The Joe Rogan Experience - #1214 - Lawrence Lessig

Episode Date: December 13, 2018

Lawrence Lessig is an academic, attorney, and political activist. He is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the former director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University.

three two one and we're live how are you sir hey I'm great thanks for being here man I really appreciate it it is the coolest thing I've done really ever well you know I can't remember that far back but it's pretty cool um I watched your TED talk on um what was the word that you used uh Lesterland Lesterland yeah and uhland. Yeah. And it felt hopeless. For people who don't know what I'm talking about, could you just give a brief synopsis of the way you were describing how completely rigged our election system is and what it actually takes to be elected and how much of the time they spend is involved in raising money and why. Yeah.

So we've got a system where we have a money primary and then we have a regular election. And in the money primary, to compete, you've got to raise tons of money to be able to fund your campaign. And when you raise that money, you raise it from a tiny, tiny fraction of the 1%. So in the TED talk about Lesterland, I said, you know, imagine a place called Lesterland, where basically it's the Lesters who rule. And by the Lesters, I mean the same proportion of people named Lester as in the United States right now. So there's about 150,000 Americans named Lester. I'm one of them. But here we are, the Lesters. So imagine a world ruled by Lesterland. Because that's essentially the world we have because of the way we fund our campaigns. Because there's about 150,000 men who give even just the maximum contribution to one political candidate.

If you ask the number of people who give the maximum contribution over the course of a campaign, meaning in the primary and the general election, it's about 22,000 Americans in 2014 who gave the maximum contribution to one political campaign. So what that means is it's a tiny, tiny fraction who are the most important funders of political campaigns. And candidates for Congress and members of Congress spend 30 to 70 percent of their time sucking up to this tiny, tiny fraction. And so is it any surprise that you see Congress bending over backwards to keep those guys happy? Because they know without those people, they don't have a shot at getting back into Congress. And the way you were describing it as when you were saying it as Lesterland, it was like, imagine if we were this screwed up. That was essentially what you're saying. Yeah. But we're more screwed up than Lesterland. Yeah, we're more screwed up than lester land yeah that was a disturbing video because i was realizing it was emerging as you were speaking i was like wait a

minute is it that bad yeah you know it's i actually since that video i've come to think it's even worse so like uh clarence land well it could be worse because it's even a smaller number. And if you look at the number of Super PAC donors, you know, the really critical Super PAC donors, about 100 people who gave more than half of the Super PAC money in the last presidential election. A hundred. A hundred. So this is a really tiny, tiny number. this is a really tiny, tiny number. But what this tiny number represents in the way we fund campaigns is the extraordinary inequality on that dimension, right? But since I was focused on the money, I've, you know, more recently started thinking about the other screwed up dimension. So think

about gerrymandering. You know, we gerrymander districts in America so that about 85% of the House seats in the United States Congress are safe seats, which means if you're a Republican in a safe seat Democratic district, your views just never matter to the congressperson because that vote of a Republican will never determine who's in Congress. Or a Democrat in a safe seat Republican district, that's the same. Okay, but that doesn't mean those Congress people are not afraid about re-election. Of course, they are afraid about whether they'll be re-elected, but they're afraid not of a Democrat running against a Republican. They're afraid of an even more extreme Republican running against the incumbent Republican.

So what those incumbents in those safe seat districts do is they obsess about what the extremist in their own party cares about. So the extremists on the left and the right have this ability to leverage extraordinary influence inside of the House of Representatives simply because we've decided to gerrymander these districts to create these safe seats. So those extremists are a kind of Lester's too. There are more of them. You know, it's more democratic than Lesterland. But they too have enormous influence over ordinary people. And most ordinary people's views then to these Congress people just don't matter. That feels hopeless for a dummy like me sitting on the outside looking at this. I'm like, God, if this is this deeply entrenched with, I mean, I guess it's not technically corruption because it's all legal.

Right. But it's an entanglement with money and with influence that, I mean, how do you unwind this? Yeah. So that point is really critical. It's not technically illegal. And what that means is the people who are engaged in this are not doing wrong things. They're just playing by the rules. They're playing with the system.

It's just that the system has become corrupted. When did it start? Well, I think that the moment the United States Congress begins to fall apart in a really dramatic and interesting way is when Newt Gingrich becomes Speaker of the House. So when the Republicans take control of Congress in 95, it's the first time the Republicans have taken control of the House of Representatives in 40 years. So the House becomes incredibly competitive. Each election, you know, is up for grabs. Who's going to control the House? So Gingrich turns his members in the House into perpetual fundraisers. It's basically,

we got to raise the money to defend ourselves the next time around. And then the Democrats followed suit. So the Democrats turned their members into perpetual fundraisers. And they changed the rules about like who gets to be chairman of committees. It's no longer like who's the person with the most experience or the most insight. Increasingly it becomes who raises the most money. And the Democratic Party, I know about the Democratic Party, the Republicans don't talk to me much, but the Democratic Party increasingly changes its focus from what are the policies that our members care about to what are we going to do to make sure that you as a member meet your fundraising target. And so from 95 until today,

the institution becomes an institution focused on the game of getting reelected. Jim Cooper, a Democrat from Tennessee who went to Congress first in like 1983. So he's been there for a long time. Cooper says Capitol Hill has become a kind of farm league for K Street. Okay, so what he means by that is members go there, they learn how to raise money, they become focused obsessively on raising money. But one of the things that they're really focused on, it's how do they go from Capitol Hill to becoming a lobbyist? Because that's where the real money is. A member of Congress gets paid about as much as the students I educate at the Harvard Law School in their first year as lawyers. So to ordinary Americans,

it's a lot of money, but to people on Capitol Hill, it doesn't seem like a lot of money. But then they go and become a lobbyist. They can make 10 times that as a lobbyist. And so what Cooper says is you have this institution, which has become so focused on the money, that it's just an institution for producing influence that can be sold. And first, the congressmen are basically sucking up to the people who want to buy influence. And then the congressmen become the people buying influence themselves because they're working as lobbyists for these important interests so they're in the rig game they understand how it gets rigged and then they work to rig it yeah yeah they they see

this as their this their business plan it's their honeypot yeah and there's um whatever the district is outside of washington dc and virginia where there's some ungodly number of wealthy people per capita, where there's more lobbyists in that area than anywhere else in the United States. Right. And that's this giant collection of wealth. Right. Washington, D.C. is an incredibly prosperous place. And anybody who's been there, you know, who's seen it for a long time, like I clerked there in the early 1990s and it was a pretty grungy place. But it's a really opulent city now.

It's like the golden city on the hill, you know, the Oz. for the purpose of buying influence to buy legislation that makes it so these incumbent dinosaur corporations that have protected themselves against competition across the country can continue to profit. It's a weird place, though, because even though it's incredibly wealthy, it's also incredibly poor. There's a vast difference. It's a picture of America. Yeah, the spectrum is really wide. I mean, that was when when in the 90s was that that's the mary and barry time right yeah so that's when i mean he won as mayor again when

he came back after being arrested for smoking crack yeah and people like whatever yeah a little crack yeah it's it was an ugly place then it's becoming you know grotesque place now from the from the standpoint of the principles of what America is supposed to be. Yeah. Because the privileged there are not people who are privileged because they've, you know, Elon Musk-like invented a great new product or they've worked incredibly hard in a competitive marketplace and succeeded. They're privileged because they've leveraged influence in a corrupt system to profit. And the people who are failing there, you know, a lot of reasons they're failing is

just we don't have a competitive, powerful economy that gives them the opportunities right now because that district, Washington, D.C., because it's got no effective representation, is one of the worst represented districts in the country. in D.C. because it's got no effective representation. It's one of the worst represented districts in the country. So essentially, this all started out with Newt Gingrich's group, and they decided to spend so much time concentrating on fundraising. And then once that became successful, everyone else followed suit? Yeah. So the game became no longer how do we legislate for America, but how do we rally our troops to raise the money we need to win in the next election? The game is just about the election.

I mean, you know, my mother lives in Hilton Head, which is, of course, a very Republican district. But they elected their first Democrat, Joe Cunningham. And Joe, my mother loved him and wanted to support him. My mother's a Republican, but here he was. She wanted to support a Democrat. So I sent a check on her behalf to support him. My mother's a Republican, but here he was. She wanted to support a Democrat, so I sent a check on her behalf to this Democrat. The day he was elected, he started raising money for the next election. His whole focus from that moment on, and now he started a big membership organization where they're going to get members to sort of help him sort of get back to Congress

the next time around. Their sole focus is the elections. And this is really different. In the 1980s, you know, they would go to Washington. For 18 months, they would do the work of governing. And then for six months, they do the work of politicking. So, you know, a year and a half, they could figure out how to solve the problems of America. And then for a half a year, they figured out how to get reelected. That's no longer the game. The game now is from day one, how do we raise the funds we need to make sure how to get reelected. That's no longer the game. The game now is from day one, how do we raise the funds we need to make sure we can get reelected? And with the

Democrats' extraordinary turnaround in this lax election, you can be damn sure that's exactly the obsessive focus that will be going into 2020. And if there's no other viable alternative, this is a game that they have to play. Yeah. Good people have to play it. This is the point. It's not like you can have the good people who say, I'm not going to play this game. I mean, there are some famous people who could say, I'm not going to play this game. You know, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

I mean, she doesn't have to raise money, I'm sure. And people on the right, too, you know, who are the famous people on the right. They don't have to worry about this. But the ordinary congressperson knows, given the way the system is right now, they've got to obsessively focus on how to raise money. And what that means is they develop a sixth sense, a constant awareness about how what they do will affect their ability to raise money, become, in the words of the X-Files, shapeshifters, as they constantly adjust their views in light of what they know will help them to raise money, become, in the words of the X-Files, shapeshifters, as they constantly adjust their views in light of what they know will help them to raise money.

There's a congresswoman, Leslie Byrne, Democrat from Virginia, who describes that when she went to Congress, she was told by a colleague, quote, always lean to the green. And to clarify, she went on, you know, he was not an environmentalist. So the point is, like, you know, in your heart heart of hearts which way you got to go to make sure. And if you're good and you're smart, you'd never say anything to indicate it, but it's operating. But sometimes you're not so smart. So in the tax bill leading up to the passage of the last tax cut, the $1.6 trillion gift to corporations and wealthy people primarily, you know, the $1.6 trillion gift to corporations and wealthy people primarily,

a congressman in New York stood on the floor of the House and said, you know, my donors have told me that if we don't deliver on this, I should never call him again. I should never call him again. So it's basically, you know, as simple and clear as possible. You don't reduce our taxes. Don't ever ask us for more money. And that's the reality of what Washington has become. Now, once this gets started, and it moves in this direction, we don't have a long history of this to

understand the waves and the ins and the outs of the tide. It just this is just what it is. And it keeps moving in the same general direction. How would that ever stop? How would there ever be some sort of reform that puts this back into a position where it makes sense and it's tenable? Yeah. So, you know, I've been in this business for about 12 years now in the business of like trying to figure out what can we do to reform this corrupted system. And, you know, part of me feels, as you said, like it's hopeless, but part of me feels like it's the most hopeful moment we've seen. Because like a decade ago, when I would go around and say, you know, we got this really corrupted system.

And like money is really – people would say, no, what are you talking about? We just have to focus on getting the people we want elected. And if we get the people we want elected, we'll get the policies we want passed. And if we get the people we want elected, we'll get the policies we want passed. Now, almost everybody realizes that until we fix this broken Congress, nothing else can happen. So it's not like this is the most important issue out there. You know, you can think climate change or health care or jobs or competitive money. You can think those are the important issues. But what people are increasingly seeing is that this is the first issue.

If we don't fix. If we don't fix this, we don't fix anything. And what's really encouraging to me is that that frame is increasingly being embraced by important leaders. So, you know, about six years ago, I think, Nancy Pelosi was on Jon Stewart's show, The Daily Show, and Stewart said, you know, the whole system's corrupt. And Nancy Pelosi's, no, no, no, the system's not corrupt. People in the system are corrupt, but the system's not corrupt. And Jon Stewart just had a field day because of how ridiculous that statement is now. But now Nancy Pelosi is going to introduce as HR1, one, the most ambitious and comprehensive reform package that Washington, I think, has ever seen.

I mean, it is unbelievable in its breadth. So it has public funding of congressional campaigns so that congressmen don't spend 30 to 70 percent of their time sucking up to the Lesters. It has a mandate to end gerrymandering, politic partisan gerrymandering, exercising Congress's power under the Constitution to tell the states, clean this mess up. It has an incredible ethics package to kind of close, block the revolving door so congressmen are not running off to K Street. And it has an incredible restoration of voting rights, the Restoration of the Voting Rights Act, automatic voter registration. It's the most comprehensive package of political reform, I think the civil rights bill of the generation. But of course, nobody outside of Washington has heard anything about it.

