Red Tape Podcast, Episode 9 – Humble Beginnings
Red Tape is the newest R Street podcast about the country’s biggest problems and the surprising ways that governments (and regular people) often get in the way of solving them. It was produced in partnership with Pod People. Listen wherever you find podcasts, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and learn more about the podcast here.
Episode description:
Not many organizations can say they were founded because of a billboard, or that they have a “no ninjas” policy. But there is one organization that can claim both, plus they love South Park. In today’s episode, host Kelli Pierce dives into the story of R Street. She interviews our President and Co-Founder, Eli Lehrer and the Executive Director and very first hire, Erica Schoder.
First, Eli and Kelli talk about the controversial billboard that started it all, why working with those who disagree with you is important, and why we should be optimistic about the future. Kelli then speaks with Erica about her love of books, that first R Street job ad, maintaining R Street’s quirky culture, and the importance of transparency, credibility, and diversity in safeguarding the independence of think tanks.
Episode Transcript:
Kelli Pierce:
Welcome to a very special bonus episode of Red Tape From R Street, my boss and wonderful co-host Shoshana Weissmann’s off hiking and getting some well-deserved rest. But stay right there because today, you’ll get to hear from the two people responsible for the R Street Institute and, ultimately, the podcast you’re listening to right now, and it all got started with a billboard.
I’m Kelli Pierce, and this is Red Tape. Today I’ll be speaking with Eli Lehrer and Erica Schoder. Eli co-founded the R Street Institute over a decade ago, and Erica, R Street’s executive director, was R Street’s first hire. In this episode, you’ll learn where our love of South Park and Pirates comes from, how we’re changing the conversation about small government and individual liberty, and what Americans can learn by adopting a more European outlook, seriously.
First up, R Street’s president and co-founder and our pirate leader, Eli Lehrer. He’ll tell you what R Street believes. How we can work with people who are different from us, and why we should feel optimistic about the future. There’s also that billboard story. Stick around. It’s a bit of a wild ride.
So Eli, are you the same guy that I see in the credits when I watch the History Channel, and if so, can I get an advanced copy of the Food That Built America because that show rules?
Eli Lehrer:
No, but I know him, and I can ask him. If you look at my Facebook page, there’s a picture of the two of us together. One funny fact is that my wife is named Kari, K-A-R-I, and his wife is Sari, S-A-R-I.
Kelli Pierce:
So you guys have hung out. You guys are bros.
Eli Lehrer:
We had breakfast together about two years ago, and we’re occasionally in touch by email. I get misdirected emails for him several times a year, and he occasionally gets misdirected calls for me. I get the much better side of it.
Kelli Pierce:
Fantastic, and I will absolutely take you up on that offer. But seriously, Eli, you’ve worked as a reporter, speech writer in DC and at some of the largest and most influential think tanks, but you co-founded R Street because of a billboard. You got to tell that story.
Eli Lehrer:
So the story of how R Street started is a relatively simple one. One day in early May of 2012, Ray Lehmann, who was then my colleague at the Heartland Institute, came into my office at the space we were renting above a vintage clothing store on Connecticut Avenue and said, “You need to look at these billboards.”
Within a minute, I found out that the president, without telling me, I ran the DC office, or anybody at our board, had decided it would be a fantastic idea to run billboards with a picture of the Unibomber Ted Kaczynski and the message, “I still believe in global warming. Do you?”
That was quite a problematic message. Among other things, at the time, our work was supported mostly by the insurance industry, and insurers all use climate change in their modeling. So among other problems with it, the billboard falsely accused all of our major supporters of being serial killers.
Kelli Pierce:
Fun day at the office.
Eli Lehrer:
Yeah. To this day, at R Street, we do have a policy that we will never falsely accuse our major donors of being serial killers. We think that’s a bad business practice. I called all of the people who were working for me and said, “I am leaving. This is crazy. I do not agree with it at all,” and everybody came with me to co-founder R Street, so that’s who R Street started. Our other co-founder Erica joined us just a few weeks later.
Kelli Pierce:
What were you working on at Heartland at the time?
Eli Lehrer:
Insurance policy mostly. I was running the DC office as well, so I had a management role overseeing stuff that went on in DC, but most of my own work was on property and casualty insurance at the time.
