The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Preserving Democracy: A Call for Civility with Richard Gephardt

Episode Date: October 30, 2024

(Conversation recorded on October 17th, 2024)    As the trust in the U.S. presidential election process continues to be in question, alongside growing polarization and dwindling good-faith conversations, the precarity of our democratic systems is becoming increasingly worrisome. Amongst the rising tensions, calls for civility are sorely needed – regardless of who wins. In this conversation, Nate is joined by former Congressman Richard Gephardt to discuss the importance of democracy as a system of self-governance, as well as the need for respecting differing views in order to keep that system intact. Richard highlights the unique historical context of U.S. democracy, emphasizing the ongoing commitment of citizen participation required for its survival. How can we encourage bipartisan collaboration and compromise toward effective policy action beyond the current election cycle? In what ways do our rapidly evolving information systems, including social media and artificial intelligence, deepen our political divides? Despite the domestic and global challenges facing us, is there hope for the future of the American "democratic experiment"?   About Richard Gephardt: Richard Gephardt is an attorney, author, lobbyist, and politician who served 28 years in the United States House of Representatives. He is the President and CEO of the Gephardt Group, where he works to inspire a new understanding of citizenship based on activism to bring about economic, social, and political change. Gephardt previously served as the United States House Majority Leader (1989-1995) and House Minority Leader (1995-2003). He is the author of three books, including An Even Better Place and The American Immigrant: The Outsiders.   Show Notes and More Watch this video episode on YouTube   ---   Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future Join our Substack newsletter Join our Discord channel and connect with other listeners  

Millions of Americans now believe our electoral process is corrupt. They don't trust it. And that worries me more than anything. Because if you lose your ability for people to govern themselves, which is what elections are about, then you lose self-government. And you have to go to the alternative model, which is the authoritarian model, letting one person make all the decisions. You're listening to The Great Simplification.

I'm Nate Hagen's. On this show, we describe how energy, the economy, the environment, and human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future. By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming Great Simplification. Today's guest is Richard Gephart, a retired politician who is a member of U.S. Congress for 20, 28 years as both the majority and minority leader of the Democratic House of Representatives. He also ran for president of the United States in 1988 in 2004. Dick has had a long and storied career in public service, which continues today in his 80s, where he's working on issues of democracy and social media and polarization and climate change, among others.

I've worked with Dick on a bipartisan project called Advanced Policy, which is trying to look two or three steps ahead at the macro policy interventions that our society and our government are going to need as we face the great simplification in coming decades. I asked Leader Gephard to join me today to offer his deep experience and his personal deep study of democracy to discuss the importance of civility among the American people. ahead of our upcoming election next week. As tensions continue to rise, the pressure on our democratic systems and our country's ability to self-govern are increasingly under pressure. Though he is an old-school Democrat,

this is a non-partisan message where he emphasizes that regardless of who wins, the response to this election will have ripple effects on our social fabric, the stability of the United States as a democracy, and our position as a global leader. With that, no matter who you're voting for, please welcome Leader Richard Gephardt. Leader Gephard, great to see you.

Great to be with you, Nate. So I have known you for quite some time, and we have engaged together on various issues, originally energy and climate. In 2020, you helped me working on some stimulus programs that would, help poor people and not be scams. You and Tristan Harris and others are working on the importance of social media and AI for our nation. But through it all, I have realized that the thing that drives you the most, that you care the most about is the importance of maintaining democracy. So let's start there. First of all, how do you define democracy and is it the institution? institutions? Is it the voice of the people? Let's start there because I know it's central to your

current thinking and your entire career in politics. I don't think of it as democracy. I don't like the word democracy because it's hard for people to understand what you mean. What I mean is a system of governance that is self-governance. In other words, it's a political system of governance where the people are paramount. The people are in charge. And the only way they can do that in a republic, which is what we have, is through their ability to elect people to represent their views in the governance system. When this was devised, in our Constitution in 1789, almost 250 years ago, it was unique in the world. Now, there's been democracies.