Because most people look at what Washington does and says, it's just a game the Democrats are playing to embarrass the Republicans. How would they stop congressmen from becoming lobbyists? Well, one thing they do, and then I build loopholes into it, but one thing they can do is they can basically say, once you're a congressman, you can't be a lobbyist for five years. For five years. Yeah, or whatever the time is. But the more fundamental fact is, you know, if you change the way you fund campaigns, if it was no longer the lobbyists who are kind of channeling the money in or that were getting their clients to channel the money in, then it's not like there wouldn't be lobbyists anymore. They just wouldn't be so well paid. They wouldn't be as valuable. And if they're not as valuable, it's not as valuable for them to pay the congressman an incredible amount of money to become lobbyists. You know, they would

become almost like, you know, lawyers, policy wonks that kind of go to Capitol Hill and say, here's what will happen if you adopt this legislation. You know, that's an important part of the process. But they wouldn't be the machas in the system. They wouldn't be the people who called the shots. And so the value of their services would fall. And if the value of their services fell, then it wouldn't make so much sense to go and become a lobbyist. Maybe you'd come home and be a doctor again or come home and, like, be a business person again or do whatever you want back in your district. So I think if you change the way you fund campaigns, you would change 70% of the problem. You would just fix it right then.

And these other things are good additions but not as critical. But without changing the way you fund campaigns, I think all of these other changes are irrelevant. They just can't get over the money. You always hear the phrase take money out of politics. It's a constant phrase. But that's not really possible. No, and I don't think it's really good. The point isn't to get money out.

The point is to get money that doesn't represent a eventually part of whatever this big reform package is that would create a way of funding campaigns where everybody gets a voucher or a set of vouchers. So Seattle has done this for city elections where everybody gets four $25 vouchers that are only usable to fund campaigns. So a candidate comes around and tries to persuade you to give him or her the voucher, and then they take that voucher and they use it to fund campaigns. So a candidate comes around and tries to persuade you to give him or her the voucher, and then they take that voucher and they use it to fund campaigns. Okay. If Rocahontas Bill passed and everybody had vouchers to use to fund congressional campaigns, and the idea is basically you take the rebate of the first $50 of your taxes, which every American pays at least $50 to the federal government. You take that first $50, you give it back, and you give it in the form of a voucher. And you say, take this voucher and help fund campaigns with it. Congressmen would still be raising money. They'd still be spending a large time raising money. But they wouldn't be raising money from the tiny fraction

of the 1%. They'd be raising money from everybody. And so the point is that you would be using that money to spread the influence in the way that a democracy is supposed to spread the influence to every American as opposed to the influence in a tiny, tiny fraction of the 1%. So that wouldn't get less money. I think that could be more money in the system, but it wouldn't be corrupting money because it would be money that is democratically accountable. But the Lesters of the world would probably try to put the kibosh on that before it ever got moving. Yeah. I mean, you know, the biggest block to anything like HR1 happening is that the most influential people in Washington have the most to lose. Right. The lobbyists, you know, the value of the industry of lobbying just collapses.

And those people are going to fight like hell to block it, which is why as wonderful as it is to me to see somebody like Nancy Pelosi take up the charge and say, here it is, here's a package of reform, and it's going to be the first thing we do, fix democracy first. What's true, what's obvious about this is without a president taking up the charge, it's never going to happen. And what's most depressing to me is that right now in the Democratic Party, you don't have any candidate for president who's making reform even an important issue, let alone a primary issue. And, of course, we had a president who was elected under the drain the swamp slogan. But, of course, nobody believes he has any plan or have any intent to do anything to drain that swamp. Yeah, I'm hoping that having him in office is such a, that the whole thing was such a clusterfuck,

and that so many people are so disturbed that it's going to make people more politically active, and more aware of the consequences of having someone like that in office. and more aware of the consequences of having someone like that in office. Yeah. And actually, weirdly, unifying. Yeah. Because even though the Democrats are not doing this right now, which is really depressing to me, you know, we have these things that we know we disagree about. And we like fuel the politics of hate as we kind of yell at each other about these things. But there's a set of issues that we all agree about. And the most important set of issues we

all agree about is the deeply corrupted nature of this government. There was a poll done by University of Maryland in the middle of 2016 asking about anger and frustration with government, found the highest level of frustration in the history of polling. And then when they asked the reasons why they were so angry and so disaffected with their government, the reasons people gave were all the same. Things like the influence of money, the influence of lobbyists, the parties care more about corporations than about. And then we broke them down about how do Republicans think about this and how do Democrats think about this.

There was no statistical difference between Republicans and Democrats. You know, sometimes the Democrats were more concerned, sometimes the Republicans. And the levels were at like 80 and 90 percent. So literally 84 percent of Americans would say it is big money that is corrupting the way our Congress functions. Right. So here is common ground. And what was so extraordinary about the 2016 election is watch a Republican candidate stand on a debate stage in September of 2015. Donald Trump stood on a debate stage and pointed to every one of those candidates and said, I own all of you. I've given all of you money. And I know the way the system works and the system is corrupt. And he called super PACs an abomination and he attacked the idea of money in politics. And so what that signaled is that Republicans too could be rallied to this cause of addressing this deeply corrupted

political system. If only we could find the candidates who would do it. And I think what Donald Trump has done is teed up this moment where we can step back and say, look, we disagree about a lot of things, whether it's GMO or climate change, whether it's healthcare for all or college for all, whatever. We disagree about a lot of things. We got to work a lot of things out. But here is something we all agree about. And we should be smart enough to realize if we don't fix this, then none of the things we're arguing about matter. It's not serious to stand on a debate stage and say you support single-payer healthcare without also saying, but first we're going to fix this corrupted system because there's no way to get single-payer healthcare in a world where doctors and pharmaceutical companies and

insurance companies are funding elections. You can't say you're going to get climate change legislation in America without addressing the corrupting influence of money in politics because the dirty energy industry has an enormous opportunity to block this change through the way we fund campaigns. So this is a moment where we should be able to get everybody in this political system to step back and say, hey, wait. The system's broken. We can see it's broken. The first thing we have to do is to fix the broken Congress. And if we fix that Congress, then we have a chance to have an argument about what policy makes sense for America. And we each have our views, but no views are different. But the thing we don't agree about, we should be able to

agree on. Now, if that's a universal agreement amongst Republicans and Democrats, that funding and that money and that all this is what's ruining politics, the people that are donating all this money, the lesters of the world, what could they possibly do to stop this reform? And what's their reaction to this kind of reform? Yeah. Yeah. So let me be clear about one really important thing. When I say Republicans and Democrats, what I mean is people in the districts across America. I don't mean in Washington. Right. You know, like Mitch McConnell is, you know, I think the focus of evil in the modern world, Mitch McConnell, will block any reform here at all. So Nancy Pelosi can offer what she wants, but it'll never get through the Senate because of Mitch McConnell. And so there are many Republicans in Washington who are going to block any reform.

But when you ask the Republicans in Washington and the Lesters, what can they do to stop it? Well, the game strategy is clear. They've deployed it before. So they'll say things like, this is strategy is clear. They've deployed it before, right? So, you know, they'll say things like this is welfare for politicians. This is just corrupting free speech. You don't believe in the First Amendment if you don't believe that, you know, the Koch brothers or the Soroses have the right to spend unlimited amounts of money in political speech. have the right to spend unlimited amounts of money in political speech.

And so I think the way around that fight is to agree free speech is the fundamental value. And nothing of the reforms I support would try to restrict people's ability to speak. What we're talking about is congressmen raising money. We're not talking about individuals speaking in the marketplace. So you have a very loud voice, Joe. Your voice is heard by millions. And nothing in our constitution should permit the government to be able to suppress you at all, so long as you're within the bounds of decency, or at least not decency, because that's not a boundary that this podcast obeys often, but at least if you're not spreading false rumors and causing great harm. But the point is, even though this free speech needs to be protected, we still should be able to focus on the influence, the economy of influence, congressmen live under when they spend 30 to 70 percent of the time sucking up to the lesters to fund their campaigns that should be a focus of regulation without the first amendment getting

in the way because we want a congress filled with people who care about what their voters want not what their funders want the framers didn't create a constitution to replicate an aristocracy they were fighting an aristocracy. They had a system where there was a house, the House of Lords, that had to ask the aristocracy, what do you want? And everything could be blocked if the aristocracy didn't like it. Well, we've replicated that system more efficiently in America than they had there because we have a system where both the House of Representatives and the Senate is filled with people who are obsessed with a single question, House of Representatives and the Senate is filled with people who are obsessed with a single question,

what do my funders want? And if they can't answer that question in a way that supports the legislation, they're not going to support the legislation. Or if it's important for them to block legislation, they will block legislation. And that's the dynamic of Washington right now. the dynamic of Washington right now. Francis Figueroa describes our government as a veto-ocracy. And what he means by that is that there are so many places where influence, powerful influence, can block the ability of the government to do something that it just can't do anything anymore. And that's, I think, the consequence of allowing this corruption of money to be so deeply woven into our political system. Is it possible to fix? Yeah, it is possible to fix.

Because, you know, for example, H.R. 1 plus Rocahanna's bill, all perfectly constitutional. You wouldn't have to amend the Constitution to do it. I think that bill alone would solve 80% of the problem. The possibility, the problem isn't like conceiving of what changes have to happen. The question is how do you build the political movement to get there? And what that takes is leaders willing to say, we have to fix this corrupted democracy first. And leaders who stop like pretending that we can get like a Christmas list of great changes in government without fixing this democracy first. So, you know, Bernie published last month in the Washington Post list of the 10 things that should happen in the first hundred days in the next

democratic administration. 10 great ideas. Not a single one of those ideas addressed the corruption of our political system. It was just a Christmas list of all the things that the progressives want. And I'm a progressive. I want some of those things. But the point is- Like what things were they? Well, things like trillion dollar infrastructure projects, single-payer healthcare, free college, all the things that Bernie is pushing and has made so salient, and things that I think it's great that he has made salient. I mean, he's a hero in making these issues central to at least the debate. But what frustrates me is that instead of focusing

our anger on the billionaires, which he does, we need to focus more anger on the congressmen, the politicians, which he does not. I mean, the guy's been in Congress for almost 30 years now. And so it might be natural for him not to notice that the people around him are the problem. Is it a natural thing? Or do you think that he's possibly aware of the consequences of stirring up that hornet's nest? Because, you know, if anybody has a right to complain, when the DNC conspired to rig the primaries against him, he's the number one guy. He should be screaming from the rooftops, you're dealing with a corrupt system and this is disgusting. And he didn't do that.

And he didn't do that while Hillary Clinton was running for president and he knew it. He knew he had been screwed out of the primaries. He knew they had conspired. He knew it was all illegal. And he kind of just kept his mouth shut. Yeah, well, I think, you know, that was a responsibility. I think that was a kind of, you know, I was a person reflecting on the horrendous outcome if he took Hillary Clinton down. And so I think he restrained himself, you know, not perfectly. I mean, the fact is, after it was clear he was not going to be the nominee, he still continued to talk about the corruption around Hillary, which Donald then picked up and turned into a weapon against her. But I think he recognized, you know, as every responsible politician does, that, you know, it's not just about him. It's about the future of America. So when he restrained himself and didn't want to take the whole system down then, I get that.

But I'm talking about now. I'm talking about when you've got the House of Representatives talking about fundamental reform. It will be the first thing they take up. We at least ought to have a presidential campaign where candidates are saying, hell, yes, the first thing we will do is to end the corruption that makes it impossible for this Congress to function. thing we will do is to end the corruption that makes it impossible for this Congress to function and stop pretending like we can get all these wonderful things given to us by Santa Claus without fixing this first. You got to do the hard work of convincing America that there is a solution because, you know, the reality is I think most of America is where you started this podcast. Most of America thinks it's deeply corrupted and there's nothing that can be done.

They're half right. It is deeply corrupted. But it's not true there's nothing that can be done. We can do something. And in fact, I think we can solve almost 80% of it. I still think there's constitutional changes that might be necessary. And I've been working like how do we get constitutional changes and talking to people? My podcast, which of course has about one one thousandth of the one one millionth of the people listening to it, yours does. What is your podcast so people can listen? It's another way. So season

two is released today, which is about an Article 5 convention. But season one was about how to think about the 2020 election. But, you know, I think that we might have to have constitutional change, and I have been supporting the efforts to think about that. But what we've got to do is to give people a sense that there's something we can do before we amend the Constitution. We did a poll and found 96% of Americans believe it important to reduce the influence of money in politics. 91% didn't think it was possible. So that's the politics of resignation. You know, if you'd gone to Egypt under Mubarak and you'd stop the average person in the street and said, you know, what do you think of Mubarak? They would have said, you know, we hate Mubarak. And then say, why aren't you doing

anything about it? And they say, because nothing can be done. Or, you know, African Americans in 1900 in America, what do you think about Jim Crow? You know, we hate Jim Crow. Why aren't you doing anything about it? Well, because there's nothing to be done about it. Well, that's how Americans think about this political corruption. They hate it. They think it's deeply unjust, inconsistent with what they thought America was about. they don't do anything about it because they don't think there's anything to be done about it. And that's where leaders have a role. And what we need are leaders running for president right now to begin to explain to people, here's what we could do if only we built the power to do it. Recognizing the most important opposition here, the lobbyists in Washington, are going to be an incredibly difficult group to defeat, but we can do that. And if we do that, every other issue becomes easier to resolve in a sensible way. Now, there's no public support for lobbyists, right? There's no people out there that are super psyched that lobbyists are out there and exerting their influence on our world.

