E308 - Monique Priestley, Vermont State Representative
[00:00] Debbie Reynolds: The personal views expressed by our podcast guests are their own and are not legal advice or official statements by their organizations.
[00:12] Hello, my name is Debbie Reynolds. They call me the Data Diva. This is the Data Diva Talks Privacy podcast where we discuss data privacy issues with industry leaders around the world with information that businesses need to know.
[00:24] Now,
[00:25] I have a very special guest on the show today, actually a repeat guest, one of the rare ones who's ever come back twice.
[00:34] Monique Priestley. She is the Vermont state representative. Welcome.
[00:40] Monique Priestley: Yeah, thanks for having me back, Debbie.
[00:42] Debbie Reynolds: Well, I'm excited to talk with you.
[00:44] First of all, your first episode was amazing and I will definitely recommend that people listen to that as part one. So this would be like part two.
[00:53] First of all, you've been a tremendous advocate for privacy and data protection and consumer protection in general.
[01:01] But I've been very fascinated with the time I've spent with you, the things that you've asked me to collaborate with you on,
[01:07] and just your tireless effort to really make sure the public understands, you know, data protection and advocating for that in your role.
[01:17] But since the last time we talked, there's been a lot of activity in Vermont.
[01:21] I would love for you to tell people about yourself, what you're doing. You're recently reelected. Congratulations on that as well.
[01:30] Monique Priestley: Yeah, actually, so I made it through the primary, but I am actually trying to go from state rep to state senate.
[01:37] So I have a general election in November, so.
[01:40] Oh, wow.
[01:40] Debbie Reynolds: Oh, that's cool.
[01:41] Monique Priestley: Oh, that was good. So fingers crossed. But not as very thing.
[01:46] Debbie Reynolds: Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Well, yeah, tell us about you. Tell us about Vermont. What's going on in Vermont?
[01:52] Monique Priestley: Yeah, cool.
[01:53] So, yeah, so the last time I came on it was to talk about H121 of the 2324 session.
[02:01] And then in that was vetoed and the veto was upheld.
[02:06] And so I shared some of the inside stuff of what happened with that.
[02:09] But for this I'm grateful for you reaching out because I wanted to share what happened on the 2025, 2026 biennium with basically what happened from 121 was that was one section was data broker updates, one section was the kids code, the age appropriate design code, and one part was the comprehensive data privacy bill.
[02:29] And so I in 2025, my chair been H121 was a committee bill. House Connors is where I serve in the state House. And he had me reintroduce all three of those sections as separate individual bills so that we could get sponsors from, you know, diverse Bipartisan sponsors from across the House.
[02:52] So that's what happens.
[02:55] 2025, we passed the kids code bill. And then throughout 2020, 20, 2025, 2026, we were working on trying to get the Data Broker Delete act passed as well as the Comprehensive Data Privacy Bill.
[03:08] Debbie Reynolds: Well, how did all.
[03:10] So how did all that stuff come come to be? So it's interesting. So when,
[03:15] and I know you've seen this. So you see these people, they track every state. I was like, oh,
[03:20] Vermont has a new privacy law or something. It's like, but they don't tell like what it is and what it does and what,
[03:29] what's in there, what's not in there. So talk to us a little bit about that.
[03:33] Monique Priestley: Yeah, all three of those bills had been wrapped up in this game with the lobbyists, basically. So when I introduced the House committee, we were Commerce, we were going to start.
[03:44] Those industry lobbyists came to us right away and said, like, we're not going to testify in your committee. We're going to just wait until it goes to Senate and then we'll work on killing it, modifying it there.
[03:55] And so we actually at the beginning of 2025 worked out with the senators to introduce copies of all of them. And then they took lead running the Kids Code and they were working on privacy and then we work on the data broker related stuff.
[04:11] So at Daniel's Law and Delete Act.
[04:14] And so in 2025, kids code passed and privacy was basically, there was a competing bill, S93, which was the industry bill. And it was gutted in all the ways that they would, including all the loopholes they would want.
