In this episode, I sit down with author, activist, and political consultant, Julian Zelizer, to talk about his new book, How We All Get Stuck in Washington, D.C., and his new TED Talk, Lesterland. We talk about how our election system is rigged, and how much time is spent on election day by members of Congress, and why it s so important that they re re-elected by gerrymandering their districts in order to keep them safe from primary challenges. We also talk about the role of money in our political system, and what it s like to live in a world where the 1% controls the outcome of every election and the rest of us don t have a say in what s happening in our world, and the role that money has played in our current political system and how it s corrupting our elected officials and how we need to wake up to the fact that we re all stuck in Washington and stop playing by the rules that are written by the 1%. This is a really important episode, and I hope you enjoy it, and tweet me if you do! with any thoughts or suggestions on how we can improve the situation. Timestamps: 1:00 - How we got here. 4:30 - What s going on in Washington? 6:20 - How much money does it take to get into Congress? 7:00 8:15 - How can we change the system? 9:30 11:10 - How do we unrigging the system ? 14: What s really going on here? 15:00 | What s the problem? 16:40 - Why is it so bad? 17:40 18:15 19:30 | How do you unrigged? 21:10 | What is our system broken? 22:40 | How much power does it matter? 27:00 // What are we powerless? 26:20 | Is it better than a democracy? 29:30 Is there a democracy in America screwed up? 30: What do we really need to change? 32: What are our system rigged? 35:20 ? 35:15 | Why are we screwed up in Washington s screwed up ? 36:00 Is it more screwed up than a place called Leicesterland? 37:00 Can we change it?
00:00:25.000For people who don't know what I'm talking about, could you just give like 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.
00:00:48.000Yeah, so we've got a system where we have a money primary and then we have a regular election.
00:00:55.000And in the money primary, to compete, you've got to raise tons of money to be able to fund your campaign.
00:01:02.000And when you raise that money, you raise it from a tiny, tiny fraction of the 1%.
00:01:07.000So in the TED Talk about Leicesterland, I said, you know, imagine a place called Leicesterland where basically it's the Leicesters Who rule.
00:01:18.000And by the Leicesters, I mean the same proportion of people named Leicesters in the United States right now.
00:01:23.000So there's about 150,000 Americans named Leicester.
00:01:28.000So imagine a world ruled by Leicesterland.
00:01:32.000Because that's essentially the world we have because of the way we fund our campaigns.
00:01:38.000Because there's about 150,000 men who give even just the maximum contribution to one political candidate.
00:01:47.000If 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.
00:02:01.000So what that means is it's a tiny, tiny fraction.
00:02:04.000Who are the most important funders of political campaigns.
00:02:09.000And candidates for Congress and members of Congress spent 30 to 70 percent of their time sucking up to this tiny, tiny fraction.
00:02:18.000And so is it any surprise that you see Congress bending over backwards to keep those guys happy?
00:02:25.000Because they know without those people, they don't have a shot at getting back into Congress.
00:02:31.000And the way you were describing it, when you were saying it as Lesterland, it was like, imagine if we were this screwed up.
00:02:37.000That was essentially what you were saying.
00:03:02.000Well, it could be worse because it's even a smaller number.
00:03:05.000And if you look at the number of super PAC donors, the really critical super PAC donors, about 100 people who gave more than half of the super PAC money in the last presidential election.
00:03:51.000Your 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.
00:04:02.000Okay, but that doesn't mean those congresspeople are not afraid about re-election.
00:04:07.000Of course, they are afraid about whether they'll be re-elected, but they're afraid not of a Democrat running against a Republican.
00:04:12.000They're afraid of an even more extreme Republican I think?
00:04:31.000Have 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.
00:04:42.000So those extremists are a kind of Lester's too.
00:05:41.000Well, 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.
00:05:51.000So 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.
00:06:00.000So the House becomes incredibly competitive.
00:06:18.000So the Democrats turned their members into perpetual fundraisers.
00:06:21.000And they changed the rules about like who gets to be chairman of committees.
00:06:25.000It's no longer like who's the person with the most experience or the most insight.
00:06:29.000Increasingly becomes who raises the most money.
