The Daily Zeitgeist - There Are BETTER Forms Of Democracy? (with George Cheung & Colin Cole) 10.08.24

Episode Date: October 8, 2024

In episode 1755, Jack and Miles are joined by the co-hosts of the podcast, The Future of Our Former Democracy, George Cheung & Colin Cole, to discuss… Big Questions About Polarization And Our Political System, What Is Single Transferable Vote, How Do We Make A More Representative Democracy? The Context of Civil Rights In Northern Ireland, An Argument To Dismantle "Winner-Take-All" Two Party Systems and more! Quiz: If America Had Six Parties, Which Would You Belong To? LISTEN: Nissan Altima by DoechiiSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I was holding the baby and I farted on the couch and the leather of the couch was a sonic created a sonic augmentation. I thought you were gonna say it was like discolored or something. No, no, no, no, no, no. It was merely the fabric of it all. It took it to a sonic place that it was just like amplified. It was like screaming into a megaphone. And then I got, I got yelled at from across the house. But then, wow. Then I asked the baby, I'm like, I was like, I said in Japanese, I'm

like, well, not all I see. And then like I said, farts are funny, right? And he just went, nice, the culture alive. We're farters in this house. He gets it. There's a farce. The image of there being like an iridescent stain or something on the on the weather. It's just like a mindfuck fruit.

Like a dried oil slick. Why is this one strip sun faded so badly? It's like, remember those hologram stickers from the 90s? When I changed my viewing angle, it has like a different shade or sheen to it. Yeah, now it's green. Now it's like a phosphorescent pink. You can see a face in it.

Yeah, I was eating shrimp tails this weekend. Oh, man. Hey, everybody. Oh man. Bo and Yang and I famously missed our 400th episode here on Los Culturistas, but we are ready to reveal the iconic 400. Who is on the list? Does it matter? No. Will it be fun? Yeah.

There might even be a surprise or two in there, so listen carefully. Listen to Los Culturistas on Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey friends, I'm Jessica Kapschoff. And this is Camilla Luddington. And we have a new podcast, call it what it is. You may know us from Graceland Memorial, but did you know that we are actually besties in real life?

And as all besties do, we navigate the highs and lows of life together. Big or small, we're there. And now here we are, opening up the friendship circle to you. Listen to Call It What It Is on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In California, during the summer of 1975, within the span of 17 days and less than 90 miles, two women did something no other woman had done before,

tried to assassinate the President of the United States. One was the protege of Charles Manson. 26-year-old Lynette Fromm, nicknamed Squeaky. The other, a middle-aged housewife working undercover for the FBI. Identified by police as Sarah Jean Moore. The story of one strange and violent summer, this season on the new podcast RIP Current.

Hear episodes of RIP Current early and completely ad free and receive exclusive bonus content by subscribing to iHeart True Crime Plus only on Apple Podcasts. Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16th, 2017 was assassinated. Crooks everywhere unearth the plot plot to murder a one woman wiki leaks. She exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a Mafia state. Listen to Crooks Everywhere on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

To listen to new episodes one week early and 100% ad free, subscribe to the iHeart True Crime Plus channel, available exclusively on Apple podcasts. My name is Brandon Kyle Goodman. I'm a black, gay, non-binary author, TV writer, actor, and I'm messy. But not in the way you think. Messy as in I'm human and flawed. I'm on a mission to destroy shame around sex. And the only way to do that is to talk about sex.

So that's what we'll do on my brand new podcast, Tell Me Something Messy. Join me on Tell Me Something Messy with brand new episodes every Thursday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. ["I HEART RADIO"] Hello, the internet, and welcome to season 359, episode 2 of DIR DAILY'S IKE EYES. The production of iHeartRadio.

This is a podcast where we take a deep dive into America's shared consciousness. And it is Tuesday, October 8th, 2024. Mm hmm. Ten eight. Guess what? It's National Parogy Day. It's National, it says American Touch Tag Day, which I'm guessing that's just playing tag. But that's like when they're like, oh, they call it soccer over there.

It's touch tag, I guess, to the rest of the world. I'm going to touch tag day. I don't know why it's it's, it's usually all this. These national day calendars are typically from the perspective of America. You know, I enjoy like some of the British isms of like, this is, you know, our words, but that one just, we fixed it. Tag.

Guys, just tag. It's cleaner. Yeah, exactly. And then fluffernutter. It's national fluffernutter day for those that love the fluffernutter. Sure. Why not? There you go.

You can have it. Big fluffernutter. My name is Jack O'Brien, AKA, why do flies suddenly appear every time Trump is near? He's rotting. No, couldn't be migrants, dude. That one courtesy of Halcyon Salad on the Discord in honor of Trump seeing a fly during a speech and saying, oh, it's a fly. Wonder where, wonder where they came from.

Like he has a conspiracy theory that the fly, we're not sure entirely. Couldn't be that he is decomposing like the bad guy in men in black could not be it. Maybe it's because it's the first time he's ever been out of doors around people who aren't carrying his golf bags, but he did seem confused by that fly. Hates the fly. I'm thrilled to be joined, as always,

by my co-host, Mr. Miles Gray! Hey, it's Miles Gray, and look, in honor of a wonderful weekend for my dear Arsenal Football Club, what about some Arsenal related AKAs? It's Miles Gray, AKA Dechtrend Rice, AKA Mikel Artrenda, AKA Leantrend Trossard, AKA Take Trendo Tomiasu. And obviously I'm the Shogun with no gun, the Lord of Lancashire, the man with Chronic Podcast, but Miles Gray.

Thank you so much for having me back for the season. Miles. Tucketrendo? We've never done that as a trending title. I don't think so, yeah. No. That is something we- Tucketrendo, yeah. Shall have to remedy. Anyways, Miles, we are thrilled to be joined in our third and fourth seats by the co-hosts of the wonderful podcast that you must go listen to right now, The Future of Our Former Democracy.

They are the executive director and the director of policy and outreach respectively for the racial justice organization, More Equitable Democracy. Please welcome George Chung and Colin Cole. Hey, hey, hey, welcome. Hey, welcome. Hey, guys. Thanks so much for stopping by. It's really bright in here. Wow.

Yeah. We like to keep the lights on. We like to keep the lights on. We have invited you into just a blank white space. We record in heaven. A void. The heaven, the white void of old Mac versus PC commercials. Or what was the one, what, in Willy Wonka, where are they at when they go into that

all white space? Oh, they're in the TV, I think. Oh, that's in the TV. Inside the TV. Yeah. Well, inside the TV. Colin Cole, AKA Mike TV. Oh, you're Mike TV?

Yeah. I've always been a little bit of whatever the guy is who gets sucked into the tube. Myself. Oh. Something German. Yeah, yeah. Augustus Blu. Yeah.

Augustus something. Come on. Nail it. Come on. It'll come to you. I said Augustus Blu. Don't make me Google Willy Wonka German, kid. I mixed it up. My brain is a blender. Augustus Gloop. Glo it. Come on. It'll come to you. I said a Google Willy Wonka German.

I mixed it up. My brain is a glup. And there it is. Shout out to Super Producer Victor bringing it. Yeah. Liked the glup a little too much. Maybe not, some would say. That is a movie I recently watched with my children.

And it has like 30 really good minutes and it is just coasting off of our memory of those 30 really good minutes. Oh really? Yeah, there's a lot of it that's just like, uh-huh, all right. Like after they leave the big candy world and go on the boat ride, it does kind of grind to a halt a little bit. There's other moments, but like they are fleeting. I would say.

And that's just my thing. A shame. I just remember always hating when he got all mad at Charlie. I was like, dude, what you're supposed to be cool. Will you like, and as a kid, I didn't know what to make sense of that character's experience. I'm like, dude, this guy's an asshole. Let's just turn this off.

I thought you were going to go. You never saw the end. Yeah. I was like,'s an asshole. Let's just turn this off. I thought you were going to go punch up the factory. You just turned it off, you never saw the end. Yeah, I was like, what an asshole. I was just, oh, not worth it. Did you see him? It came with a real turn, huh, ma? Yeah. Yeah.