But they obviously have enormous financial backing behind them and they have incredible influence in our in our culture but if you had some magic wand you could wave across this system and and fix it wouldn't removing lobbyists be one of the first things you would do no no. No. Why so? Well, because look, Congress, especially in the current government, legislates on a whole bunch of issues that they don't have a clue about. Right. They don't know squat diddly about 99% of what they're legislating about.

They need information. One of the other things Gingrich did was to completely emaciate Congress's own information service. They used to have a really powerful information service that helped congressmen figure things out. All of that's basically gone. So they rely on outsiders to come in and help them understand it. Now, my view is, you know, that's an imperfect system because there's great inequality among the quality of lobbyists. because there's great inequality among the quality of lobbyists. But if all lobbyists were doing was providing information,

like, Congressman, here's what's going to happen if you pass this bill. Like, these jobs will disappear, or this lead will reappear in the water system. If that's all they were doing, that's a really valuable thing. Information to the Congress to help Congress decide what to do is an essential part of making democracy work. The part of lobbying that is the corrupting part where they become the machers for the money, not so much that they give it directly, but they call their clients and they say you need everybody at the C-level in your corporation to send $2,700 to this person, and they steer it like that, when they become the kind of source of resource for members of Congress, that's when they have this influence, which is not related to their argument. So, you know, I've met lobbyists who hate the system as it is right now. They'll say things like, look, I want a system where I win because my ideas are

good. My arguments are better. I don't want a system where I win because my ideas are good. My arguments are better. I don't want a system where I win because I'm able to channel more money than that guy, because that's not a democracy. Like a democracy should be these representatives are listening to us. And then they do the right thing based on what they think helps their constituents, not how much they're going to raise if they do this over that. How many lobbyists are there? Oh, man, I can't answer that question. You know, one of the big problems we've got is that the law has been weakened in registering lobbyists. So, you know, we have tens of thousands of people who are functioning effectively as lobbyists, but don't have to call themselves lobbyists. You have these members of Congress who go to

government relations departments, and they oversee the government relations department as long as they don't go on to Capitol Hill and shake hands, but instead set up the meetings on Capitol Hill with lower people shaking hands. They're not called lobbyists. So if you look at the lobbying numbers, it looks like we peaked in lobbying about three years ago and now are declining. ago and now are declining. But what that is, in fact, is that the rules have been interpreted or allowed to be unenforced so that many people who are lobbyists actually aren't actually functioning as lobbyists today. So they are lobbyists, but they don't wear the label as lobbyists. What do they call themselves? Government relations people, experts. Yeah. You know, and they aren't, they could say they're not technically lobbyists. And I got into a huge fight with Scott Brown. You remember Scott Brown who ran for – who was a senator in Massachusetts.

He ran on a Tea Party ticket and he was like this amazing Republican to win as a senator in Massachusetts. And then Elizabeth Warren defeated him in the election two years into his term. He then went to New Hampshire and ran for Senate. And I was helping a Republican in New Hampshire who was a reformer running for Senate. And we referred to him as a lobbyist. And he went ballistic. He said, I'm not a lobbyist. And then he said, I'm not technically a lobbyist.

He's a government relations person who's like calling people on Capitol Hill. He used to be with the Senate trying to get them to do things for him, but he isn't, quote, a technical lobbyist. So merely because the IRS wouldn't refer to him as a lobbyist, he thought it was outrageous and fraud for me to refer to him as what we all know he is, which is a lobbyist. and fraud for me to refer to him as what we all know he is, which is a lobbyist. So being a lobbyist is not defined by your actions. It's defined by your label. It's defined by did you have to fill something out to be a lobbyist? Well, once you are a lobbyist, according to the law,

you've got all sorts of obligations of reporting, who you're spending your time with, what you're spending money on. But government relations. Yeah. These government relations people at a certain level that do certain things aren't called lobbyists. But yet they have the exact same function. Even more because they've got tons of people working for them.

They get to deploy in their work of doing lobbying. How would that ever be? How would you ever put a dam up there? How would that ever be – how would you ever put a dam up there? Well, you know, you only put a dam up there if you got the political will to make it happen. Right. You only get the political will to make it happen if you have a political process that focuses America on this deeply corrupting problem and says, goddammit, we have to fix this. And if you had that will, if you said, we're just going to fix this, and you had the geeks then go down the list of 25 things that have to happen to make it so we have our Congress

that's worried about being representative of America, as opposed to representative of the Lesters in America, we could do it. It's not rocket science. It really is not that hard. You got to think carefully about what kind of incentives you're producing. I'm not saying it's obvious. We're not going to sketch the full plan here. But it's possible. It is constitutional to do it. And if we just built the political will to get there, we could do it. because right now people, especially people like you, need to be saying to every one of the politicians who's going to be sucking up to try to be on your show to try to have a chance to get their voice out to the class of you, to the people who are listening to your podcast, it's important to people like you to say,

okay, what are you going to do about this problem, this problem in particular? Is it a priority? Or is it like one of 12 things on your list? I mean, I imagine it's 11 for Bernie or 12, somewhere on the list. But the question isn't, you know, is it on the list? Because every one of 12 things on your list? I mean, I imagine it's 11 for Bernie or 12, somewhere on the list. But the question isn't, you know, is it on the list? Because every one of them is going to say, yeah, of course, I support reform.

The question is, are you going to bring America around so that America thinks on day one, this is what will happen. Whatever else happens, this is going to happen. And my view is, if there were a Democrat running for president who said, look, hold on, we're going to fix this. And the Trumpers who were drain the swamp, you know, the 25% of that base that's drained the swampers, come with me, because that guy did not drain the swamp. That guy filled the swamp. Swamp monsters are bigger and more vital now than they ever were. But come with me, we actually will do it. I think there's a way to break this election so that it becomes an

election about the unity around this recognition rather than the disunity, which is the screaming left against the screaming right, which is the way things right now are evolving. To a person sitting on the outside who doesn't have any involvement in politics like myself, it seems so unbelievably complicated that it exhausts you. When you start examining it and trying to pay attention to it and how the system works, correct me if I'm wrong, but in the recent past, there was something that was changed that allows corporations to donate money the same way that an individual would? Right. So in 2010, the United States Supreme Court decided a case called Citizens United.

And Citizens United said that you couldn't limit a corporation's ability to spend money independently of a political campaign. So corporations are not allowed to contribute directly. But that's not worth that much because you're only allowed to give a total of $5,400 to a candidate over the course of the life of his campaign. But what Citizens United said is that the Constitution protects the right of the corporation to engage in political speech independent of a political campaign. So if some congressman is running for Congress, Exxon Corporation can come in and spend a million dollars to say why that congressman is a good congressman or why that congressman is a terrible congressman, but they have a constitutional right to do that.

Now, when that happened, there were a bunch of us who were chicken littles about this, who said, oh, this is the end of democracy because these corporations are just going to spend unbelievable amounts of money in the political process, like spending their money to affect the results. And that was not correct because what happened is corporations quickly discovered the high price of free speech. So corporations like Target backed an anti-gay candidate for governor and all of a sudden found their stores being picketed across the country because people were furious that they would be supporting such a candidate for governor. So corporations quickly found that it's not cheap to engage in political speech in the marketplace. They didn't want to do it like that. Instead, they wanted to find a way to channel their money into dark money

organizations or into what evolved after Citizens United, something called super PACs. So super PACs were created not by the Supreme Court. Super PACs were created by a lower court that said, well, if you can spend unlimited amounts of money, you should be allowed to give unlimited amounts of money to an independent political action committee. That was the super PAC. Supreme Court has never ruled on that question. We have a case that we're taking up through Alaska that's trying to appeal to the Supreme Court to get them to actually decide whether super PACs are mandated by the Constitution. And what's different about this case is the argument we're making is to the conservatives. What we're saying is the framers of our Constitution were obsessed

with corruption. That was the issue that they were overwhelmingly trying to avoid. And they weren't focused on bribery. They were focused on institutional corruption. These institutions became unconnected to their purpose, representing Americans. And what our view is, is these conservatives on the Supreme Court, like Neil Gorsuch or Justice Thomas or Brett Kavanaugh, who say that we interpret the Constitution the way the framers would have interpreted it. We're going to make the argument to them, which is there is no doubt the framers of the Constitution would have looked at these super PACs and said, these are an abomination. These are outrageous from the perspective of the democracy they were trying to create. And those justices should, at least one of them, be willing to stand up and defend the framers' values against this modern corruption.

And if just one of them voted with the four liberals who've already said they think super PACs are an abomination, then we could have a way to end the super PACs in this system. And that would be an enormous benefit because they've become so powerful. But the courts alone can't save us. Even if you ended super PACs tomorrow, you still have Lesterland. Because the super PACs are not what I was talking about in Lesterland. When I was talking about Lesterland was giving to candidates directly. And the small number of people would still be giving to candidates directly. And the only way to solve that is for Congress to pass new laws that change the way campaigns get funded. That's the sort of thing

HR1 is trying to do. That's the sort of thing Rocahontas is trying to do. But that's the sort of thing that we don't have a president to support right now. We don't have Democratic presidential candidates who are making it the champion issue right now. And it won't get done unless they do. Well, it seems complicated to people when you try to explain campaign finance and you try to explain contributions to candidates and contributions to sitting senators and congressmen it's it's complicated and there's so many different things to think about when you're discussing this that to a person who's on the outside well how do you fix this well what what are the laws now well how did it get that way

well well how about make it so they can't give them money? And there's all these real simplistic views of it from the outside. But it seems that at the very least, limiting the amount of money that someone's allowed. What is the maximum amount of money someone can give to a candidate? Right now, in the primary and the general, it's $5,400, $2,700 in each. And that goes up according to inflation. And that's pretty small potatoes compared to what the super PACs are doing in the election. So you have these people running who expect they're going to raise the money to run their office from their direct contributions, but they're counting on the super PACs to come in and spend ungodly amounts of money,

like tens of millions of dollars to support their candidate or to oppose their opponent. And so the supporters for those super PACs are an even tiny, those are the Adolphs in America. People named Adolph, this tiny, tiny, tiny number of people who are contributing to those things. But you're right. People, look, there's no reason why most Americans should understand the complexities of campaign finance law, and they don't need to. What they need to ask is, do we have a system of integrity in the way we select representatives? And if you're not brain-dead in America, you believe the answer to that question is no. We do not have a system of integrity. There's no representational integrity. It is corrupted in all the obvious ways. And nobody should be forced to study campaign finance

in order to have the entitlement to say, hell no, this system has got to end. And so I think you're right. If people are forced to articulate all the 34 different changes that have to happen, we're never going to get there. But let's not go there. Let's just start and end with it is a corrupted system and we want politicians to fix it. And if they don't fix it, we'll throw them out until we get

the politicians who do. And if we could build that as the movement, the recognition, the core message of 2020, I think there's a real shot because we've primed the Republican Party. There are a lot of people in that party who are now so disgusted with the corruption of this system. Not necessarily Mitch McConnell, he loves it, but ordinary Republican voters. And the Democrats have now committed themselves to fixing this corrupted system. This is the moment to do that. And we don't have to get into the details of how much you should be allowed to contribute to say there is a way to fix this that would give us a representative democracy. Maybe not again, but for the first time. Why is Mitch McConnell so uniquely evil?

This guy has had it in his DNA from the first moment he went to Washington to end any regulation of money in politics. He engineered the selection of the FEC, this is the Federal Election Commission commissioners, so that they would block basically every enforcement action of the FEC. The FEC does nothing now because it's a commission that has half Republicans and half Democrats. So if the Republicans disagree from the Democrats, then nothing gets done. They can't enforce the most simple rules anymore because Mitch McConnell has populated the FEC with people who don't believe in campaign finance rules. He has said Citizens United, this decision that said corporations could give unlimited amounts of money to independent political speaking, says one of the greatest

decisions of the Supreme Court. And he said he's going to fight like hell to defend it. And when this proposed H.R. 1 was raised to him, Mitch McConnell said there is not a chance in hell this will ever even get a debate in the Senate. This man is obsessed with the idea that money should have the power in Washington that it has right now. And people who are talking about reforming it are the enemy. And so, you know, the thing about Mitch McConnell is he's actually an incredibly smart man. And he's an incredibly smart strategist. And he's been playing this game for a long time.