I should mention that Heartland, through the whole thing, handled it very well, and I continue to remain friendly with many people at Heartland today, and I still think they do quite a lot of good work. I don’t know why the then-president of Heartland made the decision he did. But he was a perfect gentleman about the whole thing once we decided to leave, and I have nothing but good things to say about the way we left.
Kelli Pierce:
Yeah. And I think that’s a very good point to bring up that Heartland does wonderful work, and R Street likes to build relationships with others, and we’re going to get more into that later in the conversation. But switching back to R Street just proper. R Streeters really like to think of ourselves as pirates. Why’s that?
Eli Lehrer:
Pirates obviously, in reality, did any number of horrible things, but they were self-organized, created their own system of laws. They didn’t live quite outside the law. They were innovative in many ways, and they were egalitarian at a time when society was very big then. All of those things are quite admirable about pirates from the golden age of piracy in the Caribbean.
Kelli Pierce:
When I got my handbook at R Street, when I just signed on, there was a no-ninja policy. Why?
Eli Lehrer:
Well, it’s not a no-ninja policy. It’s a policy that we oppose ninjas. We’re an open and tolerant group.
Kelli Pierce:
Okay.
Eli Lehrer:
There’s an internet meme, probably about 15 years old now, of pirates versus ninjas arguing which one is cooler, which one is better, which one would win in a fight, and I just think it’s so obviously pirates. The other slightly serious purpose of that is it’s a very easy way to know if people have read the handbook.
Kelli Pierce:
It’s actually a really amazing thing in the handbook. I was laughing out loud at the no-ninja policy, but I have to say there’s also that philosophical opposition to ninjas as well, right?
Eli Lehrer:
Yes. Ninjas historically swore oaths, to usually to daimyos, and as a result, they were basically part of the state in feudal Japan. And so they were sort of government bureaucrats, whereas pirates were self-organizing and libertarian, and I think that also makes pirates a good deal better than ninjas.
Kelli Pierce:
I would have to agree with you on that. Aside from pirates versus ninjas, what really affected the way you wanted to build RSI?
Eli Lehrer:
There were a lot of things that went into it. First, I had worked at a bunch of think tanks, and I learned something good and interesting from every one of them. I thought that there were things that could be taken from every place that I had been to build a think tank that was even better.
I always thought that there generally were too many people playing Me Too and doing whatever was cool at the moment. I thought that a commitment to work on a relative handful of issues in depth with real complexity would set us apart as well, and I wanted to have a place that I would’ve wanted to work if I were an employee.
Kelli Pierce:
That makes sense. And R Street’s really guided by principles more than Me Too, right?
Eli Lehrer:
One of our core operating principles is deep focus and expertise, and we take very seriously the idea that we should work on issues where we can really make a difference. If there isn’t a place where we can make a difference, we think that we probably should be in the area.
As a result, there are a lot of very important areas, healthcare, immigration, and a number of other ones, where there are certainly interesting, important work to be done, but the areas are very crowded, and we don’t see a place right now for us to make a unique impact.
Kelli Pierce:
And one of the ways you do make an impact is you find success by working with many organizations on all sides of the political spectrum. Can you tell us why that’s important and why it’s important to our success as well?
Eli Lehrer:
Well, that gets to another one of our core operating principles, broad collaboration. There is no point in refusing to work with somebody as long as they don’t promote violence or hatred. If they agree with you on anything, that’s how you get things done.
You can’t get things done only by preaching to the choir and only by working with people who agree with you on everything. I think that it’s important to work with anybody who agrees with us on even one issue. And that’s another thing that I felt is increasingly absent in DC, and we work across the political aisle but do so not by being centrists but rather by saying that we will work with anybody but are going to stick to our principles.
Kelli Pierce:
Absolutely. And I think that has translated because I’ve seen people online who would probably disagree with 99% of your worldview, Eli. When you bring up R Street Institute, they just think the world of you and R Street. They just get very excited because they’re excited about the work that we do. Though I have to ask, what are some of the strangest groups maybe you’ve ever brought together on an issue?
Eli Lehrer:
I remember bringing the poison control centers together with a major consumer products company at one point. This was actually an issue that R Street itself never got involved with, but I helped do it because I was somebody who was well-connected. I happened to know people on both sides. The consumer products company asked for help, and I helped organize a meeting between them and poison control people.