There was democracy in Athens with the Greeks. There was even democracy, you might say, with the Romans. But that was in a very different context because those places didn't have that many people involved in them. It was a city or a village. And even when Rome had, you know, widespread dominion over lots of geography, even near Rome, the people that were involved in self-governance were only the people in Rome, in a certain part of Rome. So the 1789 experiment, by the founders of United States wanted to apply this to then, what, 12, 13 colonies? So that was bigger than Athens had or even Rome.

But I'm sure when they set it up, they didn't think that we could grow to 340 million people. So this is a very different animal than they started out with. but we have been able to keep it going and succeeding beyond anybody's imagination for almost 250 years. As you know, when Ben Franklin came out of the Constitution Hall where they were putting together the Constitution, there was a group of people that said, Mr. Franklin, are we going to have a republic or a monarchy, which was the way all the countries in the world were governed. And he said, we have a republic if we can keep it. He understood that the only way it would persist or succeed

is if the people were willing to participate in it every day, every month, every year going forward to make it succeed. Do you think that citizens today have taken that history for granted and take democracy and open societies for granted? I do, but I don't blame people because, you know, we all have busy lives. Most people are trying to survive, make a living, put food on the table, have shelter. So I well understand that a lot of them, maybe a majority, a vast majority of them, don't sit around thinking about this. But nonetheless, we through the years have taught civics to people in grade school and high school and college. And so I think, I hope most Americans understand the benefit that we get from being able to go.

govern ourselves. And I think most Americans don't want us to have the authoritarian model, which is the alternative to the self-government model. And they do have a basic understanding that that has worked well for us. People complain to me all the time that, you know, the country's got all these challenges, got all these problems. The Congress. is pretty dysfunctional. What do you think? And I say, well, I know we got lots of challenges, lots of problems. We always have had, and we always will.

But all I know is I don't see anybody trying to leave here. I see millions of people risking their lives to get here from all over the world. And that to me is the best testimony that this experiment, in self-government, it functions pretty well. As Churchill said, and I don't know that I'll quote him exactly, democracy is the worst form of government on earth except for all the others. And I believe he was right, and I believe we show every day evidence that this system of governance is superior to the alternative, which is the authoritarian model, letting one human

being make all the decisions for all the rest of us every day, every hour, whether we like it or not. So I know you are a lifelong Democrat, but I just think of you as a friend and a patriot, and I know that a lot of your work, even though you're technically retired, you're working on all these things all the time, but you do so in a nonpartisan. and bipartisan way, which is why I invited you today ahead of the election. Today's October 17th, and we're going to run this before the election on November 5th. I invited you to discuss the need for civility among the American people, regardless of who wins. This is not a call for listeners to vote either way, but rather to ask for tolerance and to remember the importance of what you just described as

stable democratic institutions for the future of the United States, which in turn affects the future of the world. What are your general thoughts on all that? Well, it's really the question of the day. My greatest worry about where we are as a self-government model is that so many people today are not willing to respect others. in the country who they disagree with. And it's even to the point that a lot of people feel that people on the other side of all the arguments, all the challenges, all the solutions that are discussed, are not worthy of respect.

They hate them. They actually think if their side prevails in an election, it will be the end of the country, that they're evil, that they're not worthy of respect, and they don't want to give them respect. If that persists and continues, as much as it has in the last 10 years, this democracy will fail. This self-government model will fail. Let me give you one example. when millions of Americans now believe our electoral process is corrupt, they don't trust it. They've come to the view that it's not to be trusted.

And I'll admit it's complicated because we have elections going on at the local level, the state level, and then we have federal level stuff. it's a vast system. And if you just look at America, it's 340 million people, 50 states, every one of our states in Europe would be a country unto itself. So when we have an election, all of those states ultimately have to participate and bring the data out of the field. that people can believe was arrived at fairly, honestly, with no bias and no shenanigans.