00:06:31.000And 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 Two, what are we going to do to make sure that you as a member meet your fundraising target?
00:06:48.000And so from 95 until today, the institution becomes an institution focused on the game of getting reelected.
00:06:58.000Jim Cooper, a Democrat from Tennessee who went to Congress Okay, so what he means by that is members go there,
00:07:13.000they learn how to raise money, they become focused obsessively on raising money.
00:07:17.000But one of the things that they're really focused on is how do they go from Capitol Hill to becoming a lobbyist?
00:07:23.000Because that's where the real money is.
00:07:25.000A member of Congress gets paid about as much as the students I educate at the Harvard Law School in their first year as lawyers.
00:07:32.000So to ordinary Americans, it's a lot of money.
00:07:34.000But to people on Capitol Hill, it doesn't seem like a lot of money.
00:07:37.000But then they go and become a lobbyist.
00:07:38.000They can make 10 times that as a lobbyist.
00:07:41.000And 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.
00:08:06.000So, they're in the rig game, they understand how it gets rigged, and then they work to rig it.
00:08:16.000And there's, whatever the district is outside of Washington, D.C., in 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.
00:08:34.000Washington, DC is an incredibly prosperous place.
00:08:37.000And 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.
00:08:49.000It's like the golden city on the hill, you know, the Oz.
00:08:53.000And the reason for that is the extraordinary amount of money that's been poured into that district 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.
00:09:11.000It's a weird place, though, because even though it's incredibly wealthy, it's also incredibly poor.
00:09:39.000It's become a grotesque place now from the standpoint of the principles of what America is supposed to be.
00:09:46.000Because the privilege there I'm 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.
00:09:58.000They'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,
00:10:17.000Washington, D.C., because it's got no effective representation, is one of the worst represented districts in the country.
00:10:23.000So, essentially, this all started out with Newt Gingrich's group, and they decided to spend so much time concentrating on fundraising.
00:10:32.000And then once that became successful, everyone else followed suit?
00:11:42.000The game now is from day one, how do we raise the funds we need to make sure we can get re-elected?
00:11:48.000And 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.
00:12:22.000But the ordinary congressperson knows Given the way the system is right now, they've got to obsessively focus on how to raise money.
00:12:31.000And what that means is they develop a sixth sense, a constant awareness about how what they do will affect their ability to raise money.
00:12:39.000Become, in the words of the X-Files, shapeshifters.
00:12:42.000As they constantly adjust their views in light of what they know will help them to raise money.
00:12:47.000There'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 than to clarify.
00:12:57.000She went on, you know, he was not an environmentalist.
00:13:00.000So the point is like you know in your heart of hearts which way you got to go to make sure.
00:13:06.000And if you're good and you're smart, you never say anything to indicate it but it's operating.
00:13:12.000So in the tax bill leading up to the passage of the last tax cut, you know, the $1.6 trillion gift to corporations and wealthy people primarily – Congressman 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,
00:13:41.000And that's the reality of what Washington has become.
00:13:44.000Now, 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.
00:13:54.000This is just what it is and it keeps moving in the same general direction.
00:14:01.000How would there ever be some sort of reform that puts this back into a position where it makes sense and it's tenable?
00:14:06.000Yeah, 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.
00:14:17.000And, 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.
00:14:25.000Because, like, a decade ago, when I would go around and say, you know, we've got this really corrupted system, and, like, money is really—people would say, no, what are you talking about?
00:14:34.000We just have to focus on getting the people we want elected.
00:14:37.000And if we get the people we want elected, we'll get the policies we want passed.
00:14:41.000Now, almost everybody realizes that until we fix this broken Congress, nothing else can happen.
00:14:50.000So it's not like this is the most important issue out there.
00:14:53.000You know, you can think climate change or healthcare or jobs or competitive market.
00:14:56.000You can think those are the important issues.
00:14:58.000But what people are increasingly seeing is that this is the first issue.
00:15:02.000If we don't fix this, we don't fix anything.
00:15:06.000And what's really encouraging to me is that that frame is increasingly being embraced by important leaders.
00:15:14.000So, 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.