R Street is opposed to poisoning children. We think that’s important that children not be poisoned, but at the end of the day, what needed to be done had no real public policy angle. We’ve worked with just about every think tank of any size in Washington, DC. I can’t… Obviously there are organizations we wouldn’t work with. The Taliban or an organization that was affiliated with the QAnon Movement are examples of places that we just wouldn’t work with because they do promote violence or hatred.
Kelli Pierce:
It’s always interesting to me because, at my church, my deacon is different from me politically, but I always remember her saying, “The end of the day, we all want the same things.” And I think that’s very important to think about.
Eli Lehrer:
I think everybody has a vision of a good world. I do think it’s important to acknowledge that there are differences in what people want as well, and that those… and that even very subtle differences may lead to very different outcomes in terms of what people want.
One good example of this is in polling, conservatives, when asked what they want to the labor market, say, “We want people to have jobs that they like.” Progressives say, “We want people to have good jobs.” That’s actually a very subtle difference, a job that you like and a good job. But it actually results in extremely large differences in what people want for public policy.
Kelli Pierce:
That’s true, but it also can, on the flip side, going back to what we do, lead to conversations or alliances where maybe we can be better in the workforce space.
Eli Lehrer:
Right. Right. So no, that’s why we’ve worked with one of the biggest SEIU locals in the country on flexible workers. I disagree with quite a bit of what they want to do. But on flexible work, a lot of people at SEIU have very good ideas, and that’s a place where we’ve managed to work together on that exact issue. Now that doesn’t paper over the fact that we continue to have other differences for how things should work, but it is a way that both of us can make progress on something that we think is important.
Kelli Pierce:
I want to know why you hate red tape, the bureaucratic kind, not our beloved podcast.
Eli Lehrer:
I find red tape problematic because it tends to impede human creativity and, ultimately, human flourishing. We need a government. We need regulations of the economy. An economy cannot work in a total state of anarchy, but we need to be very careful about these things. The possibility of market failure is quite real, but government failure is in the modern world, probably a bigger problem than market failure.
And market failures often, not always, not 100% of the time, will self-correct. There’s often a market solution to a market failure. Government failures can also be corrected, but it’s a much slower and non-organic process. In a democracy, it requires elections, voting, all numbers of other things, and those things are legitimate ways to get policy change, of course, and to cut red tape. But if you could stop it from happening in the first place, you reduce the chances of government failure.
Kelli Pierce:
And that bureaucratic red tape can really hurt people, regular people, with jobs and families.
Eli Lehrer:
Exactly. There are tremendous harms from bureaucratic red tape to people all over the place. The biggest barrier to working right now is professional licensing. The biggest barrier to affordable housing is zoning and planning regulations as well as all sorts of mandates. The biggest barrier to affordable healthcare is government mandates.
All of these things are as a result of too much government. Now it isn’t that we need to eliminate anything that government does. There are market failures that government needs to correct, but we need to be super careful. And in general, simple regulations are best. It’s best to have simple rules that everybody can follow and understand if you’re going to have any.
Kelli Pierce:
I think Friedrich Hayek won the Nobel Prize in Economics discussing that very idea actually.
Eli Lehrer:
Yep. I mean Hayek is enormous influence on me, but so is his left-wing quasi-Marxist counterpart, James C. Scott, who started from Marxist framework and came to roughly the same conclusions about most things as Hayek.
Kelli Pierce:
Yeah, there you go. See, people have more in common than they really do have differences. We were talking about how red tape impacts regular people. You also talk about something called low salience issues. These are things not in the headlines. But many of these things affect normal Americans every day. Things like insurance, access to good jobs, competition to keep prices low, cleaner, cheaper energy. Can you tell me how you decide what issues to work on?
Eli Lehrer:
In general, R Streets issues actually come out of what we’re already doing, with one exception, our work on governance. In fact, everything we do can be traced back, in some way, to our work on property casualty insurance. Now, in many cases, there are any number of steps, but you could draw a logical chain back to our original work on property and casualty insurance.
We found that any public policy issue connects to some other public policy issue, and sometimes having a good impact for a society that is based on free markets and limited effective government requires doing something about the issue that’s somehow related. And then issues are related to that issue and so forth. And that’s how we expand. Now, some of it is business.
