subject line. The problem with crowdangle. The problem was not the algorithm. The problem was that journalists were learning what the algorithm was doing by studying the public engagement patterns. That distinction is the entire architecture of the season compressed into one sentence. Concentrated power does not respond to harm. Concentrated power responds to visibility. And when visibility threatens it, the visibility gets killed. Brian had spent more than a decade believing he was helping to build something that would connect the world. That email was the moment he understood what he had actually been building. And what he chose to do next is the difference between the people who watch this happen and the people who try to stop it.

SPEAKER_03 16:31

I left the company because I was worried about what the algorithm was doing. I wasn't worried about uh teens specifically. I was worried about everybody, including teens. And you know, sorry because um CrowdTangle reported to me. They're part of my team. And so I started to see that data firsthand and felt like, gosh, we have this machine that can actually change with that advertising machine. I can make you think differently about a brand of toothpaste. That you would like one brand of toothpaste over another because we're able to change your opinion. Why wouldn't that same feed, that same algorithm, be able to change your opinion about other things like other people? Does it make people more racist, more hateful, more uh anti-immigrant, more anti-religious, all those things? I'm pretty convinced that that algorithm does. And so that was my motivator for saying we're on the wrong side of history. I advocated for us to look at that, to study that, which any responsible person would do. And the sentiment was like, nah, like we don't need to, it's not a problem. So I quit. After I quit, and after I spoke up, you know, I had um the journalists from the Wall Street Journal reach out and say they wanted to talk to me about these documents. It turns out they were the Francis Haugen whistleblower files. He started to show me documents from across the company that were in divisions that I didn't work on that were horrifying. Things like cartel recruitment in Mexico, where Instagram was being used for active cartel recruitment, and the company knew about it. Showed me stuff about human trafficking in the Middle East where there was debate about not enforcing it because maybe that's a cultural norm in these parts of the world. Uh, things about you know, youth's youth mental health and studying what Instagram was doing and how teens felt about themselves, all this stuff, like all these bad things. And then, you know, that's just and that was horrifying to begin with, right? And that just kept me on the path of really trying to push and and help people think about how this company is unaccountable and too powerful. And now, you know, with some of the recent court cases and documents that are being made public, things are crazy, man. Like you're seeing people inside the company talk about their knowledge of the teen brain and how certain teens, particularly when they are depressed or sad, are more susceptible to using the platform more and being more addicted. That is targeted at vulnerable people as a product strategy. That's horrifying, and it's wrong. And it's just an immoral set of acts that we need to be fighting to hold the company accountable, that they're not doing that to kids and frankly to anybody. I know they think the same way about adults too, who are the ones that are most susceptible to the algorithm and platform. We should protect kids because they are the most vulnerable, but we should be protecting everybody. You look at Meta, Meta is a uniquely bad example of how you'd want a company to be set up in our society. So, first, let's talk about structure and control. When companies are created, they're generally, if they're going to be larger, created with some sort of shares or stock or ownership of the company. Well, when Facebook was created, Mark owned most of the shares or all the shares. And then uh over time he got some advice from Andreessen Horowitz, uh, from Mark Andreessen in particular, who said, you know, there's a trick that you can do with your shares, and you can actually issue yourself a special class of shares that has multiple votes per share. Every other share of the company is one share, one vote. Yours are five votes per share, or some number. I don't know if it's five or ten, but multiples of votes. So over time, Mark could sell more and more and more of his ownership of the company and become a minority owner, but still a majority voter. So Mark has full control, majority control over all of the decisions around Facebook, which means that when we look at the board of directors, which you know, of a public company the size of Facebook, the board of directors has massive control over the CEO. Can hire them, can fire them, can really put pressure on the company. Well, Mark can hire and fire every single board member on the Facebook, on the meta board. And so he has complete control over the board. Okay, so that's not gonna be a lever for uh controlling the desires that Mark Zuckerberg has. All right, so then we've got what legislature, right? And so what laws are gonna be put in place? You mentioned that you just talked about lobbying in the last episode. Well, those lobbyists are extremely well funded by Meta and the other tech companies to avoid any sort of real legislation or real regulation that would rein in the tech companies. And they're able to outspend any sort of competition on that regulation because who's gonna fund the other side? You're talking about private citizens, you're talking about nonprofits, gonna be outgunned with a company that just today announced, I think, $56 billion in revenue in a quarter. Three months of the year, $56 billion. How much of that can you deploy around lobbying? A crazy amount. So that force becomes something that can't hold the company accountable. So then what's your next lever? You think about the people who use the product. Well, if we do something bad, the people will stop using the product. The problem that we all know is that A, the products are addictive. And so, how are you going to go away and stop using the product? B, all of your friends and neighbors and information is on this product. And so you're drawn back to it. You'd like to leave it, but suddenly you're leaving your community. It was so clear that even in some The company, anytime there was a user boycott, there was kind of a laughter around it that we knew people would maybe do a one-day boycott. And then in the data, what you actually saw was they used it even more the next day when they came back. So you just knew that this kind of uh this idea that people would hold the company accountable by leaving it is just not a real thing. So what are you left with? Nothing. You have no sort of recourse or levers to hold the company accountable. That is just a level of power that is unhealthy for society. And the last lever that's usually there is litigation in courts, which because of Section 230, that's a greatest hits of bad legislation, you know, gave them a pass until very recently. And I think that's the most hopeful sign we see is you know a couple of these court cases that have gone in the direction of the plaintiffs will now be a tool and a lever to hold uh Meta accountable. In fact, uh apparently in their earnings uh script or call today, they remarked on the fact that they may have a huge liability around, I think they called it teen issues or youth issues, some euphemism they put in there, but they see it's coming. Think about like for a second, uh, why did they do the metaverse and why did they do the glasses, right? Why was why was Oculus a thing? The reason that it was a thing, and the reason that glasses were a thing is because that is a platform, the same way that your cell phone is a platform. You have two large companies, an Apple and Google, who control the mobile phone operating system, the mobile phone platform that gives them an enormous amount of power to be able to set policies that other companies have to abide by. And that power drove Mark nuts. He did not like being on the receiving end of these companies that could push him around and could have policies that he didn't like. And so he hated that. So he tried to do the metaverse and these glasses as a play to have the next platform so that he could have the power that Apple and Google have in the mobile phone. That's what he wants with the glasses. Not because he thinks that is that their design is super cool or that it's neat that it has a camera. It's that, hey, if you're wearing this new device on your face, that means you no longer have to use your phone. I now control that platform. So that's a platform play, and that's the drive there. Same thing with AI and the investments there, right? Is that that's one that even uh helps the core Facebook and Instagram products is if you could get more and more people using those AI tools, that is the next platform that you can have rules that you set that you're not abiding by others with some pretty terrifying and catastrophic consequences as soon as Mark starts to release the AI friends that he seems to love talking about so that he can fill your day with uh relationships that are digitally created and not real, um, which God help us when that happens.