[04:31] And so we had this kind of like game between F71, which was the comprehensive,
[04:36] and S93, which was the industry version of that of like, kind of like, which model is going to move?
[04:44] Can either of them move?
[04:47] S 71 ended up not being able to like move. So I worked with senators to have that a strike call and replace it with S93, which was the industry language,
[04:57] hoping that they could basically smoothly pass that out of Senate, get it to the House and then reset things.
[05:06] That lessons learned on asking people to not to let it smooth sail because then that became a lobbying talking point of like, everybody loved this in the Senate, which wasn't the case.
[05:15] They were just kind of supporting, trying to get this back to us.
[05:19] So lesson learned.
[05:21] But then at the end of 2025, there was a risk that we were going to actually just pass S71 with that industry language from S93.
[05:31] Debbie Reynolds: In it.
[05:32] Monique Priestley: So I asked my chair and the speaker, I said, like, please don't have us do this.
[05:37] I will run all over the state of Vermont if I have to, to talk to the public, which turned into a privacy people versus big tech privacy town hall, which I did with Vermont Public Interest Research Group, which was really fascinating and great and really helped with, like, public interest this year.
[05:55] Debbie Reynolds: The. Now, what was the thing that I spoke on for you?
[05:57] Monique Priestley: Oh, yes. So, I mean, you probably did both.
[06:00] So you did. I think you did the educational hearing, which was wild. So we were trying to play S9 or S71 a little bit differently this year.
[06:09] So one was we. For that biennium, we had seven of the 11 people who had been on the committee.
[06:16] When we did the first round of H121, which I did study sessions,
[06:21] we just, like, really dug in. Like, people knew the content. So I had the legislature from multiple states come in to tell their lobbying stories.
[06:29] And so the committee really was up to speed.
[06:32] In 2025, that was a different story. It was seven out of 11 were new.
[06:37] And so in 2026, I was like, we haven't done the lobbying stories. We haven't done the educational backgrounds.
[06:44] And so we had an educational hearing which was just on, like, privacy as a topic and kind of the highlights of what goes into privacy bills. It was fascinating because it was very quickly, I think, because the clerk of the committee accidentally, like the assistant accidentally put it under the label of bus71,
[07:03] rather than just like privacy education.
[07:06] It immediately triggered these, like, auto emails from lobbyists to the public to, like, businesses, small businesses.
[07:13] I had like a rock star cast, including you, of people to testify. So like Woody Hartsug, Becky Slaughter,
[07:20] just everybody. I don't even know. It was quite the lineup. And even with that lineup and even with it being an educational hearing and not on any specific bill, I still had people behind the scenes pressured to step down from help, from presenting to us.
[07:38] And that was a trend that continued in a way that I hadn't seen it on the previous ones where I was building witness lists for both the House and the Senate, like, trying to get them to be like both sides when it got to the bills.
[07:52] And there was several times where people were threatened by their funders to not testify in Vermont,
[08:01] where people's, let's say professional sectors kind of turned on them,
[08:08] and then where somebody who threatened that they were going to be taken to court for what they said, and which was wild because in that case it was a somebody who's worked for multiple AG's offices and the FTC and was like, please go ahead.
[08:21] Absolute immunity.
[08:22] Everything I said was true. And, and also was on the record during a legislative, official legislative hearing, which. So there was things like that that I had never seen seen.
[08:32] And also just like learning the laws that go behind what people can say and when they can say it and things like that. And so yeah, so you did the educational hearing and then we jumped into,
[08:45] before we even did committee hearings,
[08:50] something that I proposed that I had heard from other state legislators,
[08:53] which they had said this process either completely, utterly fails or it goes well. And so we're taking a risk.
[09:01] And it failed, but which was to have less than a quorum of Senate committee members that were in leadership from the relevant committees,
[09:12] our leadership from our House committee, and then the two lead sponsors of basically the competing industry and consumer protective bills. So me and Senator Chittenden,
[09:22] and then we had two representatives from industry,
[09:25] one statewide industry group, and then I'll just say one very national, very well known individual,
[09:34] and then two members from civil society, from consumer production space.