We have done work that’s related to immigration, for example. It’s very unlikely that we’ll do work in a major way on immigration anytime soon, not because it’s an unimportant issue, but because there are a lot of very smart, very committed people doing all sorts of really good work on immigration from every possible point of view. And I’m not quite sure what we would add to it, and entering it would be difficult to fund and work with.
Kelli Pierce:
So going back to what R Street was really founded on when we’re talking about issues that we work on, a couple of R Streets first policy issue areas were insurance and climate. I think it makes sense talking with you why, but why actually start in those spaces?
Eli Lehrer:
Our work on property insurance and flood insurance, which was a big part of my master’s thesis, was obviously and clearly related to issues of climate change. Flooding is very clearly intensified by climate change, and doing something about flooding problems requires doing something about climate change by definition. So it was an obvious way to get into it, and it was an obviously related issue at the time.
Kelli Pierce:
Well, I think it also speaks to R Street being very practical because we look at practical solutions for things like clean energy, climate change. I think that’s very interesting because that’s a unique space we’ve carved out in that discussion.
Eli Lehrer:
Exactly. Our point is not to support whatever people in the environmental movement want with climate change. It’s to find free market solutions to a problem. It’s pretty rare that people spend a lot of time on something when it isn’t actually a problem.
And many people get confused by the fact that many people can identify a problem well and then come up with terrible ideas to deal with it, which I would say is so for a lot of say the Green New Deal, but that does not mean that the problem isn’t real.
Kelli Pierce:
I think that’s a great point that you’re bringing up is that people get into the rhetoric versus actually looking at solutions like permitting reform that are right in front of your face.
Eli Lehrer:
Exactly. People have a tendency to want to use the solutions they favor in the first place, and we’re not immune from that tendency. And, of course, everybody has to have some first principles. Having no first principles at all is itself a principle. So you can’t escape the fact that you have to postulate something in life.
So it’s natural that people will reach different conclusions about what a good solution to something will be. And it may be out of values that are very sympathetic and are good things in the world. But life is about trade-offs, and sometimes something that is very good, such as having nature left in its natural and undisturbed state is not compatible with other things such as human progress and advancement and culture that are also good.
Kelli Pierce:
Yeah. Or there might be another idea of how to actually balance nature and infrastructure projects, right.
Eli Lehrer:
Exactly. But there are going to be trade-offs. There’s rarely a free lunch in life, and there will be problems caused by any solution to any problem. It’s the first statement in every economic textbook that I know of. All choices involve costs.
Kelli Pierce:
We’ve talked a lot about problems. However, there are reasons really to be optimistic about the future despite the challenges that we face. Don’t you think?
Eli Lehrer:
I’m tremendously optimistic overall. I feel that the country, and to a large extent, the political movement I’ve been part of for all of my adult life, the Conservative Movement, are going through some times of real change. What gives me optimism is first that I see a lot of good things going on amidst the bad things. Second, none of this is new. All of the things that people may talk about as unprecedented are actually things that have happened before in American history, and fundamental institutions have always survived them. Now sometimes, we’ve had very good outcomes from transitions.
The most recent transition, which was the Civil Rights Movement, heroically under Jim Crow and moving towards an ideal of racial equality for everybody, was a brilliant success and made society better in just about every possible way. Some other times when the parties have realigned have not been as good. Jim Crow was imposed in the first place, partly as a result of parties realigning and the Democratic Party regaining its power in the South and the Republicans in the North conceding that essentially. So it’s no guarantee of a good outcome, but there will be an essentially stable outcome. I’m pretty sure.
Political scientists generally say there have been six-party transitions in US history, six-party systems. We’re currently of the sixth and clearly entering the seventh. What the new party alignments are going to look like, I don’t know. But they’re going to be different than they’re today. And as that happens, you’ll see changes, and these times have always been marked by instability, loss of trusted institutions, and violence actually. Five out of six times, there’s been no civil war. That’s the good part.
Kelli Pierce:
I’m pulling for the no civil war.
Eli Lehrer:
I’m concerned about many things, but civil war is not one of them.
Kelli Pierce:
Aside from the political space, are there any spaces where you are also optimistic, maybe in the regulatory space, in the job space, in the economic space? What are you optimistic about in terms of this country’s future aside from politics?