George, Colin, thank you so much for joining us from the great Northwest. Yes. You guys are in Seattle. Is that correct? Yep. Am I pronouncing that right? Just keep going and take a left. Past Redding, keep going.

Yeah, keep going. Keep going, keep on going. Is it called the five up there or what? No, it's I-5 up here. It's just I-5, yeah. It's an LA, maybe San Francisco thing. Nobody else awards highways the importance of being the five. Yeah. It's an LA nobody else awards highways. The importance of being V five.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, but it is an important interstate, you know, we love our interstates. Don't we folks? We love them. Yeah. That's why like the 10 also deserves respect going from C to shining C. Oh, right.

They're all given the, the, I think in LA and only at LA. I've never heard of it. I wonder what the history is of our inability to just, I guess it, because we always want to speak differently than other people. It's a remnant of surfer culture. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Take 101 dude over to the 405. They catch the 118 over hit me, meet you up in Granada Hills. Uh, but yeah, anyway, that's probably not as important as about, then what we're about to talk about today. But I still wanted to mention that. Yeah. Like I said, listeners should listen to this podcast and then also immediately go listen to the Future of our Former Democracy.

Great title, great podcasts. We are going to get into a little bit of what your podcast is about. It's about how our current political system is like, there, there are some things that I was taking for granted about our current political system. You guys use the, this is water metaphor at the, at the beginning of like, yeah, this is just what we've always assumed is how it is and always will be. And that there are some things that can be better, maybe. I like the sound of that.

Yeah. So we're going to get into all of that, but first we want to get to know you both a little bit better by asking you each, what is something from your search history that is revealing about who you are. George, why don't we start with you? All right. I'm going to play to my stereotypes. I'm a gay man and I can't get enough of trying to figure out

if I can get Kylie Minogue tickets that go on sale tomorrow. Okay. For all you other people in Seattle who are also gay men, it's on sale next week, please Kylie won't be coming through to Seattle Go ahead go go have at it But I need my front row Kylie Minogue seats because she hasn't come to do a tour of the US for a long time So gotta you know, keep up the appearance how how long has it?

I mean, I feel like Kylie Minogue's just one of those huge artists that I'm always like, yeah, it's Kylie Minogue, but it's been a long time since she's been stateside? She had a residence in Vegas, and of course I had to go do that, but she hasn't been to like around for, I think maybe almost, better part of a decade.

Definitely pre-pandemic. Got it, got it, got it, got it. And Did your fandom go all the way back to locomotion, Hera? Yes. Maybe it was those feelings that I got early on. I'm like, I'm feeling a little different. Some of our videos were a little edgy. I'm like, all right. I like this for not quite sure what reasons. Definitely, I do the locomotion as much as I can, really. What's up with Dani Minogue?

Dani is also- I'm always like the lesser Minogue. I hate to say that, but you know. She has her own career too. And yeah, the last time I went to Sydney, they had World Pride there. She kind of made a cameo appearance with her more famous sister. So it was like, you know, really in- George, you're going to Australia to even see. Oh, no, no, no. This is last time I went to Australia. OK, it just happened.

OK, I was just trying to gauge your Minogue fandom here. And I was like, oh, it's pretty high. We're going down under to see. Yes, yes, yes. How about you, Colin? What's something you from your search history? Yeah, so I'll also play a stereotype. I'm a huge nerd. And the phrase that I searched for was Warhammer, Word of Hermes. Because I'm a big fan of the deepest lore, you know, in all of my fictional franchises

I participated in. I'm going through a Warhammer book right now that made reference to a starship, The Word of Hermes, and I wanted to look it up on the Warhammer Wikipedia to learn more about it. Wow. Well, man, I'm like, I played the game a little bit and then I realized, I'm like, oh, there's a whole other level to this that I am not engaging with. But yeah, that's OK. It's it's it's a weirdly big IP.

It spans back like 50 years. It's a tabletop board game. There's hundreds of books. There's video games. There's like a whole like mock history to the actual setting, you know, 20,000 years of backstory. Right.

It's been thought out to get there. It's pretty cool if you're into that sort of thing. I just remember going to like in this hobby shop at my house as a kid and I loved miniatures and I didn't know that it was a tabletop game, but I was like, yeah, I want to like, to me, they're like, these are the better version than plastic army men.

And I was like, I want these. And I had like a little like piece of paper that was like fake Astro turf that I put my little Warhammer figures in. And someone's like, oh, you play Warhammer? I'm like, what? I'm like, these are my little dolls that I set up. Then I was like, my entry point, I'm like, oh, it's a game.

This makes sense why it was sold in this shop, not just like these stationary toys. Yeah, me on the other hand, so I grew up playing video games, building my own computer. I played Dungeons and Dragons and I always thought Warhammer's too nerdy even for me, though, and I like avoided it. And then during pandemic, a couple of friends got into it and dragged me along. And then now here I am, neck deep.

Right. Right. OK. But did they really drag you along? Right. I got into it for for social activity only. I wanted nothing to do with it. And now I stick around. Yeah. Now you're like word of Hermes. Tell me about the Kingdom of Dust. That's right. The soul jackal, the pyro domon, the whole thing.

Damn. I know what all those words mean. Uh, the, so it started out as a miniature war game. It like, that's right. Again, that was satirizing Margaret Thatcher and conservativism in the UK, uh, and envisioned a future world where. Like conservatives, like ultra conservatives became that like desperate humanity of stars and humans are the bad guys and they're out trying to make war on the alien races and it was a big critique of of Margaret

Thatcher and I'm assuming it's always taken in that respect every time it's played today correct that's right they never have to put out press releases to say hey this is a satire if you think that these are the good guys, you misunderstand the setting. Please don't come to our events in Nazi regalia. They never have to do that. It's like, I'm a big fan of Warhammer and its messages. I'm also for austerity measures every time they come up.

I love austerity. Love it. It's like Monopoly was originally a work of satire that was making fun of how America operates. And Parker Brothers took it over and we were like, what if instead that was the good guy? It's like how Rocky changed from the first one where he's poor, and then in the fourth one he's driving a Lamborghini and the richest man in America. They're just like, this is actually more fun, right?

Got to catch up with the times. America. We're the best. We do good work. We're number one. We are, and it turns out we are. What is something, let's stick with you, Colin, that you think is underrated? Underrated?

Or you can start with overrated. No, well, I'll stick here. IPAs, I think start with overrated. We can know well, I'll stick here IPA's I think are overrated. Mmm. Yeah, I like I like But why does it have like why not have a stout sometimes? Why not have a Guinness to do our Irish subject here? Why not? Why don't I have a cider or a sour? Like why does it always have to be a You know a triple hate hazy Imperial IPA? Yeah. As bitter as it can get.

Yeah, it's bloods. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I felt like I feel like in the beginning of it, it was like the hack for dudes whose partners are like, don't drink so much at the bar. They're like, I'm just having beers. And it's like, yeah, I'm having these like nine percent IPAs. Who will try and stop me. And then like that kind of became like the reason to drink IPAs. And I was like, for me, I was like, this shit is not man.

This is too hoppy for daddy. I can't have this. Like I'm not, this is not hitting my taste buds. Right. So yeah, I feel like it's, it's, it's coming back around. I feel like every L in LA, there's a lot of triple hazy IPAs that people are. Triple hazy IPAs that people are going for. Triple hazy IPAs? Yeah.