[09:39] And so we tried to do, I think we had three or four meetings where we were trying to do negotiations and those my leadership spent time with the individuals from the industry side hoping that we could have a good face discussion and that these negotiations could actually be productive.
[10:00] And immediately outside of the gate it was not that.
[10:04] So we sat down, my leadership thought it would go well. And immediately it was like we didn't agree to that. And also the governor's going to do whatever we tell him to do.
[10:12] So that's what came out of the negotiation meetings was what industry was trying to do get us to do was to copy exactly the original Connecticut data privacy bill. So like the 2022,
[10:26] what we trying to get as a baseline was where we had reset the bill in 2025, which was the very last day, I think it was May 29th of 2025.
[10:38] We reset the S71 to be the language, the contents more or less of H.208 and where S71 started,
[10:48] so rejecting the industry model.
[10:50] So what came out of negotiations was basically getting to the base of Connecticut 2025 kind of there was like not an agreement that was okay with everybody, but that was where my chair wanted us to start, was Connecticut 2025, plus the definitions that we had passed and the kids code legislation.
[11:13] Debbie Reynolds: So tell me what exactly passed and what's in it now and what's not in it.
[11:18] Monique Priestley: Yeah. So we fought back and forth basically against what the Primary elements of that bill would be. And so what ended up being kind of like core elements were the base of Connecticut 2025,
[11:34] the definitions of kids Code more or less. There are definitely some edits that happened there.
[11:39] And then the exemptions that we had, largely the database, the data based exemptions that we had in 121 and then trying to think no private right of action.
[11:51] And we str. We gave a lot like we. It was not the strong build, but it was building off a stronger base than where industry wanted us to be.
[12:00] The fascinating thing for me that like when I'm watching LinkedIn or I'm in discussions where you know, people are like understand why legislators don't just like do this or do this or like, you know, for policy.
[12:12] And there were moments in this bill where not only were the negotiations not negotiations, they became an arm twist of like literally there's certain hearings I could give people links to where my chair just turns the chamber of commerce and says what are you willing to like go with on this?
[12:32] Because there was a threat that the governor would veto anything that they didn't agree with.
[12:37] So so much of. There was definitely a baseline that my chair wouldn't budge on. But then there was also several gives.
[12:46] For instance, CT has applicability thresholds that are 0 for like sens data and things like that.
[12:54] And 0 for sale I think it was.
[12:57] And those were ones where we set a level of 3,000. And for anybody who's like why did you guys do 3,000? It's because that's the number chamber of commerce gave us.
[13:06] And that was when we asked about it. It sounds like that was the level of attendees at events. So they can still sell their attendee lists and things like that.
[13:18] And also the number at which a lot of nonprofits are sharing donor lists and an attendee lists for events. And so that number was very specific to what people wanted to be.
[13:31] Certain people wanted to be exempted. Additionally, some of the crazy moments on exemptions were brambles Bliley. So because we had a very specific data level exemption on that, it was none detected data and it was financial institutions doing it.
[13:49] So it wasn't the like usual like any data under glba. And because we had the data broker bill, like I had brought in good financial experts both like in state like the banks and insurance companies and stuff.
[14:02] But also like was talking to people all over the world brought in like I was definitely. There were moments where we'd get testimony and I was like that's not that doesn't feel like that's in line with what I'm hearing from people.
[14:15] And so I'd make calls to people who are like, very much international experts in the finance space. And I'd be like, can you please just spend five minutes schooling me on this one thing?
[14:25] And then I would go back in and ask questions. And that happened a lot. There was a lot of me trying to be educated on the fly just in order to, like, push back on exemption language.
[14:34] And so we held strong on the exemption stuff until the very, very end.
[14:39] And like, the. At the very final hours.
[14:41] GLB was an example of, like,
[14:44] my whole committee understood this.