And the faith in that process is in threat today. And that worries me more than anything, because if you lose your ability for people to govern themselves, which is what elections are about, then you lose self-government, and you have to go to the alternative model, which is the authoritarian model, letting one person make all the decisions. So it really gets down to that

because at the end of the day, if we're to keep it, we all have to keep it. And respect and having good faith in everything with people you don't agree with at all. You can violently disagree with somebody, but you have to respect them and their views. They are entitled to their views, just like I am. Everybody is entitled as an American citizen

to have whatever views they want and to argue for those views and to try to get those views to be enacted in our self-governance model. But if you give up on the whole process of what we're doing, then there's only one way to go, and that's to let one single human being run the show, lock, stock, and barrel. I hear you on that. Let me drill down on that.

There seems to be a growing trend of questioning and doubting the election results on both sides. do you worry that we're building into our cultural zeitgeist that the only reason that our side, that my side could lose is the election must have been illegitimate. And how dangerous is that if neither side is willing to acknowledge that the other side is one? And how is the public supposed to have confidence in elections if both sides are claiming that they're illegitimate? And is this something we're going to see in a few weeks? Yeah, it's very dangerous.

And we've really got to encourage everybody to cool the rhetoric. You've got to have a winner and a loser and you've got to have referees. Politics is a lot like football. Just imagine at the next Super Bowl if right before the game started, the NFL announced we're not going to have referees. we just we they're corrupt we don't want them so the two teams should go out in the field and play the game and may the best team win that would be a disaster it wouldn't happen right they couldn't play the game that's where we are that's the analogy we have to look at and i understand that it's easy to believe conspiracy theories on both sides

I remember in 2004, a lot of Democrats said there was chicanery going on in Ohio, that John Kerry really won Ohio. And we should raise those questions. And even when we went, I wasn't there when this was done because I had left. But I'm sure there were people in Congress that wanted to object. to the certification of George W. Bush's president because they suspected that there was chicanery. So at the end of the day, everybody has to be willing to live with the rule of law. That's the other main ingredient in self-governance. You have to have rules that everybody is willing to follow.

So in the 2020 election, there was a lot of belief on the side of Donald Trump that the election was stolen, that it was rigged, that the process was messed up, that, you know, people were bringing in ballots from the back room and blah, blah, blah. And all those objections were taken to court where those kind of objections are done. dealt with. I think there was like 60 or 80 lawsuits that were filed about this election was fraudulent because of A, B, and C, and they had to present evidence, which is what you do in a rule of law country. And all those suits were not accepted. They didn't win those suits. So there could finally be agreement, at least on a lot of people's part, that the the election was not fraudulent. It wasn't stolen. Nonetheless, I think there was like 150 members of the House who wouldn't vote to certify the election because they still thought

that there were problems. If you give up on the rule of law, if you say there's no way to figure out if we have a valid election or not, you're done. It's like you've got to have referees in a football game. So ultimately the referee may have to look at camera, you know, to see what happened on the play. But ultimately, you've all got to respect those referees and their decisions. And that's kind of where we are with elections. So let me go on a little bit of a tangent. At the national level, Dick, there are.

currently only a few handfuls of truly competitive elections in the House of Representatives, maybe three or four in the Senate side. Do you think that the country is now solidified in polarization and this lack of competition? And every presidential election ends up being 50.3 to 49.7. And how does a representative democracy function if there's no competition in the elective process? Do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah, it's a real worry. There's been a thing happen on both sides called gerrymandering with regard to the House of Representatives, and that's an understandable occurrence. I ran in one house seat 14 times, 28 years, and every 10 years you do redistricting,

and I'd go down to the state legislature to put in my... views for how they should change the districts, including mine. And they didn't have to listen to me, but I wanted to get my views across. And it was pretty hard in those days to do gerrymandering because you didn't have computers. And so you couldn't go down to the house level in a district and see their voting propensity so that you could kind of draw a district that would be easy for me to win. So people would use hunches. Oh, the Clifton Park area is probably going to be good for me,

so maybe you could put that in. It was all imprecise. It was stupid. But they've gotten really good at that now, and so both sides have done gerrymandering. They've both tried to get districts that are bulletproof, where the only election is the primary. the general election is meaningless.