SPEAKER_02 24:44

Brian just walked us through every lever Americans rely on to check corporate power, boards captured, regulators outspent, users addicted to the very products that harm them, courts blocked by a statute written when the internet was a curiosity. In Avery's last weeks, none of those levers helped him. He arrived at his mother's house to visit for Christmas, and within twenty-four hours easily connected to a dealer on Snapchat to fill a curiosity. A different platform than the one Brian just described, but the same structural reality, a board of directors answering to founders who control the votes that matter, regulators running out a clock that has already been running for years, courts buried under decades of precedent that say platforms aren't responsible for what happens on them, evidence that disappears by design, sometimes within seconds, because that disappearance is the product. Brian could have walked away quietly. Many people in his position have. The nondisclosure agreements alone make it the easier choice. Let the equity vest, take the board seat, never mention the years inside. He chose differently. Today, Brian and his wife Katie run the Delta Fund, an organization built on a premise that is not subtle, that the prevailing economic system is not broken, that it is working exactly as it is designed, to prioritize profit over people, to concentrate wealth, to treat human communities and the natural world as resources to be extracted. They invest their own capital toward a different kind of economy, one built around well-being instead of extraction. Having lived through what I have, I am grateful for the work he is doing. Brian saw all of this from inside the building. The next person you will hear was on the outside, trying to use the law to stop it. If concentrated power has captured the regulatory bodies meant to check it, the first place that capture becomes visible is at the agency that was specifically designed more than a hundred years ago to break up monopolies in the public interest. The Federal Trade Commission was founded in 1914. It was born out of the Gilded Age, when a handful of industrialists had amassed more wealth than the rest of the country combined. The FTC was supposed to be the answer. My next guest is Danica Noble. She spent nearly two decades inside that agency. She is the kind of public servant most Americans never meet, the kind who works seven days a week for years to build a case that almost no one will ever read about until they do. She left the agency at the beginning of this year. The next day, she filed to run for office.

SPEAKER_06 28:00

I worked for the Federal Trade Commission. I started in Washington, D.C. working in the Bureau of Competition. That's the antitrust or anti-monopoly side. After about three years there, I moved to the Seattle office of the Federal Trade Commission, where there were three of us doing antitrust. That's grown a little bit since then. We had many more consumer protection attorneys. But I practiced antitrust in that office for more than 15 years. The first half of my career there was focusing a lot on uh healthcare cases and retail. I did grocery store merger challenges. One of the nice things about being in a region is you didn't just have to challenge mergers, you could do conduct. I did a civil price fixing case in dental distribution and uh challenged the acquisition of a physician group by a big hospital system in Idaho. So those were some of the trials I worked on. But for the last 10 years or so, I would say that the focus of the competition work I was doing was mostly in big tech and technology, emerging technology markets. Of the nearly two decades I was at the FTC, there seem to be places in the US economy with undue concentration. And I think that when companies do get too big and they're able to leverage their market power, if not monopoly power, then they are able to underpay workers, they are overcharge folks, they don't innovate as much. And I think we saw that kind of across many sectors, but technology was important just because uh, as an emerging field and a rapidly evolving field, it has at this point led to some of the greatest concentration of wealth in history. And it was at the last time that there was so much wealth concentrated in a few industrialists that the antitrust laws were really born. So I'm thinking of the gilded age. So it seems to me that we're in another place where the concentration of wealth has become undeniable, unignorable, and something that's affecting most parts of our lives. I did work on a lot of the cases involving technology. I was on the original Google case, which actually started at the FTC. And this was many years ago, and there was one young Jonathan Cantor who at the time was working as a consultant for Microsoft who was telling us this theory about Google denying scale to Bing. Ten years later, Jonathan Cantor went on to lead the DOJ's antitrust division while Lena Khan was the head at the FTC, and he brought that case with that theory and you know famously won one of the most important monopoly cases that the government had brought in nearly 25 years. Now, the remedy, and that's where the liability was established in the opinion and then the first trial, but the the liability ended up weakening, and one of the reasons why was kind of the onset. Um, so that's one of the cases uh in tech. I also worked on Amazon, but where I've spent the bulk of the last four and a half years that I spent at the FTC was on our case against, at the time it was filed, in the last days of the first Trump administrations, FTC versus Facebook, because they hadn't changed their name yet. That case was originally dismissed, but under Lena Khan, we uh redid the complaint, and it was under theories that the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp were illegal monopolization of the market of personal social networking services. So I spent four and a half years working with a team at the FTC developing the case, developing the evidence and some of the theories and reading through millions and millions of documents, talking to hundreds of executives, not just in meta, but in all kinds of tech. And the part of the case that I worked on were I had a focus in online harms and especially looked at some of the online harms for children. And that was a really depressing thing to work on as a mom. Some of these platforms that the FTC and the DOJ have looked at have almost unlimited amounts of money. They have hired sometimes multiple law firms and economic experts, and so some of the most expensive lawyers in the world. My feeling is that we were always outspent, but never outmatched. The lawyers that work for the FTC had incredible integrity and talent, and it was great to work with them. But I think one of the patterns you might see if you look at a lot of the tech cases, both from the FTC and DOJ, that there are these side fights that are going on about the documents or the privilege or not deleting messages or important communications. And there have been cases for sanctions against, I think, against Amazon, against Google, against Meta, against Apple, in the destruction of really important evidence or the withholding, improper withholding of evidence. And those are really valuable, uh, expensive, and time-consuming fights, but I think both the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice have taken those on and won some pretty important rulings on that. And that is where many of the very critical documents in these cases have come from. You can understand why the companies themselves wouldn't want some of those uh documents to get out. I ended up working a little for a little while on some of the Amazon cases, and then the government shut down for like six or eight weeks and for the first time in years. Because when I worked on that meta case, we worked seven days a week. We sometimes would take holidays off, but not always. Because to your point, we were a lean team of like 20, while Meadow or some of the other witnesses probably had hundreds, if not getting close to probably maybe a thousand people working on their case. So we we worked a lot.