00:15:27.000People in the system are corrupt, but the system's not corrupt.
00:15:30.000And Jon Stewart just had a field day because of how ridiculous that statement is now.
00:15:34.000But now Nancy Pelosi is going to introduce as HR1... The most ambitious and comprehensive reform package that Washington, I think, has ever seen.
00:15:48.000I mean, it is unbelievable in its breadth.
00:15:51.000So it has public funding of congressional campaigns so that congressmen don't spend 30 to 70 percent of their time sucking up to the Lester's.
00:16:01.000It has a mandate to end gerrymandering, politic partisan gerrymandering, exercising Congress's power under the Constitution to tell the states, clean this mess up.
00:16:11.000It has an incredible ethics package to kind of close, block the revolving door so congressmen are not running off to K Street.
00:16:21.000And it has an incredible restoration of voting rights, the Restoration of the Voting Rights Act, automatic voter registration.
00:16:29.000It's the most comprehensive package of political reform, I think the Civil Rights Bill of the generation.
00:16:34.000But of course nobody outside of Washington has heard anything about it because most people look at what Washington does and says, oh, it's just a game the Democrats are playing to embarrass the Republicans.
00:16:45.000How would they stop congressmen from becoming lobbyists?
00:16:49.000Well, 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.
00:17:02.000But the more fundamental fact is 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.
00:17:21.000And 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.
00:17:27.000They would become almost like lawyers, policy wonks that kind of go to Capitol Hill and say, here's what will happen if you adopt this legislation.
00:17:35.000That's an important part of the process.
00:17:37.000But they wouldn't be the machers in the system.
00:17:39.000They wouldn't be the people who called the shots.
00:17:42.000And so the value of their services would fall.
00:17:45.000And if the value of their services fell, then it wouldn't make so much sense to go and become a lobbyist.
00:17:51.000Maybe 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.
00:17:57.000So I think if you change the way you fund campaigns, you would change 70% of the problem.
00:18:26.000The point is to get money that doesn't represent a tiny fraction of the special interests controlling how congresspeople think.
00:18:35.000So I think today, a congressman from California, Roe Kahana, is going to introduce a bill that he hopes will be eventually part of whatever this big reform package is.
00:18:46.000That would create a way of funding campaigns where everybody gets a voucher or a set of vouchers.
00:18:52.000You know, so Seattle has done this for city elections where everybody gets four $25 vouchers that are only usable to fund campaigns.
00:19:00.000So 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.
00:19:07.000Okay, if Rocahanna's bill passed and everybody had vouchers to use to fund congressional campaigns, And, you know, 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.
00:19:22.000You 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.
00:19:29.000Congressman 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%.
00:19:38.000They'd be raising money from everybody.
00:19:40.000And 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%.
00:19:56.000I 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.
00:20:03.000But the lesters of the world would probably try to put the kibosh on that before it ever got moving.
00:20:09.000I mean, you know, the biggest block to anything like HR1 happening is that the most influential people in Washington have the most to lose.
00:20:38.000What's true, what's obvious about this is without a president taking up the charge, it's never going to happen.
00:20:45.000And what's most depressing to me is 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.
00:20:57.000And of course, we had a president who was elected under the drain the swamp slogan.
00:21:02.000But of course, nobody believes he has any plan or any intent to do anything to drain that swamp.
00:21:07.000Yeah, 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.
00:21:22.000Yeah, and actually, weirdly, unifying.
00:21:28.000Because 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.
00:21:37.000And we like fuel the politics of hate as we kind of yell at each other about these things.
00:21:43.000But there's a set of issues that we all agree about.
00:21:46.000And the most important set of issues we all agree about is the deeply corrupted nature of this government.
00:21:52.000There 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 of frustration in the history of polling.
00:22:03.000And 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.
00:22:09.000Things 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.
00:22:20.000There was no statistical difference between Republicans and Democrats.
00:22:24.000Sometimes the Democrats were more concerned, sometimes the Republicans.
00:22:27.000And the levels were at like 80 and 90 percent.
00:22:31.000So literally 84 percent of Americans would say it is big money that is corrupting the way our Congress functions, right?
00:22:40.000And 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.