And I think he's, like, responsible for 85% of the judicial structure that makes it possible for this to be blocked. There's an amazing series of debates that happened 20 years ago between John McCain and Mitch McConnell. So this is when Congress was passing something called the McCain-Feingold Law, which was the last great effort to deal with this problem. It was flawed in a bunch of ways, but it was an important success. Mitch McConnell stood on the floor of the Senate and said, Mr. McCain says that the Senate, well, you can't say Mr. McCain, so the Senator from Arizona has said that the system is corrupt. I want him to name the corrupt people. And McCain stands there and said, I'm not talking about particular individuals. I'm talking about

the system. It's the system's corrupt. And then McConnell, almost clueless, just said, if the system's corrupt, there must be corrupt people. If there's not corrupt people, then the system's not corrupt. So the only corruption he could imagine was corruption where somebody was taking a bribe. And if that's the only corruption we're allowed to remedy, then the whole system of influence we have right now is not to be touched. But, you know, I think McCain's point was you can have a system filled with lots of honest congresspeople and lots of honest senators who never engage in bribery, but they know how to bob and weave and bend and speak and say the right things to attract the right kind of money.

And that's as much corruption as bribery is. And McCain's view was we had to end it. So he was the last great Republican fighter for reform of this corrupted system. There have been many before. Barry Goldwater was an incredibly vocal opponent to the role of money in politics. But I think what we have to do is to find a way to revive that and to leverage from this president's assertion that this is a corrupt system and we have to change the system into actually building the political power to make that change happen. Another thing that's very weird is that every four years or so, there's this cry to eliminate the electoral college. Every four years ago, people realized that the battleground states are so critical and that so much money is being spent on this small handful of states

because they give you all the electoral votes, and this is how you win an election. And then people say, well, why is that? That doesn't make any sense. It should be one person, one vote. Are we really that divided as a nation that we need to isolate ourselves into these small little lines on the dirt where this part is worth this amount and that part's worth that amount? And so everybody plays this weird electoral college game. And then you get a situation like what just happened where Hillary Clinton wins the popular vote, but is not the president because the electoral college is what makes everything. Yeah. So the way you just described this problem is exactly the way people have to think about it.

The problem is, I mean, it is a bad thing that the loser wins. I mean, that's just not the way an election is supposed to work. So that's happened twice in our lifetime. And it happened 100 years before that. And it's going to happen more frequently going forward. We can show that demographically. But that's not the real problem. The real problem is that in every election, the presidential candidates are focused on just 14 states, the battleground states,

the purple states. And those 14 states are the only states that matter to those candidates. And what scholars have demonstrated is that presidents and campaigns bend themselves and their policies to make those states happy. And those states don't represent America. They're older, they're whiter, their industry is kind of 19th century industry. There are seven and a half times the number of people in America working in solar energy as mine coal. But you never hear about solar energy in a presidential campaign because those people live in California and Texas. They don't matter to the presidential election. What you hear about is coal mining because the 50,000 coal miners left in America

happen to live in these battleground states. So this is just a product of the way the electoral college, the way states count their votes to allocate their electors, something called the winner-take-all system. So all but two states say that the winner of the popular vote gets all of the electoral votes for that state. So in 2000 in Florida, George Bush won that state

based on a stopped recount by 531 votes. He got all the electoral college votes in that state, based on a stopped recount, by 531 votes. He got all the electoral college votes in that state, even though he just barely won that state. And so winner-take-all is what makes it so that it doesn't make sense for anybody to pay any attention to any of the non-battleground states and spend all of your time in the battleground states. In 2016, 99% of campaign spending was in 14 states. 99? 99%. 95% of time. But the only reason they were not 99% in those battleground states is the other 5% they were in New York and California raising money, right? So this is a system designed to give power to these battleground states. And then you say, well, why? Is it something the Constitution requires? And the answer to that is absolutely not. The Constitution does not say how the states will allocate their electors. And indeed, when states started adopting

this winner-take-all system, many thought it was an outrageous perversion of the constitutional design. So Jefferson was outraged. But then he said, well, if some states are going to do it, then all states have to do it. Because if you're a state that allocates all of your electors to the winner, you're going to have more power than your neighboring state that only gives half the electors to the winner. So very quickly there was a race to the bottom, and that's kind of where it stuck. And so the question is now what we can do about it. Well, there are two big reform efforts out there. One of them is called the National Popular Vote Compact. I mean, I should say, you know, you can imagine amending the Constitution, but it takes three-fourths of the states to

change the Constitution, and three-fourths of the states are not going to agree with abolishing the Electoral College. So this is not going to happen anytime soon through the Constitution. But there are two ways, without amending the Constitution, we could fix this problem. One, the National Popular Vote Compact is basically states who say, look, we're going to pledge our electors to the winner of the National Popular Vote. So the state, you know, looks at who won the national popular vote and then picks the slate of electors from their state with the party of the person who won the national popular vote. So in a state like New York, if the Republican won the national popular vote, even though most people in New York are Democratic, they would allocate their electors

to the Republican, vice versa in Texas. That's the way that system would work. And I personally like this system because I believe in the idea of one person, one vote. Everybody's vote is an American citizen for the American president. It should be equal. It shouldn't matter that you're having to live in Wyoming versus Pennsylvania versus New York. But there are people who are worried about this because they fear that it'll become a kind of flyover democracy, that the only places that candidates will care about will be places like L.A. or New York or Chicago. I actually don't think that's right, but I get the understanding. I think they're wrong about the way the campaigns work, but I something, you know, my group equalscitizens.us is litigating this right now, which is trying to declare this winner-take-all system violates the Constitution, because it basically says that if you're a Republican in California, your vote never

matters. If you're a Democrat in Texas, your vote never matters, because we just count your vote up, and then we throw it away, because we allocate all the electors to the dominant party in your state. And so we've got David Boies as our chief litigator. We've got a case in California, Texas, South Carolina, and Massachusetts asking the courts to declare winner take all unconstitutional and instead say that electors have to be allocated proportionally. So if you get 40% of the vote in the state, you get 40% of the electors. If you get 50%, you get 50% of the electors. And what that would do overnight is it would make every state in the nation competitive. Like there'd be a reason for a Democrat to go to Texas because you're not going to get all the electoral votes. You're not going to get all the electoral votes. You're not

going to get half the electoral votes, but you'll get 40%, maybe 45%, and that could matter. Or a Republican would go to California, because you're not going to get all the votes in California, but you're going to get a lot. There are a lot of Republicans in California. So this change would immediately make every state in play. But unlike the national popular vote alternative, there are many people who look at this and say this would be better because small states would still have a pretty important role, like an elector is an elector. And if I can get it from Arizona, I'm going to care about Arizona. If I can get it from Arkansas, I'll care about Arkansas. So it's not going to just be the big states or the big population centers. It's going to be every

state. And so if we can get a court to say this violates the Constitution, then you could have states forced to allocate their electors proportionally. And if they did that, then the problem that you identified at the start, which I think is the problem, could be solved overnight. You would no longer have these battleground states deciding everything. You'd have a president who cares about getting elected by all of America, and that would be an incredible improvement. That seems like, in and of itself,

would be a game changer. Yes. If they could do that, that would change a lot. But one of the things that you said, you said you don't think that it's possible that we would ever vote out the Electoral College. But is there support for the Electoral College? Is there a good argument for it? So there is support for the idea that every state have a role. And there's a support for

the idea that small states got to kind of thumb on the scale, which is what the Electoral College does. So there is some support, but most people, you know, 70% of people don't like the idea that the president is not chosen from the majority of voters voting. So most people would oppose it. But the point is to change the Constitution, you need the state legislatures or state conventions to agree with the change. And what many states, at least 13 states, I fear, would say is that, you know, we actually win more under this system than we lose. So we're not going to change the system. And so unless you get like some overwhelmingly popular movement to support it,

or again, you know, you can imagine a presidential candidate who kind of made fixing this part of the democracy part of the plan too. I don't see how you're going to build a political movement to get there. Another way of putting it is, this National Popular Vote Compact, which is going around state to state and getting states to join, right now has about 100. And so the way this works is that when the equivalent of 270 electoral votes have been committed, then the compact kicks in. So when they get to 270, the problem of this electoral college goes away because at 270, according to the plan, the winner of the popular vote wins the electoral college. They right now have 172 electors pledged, right? So they have less than 100 more to go.

But the problem is they've got to convince states to join the compact. And they kind of hit this red wall now because many Republicans think the only way to win the presidency is through the electoral college now. So many state legislatures. Why do they believe that? I think many Republicans just think that their great benefit is from the electoral college. It's not surprising. Because the battleground states are primarily Republican. And because the base number of Republican states is so high, right? Because these small rural states get disproportionately more electors than states

like California. So Wyoming gets three electors. Disproportionate in terms of the population. Population, right. So they like the system as it is. And you look So, you know, Wyoming gets three electors. Disproportionate in terms of the population. Population, right. So they like the system as it is. And, you know, you look back and you say, well, they got George Bush, even though he didn't win the national vote. And they got Donald Trump, even though he didn't win the national vote.

It's not hard to understand why they're there. I think, again, I don't think they're right about this. You know, in 2004, if 50,000 votes had switched to John Kerry in Ohio, then John Kerry would have won the Electoral College but lost the popular vote. And if that had happened in 2004, I think the Electoral College would be dead today. Really? Because a Republican won in 2000, a Democrat won in 2004. People would say this system is just crazy.

We've got to get rid of this system. But now people think, well, Republicans benefit from this. So if I'm a Republican, I'm going to block the change. And if that's true, then it's never going to happen at a constitutional level, because the Constitution requires three-fourths of the states to support the reform. And the reinforcement of that is that Donald Trump won without having the popular vote. Yeah, yeah. And you know, of course, there's no hypocrisy that touches this president. But you remember in 2012 when there was a moment for about 10 minutes when the national media was reporting that Romney was going to win the popular vote but Barack Obama was going to be elected by the Electoral College. Trump started tweeting vigorously about how this is a denial of democracy. We have to march on Washington to end this banana

republic-like system because the Electoral College was the worst possible thing in the world. And of course, after 2016, he had different views about the Electoral College. I wasn't old enough to understand what was going on during Watergate. What year was that? understand what was going on during Watergate. What year was that? Well, so the break-in happens in the lead-up to the 72 election, and then he eventually resigns after that. But this is our Watergate, right?

This moment right now, Cohen's going to go to jail for three years, and he's testifying against Trump, and all these people are testifying, and they're calling him, what are they calling him? Co-conspirator number one. Is that what the- Yeah, yeah. The official- Individual number one.

Individual number one. Yeah, yeah. This is a very unusual moment for us to be watching this all unfold and to see this slow dissection. What Mueller seems to be doing is like slowly closing off all the escape routes and slowly circling the troops around this one area that he's trying to – that he's attacking. Yeah. So he's a brilliant tactician. Yeah.

And so I think it's clear that the worst for Donald Trump is yet to come. And I do think the parallel is Watergate, but there's a really important difference here. So I'm old enough to remember Watergate. I was like 12 or 13 when this happened. And my uncle happened to be the lawyer who worked in the House of Representatives, convincing the House of Representatives to vote the articles of impeachment. And that weekend when Nixon resigned, he came to visit us. We lived in the Kentucky part of Pennsylvania, the kind of right wing middle part of the state. He came to visit us and he told me this was going to happen. And that was the event. That was the weekend that I

decided I wanted to become a lawyer. But the big difference between these two times is that when that happened, the way most people got access to news was three television networks. Every day they watched the news at the same time because there was nothing else on. And those three television networks kind of shot right down the middle and told the story as they saw it. It was kind of the Walter Cronkite era of news. And as this story broke, they just reported it as they saw it. And as they saw it, it was a pretty damning indictment of the president. And what's amazing is he watched the polling among Republicans in their support for the president. Six months before the president resigns, the poll says among Republicans, he has about an 83% support rate.

And then when he resigns, his support rate among Republicans is about 50%. And that's because the news, newspapers and television, had told everybody the same story, and Americans hearing the same story came to the same view, that there was something deeply corrupt about this president and he had to go. We don't live in that news environment today. We live in an environment where half of America lives in one news world and the other half of America lives in another news world. And the half of America living in the Breitbart Fox news world

are not being told the stories that the people living in the MSNBC, NPR news universe are. And so in this world, the opportunity for Americans to see the facts, the same facts, and have a reflective judgment about it and come to a view that this president needs to resign or be impeached, I don't think he should be impeached, but that's a separate question, is not possible. And that's what's so terrifying about it. When you live in a democracy where we don't all live in the same universe, we don't know the same facts, how do you knit together a public that can address these critical issues of national import?