SPEAKER_02 34:26

A handful of companies are the largest accumulations of wealth in human history. They have thousands of lawyers, they have endless money, and they have the ability to delay, to bury, to outlast. On the other side of that fight were about twenty people. Twenty people working seven days a week for years against a company that posts fifty-six billion dollars in revenue every three months. That is not a fair fight, and it never was going to be. And when you understand the math, you start to understand why the system has felt rigged to so many people for so long. It isn't rigged in a conspiracy sense, it's rigged in a much simpler one. There is too much money on one side and not nearly enough on the other.

SPEAKER_06 35:20

But in that time, while the government was shut down, I was just thinking, you know, I know g government can work, and I know these amazing people work in government, but this government is not working right now. And I just had a second to catch my breath and to think what's happening. And I think I got disillusioned with the ability of the federal government to pass laws that would really protect citizens, but but especially kids online, uh, just thought we have this a little bit brief moment at the state level to bring some balance, to bring some guardrails, and that's where all the regulation was coming. And I say a brief moment because it seems to me that the tech lobby is really starting to focus at the state level because that's where the regulation is coming. And you see pushback both from the tech lobby. Um, they have big organizations that uh have all kinds of um money to spend on this, but you can also see it at the administration level. Like I am very disturbed by that idea that the states should be barred from regulating AI while the federal government does none of it. I find that unacceptable. So um I think the states are where the most important regulation and and balance will come. While the federal antitrust laws are so important and so powerful, most states have many FTC acts, they're called. So the same laws that give rise for the FTC to bring its cases, most states, and including Washington, have versions at the state level. So you have the antitrust there. But if you could bring in some more regulations, um sensible, common sense, you don't want to squash innovation. You don't want to stop technology from continuing to innovate in ways that make our lives better. We just have to stop for a minute and make sure, are our lives becoming better? And and who who's really writing the rules now? I mean, doesn't government that oversees, you know, the power of the people and the benefits to people have a role to say here? Should it really be trillion-dollar tech companies that write their own rules and grade their own homework? I don't think so.

SPEAKER_02 37:30

I want to name what this looks like in real time. Throughout April of 2026, a tech industry coalition called NetChoice continued filing and pursuing lawsuits in multiple states, including Minnesota and Arkansas, to block laws requiring social media warning labels and age verification rules. Many of these laws were enacted by state legislatures. NetChoice is challenging them in federal court on First Amendment grounds. The states with active suits include California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Virginia. Every one of these laws was passed by elected representatives. Many of them passed with bipartisan support. Many of them were written with input from families, and every one of these laws is being challenged after the fact, largely behind closed doors, in federal courtrooms, where the families who pushed for the legislation are not in the room, where their children's names are not spoken, where the question being argued is not whether the harm is real. The question is whether stopping the harm violates the First Amendment rights of the corporations causing it. This is what Danica means when she talks about resource imbalance. This is what concentrated power looks like when it has lost the legislative fight and moved to the next venue. I asked Danica about that, about what it means when a constitutional right written for human beings becomes the legal instrument that protects platforms from accountability.

SPEAKER_06 39:17

I agree that the First Amendment is a fundamental pillar to our democracy, and I am very pro-First Amendment. I think just like kind of some of the other themes that I'm thinking about, I want to make sure that humans and ordinary people have the primary right as well. And sometimes it feels with the extension of corporate personhood and the recognition of First Amendment rights for uh corporations that that can get out of balance. And I worry about it a lot in this new economy, in the digital economy, in the data economy, because who has access to the data? And it it can allow, in my opinion, for really extractive and exploitive business models. Tim Wu's got a new book, The Age of Extraction. I think it's got a good framing for this. But the idea, and I think this is one that that you're raising and the podcast raises is just because we're going down this route doesn't mean we need to keep going down this route. We can decide democratically that we want to do something else, that we want to put humans before machines, that we want to put ordinary working families in front of billionaires. And I think in uh extractive and exploitive business models, that's a place that we can do it. Now you're right that the First Amendment comes in in some of the uh early attempts from the states trying to bring some safety into these business models. And public companies are legally required to maximize returns for their shareholders. And the laws as they are allow them to choose business models that make our children products, that make increasingly make our classrooms data mines. And if we don't have the guardrails around that, then it is their legal job to you know make as much money to profit from that. But I think there are ways. The legal theories are now oh, we're not talking about the actual content. We're talking about the fact that you have used hundreds of PhD neuroscientists and engineers to design a product to be addictive. And you have pointed the biggest computers in history at the brains of our children and tried to figure out how to get them to stay on longer and longer. Right now, if my kid is scrolling on hour three, hour four for the companies themselves, the business incentive is to keep them on longer and longer. And well outside of the content that is on there or any First Amendment issues, we can create different business incentives where there are taxes because these products may be zero price. I would never say they're free. These products may be zero price, but we're paying with our attention. And the companies know that. And so in Europe, where they have been forced to um, because of being found liable for either consumer perception or um abusive dominance or monopoly theories, have had to offer something other than um a feed that's based on all your own data and haptics that they've been tracking, they have to offer subscription models. And how do they value those? They value those on what it costs if they don't get to have your attention, if you haven't paid with your attention. So I think we can design things both in terms of business incentives where we tax so that there's a different incentive by the time a uh a miner has been on there for so long. So it costs them something like it's costing all of us. Uh, there just needs to be balance. In terms of the lobbying at the state level, you're right that there are these industry associations that come in and sometimes they testify on bills. And sometimes, and I found this especially in the bills that have a piece that talk about what your obligations are if someone's a minor. A lot of times these tech companies will come in or their lobbies will come in and talk about what is and isn't possible for what's called age verification, age estimation, or age gating. And I don't find that testimony to be credible very often, uh, certainly not always. And so then there's this gap between the legislators who may not know or have any technical background and what they're being told. But to your point, the part that's difficult is when it doesn't happen in public testimony. When the industry associations or the lobbyists, and not all of them are bad, and not all of them have bad information. But very often they will host events. Or private closed door briefings for the legislators, where they are giving a very one-sided, and if you can possibly imagine, potentially self-serving version of what the landscape is, of how regulation should happen, and perhaps their own assessment of what the risks are. That lack of transparency in how the training is happening, and the absolute lack of legislators at at least in my state and probably in other states, who have deep technical or technology policy backgrounds that don't already work for big tech. I think it's a it's a big problem. You did this amazing job of talking about uh Montana and that they might be able to pass this law that limits, that relies on what the state does, which is traditionally and very clearly a job of authorizing corporate charters, that they may be able to use that historically and very clearly state purpose to limit the ability of corporations to spend on corporate speech. I think if that proves to be a positive model, first of all, it's going to be amazing because, in terms of democracy, uh a counterbalance to Citizens United that allows limitless corporate speech in elections could make a really big difference. But then even a step back from that, if we can start using corporate charters at the state level to allow for certain types of behavior and not certain types of conduct really from corporations, that may be a lever that can expand and to be used in other ways to make technology work for people and communities and society. So I'm I'm excited to see what happens in Montana. I understand in Washington that that uh that law might um a legislator might bring that law next year, and I and I'm I'm I'm just so excited to see that one spread um hopefully across the United States and and get some uh good judicial rulings that that that is grounded in law, that that is an absolutely valid path for states to take in terms of regulating their economy and the entities that exist at the pleasure of the state, which is all corporations. One thing about this moment, uh you've mentioned and explored in your podcast, and that we are at this point where there is this incredible disparity of wealth, and that we have now had the amassing of the greatest wealth in history. And one of the big differences between now and the Gilded Age with Standard Oil and the Rockefellers and Carnegie's, is this time they are absolutely marrying political power to their wealth in a way that didn't happen before. So the moment has more of an existential threat and democracy. So the urgency is there. Uh one of the questions that uh folks who work in antitrust, and Lena Kahn, when she was the chair, got a lot is are our antitrust laws up for this fight in a digital economy? Uh, in laws that were built for bricks and pipes and railroad? What about ones and zeros? And my answer is probably twofold. Number one, I do think the antitrust laws, as they are written, can reach these models, and they can reach the labor impacts and the effects on working people. And I think that has to be the answer. These are some of the most powerful laws in the United States. You could never pass a law like this. You could never do that again. These laws allow you to break up companies, pull out all of their most intimate, like, you know, most protected documents as we've talked about. And it's not just from the companies, it's from their competitors, their suppliers, their cut, their customers. These laws were built to remake economies, to deconcentrate wealth and power, and we absolutely must use them. And I think what the law does need right now in a zero price kind of world, because antitrust has focused a little too much on price and not enough on the quality side, on the innovation side, where when you have robust competition, it's not just that the prices are lower for consumers or that wages may be higher and more sustainable for workers. It's that the companies will innovate on things that are important to consumers. So innovate on things like privacy or on common sense protections or on your ability to see more of what you want and less of what you want, more controls for people. So that's why we want to see economies where there's robust and fair competition. So in the economy we have now, we want to make sure that we lower the barriers to entry. And there are these terms that get thrown around a lot platform economics, uh, network effects. And there are ways that we can kind of reduce the bottlenecks around this. And one of them is if we could have ownership over our own digital identities, where we could own our identities and the data associated with them. So that if uh I decide that Meta is not protecting my data enough or is not protecting uh what it is showing me in terms of content, I can pull my information, my identity, and go somewhere else. Uh and and then if it's easy enough for me to pull that out and go somewhere else, it's not as hard for a new company to start up because it's easier for me to move. So that's one of the ways you can do it is by trying to build mechanisms and architect competition into the system. And I think digital privacy, digital identities is one of the ways. And then we just really need to clarify that liability adheres to dangerous products like it does for every other industry and market. So, not on First Amendment expression, and maybe 230 needs some work, but if you design something that you know is dangerous and you build it to be addictive and harmful, yeah, you're on the hook for that. That's how a free and fair market will work.