I was one of those people who was always checking out the alcohol by volume and being like, I think I'm going to like this one that's 12. That has the big number. The alcohol content of a whiskey. Right. But yeah, and now I don't drink anymore as a consequence. And the like, hopwaters, I do enjoy those. Hopwaters are great. Yeah, the s I don't drink anymore as a consequence and the like hop waters. I do enjoy those Yeah, I just discovered that house ago. It's amazing. Oh, yeah, I'm gonna eat us hoppy

Yeah, I feel like hoppy quencher or whatever cool that it's delicious. It's like the hoppy becomes tropical to a man when you That's what I love about it. That's that's right. Yeah, how you, George? What's something that you think is underrated? I'm gonna go with two TV shows that were cut before they were done. I gotta say, Freaks and Geeks and My So-Called Life. Okay. Gotta go to the youth angst, people who are just about to launch their careers

in super big ways. Maybe they had to cut because they were all offered amazing roles in amazing other places. The casting was too good. It was too good. It was like, here are these amazing people who, yes, of course they went on to amazing things, but the shows were so good.

I identify with so many of them, especially the mathletes in Freaks. I was that kid. It was like, strumming my life with your fingers. I like that. You know, my life with your song. Yeah. Yeah. I was like, this is me. I feel see you. So I miss those. That whole era had shows like Firefly Arrested Development. So many good shows that got killed before their time. Yeah. I'm waiting for the reboot. Some of those shows. So can you make it happen?

You all live in L.A. So just like write the script and like talk to the people. I'm sorry. You know, we're kind of we have a problem with reboots in L.A. right now. It's too much. It's at the expense of letting new things be talked about all the time. Now, this one's this one's geeks and freaks. Oh, so we're actually foregrounding the geeks.

And it's starting a very sad, old Jason Siegel as a burnt out high school teacher. And a not so busy Phillips these days, are we? She's so good in Girls 5 Ever. Oh, yeah. Busy Phillips is so good in Girls 5 Ever. If people haven't seen that. Five of a busy Phillips is so good in girls five of them. If people haven't seen that. Yeah, I came into this episode thinking that we were surely almost out of IP and now not

just the talk of the IPA is but we got freaky geeks. We reboot the my so called life. Warhammer only has one film. I think is that right? And Henry Cavill is working on it, actually. He's trying to make it a whole thing. Thank God. Thank God.

Yeah. I was sweating. Also, fuck, I was hoping we could option that. First person with that idea. I just go to bookstores, and I just try and get the rights to everything I see on the shelves. That's kind of how studios do it. Hey, kid, what are you reading there?

What is that? What is it? Is it good? You know who has the rights to that? All right. Calvin and Hobbes. George, what's something you think is overrated? Oh, people are going to come at me. I'm going to have to say pickleball.

Oh, well, hold on. How old do you think our audience is now? Come on. Oh. Wait, hold on. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I know the grandparents out there might be getting mad at it. I feel like younger people who like pickleball aren't as militant. But yeah, is it like, is it everywhere in Seattle too?

I mean, it's encroaching on my tennis courts and we have to have some words. So I'm like a purist. So, you know, off my long slash tennis court. Yeah. Yeah. So is there a lot of lot of tension between the tennis players and then the encroaching pickleballers who are like, I'm gonna use a third of this? Can you go? I mean, they're my more enemies. I mean, yeah, okay. I have to say so right. Okay, good to know. Good to know.

Just if you're not athletic enough to play tennis, they have doubles, which is like, you can play doubles without moving around very much at all. That's me. That's me. Yeah. Yeah. Like doubles. I'll teach you. I could teach you, but I'd have to charge. That's what I have to say. Right. Thank you. How about you, Colin? What's something you think is underrated?

I don't know if this is true in California where you all are from, but around most of the country I feel like winter is underrated People don't like being cold I get it driving in Like ice and slush kind of sucks. I get it. But also you get to you get to wear cool jackets I'm a sucker for a cool jacket You get to have a sweater. You just get to have more variety. You know, I just wear a t-shirt and shorts every day.

I like being able to switch it up. I think fires are really cool. They're too hot in the summer. There's nothing like sitting out on the porch on a cold day with a hot drink. Like some winter experiences are unparalleled. And you are now singing Miles's life with you. Oh, my God. Yeah, right now I have tears coming down my face.

What's the coolest jacket you on, Miles? Oh, oh, oh, no, I don't have it. I'm I have a look. I grew up in the San Fernando Valley, which the average temperature throughout the year is basically like 85 degrees, you know, like essentially. And I, since I was a kid, I always yearned for seasons. So whenever I have the chance to go somewhere like, I mean, we might have to go this place at this time of year. It's pretty cold.

I'm like, yes, yes, yes. I want to wear a jacket. I want to know cold. Yeah, I don't have one that I'm really proud of, to be honest. I've like, I want to get a jacket. I want to know cold. Yeah, I don't have one that I'm really proud of. To be honest, I've like, I want to get a nice winter coat. But there's no need for that in LA. So I, you know, I'll just get yelled at for buying another jacket. I'm not going to use but I love a jacket. I love a scarf.

I love outside in the cold. It's all very Yeah, I'm a huge fan. And it like it to your point, when the weather, you know, just like when it's hot, there are activities you have to do because it's so hot and you socialize differently when the weather is super hot. And I think in the cold, it's very similar to. Yeah. Yeah, I love that. I love that. I love winter. It's properly rated. But yes, I feel like we should embrace it even further. Oh, yeah.

How are you two coolest jackets? I got an orange bomber jacket, going like brown we should embrace it even further. Hell. Yeah. Hell, I do. Two coolest jackets. I got an orange bomber jacket, like brown accents and some like reflectors on it. OK. And then a Alaska Airlines blue trench coat raincoat hooded thing, a parka kind of thing. It's more like a business like like not quite parka. OK. But like you can wear it with a suit. You can wear. Yeah. Oh, wow.

Aren't we doing well? My my my grandfather flew for Alaska Airlines. And so I had some connections and got one of their surplus like uniform jackets. Was that like a really a thing where you're like, hey, can I get that jacket? Or you just like came up on you like,'re not gonna miss this. It was the first one So for a long time I've wanted like a nice raincoat I have like ones that you can wear with a t-shirt or whatever but we're into it wearing like a big poofy rain jacket with like a

Buttoned down shirt and a tie like you kind of feel like a fool and I wanted something nice and they're all like 2,000 bucks and it was Or they didn't look very nice like they weren't rain jackets they weren't waterproof they didn't have a hood and I've been complaining to this about about this to George actually for like months and no no years years. One day we're getting on an Alaska Airlines flight together and I'm like that jacket that's what I want and then and then I was like how do I get one of those jackets and George said I don't know why

you email the CEO or something and then I thought wait a minute yeah my my grandpa used to fly maybe I just do email the CEO and I said hey my grandpa used to fly for you blah blah blah can you guys help me out and they dear mr. airlines really I write to you today and I was just saying that to like get him to stop talking about it. So yeah, why don't you just email the CEO. CEO. Bye George. You do have quite an idea.

All right. Let's, let's take a quick break and we're going to come back and we're going to talk about the future of our former democracy and, you know, how we could maybe change a couple things. We'll be right back. Hey, everybody. The time has finally come. This week, starting Monday, October 7th, going daily through Friday, October 11th, Bowen Yang and I, Matt Rogers, are unveiling the iconic 400. Yes, these are the top 400 people in all of culture, and we're unveiling all of them.

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Christian! No! She is not a Christian! Don't! Happily flying a pride flag. Also, there might be a little bit of a surprise or two in there. So listen carefully. Hint, hint, Friday. Listen to Lost Culture East us on Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network. Definitely Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16th 2017 was murdered. There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate. My name is Manuel de Lilla.

I am one of the hosts of Crooks Everywhere, a podcast that unearths the plot to murder a one woman WikiLeaks. Tafni exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state. And she paid the ultimate price. Listen to Crooks Everywhere on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. To listen to new episodes one week early and 100% ad free, subscribe to the iHeartTrueCrimePlus

channel available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. My name is Brandon Kyle Goodman. I'm a black, gay, non-binary author, TV writer, actor, and I'm messy. But not in the way you think. Messy as in I'm human and flawed. I'm on a mission to destroy shame around sex. And the only way to do that is to talk about sex. So that's what we'll do on my brand new podcast, Tell Me Something Messy.