And that's, I think, our biggest challenge right now. Well, it gets grayer than that, right, with characters like Sean Hannity, that they separate the line between not just being some sort of a political pundit, but actually campaigning for the president, showing up at speeches, addressing the crowd, making these big statements in support of the president. It's very strange to watch because I don't remember that at any point in time. No, it wasn't the past. But I think the thing we need to realize is it is the future because it pays. Cable news pays. Tremendously. When these people become partisan hacks inside of a politics of hate,

which is the current politics of both the Democratic and Republican parties and the cable news stations, they build tribes who are deeply loyal to them. And the loyalty to those tribes translates into advertising dollars. It is the business model of cable. So Sean Hannity looks to old geezers like me like an abomination from the perspective of what news should be like. But from the standpoint of what the future is going to be, he is the future. And so then it becomes a question like how do we knit together a democracy given there will be people like the Sean Hannity's on cable television? And I've begun to talk about the slow democracy movement, which I think I pointed to you as part of that.

The slow democracy movement, which I think, you know, I think I pointed to you as part of that. I think that there's a need to begin to think about how do we build political understanding, not through broadcast television, but through something else that gives people a chance to think in more than 30 second bites. And podcasting, I think, Fox, bipolar distribution of information? I mean, I remember when the elections were going on, I would flip back and forth between the two channels and it was like two alternative universes. There were different worlds, different worlds of focus, different worlds of what they're projecting. Yes, but I don't think the point is that it has to be down the middle. Right. I think it has to be deep. So this is what I think is so powerful about podcasting.

Like, you know, the fact that you get people to listen to you talk about an idea for an hour, two hours, sometimes three hours is astonishing. hours is astonishing, literally astonishing in an age where the most a cable news channel will allocate to a news story is a minute and a half, two minutes, three minutes, right? And you know in the context of like the tweet thinking of cable news, they can't afford to go deep on anything and everything they're going to talk about are the things they can talk about sensibly in 25 seconds or 30 seconds or 40 seconds. And what you know, because you've lived this life of like having deep conversations about things that are important, is that it sometimes takes more than 30 seconds to understand something. Always. Yeah. And the point is, if we have media that's focused at the 30 second chunk, and that's how America understands the issues, we're never going to get anywhere. And the only

way to get to get someplace is to begin to have conversations that are at the hour-long chunk or the two-hour-long chunk. And it's not important that that be neutral or balanced. I don't care if it's balanced. I care that it is attempting to be serious and in-depth, understanding the issues. So I don't care if Cato wants to have podcasts to try to tell us the deep story of Ayn Randi and economics or something like that. That's fine. That's good. I think it's important that people start thinking about these issues in a richer, deeper way. And I think the challenge we have now is how do we begin to produce understanding, realizing that the world of Walter Conkite is never coming back. And it might be a

good thing, but it is just never coming back. And the world of Sean Hannity is a world that will destroy democracy. So how do we rebuild democracy outside of that? And if you had to pick the three things that are the most hopeful, I think podcasting is number one. I think some of the reflective, deep, funny, playful, but in the end, at the end of the hour-long segment of a podcast, you understand something you didn't understand before. I think that's number one. I think comedy, like comedy television, brings people into understanding things in a way that's not possible on Fox News. I think that's number two. I think shows like Homeland.

I don't know if you watch Homeland. I watched it until the redheaded guy died. that, you know, that's number two. I think shows like Homeland, I don't know if you know, watch Homeland. I watched it until the red-headed guy died. And then it went through this dark period in the middle, but the recent seasons are just un-fucking-believable. Really? And because, they're unbelievable because they are such a deep, rich understanding

of the tensions at issue. Like, you want to understand the Iran nuclear deal, watch the last season. Because after watching that season, you like understand the tensions between the CIA and the president and what's actually going on with Israel. And I think that if you imagine television shows aspiring to tell the story in an entertaining way, in a way that brings people in, that they voluntarily want to watch it. But that in the end, at the end of watching a season, you understand something. I understand the current season is about the Russia struggle. And I can't wait to watch it because it's going to be a richer understanding of that story than anything on television.

Did you watch House of Cards? I did. Up until this season? Did you quit at this season? I watched the season. I was very disappointed. I watched episode one and I said, this seems like they just gave it to some different writers.

It's just craziness. It just seemed like somebody just got a hold of it and they said, I'll take it. I'm going to write it my own way. Right. But even in the very beginning, the striking thing about House of Cards is it made it seem like stuff actually could happen in Washington. Yes.

You're like, wow, this really powerful guy, Frank Underwood, actually can actually get important bills passed. Right. And I remember watching that saying, holy shit, this is just completely not the truth. This is just not the way the system works. I mean, it would be good if it worked like that because at least it could do stuff. But the way it actually works is that these guys would be scurrying around trying to figure out, you know,

what the tentacles of funders are directing them to do. And the tentacles of funders added together would be don't do anything. That's not what you're there to do. But what it at least did is sort of highlight the influences that these people experience. And it showed how deeply entrenched everything is.

Yeah. I mean, I don't want to talk it down at all. Man, I want a million different things like this on television. Just something that gives people – Yeah, just gives them a richer understanding. Well, an understanding period because for the most part what people – I mean you go to school, you learn about democracy and our system of representative government. And then you become an adult and you forget most of what you learned. And then you hear something about the electoral college and the popular vote and then you see bills getting passed.

What the hell is that? And the stuff you learn at school is so politically correct. It can't actually give you an understanding of anything. Like you actually taught kids in high school the way Congress worked. You know, the school board would go crazy. And they're like, no, no, no, you can't talk down American democracy like that. So the truth is not teachable. The only way to get people to see the truth is to expose it to them in a way that they want to see it.

And, you know, my point is that's not going to be Fox News. Fox News can never cover it at the depth and the interest level that it needs to be covered. It's going to be things like what you do, or things like what, you know, great television can do. Is our system of government analogous to like taking like DOS or Windows 95 or something like that and just continuing to patch it and never revisit it and never come up with a new operating system? I think the better analogy is an operating system that has been taken over by malware or some virus. Yes. Because it's not innocent. You know, DOS, you know, was a fun system and it like cranked to a halt after a while when you tried to pile

more and more on top of it. But that was just kind of the limits of what it could do. There was nothing malicious in its failure. But there's something malicious in this failure. There are people who are eagerly focused on how to make sure our government can't govern. Because if our government can't govern, they win. So, you know, the Koch brothers have this amazing, you know, bipolar character. On the one hand, they're talking about the ideals of government. But the reality is their interventions make it so we don't have an EPA that can regulate their companies. So basically, you know, we have environmental policy that leaves

their companies alone, which means they can make tons of money by polluting our environment without ever having to pay the consequence of it. And what they want is not change of a particular kind, except for tax cuts. What they want is nothing to happen. And so that's the kind of, you know, malware that's taken over the system of our government, that's blocked the ability of the government to function. And rather than having leaders at the center who say, hold it, let's just pause for a second and realize this is a fucking broken system. We have politicians that continue to pretend as if everything's working. You just have to elect more Democrats and we'll get what we want. Yeah.

Voting online. What would be the pitfalls of that and why hasn't that been implemented? If you can bank online, why can't you vote online? So I think most of the experts who are disinterested, meaning they're not working for Diebold or something like that, I would tell you that we don't yet have the infrastructure to be able to be confident about this. Now, there are lots of people working on, I think, really great open source implementations that could eventually produce the kind of confidence that we need to have to be able to vote online. And so I don't foreclose it in the long run. But I think what we've seen in the short run is that when we turn

to these proprietary providers of technology to enable us to vote, they give us shit. You know, look at these voting machines. There's a recent story about this 11-year-old who was able to, within like 15 minutes, hack into the Florida election system and change the results from one candidate to another. Because the companies that build these technologies are not filled with a bunch of rocket scientists. Like if you're really good, you're going to go work for Google or for Facebook or something like that. So the proprietary software has all of these bugs and holes

and intended backdoors built into it. Intended backdoors. Yeah, because they need, you know, the company itself needs a simple way to get in to check or to fix things. But then they don't worry about the fact that other people will get backdoors to be able to get in. This is the argument for a Diebold system that did have a third-party entrance. Tons of allegations about that.

Yeah. Did you ever see the documentary Hacking Democracy? Yes. Yeah. Was that disturbing to you? Incredibly. I don't know how much I believe about it. Why is that?

Well, because I've seen so much that contradicts some of the claims about, you know, the extent to which there was real differences in the numbers. I remember at the election really being anxious about it, because it seemed to me, in Ohio in particular, a really compelling case was made that there was something weird going on. But, you know, the point is not so much the particulars of a particular election. It's recognizing that if you turn this over to proprietary software companies who are going to build these closed systems nobody can inspect, there's no reason to trust them. It's not like they are intending to make themselves vulnerable to the Russians. They're just going to make themselves vulnerable to the Russians. And there are alternative systems like open source systems that I know some people are building

right now that I think eventually could get us there. An open source system like a Linux-based something that would go onto your phone? Well, it could be on your phone. But the point about the open source is that anybody can inspect the code and be confident that the code is doing what it says it's doing. Right. What I'm saying about being on your phone is the biometrics that we use on our phone today are some of the most secure in terms of being able to establish that it's you that's making that vote. Like iris scanners that you have on the – I have a Samsung Note 9 that has an iris scanner, checks my eyeballs. My iPhone checks my face. It checks the – I mean, they're pretty amazing.

Fingerprints, obviously. But the fact that this is probably, in terms of our own personal security in terms of information, this is probably the most secure our smartphones are, probably the most secure devices we've ever possessed. So on the one hand, yes. And that's why I say I agree with you that in the long run, we should imagine a world where it'd be trivially easy to vote, just like it's easy for me to Venmo you or Cash App you, I guess is your favorite here, or Cash App U, I guess is your favorite here, money. That should be the way the future is.

But on the other hand, we need to realize that these technologies are also incredibly insecure in the sense that there is now a commercial market to exploit insecurities inside of these phones. And these companies basically have bounties that they post on the web for people who will come forward and find certain holes and hacks. And once they get those hacks, they use them to leverage power. And governments play this game all the time. And, you know, there's a pretty strong argument that the Khashoggi murder was a product of one of these exploits,

which was then going to be revealed, and the need to cover up the fact that there was such an exploit out there. What is this? I didn't know this. What is this about? Well, so the basic idea is that these companies, and many of them, most prominent ones here, are Israeli companies who facilitate the ability of governments to buy access to your phone. And the standard way in which this is done is to pierce the security by sending you something

that you click on and it then embeds itself in the phone and there's no way you see it and no way that it can be blocked. But there's rumors now that, in fact, we've got something more than that going on where all they need to do is get your telephone number and they're able to hack into the system to get access to your phone. But the point is these companies have a market now for selling this type of insecurity. So they'll sell the ability for you to get access here. The story that, you know, I don't have a lot of reasons to be absolutely confident about this, except that I trust the person who's inside the security world that says this to me. The story is that this is part of what happened in the Khashoggi context,

that the Saudis had exploited this in a way that was going to be revealed, and the simple solution to that eventual revelation was to remove the person who would reveal it. And that's why Kishore came down. Yeah. So this is the point about recognizing these phones. On the one hand, for the ordinary life, it's more secure than anything you've ever had. But on the other hand, systematically, it's building insecurity into our lives in a way that can be exploited by powerful people. And for most people, it doesn't matter. into our lives in a way that can be exploited by powerful people.

And for most people, it doesn't matter. Like most people, ordinary Joes, they're never going to be vulnerable because nobody's going to spend a million dollars to get a hack against an individual person. When I hear that from a person justifying why they don't worry about it, it drives me crazy. I don't do anything. What are they going to do?

I'm clean. Don't worry about me. But that's not what we're't do anything. What are they going to do? I'm clean. Don't worry about me. But that's not what we're doing. That's not what we're talking about. Right. Because if we have a system where systematically powerful people can just push a button and, like, find a way to control you or control anybody. Or Jamal Khashoggi. Yeah.

Then we've got a system that no longer makes it possible for ordinary people to stand up to power. That's basically what it is. This is a structure that allows powerful people, if it is insecure, to protect themselves because they can just leverage that against us. And I think this is a completely unfocused problem. Nobody is talking about this politically. But the market for this commercialized security exploits is hugely important, and we've got to find a way to address it. So is it feasible that as technology advances and as the security advances as well, I mean the biometrics that we have today are far greater than the passwords that we used just a few years ago, that there could be something that you can't exploit, especially considering open source variants where they can be checked by the community.

Yeah. So the problem is not the kind of particular technologies working the way you intend them to work. If you've got great biometric technologies, those are really good at making sure, in the ordinary case, that you're the right person using your phone. The problem is the code is so big and so complicated that there's always going to be little bugs inside the code. And what these exploits are are like coders who like poke at the code looking for these little hooks. And they link one hook to another hook to another hook, and then they find the way in to exploit the system. So the exploits are never – well, I won't say never. There's another story that's important to recognize.