[14:46] And there was a piece of paper literally handed to my chair that switched the exemption language that was given to legislative counsel. And that is what we then were like, my committee.
[14:58] This was not like a discussion the committee had. It was like, what somebody handed piece of paper. And then the next draft we got, there was multiple drafts at the very end.
[15:06] And I was like, what is this? This is the same move we've seen six times. Like, this is. This is going to gut jlba. This is not what we want.
[15:14] We just spent weeks talking about this, years at this point,
[15:17] and it didn't matter. Like, I think it spent like half an hour an hour on me going back and forth with the financial lobbyists and insurance lobbyists and broker lobbyists, where I was like, this is going to gut things.
[15:29] This is going to make exemptions for car dealers and things like that.
[15:33] And there was never really responses other than it's not doing what you think it's doing.
[15:38] And in the end,
[15:39] we just left it. And actually one of the lobbyists represents insurance and data brokers, came in and privately and was like, do we have a problem? And I'm like,
[15:50] no, like, we don't have a problem. Like, good job. Good job. Yeah, like, good job making the money, buddy. Like, you know that you just gutted that. And I can't believe we just let that happen.
[16:00] But, like, you're doing your job, so. And he's like, nah, it doesn't do what you think it does. I'm like, yes, it does. We've had this discussion both on the record and off the record.
[16:10] And so that was one example. And probably the next grossest example was we had, I think it was seven lobbyists from. So for anybody who's like, why did you exempt all of Vermont's health care institutions and facilities and providers?
[16:27] And it's because we got this letter with a coalition of medical society and Adjacent societies and lobbyists and stuff signed onto it. And we were hearing like the governor will veto because Agency of Health and Human Services is in agreement with this coalition.
[16:43] And so it was like we did a closed door, I think seven lobbyists and me and my committee leadership and they're very much not digging into the weeds. And so I was trying to take note from my chair whether or not I should be speaking.
[16:59] And finally I was just like, I can't sit here and do this. So like,
[17:02] I need each of you to explain why the bill,
[17:05] why the exemptions don't, in detail, like why they're not going to work for you and why what they wanted was a complete, like, like glba, like a complete HIPAA level,
[17:16] just entity level exemption.
[17:19] And so we did this back and forth where again, like we did in past years, I was like,
[17:24] I don't understand why you want this. Like this levels the playing field for all of your competitors who are much bigger than you and out of state and,
[17:31] and will take advantage of you and the very customers that you're trying to serve. Because some of them were like nonprofits,
[17:39] non insured folks. So people who are seeking say like gender affirming care, abortion access or immigrants or things like that that have like a higher risk.
[17:49] And they were just like, we're not worried about digital. I'm like, but this whole bill is digital and it's to protect your people.
[17:57] And at the end of the day we got them to agree to Vermont FAC and providers just to try to make sure that we weren't opening everything up for like Amazon Health and stuff like that.
[18:11] But it was just one of those ones where it almost like wasn't based in anything other than their fear of having to comply. And the same with glba, it was like there was nothing actually based in logic.
[18:22] It was just lobbying the money, the interests of the clients and wanting a full exemption to not have to do anything.
[18:30] Debbie Reynolds: Very interesting.
[18:32] Now obviously you work a lot on these bills as it relates to consumer protection, data protection.
[18:39] Do you get the same amount of heat for other types of bills that you work on? I'm just curious.
[18:47] Monique Priestley: Yeah, I mean he tends to introduce the, yeah, I'm not afraid of the conflict bills.
[18:55] Debbie Reynolds: I.
[18:56] Monique Priestley: So we haven't been able to run AI bills really. So. But I'm assuming that those will be just as bad once we get into them. Data broker bill for sure. Like that was ridiculous.
[19:08] We had people flying in from all over the country,
[19:11] had lobbyists who come in to sit in the room to put pressure.
[19:16] Most of that happened in the Senate committee. And so I was watching all of that and then also talking to witnesses who were being treated really poorly by our senators, which is unfortunate.