00:22:53.000I've given all of you money and I know the way the system works and the system is corrupt.
00:22:57.000And he called super PACs an abomination and he attacked the idea of money in politics.
00:23:02.000And so what that signaled is that Republicans too I think we're good to go.
00:23:33.000And we should be smart enough to realize if we don't fix this, then none of the things we're arguing about matter.
00:23:40.000It'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.
00:23:57.000You can't say you're going to get climate change legislation in America.
00:24:23.000The first thing we have to do is to fix the broken Congress.
00:24:26.000And if we fix that Congress, then we have a chance to have an argument about what policy makes sense for America.
00:24:32.000And we each have our views, but no views are different.
00:24:35.000But the thing we don't agree about, we should be able to agree on.
00:24:38.000Now, 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,
00:24:54.000what could they possibly do to stop this reform?
00:24:58.000And what's their reaction to this kind of reform?
00:25:51.000You don't believe in the First Amendment if you don't believe that the Koch brothers or the Soroses have the right to spend unlimited amounts of money in political speech.
00:26:02.000And so I think the way around that fight is to agree free speech is the fundamental value.
00:26:11.000And nothing of the reforms I support would try to restrict people's ability to speak.
00:26:17.000What we're talking about is congressmen raising money.
00:26:20.000We're not talking about individuals speaking in the marketplace.
00:26:53.000We still should be able to focus on the influence, the economy of influence congressmen live under when they spend 30 to 70% of the time sucking up to the Leicesters to fund their campaigns.
00:27:05.000That 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.
00:27:15.000The framers didn't create a constitution to replicate an aristocracy.
00:27:22.000They had a system where there was a House, the House of Lords, that had to ask the aristocracy, what do you want?
00:27:28.000And everything could be blocked if the aristocracy didn't like it.
00:27:31.000Well, 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 the single question, what do my funders want?
00:27:46.000And if they can't answer that question in a way that supports the legislation, they're not going to support the legislation.
00:27:53.000Or if it's important for them to block legislation, they will block legislation.
00:27:57.000And that's the dynamic of Washington right now.
00:28:00.000Francis Figuillama describes our government as a vitocracy, vetoocracy.
00:28:07.000And 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.
00:28:16.000And that's, I think, the consequence of allowing this corruption of money to be so deeply woven into our political system.
00:28:30.000Because, you know, for example, H.R. 1 plus Rokohana's bill...
00:28:39.000I think that bill alone would solve 80% of the problem.
00:28:44.000The possibility – the problem isn't like conceiving of what changes have to happen.
00:28:48.000The question is how do you build the political movement to get there?
00:28:51.000And what that takes is leaders willing to say – We have to fix this corrupted democracy first.
00:28:58.000And leaders who stop pretending that we can get a Christmas list of great changes in government without fixing this democracy first.
00:29:09.000So, you know, Bernie published last month in the Washington Post a list of the ten things that should happen in the first hundred days in the next democratic administration.
00:29:20.000Not a single one of those ideas We're good to go.
00:29:53.000Is 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.
00:30:02.000I mean, the guy's been in Congress for almost 30 years now.
00:30:05.000And so it might be natural for him not to notice that the people around him are the problem.
00:30:10.000Is it a natural thing or do you think that he's possibly...
00:30:13.000aware 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 it 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
00:31:01.000I mean, the fact is after it was clear he was not going to be the nominee, he still continued to talk about the, quote, corruption around Hillary, which Donald then picked up and turned into I think he recognized, as every responsible politician does, that it's not just about him.
00:31:26.000I'm talking about when you've got the House of Representatives talking about fundamental reform.
00:31:31.000It'll be the first thing they take up.
00:31:33.000We 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 and stop pretending like we can get all these wonderful things given to us by Santa Claus without fixing this first.
00:31:49.000You got to do the hard work of convincing America.
00:31:53.000That there is a solution because, you know, the reality is I think most of America is where you started this podcast.
00:31:58.000Most of America thinks it's deeply corrupted and there's nothing that can be done.
00:33:04.000So that's the politics of resignation.
00:33:06.000You know, if you'd gone to Egypt under Mubarak and you'd stopped the average person in the street and said, you know, what do you think of Mubarak?