I'll talk about that in a second. But the exploits are not, in the main case, intended by anybody. It's just the natural consequence of having, you know, literally hundreds or millions of lines of code that go into making this machine work. And that's what's being exploited. And when you have a world like the iPhone, which is this monoculture, like, you know, everybody has the same operating system or same versions of the operating system. If you find an exploit in the iOS and Apple doesn't know about it and you can exploit it for six months or a year, you can, you know, do a lot of damage to a lot of people's lives before anybody gets around to blocking it. Now, you know, that's even in the

best case where everybody's working hard to make their system as secure as it can be. There was this period after the 9-11 when there's very strong, incredible allegations that the United States government went around to these technology companies and said, we need you to build back doors into your technology so we can track down the terrorists. There's strong allegations that, in fact, many of the most important technology companies complied. And what they quickly discovered is that the backdoors intended for the United States government trying to attack terrorists were being exploited by the Chinese trying to steal trade secrets

from American companies. So this infrastructure that was intended to be secure to protect American companies so that they could do their work without being – for an espionage on top of them became an infrastructure of espionage. Again, because it's so complicated to get it perfectly right. And the return from exploit is so huge that you can just expect the market is always going to supply it. What was the other example that you were going to bring up? That was it. That was it. That was it.

That was it. That was the idea, that the intended back doors that turn out to be exploited for other purposes. But isn't the system itself, like when you deal with hanging chads or paper- Terrible. Terrible. Their counters- It's ridiculous. You're giving it up to human beings.

The potential for error is massive, right? Just to count things up. Or the potential for corruption, the decision to ignore certain collections. I mean, this has all been documented, right? Yeah. And all of this follows from the fact that we, bizarrely in America, unlike most mature democracies around the world, make the running of elections a partisan event. Like, you know, Republicans in a district or Democrats in a district control the voting systems. Like, why the hell would that be? Why don't we have like

people whose self-identity and professional framework is nonpartisan, independent, like election commission that's about, you know. That's above the partisan battle. So that there's no incentive in Georgia, for example, for the government to allocate money to fix voting machines just in Republican districts and not in Democratic districts. Or there's no incentive to shut down a polling place, which they did in Georgia, making it so that people in that area would have to go a huge distance to be able to vote, or to create it so that it takes seven hours to vote in some

districts and 20 minutes to vote in other districts. There's no incentive to do that if your job is simply to make it possible for people to vote efficiently. And if we measure you and reward you based on how easy have you made it for people in the state to vote easily and efficiently, we don't get that kind of efficiency. We don't get that kind of innovation because it's a rigged game. You might have people who – I'm sure many of these people are above partisan motivation. But we also know that many of these people are deeply motivated by partisan politics, especially at that kind of middle level of party politics. politics, especially at that kind of middle level of party politics. And if they can set it up so that their side wins because of the way they've played the game for allocating voting resources,

then more power to them. And that's exactly what happened in Georgia with this recent governor's election. It's kind of outrageous that the man running the election system, Secretary of State, does not resign from this job as he runs for governor and the governorship is decided in such a very close way by the decisions that he made about how they're going to throw people off the voting rolls or which allocations of voting system technology will be made across the state. This is a product of just making it political. We could make it nonpolitical and might not have all of these kinds of problems. We're dealing with this very unique landscape now of Google and Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and all these different social media groups

that have a vested interest in a specific narrative being portrayed. And one thing specifically is, and this is being addressed right now in Congress, is the discrimination against conservative voices. And there's a lot of denial of that, but there's also a lot of evidence that that is the case and that they feel like they have some moral or ethical obligation to suppress certain conservative voices for whatever reason and push the narrative of of progressive and liberal voices this is a very strange thing because the the amount of influence that something like google or facebook has today is arguably

as great or greater than the sean hannity's of the world and the CNN's and the traditional news outlets. Yeah. So no doubt, you know, there's a big debate about whether they were more important in 2016 than the cable stations. My colleague, Yochai Benkler, has a book that argues pretty powerfully. I think that it was actually the cable stations that were more responsible for the result than the Facebooks. But whether in 2016 they were the more powerful, someday in the future they are going to be more powerful. It's certainly powerful. Absolutely.

And, you know, the question is what we mean by bias or discrimination here. Like, you know, in 2017 in the fall, it was revealed that Facebook was selling ads for people who wanted to target, quote, Jew haters. Okay, so you could go and you could buy ads for Jew haters. Now, there was never... How did that work? Okay, I mean, you know, they have lots of categories you get to pick when you buy Facebook ads, you know, liberals or people who voted, people over 60, whatever. This was one of the categories that was exposed. You could buy ads for Jew haters.

There was an actual choice? Category, yeah. What? Yeah, now, there was never a time that a Facebook engineer or a marketing person decided we ought to create a Jew hater category. That was not a decision of any human. It was the product of the machine, the AI, that was developing the categories

based on what they saw people happen to be interested in and then throw up categories to see what sticks. And then certain categories stick and then they run with them. So you might say, you know, if you were the, you know, Anti-Defamation League, you would say, oh, my God, Facebook is, you know, discriminating to encourage Jew haters. But from another perspective, you're like, the machine's doing it, no doubt. discriminating to encourage Jew haters. But from another perspective, you're like, the machine's doing it, no doubt. Yeah. But to what extent do you want to say Facebook is doing it? And I think that's often what you're going to see in this argument about whether they're, quote, biasing the system against one side or the other.

You know, like this hilarious hearing that was just held on Capitol Hill two days ago, I think. Where, you know, the great Congressman Lew, like, if you don't want negative results in the search, then don't do bad things, right? And so, you know, I think this is not – That was quite funny. It was really funny. This is like nobody's intent. We should explain that to people who don't know what we're talking about. Yeah. So there was an argument about whether Google was tilting the ads to embarrass one side or the other. And I guess it was a congressman from Iowa, everybody.

That's the guy who didn't know that Google didn't make the iPhone? Yeah. He got really embarrassed by that. But anyway, there was this – the exchange was basically, here, I'm going to show you a demonstration, and they put in a certain name, and that's Congressman Smith. And then up comes this sort of reference to his race baiting. And he's like, outraged by this. And, you know, so one theory is you've got Google engineers down there saying, let's get Congressman Smith. So we're going to make it so every time you put Smith in there, up comes race baiting. But Google's response is, look, we don't do individualized search results. Like we give

people what we think people want based on what they've done in the past and what they've shown interest in. And so that's what's producing this. It's the machine that's producing this result. And that let Congressman Liu come back with, you know, if you don't like the connections, then just don't enable them to be made by doing things like race baiting. Yeah, if you don't want negative search results, don't do negative things. Yeah, which is a pretty – but I do think that there's a really hard problem here when you say it's the machine who's doing it. What's the future going to be like when we can just say it's not my problem, it's the machine that does it? This is just Facebook, though.

When you're talking about, or Google, rather. When you're talking about Twitter, Twitter has a different issue. And their issue is there's accusations of shadow banning. That they have decided that they're going to silence certain voices or make them much more difficult to find or eliminate them from certain people's feeds. And they're doing this, this is the allegation, that they're doing this based on their own personal preferences, their beliefs, their progressive ideology wants them to lean left and somehow or another distribute that information in a much more left-leaning way.

Yeah. And I hear these, and I'm not an expert on what they're doing. And I wouldn't be surprised if certain complaints come in about certain feeds, and they say, we're going to take these off. That's the allegation. They haven't denied that. And quite frankly, some of these like feeds, you know, Alex Jones stuff, you know, if you're the consequence of your news show is that somebody takes a gun to a pizza shop in Washington to try to prove that Hillary Clinton is running a sex slave operation in the basement. There's something wrong with what's going on there.

Child sex. Child sex. Child sex, right. So I understand why they feel like they're responsible there. And, you know, it was recognized from the very beginning these companies have said, we're going to try to create a certain kind of environment. Like, so Facebook required you identify yourself so that under the shadows of anonymity, you wouldn't be causing, wreaking lots of havoc inside the system. But look, I think the more fundamental problem here, you know, so what I've said so far, people like Google and Facebook might like, here's stuff they're going to hate. The more fundamental problem here is that we have no antitrust enforcement

of any of these companies, against any of these companies. And we've allowed them to become so incredibly powerful without any justification under the law. Isn't the issue though, that this was never anticipated? When they created Twitter, they didn't think of it as going to be some voice of distribution of information that's unprecedented worldwide, but that's what it is. Yeah. They didn't expect, no doubt, they didn't expect it to work exactly the way it worked. But the antitrust law has, from the beginning, had standards standards that should have said we need to step in in certain places. So for example,

in 2010, Facebook is facing a pretty powerful competitive threat from Instagram. And the question is what they're going to do. It's cooler to be Instagram. Kids are using it much. The growth rate is much faster. In an ordinary competitive market, what they would do is they would build a better product to compete with Instagram. Their response was to write a check for a billion dollars. And they bought Instagram. And they bought a whole bunch of other companies, including WhatsApp, which was a very important competitor in people believed a really secure way to communicate. Didn't they buy Boston Dynamics too?

Have they? That's amazing. I think they did. There's a Wikipedia page that has like endless list of companies that they've bought. Yeah, they're buying robots. Yeah, that makes sense. Find out if that's true. But the point is antitrust law in any of these moments should have and historically would have stepped in and said, wait a minute, wait a minute, you can't buy your way into complete dominance of these markets. antitrust department has just shut up its doors and just stopped doing its work. So if we had a more competitive internet environment where companies had to compete against each other,

you'd have companies that try to compete by protecting your privacy differently, by refusing to sell your information differently. You'd have lots of pressure on companies like Facebook to behave, not because idiot senators who don't know how Facebook works are calling them before hearings, but because the market itself is creating the competition that drives them to behave in a way that actually conforms with what consumers want. So I agree with you. These are real questions and important questions to figure out. Are they biasing in one way or the other? And if they're biasing systematically, that's a really important problem. But the solution to that problem might not be more government regulation.

The solution to that problem might be governments making sure we have the right kind of competition going on here so that they can't get away with behaving in this bad way. What would be that right – is that a fact? Google bought it and they actually sold it last year. Oh. Yeah. Interesting. Probably sold to the Russiansussians the japanese japanese um these like what would be the right kind of competition it would have to be something that balances it out right like some sort of a right wing social media

platform but those tend to get infested with trolls and 4chan type people. As soon as you say, we're not going to have any regulation, the idea would be, right, you say, oh, Google and Facebook, they are so progressive. They lean left. They suppress conservative voices. And they don't believe in freedom of speech. So we're going to create a right-wing platform that allows freedom of speech and doesn't suppress conservative voices. And you know what happens to those things? They get infested by 4chan people and the Pepe the Frog people, and they start saying racist things. If I could say anything, I'll say anything.

Anything means anything. in today's day and age because there's a lot of bored people out there and they get excited about a platform where they can say something that they know is completely outrageous under an anonymous screen name and people think well this is indicative of a person's actual real beliefs and sometimes sometimes it's bored people that are trying to fuck with people and they're trying to get a rise out of folks and they know that if they write a bunch of n-words and Heil Hitler, that it's going to get a reaction. And then they'll check it every couple minutes to see what kind of, well, ah, look at all these people getting mad. Ha, ha, ha, ha. Like, this is what happens. Being progressive or having a progressive voice, you tend to think of being inclusive, not supporting homophobia, being open to all sorts of different marginalized groups' rights.

But when you think of conservative, you open the door for a lot of people that are rejected by these progressive groups. And they might not necessarily be conservative, but they are not welcome in these progressive groups. And they might not necessarily be conservative, but they are not welcome in these progressive spaces. So they come on to these new places and it turns into a dumpster fire. Yeah. Look, the story you just described is the story of cable television, right? So the story of cable television is that at a certain point, people like Robert, Roger Ailes, and the Murdochs decided that we didn't have enough conservative media out there. And so they funded not just magazines like the New Republic, but they funded the beginning of cable television. And, and that created this bifurcation in media with cable television. And, you know, one can make these observations about,

I mean, this is what Yochai Benkler's book is all about, like what the nature of truth is on cable television on the right is different from what it is on the left. So I think that's all fair. And I don't think anybody has a clear sense of what the right answer looks like in this space. I mean, the reality is, you know, Facebook is a technology. I mean, here, the Facebook friends are going to really hate me for this. But here, Facebook is a technology to exploit insecurity for the purpose of selling ads. That's what it does. What it does is make you feel like you check and you're like, why didn't she like that photograph? Or why isn't he friended me?

And so you constantly engage because you're constantly trying to feed this feedback. And that is exploiting Tristan Harris's work. It's really a powerful hero. It's exploiting your insecurity. Is that really what it is? Because I've always thought about it as being a fast food version of the nutrients that we're missing in an actual real community. That's so good. That's exactly the right way to think about it. But just in the same way that

fast food companies figure out how to exploit the brain chemistry that makes it so that you eat chicken wings, you know, barbecue chicken wings, because they know that's what's going to feed that kind of addiction. And just like gaming companies figure out how to tweak the game so that they know how to get the addiction out of your kids. This company is really great at getting you to turn over as much as you can to them to build you into this, quote, community. Why are they doing that? Not because Mark Zuckerberg is some kind of freaky guy who wants to know your secrets, but because the more you turn over to them, the better their ads are in feeding you information. So this is a technology for the purpose of engendering advertising. And so that advertising gets really, really good. And so, you know, you could say that

Facebook is tilted to the left, but the reality is there is an extraordinary amount of exploitation of the advertising inside of Facebook to feed information to the right in this last election. I mean, this is what Kathleen Hall Jamison's book about this is really quite amazing and documenting. And that's because it's gotten really good and being able to segment markets on the basis of what people know or care about, again, not because anybody planned it, nobody wrote Jew hater, but because the AI is smart enough to figure that out. And so when you build this technology that is driven to the purpose of making it easier to sell ads, you produce this world that has no necessary connection to people figuring out what the truth is. Again, think of cable television. Cable television is about building really loyal community, building the tribal sense of the community.