SPEAKER_02 50:14

There are many decent people in office. Many of them mean well. Few of them have the experience or the conviction to actually use the tools the office gives him. Danica is different. She has spent nearly two decades inside the agency that was built to break up exactly this kind of concentrated power. She has the documents, she has the legal training, she has the experience of watching the revolving door from the inside, and she has chosen to abandon her career to run for office in Washington State because she believes, and I believe, that what happens at the state level over the next few years will determine whether democracy works for the people or the companies turning people into products. If you live in Washington, if you live in her district, if you can vote in this election, I'm asking you to look at her campaign. This is the race that matters most to me in this state this year. Not because she is a guest on this podcast, because of what she has spent her career preparing to do, and what is at stake if people like her are not in office, while the rest of us are still figuring out what hit us. A link to her campaign is in the show notes. Please look at it. Now to a different kind of voice. This is the part of the episode where the evidence stops being abstract, where the muting we have been describing becomes something you can see. In 2022, two weeks before she turned 17, my friend's daughter Coco left home to meet a man on Instagram who promised to sell her Percocette. She never made it home. She was found dead the next day in a Bronx apartment belonging to a man in his fifties. The pills had been counterfeit, laced with fentanyl. Coco's mother, Juliana Arnold, had Instagram messages between her daughter and the dealer. She had the address of the building, the name of the man, his face on Instagram. She handed it all to the NYPD. The NYPD did not call it a crime scene. They did not review the security footage from either building. They did not run the rape kit, even though the man admitted to having sex with her. They did not pursue the digital evidence. They classified Coco as a chronic user, and they moved on. Now, think about the other New York City cases that you heard about in the news during that same time frame. In September 2021, the actor Michael K. Williams was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment of an accidental overdose. Williams was 54 years old. Within months, federal investigators had pulled license plate readers, surveillance video, and phone data. They traced the hand-to-hand transaction on a Brooklyn sidewalk. They arrested four men. They held federal press conferences. The dealer was sentenced to 10 years in prison. In May of 2023, Akira Stein, the 19-year-old daughter of Chris Stein, the co-founder of the band Blondie, died in her family's Manhattan apartment from Fanale's pills she had been buying through social media. Two months later, Robert De Niro's grandson, Leonardo De Niro Rodriguez, died from pills sourced from the same network. Prosecutors traced the encrypted messages. They mapped the network across New York City and Long Island. They billed an indictment against the entire distribution ring. In October of 2025, five men were charged with running it. If convicted, they faced a minimum of 20 years in federal prison. Different cases, different circumstances. But in each one, the same question, whether to investigate, got answered in the same way. In Coco's case, that question got a different answer. Same city, same drugs, same social media platforms, different socioeconomic class. This is what I mean when I talk about commuted cases. It is not that the system can't investigate platform-enabled harm to children. It is that when the children are not famous, it often chooses not to. And the cases we do hear about, the celebrity overdoses, the network takedowns, give the rest of us the impression that the system is working, that justice is being done, that somebody is paying attention. Juliana Arnold spent the last five years discovering exactly how much of that impression is false. She's a founding member of Parents Rise, the coalition of survivor parents like Lori Schott, Kristen Bride, and Jenny DiSario, who you have already heard from in this show.