Eli Lehrer:
In many ways, we’re doing pretty well. We have a record-low unemployment rate right now, and we seem to be on the verge of some real technological progress. Contrary to the way a lot of people feel, if you really look at the facts, we’ve had pretty slow technological progress for the last 40 or so years. Aside from communications technology, a lot of things really haven’t gotten a lot better, but we seem to be on the verge of a lot of things. Cost of access to outer space is dropping at extremely fast rate. We’ve made a significant breakthrough in fusion power.
Generative AI is proving extremely advanced and capable of doing a lot of things, and I see tremendous possibility for technology to move forward. I also think that while I certainly do not agree with everything that’s been done in, say, the name of the Black Lives Matter Movement, that we are confronting some very difficult issues relating to race that I think need to be dealt with, and that’s also a good thing. There’s going to be more problems ahead, but there is a light at the end of the tunnel, and I think that the future will be better than the present.
Kelli Pierce:
Well, I hope you learned a lot from Eli’s message. His unique views on the world and public policy have really made R Street what it is today. Up next, my talk with Erica Schoder, R Street’s executive director. She’ll talk to us about how to build trust and what we can learn from Europe. Red tape From R Street will be right back.
Welcome back. So how do we restore trust in a world where trust is in short supply? It’s a question that our executive director has thought and talked about a lot, and her answer has defined how R Street approaches difficult public policy problems. In a post-truth world, what’s the role of a think tank? To learn more, here’s my conversation with Erica. So just to start, I’ll have you say your name, title, where you live, and how long you’ve worked at R Street.
Erica Schoder:
My name is Erica Schoder. I’m the executive director at R Street Institute. I have worked at R Street for 11 years now, and I live in Madrid, Spain.
Kelli Pierce:
You work for an American think tank. You’re the executive director of this American think tank, and yet you live in Madrid, Spain. How did that happen?
Erica Schoder:
It’s true. It’s true. By the way, you’re always welcome to come visit me in Madrid. So it’s interesting that I live an ocean away. I’ve been in Europe for about 10 years now, so about a year into my adventure with R Street, my husband and I decided that we wanted to move to Europe. So my husband is Luxembourgish, so he’s European, and we had just moved to Washington, DC.
We were getting caught up in the hustle and bustle of the city that we all know very well, and we decided, “You know, I think we want to take a step back and live a different lifestyle.” But I absolutely loved R Street. I wanted to keep working at R Street. So I came back every month for a week for the first, I don’t even know how many years, up to the pandemic and digitalized everything, and just R Street became a hybrid remote in-person organization.
Kelli Pierce:
That’s amazing. And for people who don’t quite understand, obviously, Europe is made up of many different countries with different points of view on things. But there does seem to be, and maybe you can speak to this, a European viewpoint on work-life balance that we don’t quite have here in the United States.
Erica Schoder:
Absolutely. I’m an anthropologist at heart. That was my original training. So I’m always comparing and taking perspective from a cultural vantage on Europe and the United States. And I do love the work-life balance in Europe, which is why I chose to live here. As a whole, they put a priority on human connection and interaction, and you can just see that in the slower pace of life and living in Europe, and I appreciate that very much.
And I’ve taken some of the good bits about living here in Europe and imbued it into the culture at R Street. For example, our August recess during winter break, we take every other Friday off, and we really have developed a culture of respecting downtime so that people can rejuvenate and guard the passion that we all bring to our jobs. So yeah, that’s some of the, I would say, benefits of Europe.
Kelli Pierce:
That was just what I was going to ask you because that was certainly something that attracted me to R Street and working here and having that work-life balance. I want to go more to the beginning because before you got into the think tank world, you worked as a radio presenter, a newspaper reporter, and you owned a bookstore. So I got to ask what you’re reading right now.
Erica Schoder:
Lately, I have been reading a lot of speculative fiction. So one that stands out is a book by Jacqueline Harper, and it’s called I Who Have Never Known Men, and this is a… I can describe it as a slim book. It’s not very long. It’s very approachable, but it is pretty bleak, I would say. It’s relatively obscure, and it’s sci-fi.
And then I just also finished a book called Klara and the Sun by Kazuo, I hope I’m saying this right, but Ishiguro, and it’s a little bit lighter, and it’s told from the point of view of a robot-powered AI, so very relevant right now with heightened awareness of artificial intelligence and its potential implications.