If telling the truth did that, they would tell the truth. If not telling the truth does that, they will not tell the truth. The question is not whether you're telling the truth or not. The question is what builds the advertising base. This reality that we have these platforms that are ad-driven distorts or constructs, drives that platform to develop in certain ways. And that's why I think it's important to think, well, what if we could create a competitive environment where there were different platforms available, ones that were not focused on driving ads? And this is something that, again, I think – How would they fund those? Well –

Isn't that the reason why something like Google or Facebook has gotten so big is because there's so much money behind it? Well, two things. Because they've been allowed to get so big and because there's so much money behind it. Well, who would stop them? The antitrust departments. So the antitrust department would step in and say, Facebook, you've become too successful. The way you're buying up competitors is disturbing to us. Well, but again, think of the difference in that sentence.

You've become so successful. That's one sentence. And what we want to do in America is encourage companies to become successful. I believe in, you know, innovators and markets working. That's really great. But you've bought your competitor is a separate statement. Like you have a bunch of money because the stock is so valuable because people think you're the future of money. But then you turn and use that money to buy competitors. What are you putting up, Jamie? What is this? That's the total number they've spent in the last, I don't know, I think it was seven years.

It's all the companies they bought. Scroll back. Don't move. Total cost of acquisitions. What is that? $23 trillion? No, billion. Billion.

$23 billion. More than the gross domestic product of Fiji, Zimbabwe, and Maldives combined. $19 billion of that was for that one WhatsApp. Really? Yeah. $19 billion? Yeah. Holy.

That's insane. Anyway, yeah. But the point is, when you're talking about acquisitions, you're not necessarily talking about companies that are succeeding because they're so good, right? So when you say, what are the alternatives going to look like, it's a really hard question. But we have some of it in real space. We understand NPR has a different set of incentives from Fox News. We understand podcasts have a different set of incentives from YouTube videos.

YouTube videos have a different kind of constraint. If you did a three-hour YouTube video, you would not live in the same way that you get to live in the context of podcasts. But we do do a three-hour YouTube video. But it doesn't get the success that it gets because it's a three-hour YouTube video. It's because people are committed to your podcast. I mean, I know these guys. I can carry it around. And when you get to a place where it sounds like it's going to be interesting to see what's on the video then they flip up the video but you're but you know the average successful youtube video you know if you do a political youtube video you're told you can't be more than two and a half minutes then you've lost people um but the point is the environments i don't necessarily think that's correct um jordan peterson is doing a lot of really long

youtube videos that are very successful i heard his his podcast. Yeah, there's a hunger right now for unedited thought. And I mean, not edited and unedited and uncensored in terms of language, but in terms of no one influencing what you're saying. So if you decided to do a podcast or a thing on YouTube and no one was leaning over your shoulder with an agenda or a guideline to follow, there's a real hunger for that because people feel like what you've described about Facebook and cable news, they're essentially just trying to sell you things, keep you on the hook so they can profit from you. There's a real hunger for someone who's not doing that. Right.

I agree. This is why I feel like there's got to be a market for news in that regard, like an actual, unbiased, uncensored, truly objective, centrist news station. Well, again, I think that's the slow democracy movement that podcast feeds. Because the reality is, if you had a simple way to be watching in every second of your two-hour, three-hour podcast, what was working and what was not, it would be really hard for you to resist. I would resist. Okay. I wouldn't pay attention to that thing for a second.

More power to you. I've already been faced with that before. People have said to me, you know, oh, well, this is when people start tuning. I'm like, throw that away. Yeah. like said to me you know oh well this is when people start tuning i'm like throw that away yeah but you know i know friends i want chris hayes will tell you about you know life on msnbc where see that's because of advertiser dollars okay that's my point my point the way to yeah this is my whole point about this platform this platform is an advertising driven platform right

that fact steers it in a certain way. And I'm saying we need to build alternative platforms, which is what you're building in the podcast. It's not like advertising is not important to your stuff. Of course, you start with talking about certain products that help sponsor what you're doing. So it's not anti-market. It's all for market. But the point is, it allows you to develop the content in a way that's not micromanaged by the advertising dollar or the market incentive. And that's critically important. It's also other people's incentive to get you to do things in a way that they feel will be more profitable so that everybody gains. I don't have those other people.

So there's no one else. But if I've done television shows before, when you do television shows before, you will have meetings with producers and they will have notes and they will tell you that this is hurting our bottom line and this is not good for that or we have to emphasize more this or the network wants that. And it's really just about accentuating your ability to make more money. Right. Which is why we have to build these alternatives that can compete with the advertising-driven platforms. Well, if you could get a really entertaining news show on YouTube, or I mean, I guess the Young Turks sort of tried doing that. But they leaned so hard left. To the left. But they attract an extraordinary number of people, and that's good. But again, we have this image of news shows of a version of Walter Cronkite.

Maybe that's not what it is. Maybe the Colbert Report is a news show. Right, a joke, someone who's mocking it as they're delivering you the information. But they're giving you the information. I would like someone who's objective. I would like someone who's really objective, who talks about the negative applications of whatever law or bill that's being discussed. Like what would be bad for everyone? What would be good for Democrats, Republicans, poor people, rich people?

You don't get that. There's no version of that available right now. Every version leans towards whatever platform they're on, whether it's Fox News or MSNBC. Yeah. I think, not for want of trying, I just think the world doesn't support it. But the world doesn't support it because there's these people are so tribal because they want to be there on the Fox News camp or they want to be in the MSNBC camp. I really feel like there's a lot of people that just aren't being represented. And folks like me who just I want to know what what is happening.

Why? Why is this the case? Why is this leaning in this direction? What's the real motivation behind this bill? What's the real motivation behind these actions? Yeah. And the question is whether you're going to get it from a single person who purports to be, quote, objective, or whether you're going to get it from three or four people, like reading across these different perspectives. When I was a kid, I was obsessed with the Soviet Union. And in 1982, I went to the Soviet Union. I was like, I guess I was 20, just turned 21.

And I was hitchhiking through Eastern Europe, and then I went through the Soviet Union. And I was on a train from Leningrad to Moscow and sitting next to a professor. I always seem to be followed by people who spoke English, but this guy spoke English. And he said to me, you know, we have a better system of free speech in the Soviet Union than you do in America. How dare he? Yeah. So I said, what the hell could that possibly mean?

And he said, well, when you wake up in the morning, you read the New York Times or the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal and you think you know the truth. But we know when we read our newspapers, everybody's lying to us. So we have to read seven or eight newspapers and triangulate on the truth. And that makes us a more critical free speech society than America is. And, you know, it's kind of funny at the time because like you realize they didn't have any, but there's a kernel of truth to that. You know, when my dad gets an email that says Barack Obama's a Muslim, he comes from the time when you just believe what's printed,

even though it's not printed, it's just an email. And so he just kind of like, oh my God, the president's a Muslim. But my kid gets an email that says Barack Obama's a Muslim. He's like, yeah, well, I mean, what else? I mean, like, he's going to be like you. You want to see different views. And so I think that in some sense, we are producing a culture, especially among our kids, or at least one hopes, where they recognize that everything is partial. And you got to do a lot of work to knit it together. And in the end, that might be a better ecology for producing democracy and truth than one where you got to got to trust um the source to be quote objective in this case that's an interesting perspective um i do definitely agree that young people are more skeptical and more aware of the possibilities of fuckery today than ever before um here's a

funny story michael sherman you know michael scher, who is a professional skeptic. I get a DM from him, says, there's a story about you on B... What is the British... BBC. There's a story about you on BBC. You have to log in to your Twitter to read it. So I look at that, I go, what kind of bullshit is this? Would you get hacked? So I sent him a message go what kind of bullshit is this would you get hacked so i sent him a message say hey dude did you get hacked they sent him the message and he said what

there's a story about me and he logged in he's a fucking professional skeptic wow they got him but why because he's older yeah you know i mean i think guys that didn't grow up with that they don't or they don't know tricksters, they don't know the ways of it. And it was a nightmare for him. I mean, his whole system was screwed up. Every time he would make a tweet, it would get deleted. It was really bad. Oh, wow.

I had to email him and go, dude, you got hacked. No, it's a problem with us old people. This is the way we live. Well, it's just you grow up with one system and then all of a sudden you go, I don't know what to do here. Oh, it says it needs my login. Let me just give you, what? And then all these pop-up boxes and, oh no.

The number of people who are being tricked into believing the IRS is calling them on the telephone and demanding that they pay. Hilarious and tragic. I mean, they called me and told me they were going to put my whole family in jail. My whole family. They left a message. Since you did not return our call, we will put your whole family in jail. I'm like, damn, my whole family, the dog to everybody.

What about the cats? It's like, what the fuck, man man like they're trying to freak people out and it's you know an automated voice message but many people fall for it it's so sad especially yeah yeah old folks get roped into that stuff real hard it's very sad it's very sad because you know a lot of them are lonely and you know they don't have a lot of companionship and they get these messages and they don't know who to turn to to explain it to oh my god yeah yeah yeah and you know so is there a reason to be hopeful here well younger kids yes and uh the other thing that makes me really hopeful is places like reddit you know so which forums are you going to well i know there's so

much so much really bad stuff. No, some of them are great, though. But many of them are great. But the point, what the greatness inheres in their demonstrating incredible talent that's out there in the world that, you know, in the 1970s just would have been invisible. Like you kind of looked at the world in the 1970s, which I remember. The 1970s, you kind of thought there were great people at the top. You know, they were all on television. and everybody else was kind of a troll. But what Reddit does every day, you know, I obsess with certain of these feeds that

just are amazing. But it's like you read them, like, here's just some Joe Schmo out there that's taken a bunch of data and data is beautiful and like demonstrated something amazing by the way he's built it. And you get the sense that the world is filled with these incredibly talented, smart people everywhere, who are, you know, many of them just have too much time. But the point is, they are out there everywhere. So if you ask, why should we be hopeful? It's that we develop

these critical attitudes, we have this ability to think across. And the army is filled with so many incredibly talented people. And the internet surfaces it. It makes it possible for us to at least reach them. And then the question is, can we use this power, leverage this power, and actually do something with the forces of evil that now control? I had an interesting moment last night at at the ice house comedy club where there was a drunk couple in the front row that were talking really loud and they were annoying all the people around them and they were kind of chiming in and heckling and raising their hands and eventually they got kicked out and uh it was pretty fun everybody was having a good time it was

pretty pretty crazy even as they were getting kicked out the rest of the audience was having a good time because we were making fun of it and i said as these people were getting kicked out, the rest of the audience was having a good time because we were making fun of it. And I said, as these people were getting kicked out, I said, this is basically us. Most of us are cool. There's 150 people in here. And out of the 150 people, 148 of them are having a great time. Everyone's drinking and laughing. And we're all these comedians and no one wants any extraordinary attention no one wants any special attention but two people fucked it up now if you

were next to those people you would say oh the crowd there sucks the people are always yelling things out and they're drunks and they heckle well because that those two people required an exorbitant amount of attention they asked for more attention than anyone else and if you use that bias sample group and say well this is the crowd the crowd is these drunk people that yell things out no the vast majority of the crowd are really polite fun people out having a good time and they approached it with the perfect attitude i think this is the world. This is the world. I think the world is there's a small percentage of people that fuck things up for everybody.

And I think that this is in terms of politics, in terms of business, in terms of everything. In terms of the net. Yes, in terms of the net for sure. And I think the net is a perfect example of that. If you're a person that gets, if something happens to you and people start attacking you online for it, if you just notice the number of people, like say you're involved in some sort of a story, right? Say maybe there's a million people that know about this story and you get 150 people send you mean things. You think it's the end of the world.

Yeah. 150 people. You don't notice that it's 100. You just see all these messages, and it's unmanageable. You're like, oh, my God, everyone hates me. No, 150 people have decided to take action and make you feel bad because they feel bad. It's a small number in terms of the overall number of human beings. But if you're Louis C.K. and it's coming at you,

you're like, holy shit, the world fucking hates me. And this is the situation that we're in right now. We just have so many voices. It's incredible, though, because out of all those voices, as long as you're not personally trying to figure it out and filter it yourself with your own, which is completely impossible. But if you could just look at it objectively from afar,

this is going to work itself out in a far better way than has ever happened before. In our past, there's never been this many voices. In our past, there's been, like you were talking about, a select few voices, the Walter Cronkites, whoever it is at the top, and then everyone else sort of had to wait for the narrative to be spelled out for them. Right. That's not the case anymore.