There is a good answer to that that some states are starting to try. It's called Ranked Choice Voting. And in that system, you have rounds of voting. You don't have a primary on either side. And it is tended to elect people who are more centrist, people who are not far right or far left, but they're more moderate in-between kind of, candidates. That to me is a very good reform that we ought to work for all over the country in states

because it tends to elect people who are more in the middle, which is, look, I was in Congress for 28 years. I was in charge of working on a lot of really tough compromises. Nothing really big and important can happen in Congress that is not a compromise that is somewhere in the middle where you give a lot, you get a lot, you make a deal, two-thirds of a loaf is better than no loaf, even half a loaf is better than no loaf, and you get it done. That's the key. So we need Congress to be more bipartisan, I guess, is what you'd say, able to work to get to the middle to get things done. So let me ask you on that note, how old were you when you first ran for Congress?

1976, so I was 35. So put your 35-year-old self with your exact same diplomacy, skills, and civility and all the things you care about running today in Missouri like you ran. Would you win? And the reason I'm asking is like everything else in our world, a better AI model outcompetes another AI model and a warmongering culture will outcompete a peace mongering one. And we've gotten more polarized on the left and the right. And people that have virtues and civility like you seem to be outcompeted on the on the sides.

today. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, it would be very hard. I don't think I could get elected in Missouri now if I were 35 years old or whatever, 45 years old. I couldn't get elected now because Missouri and my old district doesn't exist anymore, but the area where my old district was is much more far right, if you will, than it was then. Then it was kind of a swing. district. It was not far left. It wasn't far right. It was in the middle somewhere. Now, I believe that a big part of this is not that the people have changed that much. I think our information culture has dramatically changed, dramatically. And I think our information culture is serving to drive people

forget the representatives, people to the far right and the far left. Why do I say that? Well, you have to look at social media. To me, social media, the internet communication is the biggest change in human history. Bigger than the printing press, bigger than the radio, bigger than television. It is transformational. And either we learn how to use it to our common benefit or we let it destroy our ability to have self-government.

I won't delve into why I think it's doing that, but I think it clearly is doing that. And we've got to get our arms around it some way. Now, when the printing press was invented, Understand there were lots of problems. If you look at the history and what happened after the printing press, it was a disaster. We had witch hunts, which hunts going on in Europe. Were there good things that happened from the printing press?

Obviously. You wouldn't have a Bible without the printing press. You wouldn't have had newspapers. there was great benefits that came from it, but great disbenefits, great dangers came from it. But we finally learned how to use it to the best of our ability that it would be an improvement in human life and an improvement in countries. you know, you wouldn't have had the Protestant breakoff from the Catholic Church without the printing press. Martin Luther, what have you. But we also, over time, pulled together something called journalists.

We train people to be faithful reporters of reality in newspapers. So we had a common set of curators that could tell people what was pretty much true and what was pretty much not true. Then came radio and television. We had the same problem again. I mean, you wouldn't have had Adolf Hitler without radio. He was able to brainwash the German people. He never won a majority, but he gained. power, but over time the journalists moved from newspapers over to radio and television,

and we kind of knew who to believe. If you go back to early humans, how did they communicate? They communicated face to face. It was the only way you could communicate. And you were in tribes of about 100. So you knew everybody. You knew who to believe and who did not believe. You knew who was a good reporter, who was not a good reporter. Who was not a good reporter. Here comes the printing press. Do I believe this? Who wrote it? What do they know?