Kelli Pierce:
So speculative fiction, it almost seems, to me, like a baby of Ursula Le Guin.
Erica Schoder:
Yeah, actually speculative fiction is a genre that encompasses sci-fi, dystopian novels like Margaret Atwood. It’s the parent genre of a lot of sub-genres.
Kelli Pierce:
Gotcha, gotcha. So definitely taking your bookstore training, and applying it here in the real world.
Erica Schoder:
It’s true. It’s true.
Kelli Pierce:
Obviously, you’re a reader, but again, you own that bookstore, and that gives you a perspective, I think, on business. And I think a lot of people don’t always understand that world of business. Maybe their only experience in the working world’s with a bad boss. How did your experience running that small company help you work for a think tank that advocates for the ideals of freedom?
Erica Schoder:
I just have to take a step back here and say that the original R Street job ad was one of the most irreverent and intriguing job ads that I’d ever seen. This was their very first job ad that they put out, and I was their first hire. And one part of that job ad that I remember very vividly was that it said, “You have to be able to tell your boss he’s full of shit.” Can I say that on the radio?
Kelli Pierce:
I’m okay with it.
Erica Schoder:
So you have to be able to tell your boss he’s full of shit. That’s pretty amazing. And I also have to say I am pretty good at that. Can I get into the backstory here?
Kelli Pierce:
Sure.
Erica Schoder:
Okay. This was a group of insurance policy experts, and they had just spun off from a larger think tank to go out on their own. And that’s a really good story, but too long to tell here. But they were very courageous in making the leap, I felt. And they knew how to be public policy experts. They knew the mission that needed to be freeing up markets and creating more effective limited government.
And they knew that they wanted to see the mission through by building broad coalitions, by having deep expertise in their issue areas, and by responding rapidly to the external environment because they felt that this was lacking in the think tank space. So that was what they knew, but there was a whole host of things that they didn’t know. So they needed someone to come in and build a business and build a culture and build a sustainable organization. And so that’s what I’ve been doing over the last 11 years.
Kelli Pierce:
So was it just that amazing ad that made you make the jump from small business to think tank, or were there other things as well?
Erica Schoder:
So it’s not too dissimilar think tank work from other work that I’ve done. So I’ve always been in the ideas industry, and ideas are my passion, and I love to help people innovate and implement good ideas that have a real impact on our world. And the mission of R Street, the notion of freedom, has always been part of my journey, as well from, I would say, the ideas of freedom of expression in the book-selling world to our mission here at R Street, which is creating freer markets and more effective government.
Kelli Pierce:
Now that we know a little bit more about you and your journey to R Street, I want to talk about how R Street helps regular people, the people who are listening right now. A lot of our work focuses on practical, real-life solutions to problems that everyone can use right now. Why do you think this is so important?
Erica Schoder:
So R Street approaches public policymaking through the lens of real pragmatic solutions, and that’s a really big focus of ours. We want to be pragmatic and not dogmatic, and we want to find real solutions to problems that have a real impact on everyday Americans. And to that end, it’s really important to remember that we are all part of this political process in the United States. So think tanks are made up of people, political institutions are made up of people, and we’re all human beings. We’re all participants in this democracy.
And we all care about the implications of public policy. Whether we understand the policy side or not, public policy has real implications on our lives, and it’s certainly not always easy conveying this as a think tank because some of the issues that we tackle necessarily are very complex, and we need deep expertise to really understand and to translate that complexity. But at the end of the day, it’s all about the change that we can make for the general public. It’s all about making markets and government work better for everyday people.
Kelli Pierce:
Often when we talk about public policy, for most people, they’ll only think of these government bureaucrats making rules from up high, but that’s not really accurate. People in business are an important part of this conversation and this process.
Erica Schoder:
That’s right.
Kelli Pierce:
And speaking of government, I think these days not many people trust the government. Really on both sides, you can see this deep distrust of politicians, agencies, courts, but that sense of distrust isn’t just aimed at government. It really does seem to permeate much of our daily lives. Trust in institutions is at an all time low.