[19:28] And it's actually one of the reasons that I decided I need to run for Senate because there was nobody keeping what was happening in check.
[19:37] There was definitely like fed questions from industry.
[19:42] It was just like undermining witnesses in a way that was just wild.
[19:47] Undermining research and data and science in a way that just didn't make sense.
[19:53] And so broker bills for sure.
[19:56] I did actually introduce, you know because of all of the work I've been doing on privacy and tech the more I'm realizing that we have real issues when it comes to lobbying transparency and to campaign finance and things like that.
[20:12] And so I, I ran a corporate power reset bill so like a workaround for Citizens United and so that one I feel like if that one could have moved there just wasn't political in an election year there just like wasn't political will to do it which is wild then I think that would have garnered quite a bit of pushback.
[20:33] I also ran an amendment a friend had been working on a fair share, some modernization of our tax brackets so to tax 500,000 more and million or more in revenue and that that became like a party that was like an inner party war.
[20:51] So there was like a four hour negotiation with leadership to try to like force that conversation.
[20:57] So yeah, I tend to pick the fights but
[21:01] Debbie Reynolds: well what things are you that you could talk about? What's on the horizon for you? What are you thinking about now?
[21:10] Monique Priestley: Yeah, I mean I think the big ones totally. I think the big ones are surveillance pricing for sure. So there was a bill the Senate introduced but I from the sounds of it I don't think they were ready for the lobbying fight very heavily related to data privacy and so surveillance pricing.
[21:26] I had introduced a people first chatbot model bill so for companion chatbots,
[21:32] AI bot bots. And so I would reintroduce that for sure.
[21:36] And then I really governments privacy and AI use is a big one. I'm a vice chair of the Joint Information Technology Oversight Committee and we are just learning about systems being being announced publicly at conferences like our involvement in Project Blastwing that it doesn't seem like many people that should know that we are in that know that.
[22:02] And so real concerns about our state government's use of data and when it decides to share what access people have to it and and then whether or not we're Just hooking AI layers and systems on top of all of our data products.
[22:21] No, I had introduced a Information Practices act and we did not move that. There wasn't kind of the will for that this year. But definitely want to focus on that and then lobbying reform and Citizens United related stuff because the amount of lobbyists,
[22:39] like I think in March I had tracked on H121. I think at the time there had been something like,
[22:47] I think it was 425 registered lobbyists at the time we were doing that. And then this year it was like 625. And not sure if that's related, but definitely could be.
[22:56] But There was like 1250 registered lobbyists this year,
[23:00] like way outweighing at any given time there was like 600, 700 registered lobbyists. And so the.
[23:06] And that's fine. Like that is a thing that plays out at every state house.
[23:10] But I don't know how aware even legislators are in that number and in who's running around the building.
[23:17] We don't have transparency on how much money is being spent per bill and who's spending it. And I've talked to reporters about like what's your favorite state to report on to be able to have transparency?
[23:27] And so trying to take lessons from what reporters are seeing as well as like what other states are doing for sure.
[23:35] Debbie Reynolds: Now are you working with other states to share information? Give me a little bit of information about that?
[23:42] Monique Priestley: Yeah, for sure. So that I think that has like dramatically increased since the last time we talked. So I'm still involved in like James Maroney,
[23:50] senator from Connecticut, is very much has been running a group of, a multi state group of legislators.
[23:57] We went from working kind of being hosted by civil society group to being hosted by Princeton's technology kind of lab. And so that's continued and we're trying to figure out the best way to move forward on that.
[24:11] In the meantime, like I became a co chair of the AI Task Force for Future Caucus and I've just joined other kind of advisory boards and very much,
[24:22] very much increased the network of like civil society, academics, technologists,
[24:27] both from doing these podcasts as well as like attending so love conferences and things like that. Like people have just like come out of the woodwork to say like I'd like to help or I'd like to be a witness which like if anybody's hearing this, please reach out.
[24:41] It is invaluable. We're so up against like a wall, an army when it comes to information and we don't have the staffing capacity to know all the things.