Okay, let's play this messy round of Smash or Pass. Okay, here it is, Smash or Pass, spit play. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know how I feel about bodily fluids being on me, unless it's... Oh! Ah! Because we're doing the pull-out method.

We're living on the edge. Oh my god. I was not expecting that. Baby, like I always say, if you know how to work that body, that sexualness, and that heart, you're unstoppable. Embrace your power. That's really what we're going to do on this show.

Join me on Tell Me Something Messy, with brand new episodes every Thursday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey, it's Mike and Ian. We're the hosts of How to Do Everything or wherever you listen to podcasts. to date inside the Bermuda Triangle. We can't help you, but we will find someone who can. Listen to the How to Do Everything podcast on iHeartRadio. I'm Maria Konikova. And I'm Nate Silver.

And our podcast, Risky Business, is a show about making better decisions. Both Nate and I are journalists who moonlight as poker players. We've both won and I have to say lost hundreds of thousands of dollars playing poker. And poker is a lens that we're going to use to approach this entire show because poker isn't just about playing cards. It's actually about how to make good decisions. It's an entire framework for thinking about the world. In addition to poker we'll be talking about the wide world of gambling, so sports betting, for example, plus the news, politics, it is an election year, and personal decisions too.

Like whether I should call a plumber or fix my shower myself. Tune into Risky Business every Thursday. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And we're back. We're back. So George, Colin, like I said, the podcast is really good. You kind of start out talking about this idea that we are super accustomed to this one feature of our political process that doesn't need to be this way and in fact when other countries have changed this

feature they've been much happier not 100% A pluses across the board as that will never be the case with politics, but much happier and more functional. But I did just want to like start out by asking why now everything seems to be going so well with our current political system. No, I mean, when our conversation was starting out, you know, we don't want to spend all our time talking about how things bad because I think most of our listeners know that. But we did start out in a place of, we're facing an election where the stakes are kind of more of the same or burn it all down and fascism and you know, you guys even pointed out that like our

current situation is terrifying to people in other countries. The assassination attempts, the multiple- Plural, yes. The politicizing of those assassination attempts and just the rhetoric is all pretty scary. What are you hearing from people who are keeping one eye on our current electoral politics? I think everyone understands that there are some huge challenges, and yet we don't really have the imagination to think about how to solve these problems. Like, we feel stuck, and all we can talk about is like, get this one person elected, and somehow that'll save

our democracy. No one believes that, but we're kind of grasping for straws in terms of what do we actually do to get out of this vicious cycle that we're in. Maybe one quick aside in terms of the origin story. Like, we're really talking about our electoral system, how we cast our ballots and how those ballots are translated into seats. This all started in terms of our American electoral system well before we were even a country. Like we have to go way back to 1215. Ah, yes. Yes.

1215 is a signing of the Magna Carta where King John of England cedes just a little bit of control to this new parliament, essentially the English aristocracy. Like, you know, he relied on them for tax dollars to fight these foreign wars, and they kind of got fed up with having all their money taken away to fight a war that they didn't necessarily believe in. And so they demanded some power. Magna Carta get signed, no more absolute monarchy. They started elections in 1265 using essentially what we now know as a winner-take-all system where you select one top one wins and

We largely have not changed that system Since that time we as us as we were a former British colony. We essentially inherited all of those British English systems like the legal system is a British common British common law system, the electoral system's the same. And so we've never really had- To be fair, we did get rid of the wigs. That's true.

The barristers, we don't do that anyway. But I'm sorry, I mean- I mean, there's some things we should have kept because that was kind of fucking cool. I feel like, yeah, like lawyers wouldn't be total jackasses if they're like, dude, I gotta, sorry, I gotta- I gotta powder my wig, sorry. I'm not, I got to, I got to powder my wig.

I'm not going to be a hater. That would definitely make it more fun for sure. Yeah. And so, you know, I think what we have to do is start to allow ourselves to imagine other options. There are other countries, as you said, that have become democracies since we had, you know, since we've expanded the franchise and thought about these challenges of how do we do other than just elect a delegate to tell the king how we don't like his tax policy. Now we're trying to think about, okay,

now that the franchise has expanded well beyond just men with lots of property to lots of different people, and so you can't have a one-size-fits-all approach to representation, all these other countries have picked something else that allows for that representation for minority groups across the board to have real representation. And so being able to give ourselves permission to get beyond our American exceptionalism and say, we have things to learn from other places, other people, other societies. Why don't we understand what choices they had and what decisions they

made? Yeah, it's very American to do the winner take all like Americans most comfortable in a casino, you know, a casino, we love a story that makes it all on the line. People put it all on the line one in a million. And we just follow the one person out of a million who actually wins to tell ourselves that. But yeah, we love high stakes stories. Right.

And yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt, Collin. Oh, okay. Well, so zooming in on some of the problems. So we all know the electoral college sucks. We're not going to talk about that so much unless we want to. But talking about- We're bought in on that idea already. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We're ready for some alternatives, man. Right. But when we talk about electing people to Congress or your state legislature or your city council, I think most folks know gerrymandering is bad. Maybe you don't know the details of how it works, but you know it's manipulating the lines, manipulating the systems to get the outcomes that you want. People are concerned about that, and folks are concerned about this idea of polarization, that our two sides are getting further apart and they're starting to hate each other.

But there's not really many thoughtful ways about how to grapple with these problems. We just say, oh, we should elect more moderates. Like, we just need to find a voice to compromise more with the middle. Right. We need to draw the lines better. But all of these ideas are like kind of abstract. They're maybe not actually good. Maybe electing more moderates actually doesn't lead to more people feeling like their voices are heard. And, you know,

gerrymandering is kind of a reality. Like Democrats and progressives tend to live in cities. People of color tend to live in cities. More conservative white folks, working class folks often live in rural areas. Like, you can only manipulate the lines so much. And so, if those are the problems that you want to solve, you can't just do the current thing that we're doing better. The current thing that we're doing is the problem that leads to all of those outcomes.

Like, we have to come up with something different. And that's kind of what we're trying to explore in the podcast, is if we wanted to explore from with something different. And that's kind of what we're trying to explore in the podcast is if we wanted to explore from a totally different starting point, how to conduct elections and how to build our government, how can we make some of those problems obsolete? Right. Like, you know, I'm always struck when I was listening to the podcast and when we were talking on our yesterday's episode, just sort of given what our options are

in the United States and how a lot of people don't fit under, you know, these gigantic umbrellas of just either of these parties, right. And they, the discourse is, or the rhetoric we hear so much is like, you know, you have this sacred right to vote, you know, and you can vote and you're able to vote and that's sacred. But, you know, as listening to your show, the other the other part of this that I feel like we don't talk about is what about do we have a right to be represented? Because it's one thing to say, here's the fucking

menu, which one do you want? And you're like, well, actually, according to my dietary restrictions, I've none of these actually, is there something else like no, sorry, so you can have, you know, some kind of terrible reaction to what's on offer or just not not engage into the process at all. What I mean, is that something like we should really be thinking about is that it's not just about our ability that we can cast a vote, but that we also need to have some, we should have the right to have our own beliefs or values represented in the people that we do ultimately send to Washington to legislate.

Absolutely. George? Yeah, I was going to say that just to build off of that, the challenge of a winner-take-all system as it relates to folks of color is that our options are very limited. We have this Voting Rights Act landmark piece of legislation that obviously people died to get passed. And it's been interpreted that the only way that folks of color in particular or other minority groups that can have representation under this winner-take-all system is when we have, when we can draw majority minority districts. And that kind of makes sense at some level.

Like, okay, you put a lot of like-minded folks together into a district and they are more than 50 percent, they get representation. But ironically, that requires segregation. And do we want segregation as a means to an end in order to achieve better political representation? So I think it's really challenging to have that, as you mentioned, the right to vote when

that doesn't necessarily translate into real representation. Well, it depends on how intricately you draw those lines when you're gerrymandering. We can go really fine. There is a right way in. I'm really good at tracing. I have a very fine point pen. Right. There's also like two different dimensions of representation I'm really good at tracing. You have a very fine point, Penn.