Trust in the legacy media has fallen consistently over the years. It seems like everyone’s skeptical of someone or something. But you’ve spoken extensively, especially recently, about why it’s so important to address this and build credibility, and you see it as one of the keys to R Street’s successes over the years. How can we rebuild what’s so badly broken?
Erica Schoder:
Well, whether you think it’s dysfunctional or broken, I do have to say it’s not beyond repair. So think tanks like R Street, we play a really important role in fixing this dysfunction. And we know that, as you said, trust in institutions is at an all time low. We know that the government and media are not doing a great job of driving informed conversations. And this is where think tanks like R Street demonstrate our value. We have an opportunity and an obligation to essentially step into that space that others are vacating. We all know there’s more information out there than ever to parse and to synthesize and to translate.
And our job as a think tank is to essentially use that data, research, and take it and inform and inspire better public policy solutions. And I would say that despite claims that we might be in a post-truth world, I’m sure you’ve heard everyone talks about being in a post-truth world, we still need evidence-based solutions now more than ever. So to really have influence on public policymaking and use evidence-driven solutions, we have to be trustworthy. We have to be institutions that invest in our own credibility. And if you know the work of a think tank, you know that credibility is absolutely 100% fundamental to the value proposition.
We have to stay independent from so many pressures, so many people, so many groups that are seeking to influence us, which is why think tanks have built very strong internal controls around how we act with these stakeholders, particularly around donors and policymakers who we seek to influence. And I have to say that R Street has done an incredible job of supporting the independence of our scholars and our work through building in these processes that allow us to first set a very, very strong research and public policy agenda and then get our stakeholders essentially aligned with us.
Kelli Pierce:
And I think that’s very important to note for the general public because that’s not always clear that when you’re in the think tank space, you are doing the work first, and then that attracts somebody from the outside that might align with your views regardless of where they might fall on the spectrum. It’s not the other way around.
Erica Schoder:
Absolutely. And it has to be that direction, otherwise you can’t remain independent.
Kelli Pierce:
And how has this emphasis on credibility really shaped R Street?
Erica Schoder:
That’s a great question. And to answer that, I’m going to take us back to 2020, where I think all of us learned a whole lot about ourselves and our ability to navigate uncertainty. Think tanks really weathered the pandemic well. And I think it’s because we understand how to build trust and think tanks understand the importance of credibility. And I’ll give you an example from R Street. So we have put a lot of emphasis on internal credibility and trust, and we improved our transparency around decision-making.
We created principles that we held ourselves accountable to, like put people first. We also improved our internal communication channels, not just to communicate up, down, and sideways but also to gather data for those really important decisions that we were making during the pandemic. And we also very much leaned into the diversity of our viewpoints and experience and expertise. And to do that, we codified one of our core values, which is one team. And that acknowledges that everyone in the organization, from policy to operations, has very valuable expertise and experience that we need to run a successful and healthy mission-driven organization.
Kelli Pierce:
And I think that’s a very important point that you brought up. Even though we are a free market think tank, everyone has different points of view. We don’t all think in lockstep.
Erica Schoder:
Exactly. And that I believe is key to our success. So we create spaces where we can have healthy conflict around ideas. We create opportunities for diversity of perspective to really shine through so that we can create together the best public policy solutions.
Kelli Pierce:
Do SpongeBob memes distract from the mission, or does it actually add to the conversation?
Erica Schoder:
That’s a good question. So you brought out a very particular aspect of R Street’s culture that I think is actually really important. So R Street, we are a bunch of quirky folks, and we sometimes illustrate public policy conundrums through memes. It’s true. And we take our role as influencers of public policy change through data and evidence very seriously.
Don’t get me wrong there. But we don’t take ourselves too seriously. And that is something that was alive and nurtured at R Street from the very beginning. And I’m very proud to say that we have managed to scale quirky, and that wasn’t an easy feat, but it is certainly who we are, and it’s in our DNA.
Kelli Pierce:
We do like to joke on the podcast that all roads lead back to South Park, and we’re only partially kidding.
Erica Schoder:
They do. They do. And that’s a great example of something that we have just managed to scale. So every staffer at R Street, when you come on, you make a South Park character of yourself, and then we have it proudly displayed in the office. That’s just part of our culture. It’s a symbol of quirky.
Kelli Pierce:
I love seeing my little South Park character last time I was in the office with my little croissant just sitting there.