[24:51] So even just those people who I'm like, I can call and be like, hey, can you explain what like zero knowledge proof is to me in a min or an hour and then I can at least have a head start and like asking questions like those that's invaluable and that's just like kind of like taken off.
[25:10] Debbie Reynolds: Well, that's great. I'm glad that people are reaching out to you and glad that you're.
[25:15] You sent me a couple of back calls so I've been able to answer those as well.
[25:20] Happy,
[25:20] always happy we're back call network.
[25:24] Always happy to be involved in good trouble.
[25:27] Monique Priestley: So yeah, for sure.
[25:29] Debbie Reynolds: Well, what types of things do you want to share in terms of what messages would you like to share with people about just your experience? Because this to me is like what I learned,
[25:44] I think just working with you in Vermont. And then also my other government work that I've done with the US Department of Commerce. To me it's like Survivor, like the government edition sort of.
[25:54] It really is.
[25:56] And then it's like what I realized,
[25:58] and I'm sure you probably have the same feeling is that this is like an inch by inch battle.
[26:03] Monique Priestley: It's like, oh, totally.
[26:05] Debbie Reynolds: You want like a Hail Mary or you want to be able to get like a field goal or I don't even know anything about football really. But you want to be able to make a lot, a ton of progress.
[26:15] But a lot of times it's just that those inches and so you have to keep fighting inch by inch. But what do you think?
[26:22] Monique Priestley: Yeah, and that's. So this year was really hard for me in that way. I mean it's all been hard, but in that like I vote. I ended up voting for the privacy billing committee so that I could report it on the floor.
[26:36] And I had a lot of really hard discussions with my chair and sometimes vice chair vote a lot with my chair where when nobody else was around, just having heart to hearts on like how ****** up everything was and, and just being like I'm not okay with this.
[26:53] Like I'm not okay sacrificing integrity and just in a lot of ways because,
[26:58] because when I say that, because it's not.
[27:01] Sometimes the shooting for the Hail Mary thing is like there are negotiations, sure. But when the negotiations aren't on good faith and it's like threats to the governor to veto the bill and there's nothing based in like logic and people aren't able to explain and reason that feels like that's not a negotiation.
[27:21] That's just bullying. Like, that's just manipulation of the system.
[27:25] And so those are the moments where I have a really hard time going along with it. So on the floor,
[27:31] we had a roll call vote, and only three of us voted no on the privacy bill, including myself.
[27:37] And I had worked with the clerk to figure out, like, we're only supposed to talk for, like, a minute.
[27:43] Well, three. Three sentences, maybe not even a minute.
[27:46] And I had written a speech that was a page, and I was like, am I gonna get in trouble? Are they gonna use rules to get me to stop talking?
[27:53] I have to say my piece because I haven't been able to, because I've been trying to go along with my colleagues and show respect to my chair and things like that.
[28:02] And so I ended up giving a very long speech, which I found out, you know, rules that would make it okay for me to do that. And I wanted to signal to, like, Massachusetts to Maine, to other states, to civil society,
[28:15] like, this wasn't okay. And also, I put in a speech that there were entities that were lobbying and putting pressure on us. That was literally just bullying.
[28:25] And that sets a precedent. So, like, how are we supposed to pass strong consumer protection bills, like AI Bills,
[28:31] if we're only at the end of the day, making decisions based on will the governor be threatened? Will there be threats that the governor will veto the bill based on pressure of people who are in his ear?
[28:42] People ask, like, why do legislators do this? It's a lot of it. So much of it is politics. It's just like, who has the influence there?
[28:50] So much of my day during session is checking in with experts, trying to, like, learn all the things as much as I can, fire hose style.
[29:00] And then we get to the privacy bills or AI bills, and then it's a lot of, like,
[29:05] it all matters. Who's lined up for witnesses, who says the things, who says the lies. In some cases, like, it definitely caught that.
[29:14] And so having a network of people to that signal, like you, and be like, hey, this person just said this thing that doesn't feel right. Like, can you give me more background on that thing?