Then you moved to TV and we finally got our arms around it and made it work pretty well. Now, 8 billion people are journalists. They're reporting facts to all of the rest of us. And you put behind that social media algorithms, that's AI, to boost to people information to keep them angry, anxious, and upset 24-7, and you have the seeds of the house dividing against itself, which is where we are today. So we got a lot of challenges and the information culture to me is the fundamental challenge we face. Well, you know some of the things I'm working on with energy depletion.

and climate change, geopolitics, and I keep thinking if we can't solve, if we can't agree on what's true or not, we have no chance in solving those other issues. So I do think the information and what Tristan Harris and Azaraskin and others are working on is central because if we can't believe the same things, how can we have a discussion and how can that lead to policy and decisions?

You're exactly right. It is fundamental. and there's a lot of efforts going on. Tristan and Eza are working on a lot of stuff at the Center for Humane Technology. I'm aware of an effort by a group of people called Project Liberty to do Internet 2.0 that will return the Internet to what it originally was thought to be, which is a without algorithms, without mining your data every day and stealing your identity.

And I don't know. They're trying right now to buy TikTok to make it that Internet 2.0. I don't know whether they'll bring it off. I'm trying to help them. So that way they could try to port into that new Internet, old Internet, whatever you want to call it, the people that are on TikTok who don't want want to retain their privacy and don't want to be killed with algorithms every day.

I don't know how many people will go on it, but hopefully over time, more and more people will migrate to that kind of an internet, which would be a much healthier information culture than we have today. I think five years ago, people kind of would have poo-pooed that, but I think people have felt how this is tearing us apart. and their teenage kids are not healthy and they don't make eye contact anymore and we don't have attention spans and we don't even talk to our neighbors. So there may be a backlash against misinformation and AI and social media.

I'm hopeful on that. Let me ask you this, getting back to the election. So in three weeks, it's kind of emotionally, partially looking forward to Christ, morning and partially looking forward to a root canal. And we're in this emotional holding pattern in our nation. Why is it that citizens place so much of their emotional hope in the future based on the presidential election every four years? And don't we have to have the people actually change, like the stories you were just telling me

about social media and its influence, we can no longer be spectators. We have to grow up and take responsibility of this stuff. It's not on the president. The president's an important person for sure. But what are your thoughts on all that? Yeah, my hope is that people, as you said a minute ago, are getting fed up with the way that culture has developed

and the way the algorithms work and affect them and will demand a cleaner internet, a cleaner information culture, where their identity is not stolen, their data is not scraped every day and used for whatever commercial purpose, and they're not being bombarded day and night with AI-generated information that probably is not true or who knows whether it's true or not. So we have to assert our agency over our information culture. We can't just be, you know, standby observers. We can't just let this happen to us. We're all citizens. We're all human beings. And we should have a right to be able to get as truthful of information as we can get.

get. And that's why I'm hoping if these new platforms can be out there, and they're going to do this whether they can buy TikTok or not, they're going to put this out there. And they're going to advertise, you know, they're going to try to get people to understand it and get on it and do this. I'm really hopeful that people will do that. The other thing is people have to give up on hatred. They really do. They've got to understand that everybody has merit, that everybody deserves respect, be willing to even go to people that you know you violently disagree with and just listen to them. Ask them questions. How do you see this issue or how do you say, why do you see it that way?

And when you ask people for information, you show them respect. You want to know their feelings, their beliefs, why they've arrived at the conclusion they have. You don't have to change him or try to change him. But if you show people understanding, you will usually get it back. The most important lesson of my life was my mother. Five years old, she got down under her knees, looked me in the eye, and she said, Dick, treat other people the way you would like to be treated. Before you say anything to anybody, think how you would like it said to you.

before you do anything to anybody, think how you would like it done to you. If you can internalize that belief, it will solve a lot of these problems of hatred and division that we're facing in the country today. I'm thinking about where I live to, in the next couple weeks, just go knock on the doors of some neighbors and say, it's a coin flip who's going to win this election. But here are the things that I care about. I want to have a good community here. I want to have these standing forests. I want to have healthy food. And let's agree that no matter who wins,

that we're going to keep a dialogue open on the things that we care about, because somebody's going to win. And I wonder if that's happening around the country at all, or if everyone's just got the popcorn and TV clicker set out. And how could. people listening to this, you know, put country before party as you've often done on some of these issues. I just, I'm not an expert in this field, so I'm just wondering what your advice is. Well, I guess my one sentence advice would be reach out and listen to someone.