That's right. And again, I think it's the best of times and the worst of times. So it's the best of times because all these new voices are bringing all sorts of great perspective and insight and intelligence to the story that wasn't there before. And that's great. The problem is, is if the infrastructure that used to be there to kind of bring us up, bring us all up to a kind of basic level so that we understood the facts disappears, so that we don't have anything that kind of makes it so that we all understand what's at issue and

what's at stake and what the facts are, so that we can act as a democracy in a sensible way then the question is how do we run a democracy you know because if we could have all these different you know i like to think about the difference between the culture channel and the democracy channel so in the culture channel this is the best of times by orders of magnitude yeah the stuff on television today is a billion times better than anything from the 1970s and 1980s. And that's a product of this incredible competition and the fact that you can have anything and any niche market, and as long as it's enough, it makes sense to do it. And that's what's great. But when you turn to the Democracy Channel, the same fragmentation, the same niche market, the same reality of us all living in these

different universes means we can't address problems as a democracy with even the same facts. And that's a real problem. Because if we all live in our own fact universe, but we have to face the same real problems in the same real earth, then we're not going to decide them in any sensible way. And how you solve that problem is really hard. Like we're not going back, thank God, we're not going back to the 1960s. It's just not going to be the case that there are three channels we get to watch. That's just not going to happen. And it's a great thing because we've got all this amazing culture. But what do we do on the democracy side? How do we build a democracy recognizing that everybody's not going to spend

all their time geeking out about campaign finance reform legislation? And that's why I think we need to think about these other ways to bring people to some sensible understanding. And, you know, Brian Callen and Hunter Matz were the first people that brought me into this, like they put me on their podcast. And I remember remember like not even knowing when he did this like the length of that conversation and thinking what are you gonna cut this down to like six minutes or ten minutes how long did you guys talk i think we talked for an hour you know and then we're already done two hours and 15 minutes holy shit yeah there's a time warp in this room wow i can see that yeah i mean but i remember thinking like in the middle like I stopped and I thought

whoa this is the this is the changing of the world this is it as opposed to those panel shows there's three talking heads talking over each other like when you're on these cable television shows and you've got 30 seconds to say something and and you know you linked it before and I think this is really the key it's it's it's exactly like diet. We recognize that we have been put into a world right now where we all eat shitty food because it's been designed to make it so tasty. We love it. And the only way we reform that is if individuals, one by one, begin to decide to eat the right stuff. You got to decide to engage in the right kind of healthy behavior to be able to survive in this world because the incentives of the market are to sell you stuff that doesn't

necessarily do that. It's the same thing with the information space. That's why the slow food movement is like the slow democracy movement. Like the slow food movement is how do you produce food that's actually healthy in a way that feeds you and feeds your body in the right way. I think the slow democracy movement, how do you feed a democracy? And the elements to that have got to be contexts where people are free to get deeper than 30 seconds. And if we don't build more of those, we're going to have a really desperate time for democracy. We're going to have what we have, which is the rise of authoritarians around the world. Do you foresee the possibility of alternative social media outlets sort of viewing all the issues that people do have with Google or Facebook or Twitter

and any of these are perceived to be biased sources of information and coming up with something that has clear protections in there. Sort of like the founding fathers did when they established our system of government. Listen, we don't want that. Let's organize that as we're starting to make sure that this doesn't ever turn into some sort of an echo chamber. Yeah. Look, it's way above my pay grade. Yeah.

But what I know gets us there is competition. I know that the only thing that has ever gotten us to the next great innovation is the enforcement of competition. Which is why it's a problem when someone like Facebook buys Instagram. What gave us the internet was interventions by the government against AT&T, which was the dominant telecommunications company for more than a century, that finally said enough of this. You can't leverage your power to control all innovation.

And once that intervention happened, people could layer on top of their wires a new network called the internet. people could layer on top of their wires a new network called the internet yeah and when they did that government said um to companies like cable television companies okay yeah you've got broadband across your cable line but that doesn't mean you get to decide what applications go on that cable line so you you're hb i mean you're the cable company you can't say that there can't be Netflix on the cable, or you can't slow Netflix down. Now, obviously, they would want to slow Netflix down, because Netflix is a competitor with their basic business model. But the intervention to assure competition created the opportunity for these great new innovations. Now, nobody at the beginning

of that had any clue about what would come out of it. All that they knew was that the only way to get something new and great was to assure competition. And that's the commitment we've given up. Since 2000, since George Bush became president, 2001, there's been no major enforcement action by the Antitrust Department against any of these companies.

And that is a huge problem. And until we rediscover the importance of competition, not because we're geniuses and we can figure out what the future will bring, but because we know from the past that the only way the future comes is if you guarantee competition. Unless we do that, we're never going to solve any of these problems. Yeah, ensuring competition is ensuring innovations, and anybody who doesn't want competition wants to stifle innovation, and it's got to be thought to be a selfish proposition. Right. economists who said the only question was efficiency or consumer welfare. But there's another perspective that libertarians like Luigi Zingales, who's an economist at University of Chicago Business School, and people who are not libertarians like Tim Wu, who's a professor at Columbia, embrace. And this is the idea of political antitrust. And the idea of political

antitrust is you should also worry if companies are so big that they can corrupt the government. Like this is a dimension to worry about too. Because if they get to be so big that they can corrupt the government, then you know that they will use that power to protect themselves against innovation. Because if an innovator comes, he doesn't come with 50 lobbyists. He just comes with a great idea. I mean, you know, Elon Musk saw this dramatically as he's developing this incredible alternative and tried to figure out how to sell it inside of states. And then the lobbyists for the car companies would go state by state and forbid them from being able to sell cars without a local dealership in the state, right?

There was a huge fight as the incumbent industries leveraged their power over government to protect themselves from this new competitor. And this is the fight we have to make central again. Because if we don't do that, then the dinosaurs will have the power through this corrupted political system to protect themselves against the future. And this is just the moment when we need to figure out how to make the future come. I'm glad you're raising these warning flags, but I feel like from talking to you that you're fairly optimistic. the future. And this is just the moment when we need to figure out how to make the future come. I'm glad you're raising these warning flags, but I feel like from talking to you that you're fairly optimistic. You're the first person who's ever said that. Really? I feel like you're optimistic. Your perception of the internet and the young people coming up and the way information is being distributed today, that there's so many people participating in it and there's so much competition even in that form, right?

I mean, there's more voices now and there's a lot of – look, in the past when you had to be selected in order to speak, it was very difficult to get through that selection process and it's not necessarily the best voices that got through it's just sometimes the most persistent and the most influential whatever the reason why they got to be one of those people with the tie in that block on those panel shows that's not the case anymore right you know now you've got kyle kolinsky you've got all these you know these these people that people that don't necessarily fit in any traditional, Jimmy Dore, they don't fit in any traditional role on regular mainstream television, but they have a pretty influential voice. Absolutely. And they're very politically savvy, and they're talking about things in a way that they would be,

it would be very hard to get a producer to sign off on the way a lot of these guys communicate and some of the things that they do. It would be very, very difficult. So you're optimistic too? I'm very optimistic. Okay, so I'm optimistic in that space. I guess everything outside of the beltway of Washington I'm optimistic about. I think America has an incredible capacity to innovate out of its problems.

What I fear and what I'm not sure any rational person should be optimistic about, but that doesn't mean you don't fight it. What I fear is Washington. And so I've said many times that the power of corruption in Washington might be so great that it cannot be defeated. But that doesn't affect what we should be doing. We should be fighting it whether or not we think we can win. Like winning is not the only reason you fight. You fight because it's the right thing to do. And we need to rally because we might be wrong. It could be, it could just be that if we got the political force, we could take them down. And I think that's what we got to be setting up for right now.

When you see people like Tulsi Gabbard, or when you see the young woman in New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to me, that's very promising, that people are leaning in this direction. And that they're saying, let's look at this in a different way. And let's see some new voices. Let's hear people that are clearly not influenced by corporate America. They're clearly not – they don't have all of their veins hooked up to the matrix yet. Yeah. Now, Tulsi, I had known before your interview with her. Your interview with her, I think, gave people an incredible understanding of the depth of her soul, which is deep.

How about when she tweeted to the president, making us Saudi Arabia's bitch is not putting us America first? So she can both do the deep and also the shallow. She can do both. That's amazing. That is an unprecedented thing, too, because what Trump has done is like he's opened up the door for this kind of very hostile communication. But what he's also done is open up the door for it to come back at him.

Yeah. Yeah. Not that he notices, but you're right. Exactly right. The rest of the world notices though. But what I think is interesting about Alexandria is she is very disciplined about saying, look, we got to fix the system if we're going to get any of these things done. So I like to think about like Alexandria versus Bernie, you know?

if we're going to get any of these things done. So I like to think about like Alexandria versus Bernie. So she, like every time she gets up there and talks about her green energy new deal, it's like you got to fix the political system and then we're going to be able to get this stuff. As opposed to like putting a list of 10 things you want to do without anywhere even mentioning the fact that you're going to make these things possible

by fixing the political system. I think we need new people, which this new Congress is filled with them. There are 107 members of people running for Congress who wrote to the Speaker of the House and said they want as the first thing is addressing of this corrupt political system. And Nancy Pelosi gave them not just that, but all these other reforms too. That's H.R. 1. The younger people coming into Congress realize the system is broken. I fear the older people in Congress have gotten so used to the system that

they don't even notice anymore just how broken it is, how outrageous it is. And they need to rage, so they're going to rage against the billionaires or whatever. But I think we need to focus the rage on the problem, and that problem is Congress. If we don't fix Congress first, nothing else matters. Nothing else will happen. And we need to build the movement, which I think could actually be a movement that brings people on the right and people on the left in to make that change possible. Well, that's the philosophy that you have to have darkness in order to inspire light and that there's some sort of a balance to be achieved in this managing of those two energies. And that when you have an administration that's clearly fucked up and then people come along

and say, it's time that I get into politics and make a difference. These are the people that are motivated because they see a need for change. Whereas some people with other administrations like i like the way things are going i'm going to go uh pursue the private sector i'm going to go do this i'm going to do people see something like what's happening with trump and they say i want to i want to stop this this is not the america that i know right there are people entering politics for the best possible reasons and and i think people on the right have entered politics for the best possible reason and people on the left too the question is how quickly do they get bent by the system?

How quickly do they become part of the system? The dark side of the force. Because, like, when you, like, you know, when you say members of Congress spend 30 to 80 percent of their time, 70 percent of their time raising money, you might think that means they're miserable most of the time. But, you know, there's a way in which it's actually psychologically rewarding for them. So, you know, to be a member of Congress right now is a pretty miserable job. You don't get much done. Like, you're spending all your time like rats in a maze. Like, the bell goes off. You've got to run to the floor. Your aide tells you how you're to vote. You vote. Then you leave from the floor. It's nothing like what the framers imagined. Like like they were sitting on the floor listening to debate about ideas. All that's bullshit. The only

debate is debate to C-SPAN. It's like a speech to C-SPAN. And that's what it is. So the life of a congressman is pretty miserable. But when they fundraise, it's kind of like push-ups. You know, it's like they sit down and they're told, okay, you got to raise $20,000. You know, it's like they sit down and they're told, okay, you got to raise $20,000. And the aides sit there and say, call Joe. He cares about this. And call Fred and he cares about that. And you go through.

And when you hit your numbers, it's like, hooray, I did something. So it's like you feel like you're accomplishing something. But the point is the psychology of that increasingly makes you okay with the system that you're in. And you realize you win in that system. You've won under that system. And so your openness to changing the system becomes really sketchy. So I think the critical moment right now is to solidify the recognition. This Congress is corrupted, and we have to fix it. And the only thing I'm worried about with H.R. 1 is that it's

going to make it into a democratic issue. It's like the Democrats care about it, so the Republicans are supposed to not care about it. The critical thing now is to get Republicans to support the idea of reform and then make it something other than just a traditional tribal fight between left and right. Are you optimistic? Was I correct in that? I'm optimistic about everything outside of the Beltway, and I'm going to fight like hell to prove that we can fix stuff inside the Beltway. But if you told me I had to bet on my son or daughter's life,

I'm not going to tell you that I think we're going to. Yeah, I would never ask you to do that. Okay, good. All right. Now we're clear. Thank you for doing this. I really appreciate it. I really enjoyed talking to you. Let's do this again. Hopefully you'll be right. Every Okay, good. All right. Now we're clear. Thank you for doing this. I really appreciate it. I really enjoyed talking to you.

I'm grateful. Let's do this again. Hopefully you'll be right. Every time you ask. All right. We'll do it. Thank you. Thank you, sir.

Appreciate it.