There's also like two different dimensions of representation that we lack. I mean, there's a lot that we lack. There's two big ones. So one is just if you want to buy like the we live in a two party system, we don't like it. We want to envision something else. But like that's that's the world we live in today. And you know, there's millions of Republicans in California

who effectively have no representation. Their vote for president doesn't count because we know a Democrat's gonna win. Their vote for governor largely doesn't count. For the most part, the members of Congress and state legislature, it doesn't matter. We already know in advance a Democrat's gonna win those seats.

And the exact same thing is true for Democrats in Texas, in Alabama, in Mississippi, in Missouri. There's so many folks who just know five years in advance, I'm not going to elect someone who I care about at any level of government. So of course, people are like tuning out and not participating. But you actually have the same problem sort of within the parties. So like, I live in Washington State. I know ahead of time a Democrat's going to win governor and Congress, everything I was just saying. But as a result, that means the November election, even if you're a Democrat in Washington,

doesn't really matter because you know the Democrats going to win. The election that really matters is the primary, you know, a few months earlier that picks which Democrat is going to win. And primary elections are mostly older, wealthier, whiter folks. So you end up having a teeny tiny subset of the population pick the one option everyone else has to choose from in November. And so like in Washington, we have seven Democratic members of Congress. Six of them, I would say, come from sort of the moderate Hakeem Jeffries, Nancy Pelosi wing of the party. And one of them comes from sort of the AOC Bernie Sanders wing, even though consistently the Bernie Sanders wing of the party is about half of all the

Democrats in Washington state. So those people aren't represented either. Yeah. So the critiques I've heard from like a more representative system, what one of them is like, yeah, it might work for those like small homogenous European nations, but America, like, you know, America has racism. So how could how could that work here, which is a terrible argument, but it's especially interesting that you are drawing on Northern Ireland being the example because, yeah, I think it would just be instructive for people to hear about sort of the context of civil rights in Northern Ireland. Yeah, I'd be happy to start. I first started thinking about Northern Ireland, actually not well, I guess when I was a kid growing up during the time of the troubles in Northern Ireland, I just watched TV and I just thought, wow, white folks hating on white folks, like, I don't get it. Like, what

did they do that makes them so angry? Fast forward, I remember reading this kind of mostly born report that a colleague organization of ours came up with that were that was making the case for proportional representation. And they basically, it was like two lines that said, when communities don't have any recourse to have any voice whatsoever in policy, their only option in most times is political violence. And that's what happened in Northern Ireland. And that was resolved largely through power sharing that included a change to the electoral system as part of the 1998 agreement. And I thought, oh, what?

I remember a big to do about Senator George Mitchell and President Clinton at the time leaning in and getting folks to put down their arms and to come to an agreement. But it was kind of like a revelation, like, actually, there's so much to learn from. And as we started to kind of dig deeper and in the end, we ended up bringing a bunch of our colleagues to Ireland and Northern Ireland to observe the elections earlier this year. The parallels between our societies are so astounding that we essentially are both the creations of English settler colonialism. At some point, the English beat the socks off of the Irish elite.

They fled and basically they started, the English started sending tens of thousands of people to Northern Ireland, to this region called Ulster to essentially populate it and control it because they needed to have this buffer, the back door to prevent France and Spain from attacking from the backside. And so settler colonialism, they had all this manipulation using gerrymandering and limiting the franchise to essentially create one party rule for 50 years. And then the result was a civil rights movement in the late 60s, early 70s,

that really started to make the case of, no, we need housing, we need jobs, and we need one person, one vote. And so going there and being able to see mural after mural and statues of Frederick Douglass, famous antislavery activist who actually traveled to Ireland during the time of what we know as the potato famine, they call it the great hunger, great starvation, and talked about the parallels between the treatment of African Americans in American slavery and the treatment of Irish Catholics in Northern Ireland. And so I just thought, wow, there are so many things that are just like parallel track that we should see

What what did how did they actually resolve their their deep deep polarization? And their civil rights movement didn't just result in oh they got granted rights because they marched in the streets like just like in ours Riot police were uh marshaled against them. You had militia groups formed to you know, throw rocks Fire hoses were were sprayed. Uh, It just wasn't, it was not a peaceful process. And what we saw in the late 1960s, early 1970s, is very similar to what we're seeing in the US today, which is this increasing rate of political violence, of folks feeling like they're not heard, of folks marching in protest and counter and counter protest to each other, not just exchanging ideas, but exchanging bullets, getting into fights. There being this ramp up of political violence. And it's really familiar, the parallels in which the sort of political dynamics

mirror what we're feeling a lot of today. And that preceded what's known as the troubles, right? Or that was the troubles, and then it kind of turned to open warfare in the seventies and into the eighties, right? Yep. And so the system that you're describing came together in the aftermath of this horrible kind of civil war that happened in the streets of Northern Ireland. And so I want, I want to just kind of get into how that system could be transferred to the US next. Let's take a quick break and we'll be right back.

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How do you feel about biscuits? Hi, I'm Akilah Hughes, and I'm so excited about my new podcast, Rebel Spirit, where I head back to my hometown in Kentucky and try to convince my high school to change their racist mascot, the Rebels, into something everyone in the South loves, the Biscuits. I was a lady rebel. Like, what does that even mean? The Boone County Rebels will stay the Boone County Rebels. But the image of the Biscuits.

It's right here in black and white in France. They lying. An individual that came to the school saying that God sent him to talk to me about the mascot switch is a leader. You choose hills that you want to die on. Why would we want to be the losing team? I just take all the other stuff out of home. Segregation academies, when civil rights said that we need to integrate public schools, these charter schools were exempt from that.

Bigger than a flag or mascot. You have to be ready for serious backlash. Listen to Rebel Spirit on the iHeartRadio app, bigger than a flag or mascot. You have to be ready for serious backlash. Listen to Rebel Spirit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. We're back. And so, yeah, I just wanted to hear kind of from you guys

what your vision is for how that system that is currently a representation a representative democracy like how that could take hold in the United States Just let me throw one quick historical footnote. I'll turn over to Colin actually their implementation of What Colin will refer to shortly actually started in 1921. Oh, wow. Northern Ireland and as they were partitioning Northern Ireland away from the south, which then became the Irish Free State, basically the British said, okay, well, why don't we agree

as part of this end of this war with the Irish that both sides will have some form of power sharing built into their systems because both sides have minorities that they wanted to protect. Northern Ireland gets rid of it as soon as they can because they see the writing on the wall they're like one party control let's do it. Ireland actually keeps it for a full hundred years and that's still the system that they use today. So actually in 1998 when they actually re-implemented it, something that they actually had for about roughly 10 years beginning in the 1920s. So I'll kick it off Colin. And we'll come back to the sort of forgotten history question in a moment too. So the system that they use in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland is a system of

proportional representation, so-called because each segment of the population has the power to win their fair share, their proportion in government. So if Irish Republicans, who are different from US Republicans, they want to join the Republic of Ireland, Irish Republicans or Irish nationalists win 33% of the vote, they're going to win about one in three seats in parliament. And what you might have happen is you might have, say, 40% of the vote go to Irish unionists, folks who like being part of Great Britain, maybe 40% of the vote goes to Irish nationalists,

and another 20% of the vote goes to people who say, oh, we don't really care about that, we care about jobs or we care about housing. And then that ends up being the makeup of your parliament. And in terms of what that could look like in the US, it's interesting. So there's a path to get it here. There's an act that's been introduced in Congress every year since 2017, the Fair Representation Act, that would just move the US congressional seat system to that system. So instead of Massachusetts electing 10 Democrats, they would probably elect six or seven Democrats and three or four Republicans. And instead of Alabama electing all Republicans, they would elect two Republicans and a Democrat or whatever the population might be.