Don't just stay in your echo chamber. Even if you think it will be uncomfortable and it probably will be, reach out to people that you disagree with on politics, on issues, whatever. I'll just give you my experience when I became leader of the Democrats in the House as an example of how this can work. So when I became leader in 1989, I was younger than most of the members. And so I thought, how am I going to get this group together? I mean, a lot of them maybe doubted my ability to bring the group together. We had four people in the leadership. I expanded it to 60 out of, say, 200 members.

I would have put them all in a room if I could, but that wasn't practical. And all I asked that group of 60, and I picked them from far left to far right, you know, the Democratic Party in any other country would be five different political parties. So would the Republican Party. So I put them in a room every night at 5 o'clock for two hours, and we went over the issues. And all I said to them was, I want you to listen to one another. None of us knows everything. I don't.

You don't. I know what I know. I don't know what you know. I didn't grow up where you grew up. I don't know what your experiences have been. I've got to listen to you. We had some bad meetings. People would say, oh, you're all crazy.

I'm leaving. They always came back. we always found a resolution. That's communication. Communication is everything. And you have to communicate face to face. So you know who you're talking to and you know their identity and you know something about them. And you can assess whether or not you're getting, you know, their true beliefs or it's a

Assad. So just reach out and listen to someone. That would be my best advice. And what about in the government level? How could we begin to change our democratic institutions in ways that do not favor one party over the other and favor the sort of discourse that you exemplified, you know, 40 years ago? Are there any changes? I mean, people talk in the media about constitutional amendments or getting rid of the electoral college or different voting systems or campaign finance. I mean, or does it just really start with one person and then 10 and then 100 and that way? Yeah, well, let me start with the good news. I've met a lot of young members in both parties today.

And I would say the majority of them in both parties are really good people. And they're there for the right reason. And they're there to solve problems. And that's really good news. I think rank choice voting, which we talked about a little bit ago, would be a huge help. I also campaign finance reform I worked on all the time. We finally passed a bill with John McCain. And to show you how it worked then, they had passed campaign finance reform in the Senate.

And we were having trouble passing it in the House. John McCain came to my office. I was the leader of the Democrats. John McCain, big Republican, came to my office, and together we called in Republican members and explained why campaign reform was so important, finance reform, and we passed it in the House

simply because of what he did to lead that effort. We've got to get back to that. We've got to have campaign finance reform. I've got ideas. Other people have ideas. There are million ideas. Getting Congress to do it will be a tall order just as it was then. But it needs to be done.

It's really important. And then the last thing I'd say is that I hope we keep getting young volunteers to be willing to run for office or to help people run for office. Self-government requires good volunteers. I was inspired to go into politics because of Jack Kennedy. When I was in college, he was elected president, and I thought he was awesome. He was smart.

He was patriotic. He came from a wealthy family, but he wanted to do public service and to dedicate his life to public service. And I was inspired by his example. So the people in Congress today need to provide that example to young people. Last thing I'll say is I have an institute at Washington University in St. Louis for civic and community engagement. I've had it for 20 years, and I go out there every other month or whatever and meet with the young people. I want to tell you, Nate, the young people today are far better than my generation. I can't tell you how much better they are.