[29:25] Or can you? In a lot of cases,
[29:27] so many people like you, very last minute, I had people threatened to not testify. So I was like, I have to fill this gap, like, really fast. And sometimes that's on the fly.
[29:36] Sometimes that's in, like, five minutes. I need somebody else to testify because somebody had to step down.
[29:40] And so,
[29:42] yeah, it's just like, having that bench is so incredibly Important.
[29:46] Hearing the ideas from everybody is so important because you never know what you're not hearing from people.
[29:53] Had people come forward about specific things like accessibility that nobody else was talking about and wanted to make sure that that was heard. So there's so many different elements and otherwise we're part time folks without the expertise up against usually on these bills,
[30:12] completely packed room where we're surrounded by lobbyists and so and hardly ever are we surrounded by the people and, or by advocates in civil society because they generally can't afford to be there and to fly in from D.C.
[30:29] and things like that. So yeah, it's all hands on deck and like really takes a village for these bills.
[30:37] Debbie Reynolds: Oh my gosh. Well, I, first of all, I have to commend you for your work. I didn't understand again, before I did my government stuff and before just getting to know you, I just didn't understand how hard it was.
[30:52] I mean from the outside you think, well, why don't they do this? Or why don't they do this? And it literally is like a slug fest,
[31:01] Monique Priestley: literally running through the building sometimes and hiding your closets, phone calls and all the things. Yeah, it's ridiculous.
[31:08] Debbie Reynolds: Exactly, exactly. But I commend you, I commend you for doing this hard work because I think to me, people who are people who do this work and do it best are very passionate about it and know why it's important to people.
[31:24] So it's not even a personal thing. So I just commend you for your work and we support you. And so you have a,
[31:32] you have 163 countries of people listening to you right now.
[31:37] And so yeah, we happy to help you feel that bench, for sure.
[31:42] Thankfully. Well, it's funny because when you asked me,
[31:45] gave me a backhaul, I jumped in and I was laughing. I was like, they aren't, the lobbyists aren't going to call me.
[31:51] Yeah, they are going to threat me. So.
[31:54] Monique Priestley: Well, yeah, that's, I mean talk about standing up for people. But it's also democracy. Like the more I learn about this, the more it's just like I don't, if we don't address this stuff, I don't understand how we have a democracy moving forward.
[32:08] So like,
[32:09] and talking to people internationally very much has been the same conversation. So it's, it's wild how interconnected all of our countries are and all of our states are and all of us individually, like this affects everyone globally, even if it's the little state of Vermont, which is wild.
[32:26] Debbie Reynolds: Exactly. I totally agree with that. Oh, my gosh. Well, thank you so much for being on the show.
[32:32] We'll definitely be supporting you, watching you.
[32:35] You have my phone. You have my number. You can text me, call me anytime. Happy to be involved, in good trouble to help you out and to educate people, because I feel like that education.
[32:45] There's so much that can be done when people don't understand.
[32:49] So I feel like that understanding is like a critical piece.
[32:53] Monique Priestley: Yes.
[32:54] That's where me trying to be educated on all the things all the time and having people school me on stuff is so helpful, because if I can't understand the nuance, like, if somebody doesn't understand a thing, I might have to explain it to them, like, five different ways in committee in order for one to click.
[33:13] And we actually had that on the definition of biometric, people weren't understanding certain things. And finally I was like, wait, my watch. Like,
[33:21] like. Anyway, it was like this from a moment where I was, like, running through all the things people had told me to be like, what is the one example that's going to click here?
[33:28] Debbie Reynolds: Well, you're doing a great job, excellent job. So definitely keep up the good work, and we're all rooting for you and supporting you and your work. It's incredible.
[33:37] Monique Priestley: Thanks, Debbie.
[33:39] Debbie Reynolds: All right. All right. We'll talk soon. Thank you.
[33:42] Monique Priestley: Okay, bye.
[33:42] Debbie Reynolds: Okay, bye,