SPEAKER_05 55:27

Coco was way out of her element where they found her, and with someone who was, you know, quite a bit older than her in his 50s, and she was just 17. So you're telling me that she's found dead in a man's apartment in the Bronx, and he com admits that he's had sex with her, and they don't even think about calling it a crime scene when they know she died of some sort of etinol poisoning because they found a glassine in the bathroom. And he had some cockamini story, and they did nothing about it. And I didn't even know, Erin. Like I didn't even know. Like it took, you know, you're so in shock. You were, you know, like you're so in shock. And so I'm talking to the medical examiner, I'm talking to whatever detectives, and the detectives are making me think like they're doing something, but it was a drug squad. I didn't really know the difference between like what, you know, what division they were in. And they didn't care at all, really. I found out later, like what was happening on the ground, even though I kept on talking about it. They were just trying to figure out like where the drugs came from. So, like, what was the stamp on the glassine? What gang was that? They had her phone, they had her computer. I had showed them all these messages between she and the guy who lured her down there, who approached her on Instagram, groomed her, and then got her to meet him, you know, down where he lived. So the FBI invest, you know, interrogated him. They questioned the second gentleman who called her death in. And um, they told me they knew that both the guys were lying, but they couldn't do anything about it. And I didn't know then. It couldn't make sense to me. I was like, what do you mean? Because my brain kept on going through the trauma of like what happened on the ground. Because I was there that night when I found the messages and I found her, you know, the address that he had given her. I went down there by myself because my local police wouldn't go down there because I wasn't in the city. And I knew all these places. So it was like just like it never went out of my brain for like a few years. I just couldn't, couldn't stop trying to figure out what happened. You know, I found out seven months later when the final autopsy report and toxicology report came out that they never called it a crime scene. So they never took any forensic evidence. There were cameras at both of the buildings because I saw them and I knew they were there and I just assumed they were going to look at them. So they never knew when they left, where they went, who was with them, you know, nothing. And I couldn't get anyone to pay attention. When I started thinking about the other cases and how they were called a homicide and how they got caught these guys, right? My God, the guys that did this to Coco are still on the street. And you think they're not doing it again and again and again, just like, you know, the guy who sold Avery, you know, the drugs. It's just, it's not that they, it's not that they can't do anything about it. They're just choosing not to do something about it, which really is the thing that really gets me going. In what world is that okay? I mean, it's just flat out wrong. It's like sinister. And how can we be okay with that? So I hope that's why we are doing what we're doing, right? Is to get people to say you have a voice and you need to speak up. And I think that's the only way we give our legislators the freedom to just say, no, I won't get re-elected, even if I have your $10 million meta. I'm not gonna get elected because I'm pissing off my constituents. We never really realized how strong our voices would be is survivor parents. I didn't know the first time I went to talk to legislators, like how they were gonna react to my story. And, you know, after some time when I saw that we were actually kind of making, you know, some headway and really showing these legislators like what's really going on. And we almost got legislation passed. We got it passed in the Senate, you know, the Kids Online Safety Act passed 91 to 3, but then it got blocked. Not because it was a bad bill, it got blocked for political reasons because House leadership chose to block it because I believe they were told to block it by the tech companies that, you know, build are building, you know, now data centers in Louisiana. So we're here to shine a light on that. We're here to work for federal and state legislation that will keep these companies accountable and that they can design their platforms with our kids' safety in mind and not just with their profits in mind. Get educated on this stuff. So, yes, you have to have those conversations with your kids, but in addition to that, we shouldn't have to be doing that. We shouldn't have to be the police people. The burden should not be on us. So we want to change that narrative that this is not the parents' fault. We're all doing the best we can. And even if you're on top of your kid and you're there every second of every day and you have every parental control in place, we're finding with the stories that you're hearing from the other parents, it doesn't make a difference because we're up against multi-billion dollar, trillion dollar companies that are purposely designing these products to addict our kids with no care in the world of what they're feeding them, what kind of content they're feeding them. And when I say feeding them, it's not like they searched for it. They're in their algorithms. You know, kids searching for something will get something completely different, and it turns into horrible, hateful, harmful, harmful things that they're saying. So I think we need to stop blaming the kids and stop blaming the parents and really start holding these companies accountable. And they've shown it that they're not gonna do it themselves, so we really have to push our legislators to take action and to make sure that they're not, you know, it's a choice. Are they gonna side with big tech? Are they gonna shield big tech? Or are they gonna stand with the families and the children and protect the children of this country, which is actually why they have been elected in the first place?

SPEAKER_02 1:00:48

For parents that are just kind of learning about this for the first time, what do you do to sign up?

SPEAKER_05 1:00:53

To the website, parentsrise.org, and you sign up. And when you sign up, you'll get access to all the information that we send out on a regular basis, updates, and also other training tools and other ways that they can advocate at their own pace. Whether they want to show up in DC, great. But if they just feel like no, they're rather like an armchair kind of advocate, that you can do that too, writing letters, making calls, getting educated on these issues, talking to their friends, and really having starting these discussions with people in their communities because that's where it starts. It starts at the grassroots level. And that's what we're really focusing on is bringing building a movement for the ground up. We've always been dealing with the top down. Now we have to have the ground up and show, you know, our leaders that like we demand change. And we're not going to put up with this because if we don't, these tech companies are gonna take over, you know, our our world, unfortunately. And potentially not for the positive.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:47

A lot of what ends up happening in the lobby and with these bills, what I've been noticing, is that the timing is way last minute. Something will be about to pass, or something will come under threat after it's already passed. Can you give an example of something recent that if you had signed up for Parents' Rise, that you could have had a voice in saying, no, stop this. We don't want it.