They're smarter. They have good values. They care about the issues. They care about solving the problems like climate change and runaway spending and on and on and on. and I have, when I go to these meetings with these kids, I come away 20 feet off the ground. So you recently finished kind of an autobiography book. Maybe you could explain the title and give us a little overview of your book. Well, the name of the book is 535. That's the number of people in Congress, not one.

and the purpose of the book, the reason I wrote it, was to get across a lot of the things we've been talking about today. I am in awe still today about our ability to keep self-government in the United States. That may sound like overstatement. It's not. It's not. because I saw our ability over the 28 years I was in Congress

for solving intractable problems. I mean, really tough problems. And every time we reached a consensus to be able to do that, about half the country was very angry with that compromise. They thought they gave them. too much. They didn't get enough. It wasn't worth doing. But, and here's the big but, they were willing to grudgingly accept and live with that solution rather than picking up a rifle or leaving the country because they thought the process by which we reached the solution was fair.

they were heard, they had a voice, they had a vote, they just didn't win this time, maybe they'll win next time, but they were willing to grudgingly accept that result. That's what I'm in awe of. Well, it's almost like instead of totally focusing on who you're going to vote for, it's a recognition of the process and the actual importance of the benefits that all of us get from an open society and democracy, which just like many of the species on Earth, we will miss them when they're gone. We will dearly miss democracy when it's gone if it's gone in the future.

Yeah, and if we don't retain it, I think humans will be gone because we're not going to solve any of the problems that we need to solve to survive. So how, just to put you on the spot with a couple of hard questions, and then I know you have another appointment, so I want to be respectful of your time. But how concerned are you about a civil war breaking out in our country? I'm worried about it, but I'm not very worried about it. You know, I've thought about that a lot. And I think enough Americans realize how lucky we are, how fortunate we are to have this system of governance and the great benefits that come to all of us because of that. I mean, I understand people are always unhappy about their economics.

They're always unhappy about something. That's human nature. But I think enough people really understand that we cannot squander. this gift that we were given. And they're not going to hit the bricks and pick up rifles and go out as we did in 1860 and start shooting one another. And so I'm still optimistic that we're going to avoid that outcome. There's talk about it today and it's worrisome.

And there certainly is a political violence today in a way that we haven't seen. I mean, the 60s, we had a lot of political violence, but we had a war in Vietnam and the civil rights movement, all the things we know. So there's always turbulence in any country and certainly in any democracy. But I think at the end of the day, people have an understanding of how important this is. And I'm hoping that this election is fraught as it is probably going to be. people will behave properly and they'll, more people will vote than has ever voted. And I must remind you that in the 2020 election,

with all the problems that came of it, 80 million people did not vote who were registered and qualified to vote. Yeah. I mean, that's ridiculous. So we can all do something, even if it's the minimal thing of voting, We can all do even more than that. And if we will do that and engage in this process of governance, we'll avoid a civil war.

Tangential question, but one that you and I have talked about in the past. From your perspective, how important is the Russia, Ukraine and the Israel-Gaza conflicts in deciding this election? And how would the United States role in those conflicts change based on who gets elected? It's kind of an uncomfortable topic, but I think this is our reality as you're aware. Yeah, both of them are very worrisome. Could easily get out of control and even cause nuclear exchange warfare, which would be unthinkable, which would be on the precipice of blowing up the world, as we've known since the A-bomb was invented.

So we need very careful leadership, especially at the presidential level, congressional level, so that it doesn't spin out of control. There have to be negotiations. I realize that if you read Clausewitz, the great military writer, diplomacy is just another,

feature of warfare. And people will always try to have an advantage from the way they've prosecuted the war so that they can get what they want out of the inevitable negotiation. So it's going to be hard. The Ukrainians are bleeding real blood, and it's easy for us to sit here in the United States and say, yeah, you've got to get this settle. The Middle East is even more complicated. I've studied the Middle East my whole life and career.

The hatreds are not only between countries and peoples, but within religions. Within religions. Most of us don't understand the enmity that is between Shias and Sunnis. in the Middle East, within the Muslim Islamic religion. So there are lots of real challenges to getting people to live side by side, to have peace, to not have constant warfare. I agree.