00:33:13.000They would have said, you know, we hate Mubarak.
00:33:15.000And they'd say, well, why aren't you doing anything about it?
00:33:17.000And they'd say, because nothing can be done.
00:33:19.000Or, you know, African-Americans in 1900 in America.
00:33:32.000They think it's deeply unjust, inconsistent with what they thought America was about.
00:33:37.000But they don't do anything about it because they don't think there's anything to be done about it.
00:33:41.000And that's where leaders – Have a role.
00:33:44.000And 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.
00:33:54.000Recognizing the most important opposition here, the lobbyists in Washington are going to be an incredibly difficult group to defeat, but we can do that.
00:34:04.000And if we do that, every other issue becomes easier to resolve in a sensible way.
00:34:10.000Now, there's no public support for lobbyists, right?
00:34:13.000There's no people out there that are super psyched that lobbyists are out there and exerting their influence on our world.
00:34:19.000But they obviously have enormous financial backing behind them, and they have incredible influence in our culture.
00:34:43.000Well, because look, you know, Congress, especially in the current government, legislates on a whole bunch of issues that they don't have a clue about.
00:34:51.000They don't know squat diddly about 99% of what they're legislating about.
00:35:10.000So they rely on outsiders to come in and help them understand it.
00:35:14.000Now, my view is that's an imperfect system because there's great inequality among the quality of lobbyists.
00:35:22.000But if all lobbyists were doing was providing information, like, Congressman, here's what's going to happen if you pass this bill.
00:35:29.000Like, these jobs will disappear, or this lead will reappear in the water system.
00:35:35.000If that's all they were doing, that's a really valuable thing.
00:35:38.000Information to the Congress to help Congress decide what to do is an essential part of making democracy work.
00:35:43.000The 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,
00:36:22.000I 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.
00:36:28.000Like 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.
00:36:40.000Trevor Burrus How many lobbyists are there?
00:36:46.000One of the big problems we've got is that the law has been weakened in registering lobbyists.
00:36:52.000So we have tens of thousands of people who are functioning effectively as lobbyists but don't have to call themselves lobbyists.
00:36:58.000You have these members of Congress who go to government relations departments, and they oversee the government relations department.
00:37:05.000As long as they don't go onto Capitol Hill and shake hands, but instead set up the meetings on Capitol Hill with the lower people shaking hands, they're not called lobbyists.
00:37:13.000So if you look at the lobbying numbers, it looks like we peaked in lobbying about three years ago and now are declining.
00:37:19.000But 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.
00:37:30.000So they are lobbyists but they don't wear the label as lobbyists.
00:38:21.000And then he said, I'm not technically a lobbyist.
00:38:24.000He's a government relations person who's like calling people on Capitol Hill he used to be with on the Senate trying to get them to do things for him, but he isn't, quote, a technical lobbyist.
00:38:32.000So 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.
00:38:44.000So being a lobbyist is not defined by your actions.
00:38:50.000Do you have to fill something out to be a lobbyist?
00:38:53.000Well, 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.
00:40:11.000And if we just built the political will to get there, we could do it.
00:40:15.000And the only way we build the political will, it's really important right now.
00:40:18.000Because 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 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?
00:40:35.000This problem in particular, is it a priority?
00:40:37.000Or is it like one of 12 things on your list?
00:40:40.000I mean, I imagine it's 11 for Bernie or 12, somewhere on the list.
00:40:43.000But the question isn't, you know, is it on the list?
00:40:45.000Because every one of them is going to say, yeah, of course I support reform.
00:40:49.000The question is, are you going to bring America around so that America thinks on day one, this is what will happen.
00:40:56.000Whatever else happens, this is going to happen.
00:40:58.000And my view is, if there were a Democrat running for president, Who said, look, hold on.
00:41:08.000And the Trumpers who drained 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.
00:41:19.000Swamp monsters are bigger and more vital now than they ever were.
00:41:24.000But come with me, we actually will do it.
00:41:26.000I 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.
00:41:40.000To 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.
00:41:49.000When you start examining it and trying to pay attention to it and how the system all 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.