SPEAKER_05 1:02:12

Actually, something did happen this week. So there's a bill in the Senate called the Guard Act. Um, it was introduced by Josh Hawley, who's been a big proponent of kids' online safety. It was going for markup, which means it gets, you know, comments are added and they and then they all decide at the in the committee, which is this one was in the Judiciary Committee, the Senate Judiciary Committee, to pass it out a committee, and then it goes and it can be put on the floor then. But that's based up to leadership, right? So it was going for markup yesterday, on Thursday. Just on Wednesday, another senator who a leader in leadership position, Ted Cruz, decided he had to come up with another bill. So he came up with another bill that was another AI bill, protection for kids, yet it read like it was written by OpenAI. They tried to name it and put it out there as if it was like the same, you know, that they were weighted the same and you should vote for mine and this one exactly, like how they took the Kids Act from COSA in the House. So it's just happening all over and over again to create confusion and to make people wonder, and people who aren't paying attention as much, including our legislators, like, oh, this sounds pretty good, you know, let's go for it. But inside of that bill and that language, we'll have what we ironically call a poison pill, right? Wording that maybe only trial attorneys would understand, you know, or people that are very much into this policy. And unfortunately, not all of our legislators pay that much attention. What we did is we put together a letter to the Judiciary Committee, and it was signed by 450 survivor parents. And this we did with survivor parents, not just with parents, but we also do these letters with parents. And it had a huge effect on the Judiciary Committee and the GARD Act passed almost unanimously. And what we're hearing, and there were some parents who were able to go and sit in on that, that a lot of it had to do with the voices of these parents and standing up and saying, this is not okay. You know, this is not right. We need good bills, we need good legislation, there's no reason why we shouldn't. It's just, it's it's common sense laws, is what we're needing. We don't, we're not asking for anything special. So that's how if you get involved, you can have access to do a lot of these types of things and really feel like you're, you know, you do have a say. I think some of us get pessimistic and we think like, uh, like our votes don't even count now, or if I called my senator, it wouldn't make a difference. They do. They write down every time they get a call, every time they get a letter, every time they get a complaint, they write it down. And if they see more than a handful of the same complaint coming in or the same issue, they're gonna take a look at it because they don't want to be caught with their pants down later that they they ignored it and then it became this really big deal. So it does, it's crazy. I didn't think it worked, but it actually does. And unless we do that, we don't have democracy anymore. You know, if we are so passive and we sit back on our heels, democracy takes work. We take it for granted in our country now, and unfortunately, it's being tested like we've never seen before. So now's the time we need to dig in and realize we need to speak up even more than we were because we know that there are not enough people out there looking after it the way we'd like them to. That's why, you know, we're doing what we're doing, and we ask everyone who who cares about these issues and your our kids and their future and the future of our country speak up and join us.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:35

Just last month, there was another celebrity case in the news. In October 2023, the actor Matthew Perry was found dead in his hot tub in Los Angeles. The cause of the death was acute effects of ketamine. Prosecutors built a case against five people, including a North Hollywood woman named Justine Sungha. The press began Calling her the ketamine queen. She had been selling ketamine to a private clientele. Hollywood actors, wealthy professionals, adults with private addresses, private staff, and private money. In April 2026, Songha was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison. Federal prosecutors held a press conference and called the sentence a warning to anyone selling controlled substances to vulnerable people. I realize anyone can deal with depression and substance abuse. But dealers must know by now, warnings of this magnitude are rarely given if you are selling drugs to regular American children on social media. One month before Sungha's sentencing, I released the Muted Cases episode on the day that the 34-year-old felon who had been selling drugs to children in our community for years was sentenced. He had groomed them, started them young, vapes first, when they were as young as they began to show interest, because all the other kids were already doing it, saving the harder stuff for later. The plea deal was clean, 34 months, the case was closed. The community was never given that history or a public warning through the court. And Avery's case is not the only one like that. Remember, Sam Chapman lost his 16-year-old son Sammy to a counterfeit pill laced with fentanyl. Sammy bought it from a dealer he met on Snapchat. This was in California, about an hour from where Matthew Perry would die two and a half years later. You heard the story in episode six, how hard Sam had to work to get an investigation started, how a Los Angeles County District Attorney declined to press charges. If our legal system prioritizes the clean win, the perfect record, the celebrity cases, the ones the press will cover, over exposing a public health crisis to the community living inside it, there is only one path forward for everyday American children harmed on social media. Civil litigation. Sam Chapman is one of dozens of California families who have a civil case against Snap Inc. Other families have sued Meta, TikTok, Discord. The list is growing. These cases are difficult, they are slow, they have spent years grinding against a statute called Section 230, the law you have heard about all season that has kept platforms shielded for product decisions. Fixing this public health crisis requires families like theirs to break through that shield and the thousands of expensive attorneys who work for big tech. Which brings me to someone I deeply respect and who has already come up on this podcast before. Nikki Petrosi has been tracking these recent civil cases, and she covers them in detail most journalists never bother with. After this episode, after everything my next guest is about to tell you, I hope you will have a new frame when you listen to Nikki's work. Because when you realize how we got here, how we would never be here in the first place if systems operate the way we assume they should when we don't have to face them. And at the same time, when you see the news coverage or press releases, I hope you can spot the propaganda, the grassroots-looking opposition that is not grassroots, the AstroTurf Talking Points, the corporate playbook deployed when a family gets close to accountability. Find scrolling to death wherever you listen to podcasts. It is a natural next step from this season if you are not already following it. Now to my final guest. She is the person best equipped to give you the legal frame at the center of all of this. I've mentioned her before, the former prosecutor that helped me navigate several very difficult moments throughout the criminal case. Her name is Rako Kaldner. She has been an attorney for nearly 40 years, and her dedication to the balance of law is more intricate than most attorneys. She is the executive director of the Washington State Commission on Judicial Conduct, a constitutionally established independent agency that enforces the ethics of rules for judges. There is an equivalent body in all 50 states. It is a role that carries enough weight that she has to tell you.

SPEAKER_07 1:10:47

I'm expressing my personal opinions. I'm not expressing the opinions of the Commission on Judicial Conduct. I'm not here in my professional capacity. I'm my opinions are informed by my job experience, but that's not who I'm representing. That's not the uh basis of my participation in this conversation.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:08

Aaron Ross Powell I believe that it is because of her, because of what she knew about how digital evidence disappears and how fast it disappears, that there was a case for Avery at all.