And you could have these smaller chunks break through. But what's really interesting is that the specific version that they use, that is proposed for this bill that they use in Northern Ireland, it's a form of ranked choice voting, and I say a form of ranked choice voting because a lot of folks might have heard of RCV, ranked choice voting, but there's a bunch of different ways to do it. The way they do it in Minneapolis is different than the way they do it in it in Minneapolis is different than the way to do it in Maine, which is different than the way to do it in New York, which is different than the way that they do it in Ireland.

But back in the 1910s, 20s, 30s, 40s, cities in the US actually used this Irish version of proportional ranked-cho choice voting. Cities like New York City, Cincinnati and Cleveland, Sacramento and California. And you saw, again, back in the 40s at the height of Jim Crow, well before the civil rights movement, you saw black communists from Manhattan get elected to the New York City Council. And that's just sort of, it's hard to imagine today, let alone during the Red Scare. Yeah. And it is, we always talk about the way that these facts that aren't part of the system as currently constructed

get just memory hold from history and kind of erased from history. So that's super interesting. And you said that someone would be like, what is that from a Marvel, like reality or the black communist from Manhattan is a city council in the high castle or some shit. What is this? Yeah. You're like, no, that's real.

That's real. In the context of racial justice and equity, like in the US, like when listening to your show, I was thinking about, we had a lot of energy behind that cause in 2020, but we, it feels like we no longer have the attention of the mainstream democratic party right now and, you know, having a party that is focused on that cause and is always there, even if they're not the majority in power, but they're always being represented, that's just a thing that I had taken for granted as impossible.

That would just be amazing to have that like, you know, there would always be people doing work for racial justice and equity in the US, like in government, right? Does not see it's wild that that is such a basic idea. But like it's just, yeah, because you think of how like platforms change every year, like the Democrats platform looks completely different now than it did in 2020. Like, well, you know, I think we use too much like political capital to be talking about police reform this go-round. So let's put that on the back burner and become fully pro-cop this year because you know, we kind of are a little our policies can be nebulous at times and I think that's like it really gets to what really affects voters and makes people so

disapget that you just get to this point where you're totally disaffected. You become ambivalent to the process because you feel like, well, what about all these other real problems? And the only way to enter the conversation is this very rigid system where unless you're reading from the same hymnal, your chances of getting elected aren't really possible. And I think that's really a great way for I think that would help a lot of people also become much more involved, because what we're talking about

is something that does give people a fair shake, where it's like, no, if you have the numbers, like you can get a seat at the table. That's just it is what it is. And then guess what? People will have to have coalition governments where they are going to have to work with you to get the kinds of majorities you need to achieve certain things. And I think that's super, I think underrated, an underrated thing about it. Because I think most people will just go to the fact like, oh, so what you want more Republicans? And it's like, well, no, that's not, that's really not the case.

You just want something. You want it to actually be representative of what's there. You just want something you want it to actually be representative of what's there and I feel like it sounds like to And just listening to the show like we had a moment when we were writing the Constitution Where they're like what if Congress looked like? everything we see out there in America and it's like and that's like one of those forks in the roads where our destiny is like And we decided it's not that new of a concept. Like these are things we've been grappling with since the beginning of this country. Absolutely. There's a few other things that are kind of mind blowing when we talked about Ireland,

particularly Northern Ireland. One story that keeps coming up is that whenever we talk to folks on the ground there, they kept saying, you might have some concerns in the US about getting far right parties elected and taking seats and that might freak some people out. But in many ways that's important because in the Northern Ireland experience, they saw that there were people who were shut out of the political system that they had no alternative but to be violent.

And so when you have people win seats, their fair share, maybe they win one or two in a city council, and they have to grapple with balancing the budget, closing a hospital, dealing with pensions, then it's harder to be completely anti-government when you actually have some power and you have to grapple with some collective decisions that you just can't just throw rocks at the house. Right. One other interesting thing that we learned about that kind of blew my mind is how power sharing was taken to the logical extreme in both Ireland and to more so in Northern Ireland.

So our winner take all system, we understand it particularly in our electoral system in terms of there can only be one winner when you have one member per district. But when you think about the winner take all system in terms of legislative governance, we understand like if you're the majority party, you get to pick all the committee chairs. It's like to the winner go the spoils that seems obvious to us, right? Right? That's not how neither Ireland nor Northern Ireland does it. If you win 40% of seats in the parliament, you win 40% of committee chairs. They have this process, it's called the DeHant method, whereby it's like the NFL draft,

your party as like the team gets to pick in a particular order which committee chairs you want. So if you're the first pick, you'll probably get to pick like the team gets to pick in a particular order which committee chairs you want. So if you're the first pick, you'll probably get to pick like the Taxation, Ways and Means committee because it's likely the most powerful, Justice is usually second, something like that. And so you just kind of go down the list in terms of who deserves the next pick. Added to that logical extreme in terms of Northern Ireland, if once again, if your party is 40% of the seats in Parliament, you get 40% of the Cabinet seats in government itself as a way to make sure that everyone

has a fair share. There are critiques in terms of sometimes it grinds to a halt because those parties almost never agree on lots of big things, and so sometimes it shuts the government down, which is its own problem. But the idea that they are committed to power sharing in order for everyone to feel like they have a stake in governance, that's a really key idea that's really missing in our debates here in the US. And it's something that Northern Ireland folks we talked to kept emphasizing that like, oh, like there's a lot of critiques about power sharing, the specific model we have, who gets how many seats. But the elections being proportional, like that's a no brainer. Like no one, no one debates that at all. Like that's obvious.

Yeah. Right. Yeah. I mean, project 2025, the thing that's scary about it to people is that they're planning to like clear house and just make all the cabinet entirely one thing. So that, that's interesting. I feel like maybe after this next presidential administration, there might be more appetite. It could be the last one, folks. It could be the last election ever.

Not for the reasons he's saying, but. Oh, yeah. Well. Yeah, go ahead. Sorry, Miles, I interrupted. Oh, no, no, no. I was just saying, and also the visibility, because I think especially in the United States, we have this version of the amount of extremists there are in the United States, we have this version of like the amount of

extremists there are in the United States, you would think depending on where you're watching news like they're outnumbered, there's 7 billion of these people. And it's always interesting to see like when people like are like in in in Europe, when they're having their elections, you're like, oh, they're far right parties only got like a fraction of what people thought they were going to do. And I think that's also helps, too, for people to understand, like, OK, there is this group of people that exist, but they aren't nearly as large or influential as they would want you to

think, which I think also helps people have a little bit of a clearer understanding of like, truly like what we're dealing with in the country in terms of like who who sort of like where everyone's ideologies sort of lie because yeah I think it's very easy to sort of obscure that with our with our media in this country and have people kind of thinking like oh my god like what's all happening like who what are we up against and yeah knowing that I think putting being able to quantify that I think is a big benefit. And that's part of the risk of a winner-take-all system is you can have a fringe element

that wins it all. People forget that back in 2016, if you looked at polls, most Republicans didn't actually like Donald Trump, but they were split between Chris Christie and Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio and John Kasich and Mitt Romney. And Romney wasn't running in 2016, was he? No, he was not running. The spirit of Mitt Romney was running. Yeah, right.

The spirit of hot dogs. John Huntsman. Point is, the winner take all system lets a fringe element, if they win more than others in the primary process or whatever, win everything, the proportional system caps your ceiling at your actual support. So you never have a fringe party

take over every chamber of government. I do want to just go back to this idea that, it doesn't say anything about two parties or parties of any sort in the constitution. And yet, and like George Washington was like kind of against parties in general. He was just a downer, didn't like to party,

but he, like America just kind of snapped to a two party system and like kind of keeps going back to a two party system and like staying in this two party system. And so for me, that's one of my big questions is like, is there just something One of my big questions is like, is there just something about America and our, at the central lie at the heart of America, where it's like, we're, we are a representative democracy and also the system is completely designed to keep the dispossessed without power. Like that's been the deal kind of from day one.