00:42:03.000So in 2010, the United States Supreme Court decided a case called Citizens United.
00:42:10.000Citizens United said that you couldn't limit a corporation's ability to spend money independently of a political campaign.
00:42:20.000So a corporation is 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.
00:42:31.000But what Citizens United said is that the Constitution protects the right of the corporation to engage in political speech independent of a political campaign.
00:42:39.000So 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.
00:42:54.000There 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.
00:43:09.000Because what happened is corporations quickly discovered the high price of free speech.
00:43:16.000So 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.
00:43:32.000So corporations quickly found that it's not cheap to engage in political speech in the marketplace.
00:43:39.000Instead, 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.
00:43:49.000So super PACs were created not by the Supreme Court.
00:43:53.000Super 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.
00:44:04.000That was the super PAC. Supreme Court has never...
00:44:10.000We 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.
00:44:20.000And what's different about this case is the argument we're making is to the conservatives.
00:44:25.000What we're saying is the framers of our Constitution were obsessed with corruption.
00:44:30.000That was the issue that they were overwhelmingly trying to avoid.
00:44:36.000They were focused on institutional corruption, these institutions that became unconnected to their purpose, representing Americans.
00:44:43.000And 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.
00:44:56.000We'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.
00:45:04.000These are outrageous from the perspective of the democracy they were trying to create.
00:45:10.000And those justices, should at least one of them be willing to stand up and defend the framers' values against this modern corruption?
00:45:20.000And if just one of them Voted with the four liberals who've already said they think super PACs are an abomination.
00:45:27.000Then we could have a way to end the super PACs in this system.
00:45:31.000And that would be an enormous benefit because they've become so powerful.
00:45:39.000Even if you ended super PACs tomorrow, you still have Lesterland.
00:45:45.000Because the super PACs are not what I was talking about in Lesterland.
00:45:48.000What I was talking about in 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.
00:46:02.000That's the sort of thing H.R.1 is trying to do.
00:46:04.000That's the sort of thing Rokohan is trying to do.
00:46:06.000But that's the sort of thing that we don't have a president to support right now.
00:46:10.000We don't have Democratic presidential candidates who are making it the champion issue right now.
00:46:16.000Well, 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.
00:46:27.000And 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?
00:48:24.000Let's just start and end with, it is a corrupted system and we want politicians to fix it.
00:48:29.000And if they don't fix it, we'll throw them out until we get the politicians who do.
00:48:33.000And 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.
00:48:43.000There are a lot of people in that party who are now so disgusted with the corruption of this system.
00:48:59.000And 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.
00:49:06.000Maybe not again, but for the first time.
00:49:09.000Why is Mitch McConnell so uniquely evil?
00:49:12.000This guy has had it in his DNA from the first moment he went to Washington to end any regulation of money in politics.
00:49:26.000He 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.
00:49:43.000If the Republicans disagree from the Democrats, then nothing gets done.
00:49:46.000They 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.
00:49:54.000He 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.
00:50:03.000And he said he was going to fight like hell to defend it.
00:50:06.000And when this proposed H.R. 1 was raised to him, Mitch McConnell said, there's not a chance in hell this will ever even get a debate in the Senate.
00:50:15.000This man is obsessed with the idea that money should have the power in Washington that it has right now.
00:50:23.000And people who are talking about reforming it are the enemy.
00:50:26.000And so, you know, the thing about Mitch McConnell is he's actually an incredibly smart man.
00:50:31.000And he's an incredibly smart strategist.
00:50:33.000And he's been playing this game for a long time.
00:50:36.000And I think he's like responsible for 85% of the judicial structure that makes it possible for this to be blocked.
00:50:43.000There's an amazing series of debates happened 20 years ago between John McCain and Mitch McConnell.
00:50:50.000So this is when Congress was passing something called the McCain-Feingold Law, which was the last great effort to deal with this problem.
00:50:55.000It was flawed in a bunch of ways, but it was an important success.
00:51:00.000Mitch McConnell stood on the floor of the Senate and said, Mr. McCain says that the Senate – he can't say Mr. McCain.
00:51:08.000He said the senator from Arizona has said that the system is corrupt.