SPEAKER_07 1:11:20

Aaron Powell I mean, we've been friends a very long time. You work with Dave, my husband, for many years, and were his fave at the time. And I remember when he met Avery's mom, and I remember baby Avery, and what an incredibly sweet guy he was. I remember him sitting in the chair I'm at right now at the kitchen table when it was around Easter, and he made a perfect bunny to paint and had ears. Uh just cute as bud. Yeah. So when that call came in, yeah, we were here, we were home, and I could tell that Dave was talking to you because he was saying your name and he sounded shocked and sad. So I wanted to come in and find out what happened, and he and he told me in brief, and then I felt that it was really urgent to talk to you because I'm aware as someone who spent about ten years working as a prosecutor in this community that um messages on telephones, which is usually how everything's done with drug deals any or anything anymore practically, um, vanishes, especially with Snapchat. And so we talked for a while, but I remember very urgently asking you to get that phone as fast as you could and and get it to the police, and you did. And that preserved enough evidence that there was in fact a case. And we don't know what would have happened in an alternate universe, but the chances that they would have had enough to go on to establish a prosecution at all would have been exponentially less if you didn't have that evidence. And then I was also acutely aware that you had gone through about not about the worst thing a parent could go through. And that this system is not kind to crime victims or their survivors. It's just not. Crime victims are very often blamed. Very often blamed and disparaged. You know, that and that's true for entire races of people, but it's true for crime victims in general. It's certainly true for women who suffer sex crimes, and it's true for children who die of drug use. It's their fault or their parents' fault. And and that is emotionally an easy cord to twang and an easy way to perpetuate an unhealthy status quo cases like this one, the one against Sun Wen. There's enough evidence there to show how long he'd been dealing, to how young the children were, how much of our community is affected, how vulnerable so many more of them could be. And in some of those meetings with the prosecutors, we talked about that. We talked about exactly that. This is an important case, it's a rare case. And of course there are gonna be evidentiary issues. Of course there are gonna be issues where evidence might be suppressed, where you might have a ruling that would uh diminish or eliminate part of the evidence you have to present in your case. But if you don't try, it'll never happen for sure. You can guarantee it won't happen. I got into law because a lot because of my family history. My father's family are Ashkenazi Jews, my mother's family are all from Japan. And from an early age I became very aware of both the Holocaust and the incarceration of Japanese Americans, because half of my family experienced the one and half experienced the other. And when I was a really little kid, it was baffling to me how such awful things could happen, how people could treat each other that way. When we were all very patriotic Americans and really believed in the country and its stated ideals. And I became extremely aware it doesn't matter how good the institutions are structured to be or written to be, it helps if they're structured or written well. But the individuals in those positions either will or won't realize the ideals of those systems. And I I'm not a religious person per se in organized religion, but I do believe in Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative, very deeply, that it is a moral imperative, categorically, that one may not use another human being or view them as a means to an end. That people, even accomplished, admirable people, are not intrinsically more valuable than other people. People have absolute value as universes unto themselves. So when I got into law as a prosecutor, as an advisor to civil service commissions, as a as the legal representative of child protective services and the other stuff I did, it was very assertively with an eye to trying to look at the values and ultimate goals expressed in the practice of law, what it's supposed to achieve, and maintaining equity and human dignity in each situation with the most despised character in the equation, but also not to forget or minimize or cast aside the other people in the equation. And unfortunately, I think that in our legal institutions that happens very, very much. And that's enhanced and exaggerated by the fact that we live in a capitalist country, probably end stage capitalism, where people are very much means to ends, to the point of what you've been examining and living and trying to change. We're commodities now. We're we're we are we are the raw material that generate profit. We were talking a moment ago before we went on on the recording about the mythology of America. We have, which, which I believe in. So it's very hard. It's very, it's a lot of cognitive dissonance here. I still believe and I want to strive towards, and I hope that we can achieve the ideals of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. But I've been to the African-American Museum at the Smithsonian a couple times, and I would recommend that for any American, because it goes back to the foundations of slavery in Africa, and then it goes into the use of African slaves by the founders of our country. And without slaves, we couldn't have accomplished the incredible industry and wealth and power that we developed. There were choices, but it what it took, and the reason we were so successful was on the backs of black people treated as chattel and highly, highly, highly effective piece of burden and things, objects. At the same time, we were the founders of our country, were articulating the highest philosophical values. All men are created equal and endowed with an inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness unless you're not counted as a person. So we've always had that cognitive dissonance. We always have. We strive, I think, in general, to get better, but institutions don't do that automatically. So it's incumbent on all of us to remember in each instance that categorical imperative. How I would tie that to the legal system, which I believe in and strive to make better, is a couple different ways. I mean, you've gone over it in the earlier parts of the podcast, that institutions and corporations have been not only elevated as equal to, but greater than humans, which is terrifying. And we should be worried about that. Actually, we should resist that actively. We should change it because it's really screwed up. It's wrong. It's morally wrong, it's existentially wrong, and it's got us in a lot of trouble. Then the criminal justice system has an interesting background in history too. In most places where we had police first established in our country, they were established specifically to retrieve stolen or lost property, specifically slaves. That's what police were for. That's their genesis in our country. When we eventually, as a nation, caught up with the idea that slavery was bad and evil and contrary to our stated core values, the 13th Amendment was established to eliminate the badges of slavery, the mechanisms of slavery, except for in the criminal justice system. That was, that is the exception. It's written into the Constitution. So in the criminal justice system, when you are a criminal, you've been defined and adjudicated as such, you don't have those otherwise inalienable rights. You lose your right to vote, you lose your right to liberty, you lose your right to property, you lose your right to all sorts of things. There are good things you can do with criminal justice. I saw a real revolution in the way domestic violence was addressed back in the day, and you can do good things with it. None of this is entirely black and white, but there is no denying, if you take even a superficial look at the history, that the history of our criminal justice system, its foundation, its structure from the Constitution onwards, and very much its practice, has been white supremacist in its application. It has been run vastly disproportionately by white men. It has been enforced vastly disproportionately against black people. So then, more broadly, stepping away from that, that fundamental inequity, and I keep stating because it's true, I do think it's a good, decent system. It can work to do a lot of things. But a lot of times it fails. A lot, a lot, a lot of times it fails. And one of the ways that it fails is that the victim and their survivors really have virtually no voice.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:30

What Reiko is describing is not just history, it is the architecture we are still living inside. The system that historically denied rights based on who you were is now denying them based on what you have. A right that you cannot afford to exercise is not really a right. A justice system that treats the powerful with urgency and the rest with delay is not really a justice system. And as the extraction economy moves more and more of us toward the bottom, more and more of us are discovering what generations of Americans have always known. The bar to be heard keeps getting higher. That is what concentrated power does over time. It takes wealth and then it takes voice.

SPEAKER_07 1:23:24

The constitutional focus in the practice of how criminal law works is on the defendant because they're the person who is the brunt, experiencing the brunt of the full force of the state. And it needs to be fettered by the constitution, it needs to be fettered by the attorneys who are representing them. But what in practice gets lost in the equation is the victim and their voice. And if that victim isn't with us anymore, then the only voice they have left is their survivors. And that voice is often muted, disrespected, or disregarded and has very little force. In all of these systems that I'm talking about, a thing that would make the operation of the system better, a feature that I don't ever remember being articulated strongly when I went to law school was what is the goal of the system? What are the values? What at the base are we trying to do for our society? In law school, it was more like the particulars. Learn about, you know, how does tort law work, or the learn seven-factor tests, learn case law, learn how to research, learn, learn, well, you don't learn in law school so much, but then you get out there and you start doing it and learn how to argue in court, learn how to persuade a jury, learn how to negotiate, learn how to bluff. What doesn't get taught is what you're doing on a day-to-day basis throughout your career as you interact with every single element of the system. How is that consistent with the core values of your enterprise? Are there core values of your enterprise? And how do you keep them in sight? And that really can get lost.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:15

What is a criminal justice for? If you ask most Americans, they will tell you it's about consequences, about making sure the person who broke the law faces a punishment the law prescribes. That is a version on television. But that is not why the system exists. The system exists to keep a community safe, not just to process individual cases, but to protect the public from active danger, to investigate patterns, to send warnings when warnings are needed, to learn what the harm was, who was it reaching, how to stop it from reaching anyone else? That's what the system is supposed to do. And if all the focus inside that system goes to the easy win, the clean plea, the defendant, the case that closes without complications, then who's paying attention to the community? Who's sending the warning? Who is asking what we can learn from this case so the next family does not have to call a friend at 2 a.m. to find out if their child is dead. Rako has spent her career inside that question.