Like when you look at the wording of the constitution and then like what, who those words actually applied to, I'm just, I guess that's the big question for me is like how, you know, in the experience of granted a winner take all primary system, but like the primary system of a progressive and widely popular Bernie Sanders, you know, getting a lot of attention and enthusiasm. And then it just kind of felt like you were always up against this entrenched machine. I'm just curious how you guys think about the existing kind of inertia and money and power of the system as it currently exists and how you could potentially see this idea overcoming that over time.

George, can you mind meld with me real quick? You want to say something in unison? I'm going to go back to French class. Yes. The name is Duverger. Yes. And I, of course, know what that means. But the listeners...

George Collin, it's been great having you. That sounded beautiful. And seen. No further questions, my honor. All right. Duvergé was a French philosopher that basically came up with this theorem or this law that basically said, any winner-take-all system is going to end up with only two major parties that can contest for power.

Because when there is another faction, another party that tries to vie and play within the confines of a winner take all system. They almost never win. And if you try several times, you'll have to just give up because how do you tell people to vote for us if you can never turn their votes into actual seats that is actual political power? You actually increase the odds that your opponents win. Like if Bernie Sanders runs a viable candidacy that increases odds Republicans win. So like it just turned it the logical conclusion is only have two candidates. Yeah, seems like a bad system almost. And so you see this playing out in basically

the UK and the other former British colonies that have kept this system. In Canada, there's essentially only the conservative and the liberal slash moderate party that can win ever any election. They only have multiple parties because they have kind of regional politics of like Quebecois separatists that has its own political party. But for the most part, nationally, they are a two-party system because they have the exact same system that we have. The UK is pretty much the same. You have Labour and then you have the Tories or Conservatives. Sometimes the Liberal Democrats play that kind of in-between role, spoiler role. But for the most part, Duvergé's law plays out very clearly in all of these systems. And so being able to start with, you know, what is the electoral system that we want for our society?

Is it something that is very simple and that forces a majority, even though it doesn't reflect the majority interest? Or do you want to make sure that you have a minority representation built in to our electorate? And so by picking a proportional system, whichever flavor, because there's definitely variations on a theme, the fact that you will get three, four, five parties means that there are coalitions. There is kind of like a shifting depending on which issue that different parties can call us and get get legislation passed. So there is nothing structural or cultural about the US that pushes us towards a two party system. It is the system that pushes us awkwardly into these two camps that don't fit us. And actually, there's some really interesting political science. I'll give a very high level, we can put a link in the show notes if you all want to know. But there's some really interesting political science. I'll give it a very high level. We can put a link in the show notes if you all want.

Show notes. But there's some political science that's been done that shows that effectively in the U S right now, there are six political parties, there's six ideologically consistent and distinct ways of being basically that most people subscribe to. And it's just that they're jammed into the two parties. Like, uh, Alexander Ocasio-Cortez said a couple years ago, in any other country on earth, Joe Biden and I would not be in the same political party, but in the U.S. we have to be. And so when you think about like, you know, your, your, your Mitt Romney, Barry Goldwater, John McCain type folks,

and your evangelical Christians, and your like, MAGA wing of American Nazis like they don't actually have anything in common politically and on the same parallels on the left and so whether or not these six parties emerge or they become distinct factions within the two parties as we have them there's those are probably the coalitions that we would see emerge if we moved to a proportional multi-party system. I think the other part about this too is like, I think at this point we see that there is a way to do it. It is being done.

We've dabbled in it in the United States before, but right now in its current form, it seems like intractable. Like this is, it's stuck. And I know when we were speaking a little bit earlier before we even recorded, I remember Jack and I were like, boy, how do we, is it possible? And I felt like you brought up a few good points was to think about a lot of like the major changes

we've had in the United States across, the storied history of this place. The years preceding those changes, it felt like this is gonna be how it is forever. And then boom, we have rights, we have universal suffrage, we have civil rights, etc. We have marriage equality and those kinds of things. And I think for a lot of the times too, we're also the, I feel like the de facto way we speak about it in very early kinds of political conversations when you're younger and getting into it is like, it feels everything has to happen from the top down. And when you look at the current system, like there's no way these freaks are going to be like, yes, I would like to dilute my power. But it seems like this is the kind of thing where we can create upward pressure from a more local level.

And that is happening in the United States. We like to make things about personality and like individualism in the US and so often the answer is actually structural and we don't like to admit that a lot of the times because it doesn't allow for us to be the heroes of our own narrative. So can you sort of just point to like some examples of like how this is not just like Cincinnati decades ago which were things like that were happening, but like even in in the year of 2024, the there are there are movements being made that are approaching something like this that could potentially help, you know, drive the conversation on a national level. Yeah, I'll

start and I'll kick it over to Colin. I think the most exciting thing for folks to watch in the 2024 elections besides the presidential is what happens in Portland, Oregon. It's on the five. If you'd go north on the five, you get off straight for the- Yeah. Yeah. What was really exciting,

and this goes to some of the work that we do as an organization, more equitable democracy. We support people of color led groups on transforming our electoral system in order to advance racial justice. And so our colleagues there were doing a lot of advocacy work in communities of color, trying to bring more resources to their communities. And they always hit like this huge buzz saw their city commission. It was a commission whereby there was no separate

executive branch from the legislative branch. They were one in whereby there was no separate executive branch from the legislative branch. They were one and the same. They were all elected at large. So you essentially had to win like a congressional race in order to win a city council seat. And that always favored big moneyed interests, usually folks who had relationships with developers. And so they understood, we did a lot of research to kind of back this up, that breaking up that system was important, but that going to the most obvious solution in the American kind of context is to go from all at large to single member districts, just like cut up the city into five equal districts.

Maybe we'll be able to get two seats out of the five that are responsive to our community's needs. Though communities of color are about 25% of the population in Portland, because of a really long anti-black history, there is no one particular area that is heavily people of color. There isn't the same type of segregation there is in other cities.

And so just drawing those single member districts was not going to solve any of those problems. And so- In any configuration I'll highlight. Like we said, what if we moved from five to seven to nine to 12 to 15 city councilors, you just could not do it. Not possible. And so that's why we introduced the Irish model to them

and they started to think, oh, okay, well, if we had a larger district where we elected three, maybe we can win one or two of those that are in neighborhoods that we do a lot of organizing. And so what was really exciting was that, and this sounds, when I say exciting, this will sound boring for just a second. There was a charter review process. Please don't fall asleep.

Oh, I love that. This is not, it's actually really important. Hell yeah. CRPs, baby? That's me all day. Just like we got an air horn in there when it's a charter review process. Awesome. Baked into their charter,

their constitution was this mandatory about once every decade-ish process, whereby folks from the community were invited in to kick the tires of their system, their structures of government, and asked to come up with ideas to change it. For 99% of the time when local governments do this, it's just window dressing. They don't really mean to invite people to change things. But to their credit, everyone understood in Portland this antiquated system that had been designed about more than 100 years ago wasn't working. So everyone understood something needed to change. And so the ability for our partners to organize around a process where people were supposed

to be invited in to come up with ideas and to really flesh them out, that's what allowed for that deep conversation about what does it mean to have an election and have everyone represented? How do we integrate or prioritize racial equity within these structures? Can a winner-take-all system ever be equitable? It's kind of like at odds with one another. And so that's how they came up with this design of essentially the Irish system. They ran a campaign to support the recommendation that came from that city charter review process, and they won 5743. This is the first city that has adopted this form, the first major city that has adopted this electoral system

since New York City did in the 1930s. So it's been a hundred years of that kind of hidden history that it's been kind of outside of our imagination. Colin, do you want to say any words about like how things are going at this point? Yeah, well, it's also a lot of folks might be like, oh, yeah. Okay, Portland did it but like I've seen Portland Yeah, it's crunchy liberal hippies who damn damn uh, what's Kyle McLaughlin is a good mayor But

if you talk to some of the activists and colleagues of ours in Portland what they would tell you and I think what like looking at the election results would tell you is that Portland is like most major cities in the US, in that that has not been the people winning elections. The City Council has largely been the candidates most preferred by developers and big business. Like George mentioned, they're all folks from downtown or west of the river, which is where all the really rich people live. The established political establishment that's entrenched in Portland is the same as it kind of is anywhere. And, you know, one in four Portlanders is a person of color. So like, yes, it's pretty white, but it's not it's not just like a white utopia, like, like people might think it's it is a multiracial community.