Erica Schoder:
Oh, that’s so cute. I haven’t seen yours yet, but I love walking around and guessing who’s South Park character correlates with the living human being.
Kelli Pierce:
And I think it also leads to another point where there are other think tanks that like to speak in very elevated language, which is fine, and talk about very abstract concepts. Again, valuable to the discussion. But there’s also value in plain speaking, and you can still be smart while appealing to a wide audience.
Erica Schoder:
Yes, absolutely. And it’s an imperative that we do that. We have to demystify these sometimes very complex public policy issues. And it’s not easy, but we have to do it. It’s essential. Because if people can’t talk about ideas, then we can’t properly think about them. So we have to be able to have dialogue about the issues that are so important to all of us, particularly as we participate in this American democracy.
Kelli Pierce:
Absolutely. I think back sometimes to politicians who’ve been raked over the coals for explaining complex topics in simple ways. And I go, “What’s the problem there? I think that actually helps.”
Erica Schoder:
I see that all the time. I couldn’t agree more.
Kelli Pierce:
If someone’s listening right now who has very different politics from you or me, doesn’t look like you or me, or just has a deep-seated difference, what can they get out of reading R Street scholars or following us on Twitter? I mean, besides the SpongeBob memes.
Erica Schoder:
I would say our scholars are really good at using data and evidence to clearly show how we can create better public policy solutions to sometimes very difficult and intractable problems. And these public policy solutions improve the lives for everyday Americans. And whether you agree with our public policy positions or not, I think we can agree that R Street scholars come to the table in good faith and we bring together diverse stakeholders.
We create spaces and opportunities to have constructive dialogue and to have constructive debate that ultimately gets us to these real solutions that we know are so important. And I would say we believe that the way to make progress on our mission to make markets freer and government work better is to have those very hard and sometimes uncomfortable conversations that lead us to collaborations with groups and people who might agree with us on a single issue but are sometimes strange bedfellows. And it can feel uncomfortable, but it’s really important.
Kelli Pierce:
Yeah, there’s such value in learning from someone who doesn’t think like you do but is very smart and knows their stuff. I always learn so much from people who disagree with me, I feel like.
Erica Schoder:
Oh, I couldn’t agree more. And we often talk about this internally at R Street that to think clearly we have to be able to speak freely. And so we have to do this by creating internal spaces to have this dialogue. We have to have dialogue with people that we disagree and sometimes profoundly because that’s the way to essentially come to the best public policy solutions. But also, we have to be willing to change our minds in the process.
Kelli Pierce:
So when you go into a space where maybe you’re the only person who thinks like you do, how do you build bridges with people? Or maybe it’s building a bridge with someone who has one profound disagreement with you. How do you do that?
Erica Schoder:
So I think we all have a part in this. We all have to work on active depolarization. And at R Street, we try to do this by getting people together to talk about all of our good ideas and good public policy solutions. As I mentioned before, we create spaces for healthy disagreement. And sometimes it’s with people who it might be an off-the-record collaboration.
Sometimes it’s showing the general public how to have debate and civil discourse and disagree with one another on a particular issue set. And I would say, more broadly, each and every one of us, we have to be willing to trust one another. We have to build relationships that challenge us and that even make us uncomfortable. We know how easy it is to lean into these echo chambers that we’ve built because that’s comfortable, and we have to all fight that urge so that we can all contribute.
Kelli Pierce:
So that’s it, listeners. We have reached the end of season one of Red Tape, and while our goal with the podcast was to show the crazy ways government can get in the way and the simple real-life solutions to solve those problems, we hope you’ve also come away with a new perspective on working with and listening to people you might disagree with and feel inspired and perhaps a little more optimistic about our future than you did before. So see you next season, and hopefully, my co-host will join if Shosh ever finds her way out of the woods.
Red Tape is produced by R Street in partnership with Pod People. To learn more about the work we’re doing at R Street, follow us on LinkedIn and on Twitter, and our Twitter is @RSI. And, of course, for more in information on R Street, you can check out rstreet.org. Also, if you’ve enjoyed listening to today’s episode, the best thing you can do is share Red Tape with a friend or an enemy. And if you’re an overachiever, please leave a glowing review and rate us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really does help us introduce the show to new listeners. I’m Kelli Pierce, and we’ll see you next season.
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