SPEAKER_07 1:26:34

We have this expectation of real democracy. We do as a nation have an expectation of freedom, of agency, of fairness, of justice, however imperfectly we understand that. So I think that's our hope of getting the hell out of this. But we've got to get much better informed. We've got to get much more active. We've got to get much less passive. We've got to insist on accountability for the failures of our leadership and and expect more accountability than we've we've expected. People are just people. They could do good or bad things at any given point in time. You have to stay aware, you st have to stay alert. You know, our best, our best virtues and our worst flaws are always with us. So we do have a system of laws. It could be made to work. We need to empower people to do that, and we need to empower them through education. And I think everybody who's a player in the system, and I know that lawyers nationwide right now are really concerned about the rule of law, that we all need to take a laboring or go back to the core values of what do we hope for for a just USA and remember that we're working towards that all the time. And to have More compassion for people exercise that categorical imperative that even the people who have messed up and are angry and inarticulate and don't understand or are just lashing around, that they're humans with value and that they deserve to be listened to and understood, and that we have core values in common that we're trying to achieve. I think that's possible. And in a really bad time and a bad place, that's all you can goddamn do, in my opinion.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:37

Here's what I hope you take away from this series. Every unregulated extraction economy in human history has worked the same way. Whaling fleets emptied the oceans because no one was forced to leave any whales behind. Industrial fishing collapsed entire fisheries because the next ship would catch what you didn't. Fracking poisoned groundwater because the cost of contamination was paid by people who didn't sign the lease. Coal mines hollowed out mountains and the lungs of the workers inside them. And when the mountain was empty, the company moved on. The pattern is always the same. A resource is identified. The people closest to it are told extraction will bring prosperity. The extraction begins. Something else, something the company didn't pay for and wasn't asking about, gets destroyed in the process. By the time the destruction is undeniable, the wealth has already moved somewhere else. That is what is happening to your children right now. The resource is their attention, their developing minds, their loneliness, their search histories, their faces, their friendships, their fears. The extraction is constant, automated, and largely invisible to the people inside it. The thing being destroyed is harder to put a price on. Childhood, mental health, the ability to be bored, the ability to sit with a feeling without searching for a screen, the ability to grow up before you are sold. And just like every other extraction industry, the people running this one will tell you the answer is personal responsibility. Don't fish so much. Don't buy the gas. Don't give your kid a phone. That is not how we ended whaling. That is not how we got the Clean Air Act. That is not how any extraction industry has ever been brought to heal. We did it by recognizing that an unregulated extraction economy will always destroy something it doesn't pay for. And we did it by deciding collectively that some things are not for sale.

SPEAKER_03 1:30:59

People are waking up and they're pissed. When you talk to everyday Americans, they're pissed. It's not working for them. The system's not working for them. They don't really trust either party because neither party has worked for the working class for a long time. They don't trust corporations. They feel like corporations are making their lives worse as they get overcharged, as they see the way that corporations are extracting rents from their lives in every way, in every means possible. That sentiment's rising. I saw a stat on Citizens United that said that when you asked, when you poll people, 75% of people think Citizens United was a terrible idea. And so you've got uh an energy in society right now. You've got an anger in society right now, and we're letting that anger be channeled against each other because the forces that control a lot of our channels and media and power centers want us to be fighting each other and like battling each other instead of battling the forces that are actually making our lives worse. That monopoly power of individuals, that monopoly power of corporations is the problem that we should all be in arms fighting against. And that's the shift that I'm starting to see happen more and more. And the question is what is that force going to be that gets people to realize that the person who they really feel like is this terrible conservative or terrible liberal is actually somebody who they have way more in common with. And they should be linking arms, they should be fighting against the centers of power to reclaim them. Like we're a nation founded on liberty and freedom. We've had those terms co-opted. And what we need to get back to is what does it mean to be a nation of opportunity, a nation that was really founded on giving people a path to have a dream, a dream that we've taken away and made unfulfilled. And so that's the energy that's in society. And that's what we need to start to channel and get people to move in that direction again.

SPEAKER_02 1:33:03

The anger is real. It is also being misdirected from the people who profit from us fighting each other instead of looking up. Concentrated power has spent decades convincing us government oversight is the enemy, that regulation is bureaucracy, that if we just leave the markets alone, they will protect us. Look at the marketplace we have, look at who's drowning inside it, look at the children inside it. That is a propaganda achievement on the scale of Bernays. And recognizing it, naming it out loud, is the first step to undoing it. That is the fight. Not screen time, not parental controls, not whether your particular family can hold the line in your particular living room. The fight is whether we still believe as a country that some things should not be mined.

SPEAKER_06 1:34:04

Come over closer to me, Dad.

SPEAKER_02 1:34:06

Especially our children. Superhuman is a snapping back production. Written, hosted, and produced by me, Aaron Ping. You can also follow me at SuperhumanPodcast.substack.com. The music you've been hearing throughout the season is by Carton Abel. Carton releases his work freely for other artists to use. His generosity is moving and inspired me throughout writing the series. If his music has moved you, please visit his page and support his work. I would also like to thank musician composers Joachim Cooter and Evelyn Simon for their generous and moving scores they made for this episode. The season would not exist without the people who shared their stories, their expertise, and their time, and I thank each one of them. To Gene Cavendish, who taught me to ask for proof, to my parents for taking Avery to that last concert, and their selfless work to making this world a better place for Avery and children in the community they serve. To Rako for her generous support in helping me understand what was going on in the criminal case. To everyone who has listened, who has shared an episode, who has reached out to me to tell their story, to Laura Marquez-Garrett, whose strength and passion for truth and justice is a beacon of light for me and so many other survivor parents that always shines, even during our darkest moments. And to Avery, who taught me more about life and compassion than anyone ever can.