It is a multiracial community. And if Portland can do it, I actually think anywhere can do it. At least on the city level. Four of the five city councilors came out against the reform when it was being considered. The former mayor came out against it. The Chamber of Commerce came out against it. They were fighting every single established interest that existed and they still managed to win. And yeah, now they're doing it for the first time. They just like made sample ballots public a few days ago.

And there are some other smaller cities in America that are using proportional systems, Albany, California, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Minneapolis, Minnesota for their parks and recreation board. And there was one Detroit suburb that used it for a few years because this is a weird story, but basically the Obama department of justice brought a lawsuit that the Trump department of justice settled. And so under the Obama case, like they adopted a proportional system to resolve the voting rights act complaint, but the Trump DOJ said, you only have to use

this system twice and then you can go back to the old system that violates the Voting Rights Act. So they don't use it anymore. But it's not just Portland. Two at bats. That's right. If they can't get it right and make it permanent after two at bats. You know, I don't know what we're doing here. Well, guys, honestly, I feel like we could talk to you for days about this and I can't wait to listen to the next episode of your podcast that drops here. How many? Two episodes in? Two, the third

drops tomorrow. Third drops tomorrow. So there we go. Everybody should go check it out. Wonderful having you and we'll have to have you back. Where can people find you guys and hear more about all of this? So you can go to our website, which is equitabledemocracy.org. We have a link to the podcast there, as well as it's on Apple podcasts and Spotify, wherever you listen. You can also find our organization on Twitter

that's at Equitable Demo on Twitter and at Equitable Democracy on Instagram. I'm on Twitter at Colin J. Cole. That's C-O-L-I-N, Colin, like Colin Farrell, not like Colin Powell. Wow. There you go. And you have much more Colin Farrell vibes

than Colin Powell vibes. Oh, thank you. We were saying that before, yeah, we got on, yeah. He's Irish, so it's on brand. Yeah, exactly. How about you, George? On X, George K. Chung, C-H-E-U-N-G. And definitely check out our podcast, The Future of Our Former Democracy on

Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. We will link off to that in the footnotes. Is there work of media that you guys have been enjoying? I'll start. It's this fairly new couple that is on X and TikTok called the, it's the Peacocks. It's this couple. Why I think that they're so interesting is that it's the guy is from Northern Ireland and the woman's Chinese New Zealander. And they're all about teaching their kids Cantonese, which is my parents' language. And the fact that there's a white dude that speaks better Cantonese than I do I

Feel a little bit of shame because you know Chinese people East Asian people and shame we do shame really well. Oh, yeah number one number one is shame, baby But there's only been in my life two times that I've met a white person that has spoken better Cantonese than I do and For better for worse. They're always Mormon missionaries. So got to love them. They get they're putting in work, which they put in that work. They put in the work. So that's like when I mean, yeah, like people like white people speak Japanese really well and they live here.

I'm like, what's going on? Like, oh, my my parents are missionaries in Japan. And that's why I speak Japanese. Oh, my. Wow. Wow. Wow. Yes, they do the speak Japanese. So I'm like, wow, wow, wow. Yes, they do the work. Yeah. What about you, Colin? So I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna stick with the Warhammer thing. We already talked about the Warhammer books. But so I watch a lot of long form like video essays. And there's a good one that's sort of the good confluence of a couple of my things. It's called People Make Games. And they, you know, do longer form explorations of, you know, video game industry, board game industry, but they have a video recently called The Games Behind Your Government's Next War, and

they dive into how governments around the world are using war games and building custom board games, basically, to test out foreign policy and wars. And oh, well, if we were to mobilize our fleet over here, knowing that we have this economic relationship here, you know, Miles Jack, I'm going to have you go ahead and play China. And let's just play a game and try to simulate what comes out. Yeah. And it's this whole massive like government board game industrial complex. It's fascinating.

Oh, wow. Yeah, I'm going to check that. I'm looking at the thumbnail of that right now. I'm definitely going to look at that. Yeah. Wow. Okay. Okay.

All right, miles. Where can people find you? Is there a work of media that you've been enjoying? Oh, yes. Find me on Twitter and Instagram at miles of gray. If you like basketball, you can hear Jack and I talk endlessly about the NBA on miles and Jack got mad. Boosties.

And if you like 90 day fiance, like I do to blow some steam off of the, you know, horror that is being on earth at this time. I talk about 90 day fiance on the other podcast for 20 day fiance. A tweet I like is, you know, but the thing I love about like TikTok and stuff is like, there's so much good recipe sharing. But

alongside that, you get some people who begin to say like their authority is on the kinds of cousins that might be a little bit culturally specific. And this video, I just let me make sure I have the creator's name right. It's from Nathan underscore ing. And it's just a good sort of side by side video. And I'm just going to play it because it just kind of sums up like sort of the by side video and I'm just gonna play it because it just kind of sums up like sort of the tone on tiktok but just how sometimes we see these videos this was also my work of media oh really if you're white to the naked eye but I actually

have asian taste buds I'm not sure what that makes me it makes you a white person that likes asian food It makes you a white person that likes Asian food Alright There you go. Not buying your cookbook. Nice. All right. Tweet I've been enjoying. At Strange Harbors, Jeff Zang tweeted, is Todd Phillips punk? Is MasterCard a queer ally? Is this TV show, my friend? I thought that was a good just summation of my internal monologue.

Bullseye. You can find me on Twitter at Jack underscore O'Brien. You can find us on Twitter at daily zeitgeist We're at the daily zeitgeist on Instagram We have a Facebook fan page and a website daily zeitgeist comm where we post our episodes and our footnote Where we link off to the information that we talked about in today's episode as well as a song that we think you might enjoy Miles, what song do you think people might enjoy? There's an artist on TDE, Dochi, D-O-E-C-H-I-I, and she's a dope MC and artist. Top Dog Entertainment always likes to find some of the city's best, and Dochi is no different.

This track is called Nissan Altima. She's just a great lyricist, has a total sense of humor in her lyrics, but just because she's a great MC, like you're just like, oh, that was a bar and funny. And just overall really talented artist. So check this track out by Dochi, it's Nissan Altima. Shout out to Brian, the editor. Yeah, get it right, say it right.

You first put me under that. All right. Well, The Daily Zeitgeist is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. That is going to do it for us this morning. We're back this afternoon to tell you what is trending.

And we'll talk to you all then. Bye. Bye. Hey, everybody. The time has finally come. This week, starting October 7th through October 11th, that's Monday through Friday everybody, we are revealing the iconic 400. Yes, Bo and Yang and I famously missed our 400th episode

here on Los Cocheristas, but we are ready to reveal the iconic 400. Who is on the list? Does it matter? No. Will it be fun? Yeah. There might even be a surprise or two in there, so listen carefully. Listen to Lost Culture East Us on Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16th, 2017 was assassinated. Crooks Everywhere unearths the plot to murder a one-woman WikiLeaks.

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The story of one strange and violent summer, this season on the new podcast, Rip Current. Hear episodes of Rip Current early and completely ad-free and receive exclusive bonus content by subscribing to iHeart True Crime Plus, only on Apple Podcasts. real life. And as all besties do, we navigate the highs and lows of life together. Big or small, we're there. And now here we are, opening up the friendship circle to you. Listen to call it what it is on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

My name is Brandon Kyle Goodman. I'm a black, gay, non-binary author, TV writer, actor, and I'm messy. But not in the way you think. Messy as in I'm human and flawed. I'm on a mission to destroy shame around sex. And the only way to do that is to talk about sex. So that's what we'll do on my brand new podcast, Tell Me Something Messy. Join me on Tell Me Something Messy with brand new episodes every Thursday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.