And that's one of many storm clouds on the horizon for the world and for the United States. In my opinion, and you and I have had a lot of talks about this, some of these crises in the next decade seem inevitable to me. But leader get part, before we close, could you paint a positive picture for the USA 20 or 30 years from now, both internally, some of the things about civility and reaching across the aisle you mentioned, but also as a beacon to the rest of the world that we once were, can you imagine? can you imagine and envision such a future and what would that look like?

Because I think a lot of people are are pretty down in the U.S. right now and for good reasons. But I think we can do better than we have. And I think to write us off is a mistake. But you as an elder statesman who've been involved in all these issues your entire career, you know, what sort of a positive vision that's also realistic could you paint? Well, our self-government model is always in need of improvement and forward progress. And my hope is that in the next 20, 30 years, we will improve our performance in a variety of ways, some of which we've talked about to make our governance more trusted and successful in deep. dealing with all the problems we face.

I remember the 60s. I was a young person. I'd just come out of law school. We had riots in cities. We had major political figures assassinated. Jack Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King. The country was in flames. Nobody remembers that.

We all looked back and everything was great. It was not great. It was worse than it is now. And we came through that and we did better. All you can hope for with human beings is incremental improvement. You can't solve things overnight. Humans have trouble changing. They have trouble adapting.

They have trouble adapting. They have trouble meeting new circumstances. And that's what we have to do. And I think we can. I think we will. Well, I agree with you there. Not to end this on a buzzkill note, but I don't know if you saw, but in the last two weeks, today's October 17th, in the first two weeks of October, our debt went

up $500 billion in two weeks. So it crossed $35 trillion now. I don't think we were in the trillions back in the 90s or close. So this is a real issue. We can't print our way out of these problems. So it's another issue. Did you want to comment on that? Well, it's just, you know, I know a fair amount about the federal budget.

And the untold truth is that the budget is in part so far out of whack because, of health care costs and Social Security. It's more health care costs. We have, I think, 20 to 25% of our GDP is health care. And health care is mostly not making people healthy, but giving them drugs or surgeries after the fact. Extending painful life. Well, we could learn some things from you and I have that the first thing you eat in the

morning is at 1130 in the morning. You have celery and radishes. cauliflower and broccoli too. Okay. Final question, sir. So aside from voting, actually completely separate from voting, what are some things that people watching this can do in the weeks around the election before and after and into the future to uphold the social contract that exists in the United States of America?

Well, the first thing is we cannot resort to violence, even though we're really upset and we think this election has been stolen by the other side, whatever. We cannot go to violence because once violence starts, cycles of violence only end when everybody's dead. The other thing is, as I said before, just be kind to each other. Be kind to each other. Be kind to people, listen to people, give them respect, and you will more often than not get it back. I see it every day. You know, I run into people who violently disagree. I'm a Democrat, and I know they're a Republican, and they come after me and say, your side is wrong on this, and they get angry. And I say, I understand. It's okay. We can disagree. But I respect you. Tell me why you're so upset. It calms people down if you do that. Just treat each other

the way you would like to be treated. It's that simple. I'm even thinking of writing another book, and I can't figure out the title, but it's something like, be selfish. Treat other people the way you'd like to be treated. Because why do you want to give out bad stuff? You're going to get bad stuff back. Why don't you get out good stuff? You'll get good stuff back. What's wrong with that?

That's selfish. So that's it. Leader Gepard, you are still a leader after all these years. And I can hear your phone going off during this interview. I know you're working on a dozen different projects. So thank you for your time today. And thank you for your lifetime of, of public service. Thank you, Nate, for all of your good work and for doing these podcasts and

talking to people all over the country. You're doing a fabulous job. Keep it up. Thanks so much, Dave. If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of The Great Simplification, please follow us on your favorite podcast platform. You can also visit thegreat simplification.com for references and show notes from today's conversation. And to connect with fellow listeners of this podcast, check out our Discord channel. This show is hosted by me, Nate Hagan's, edited by No Troublemakers Media, and produced by Misty Stinnett, Leslie Batlutz, Brady Hyan, and Lizzie Siriani.