00:51:11.000I want him to name the corrupt people.
00:51:14.000McCain stands there and said, I'm not talking about particular individuals.
00:51:20.000McConnell, almost clueless, just said, if the system is corrupt, there must be corrupt people.
00:51:25.000If there's not corrupt people, then the system is not corrupt.
00:51:28.000So the only corruption he could imagine was corruption where somebody was taking a bribe.
00:51:33.000And 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.
00:51:44.000But 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.
00:51:53.000But they know how to bob and weave and bend and speak and say the right things to attract the right kind of money.
00:52:00.000And that's as much corruption as bribery is.
00:52:03.000And McCain's view was we had to end it.
00:52:06.000So he was the last great Republican fighter for reform of this corrupted system.
00:52:14.000Barry Goldwater was an incredibly vocal opponent to the role of money in politics.
00:52:20.000But I think what we have to do is find a way to revive that And the 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.
00:52:34.000Another thing that's very weird is that every four years or so, there's this cry to eliminate the Electoral College.
00:52:41.000Every 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.
00:52:58.000Are 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?
00:53:08.000And so everybody plays this weird electoral college game.
00:53:13.000And 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.
00:54:49.000Say that the winner of the popular vote gets all of the electoral votes for that state.
00:54:54.000So in 2000 in Florida, George Bush won that state, based on a stopped recount, by 531 votes.
00:55:02.000He got all the electoral college votes in that state, even though he just barely won that state.
00:55:08.000Winner-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.
00:55:19.000In 2016, 99% of campaign spending was in 14 states.
00:55:29.000But the only reason they were not ninety-nine percent in those battleground states is the other five percent they were in New York and California raising money, right?
00:55:36.000So this is a system designed to give power to these battleground states.
00:55:43.000Is it something the Constitution requires?
00:55:46.000And the answer to that is absolutely not.
00:55:48.000The Constitution does not say how the states will allocate their electors.
00:55:52.000And indeed, when states started adopting this winner-take-all system, Many thought it was an outrageous perversion of the constitutional design.
00:56:06.000But then he said, well, if some states are going to do it, then all states have to do it.
00:56:10.000Because 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.
00:56:19.000So very quickly, there was a race to the bottom, and that's kind of where it stuck.
00:56:23.000And so the question is now what we can do about it.
00:56:25.000Well, there are two big reform efforts out there.
00:56:29.000One of them is called the National Popular Vote Compact.
00:56:33.000I 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.
00:56:44.000So this is not going to happen anytime soon through the Constitution.
00:56:47.000But there are two ways, without amending the Constitution, we could fix this problem.
00:56:51.000One, 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.
00:57:00.000So the state 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.
00:57:11.000So 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.
00:57:21.000That's the way that system would work.
00:57:25.000And, you know, I personally like this system because I believe in the idea of one person, one vote.
00:57:29.000Everybody's vote as an American citizen for the American president should be equal.
00:57:32.000It shouldn't matter that you're having to live in Wyoming versus Pennsylvania versus New York.
00:57:37.000But there are people who are worried about this because they fear that it will become a kind of flyover democracy, that the only places that candidates will care about will be places like LA or New York or Chicago.
00:57:50.000I actually don't think that's right, but I get the understanding.
00:57:53.000I think they're wrong about the way the campaigns work, but I understand why they're anxious about it.
00:57:57.000So then that leads to the alternative solution, which is 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,
00:58:16.000If 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.
00:58:30.000We'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.
00:58:43.000So if you get 40 percent of the vote in the state, you get 40 percent of the electors.
00:58:47.000If you get 50 percent, you get 50 percent of the electors.
00:58:49.000What that would do overnight It would make every state in the nation competitive.
00:58:56.000Like there'd be a reason for a Democrat to go to Texas because you're not going to get all the electoral votes.
00:59:02.000You're not going to get half the electoral votes, but you'll get 40%, maybe 45%, and that could matter.
00:59:08.000Or a Republican would go to California because, you know, you're not going to get all the votes in California, but you're going to get a lot.
00:59:14.000There are a lot of Republicans in California.
00:59:16.000So this change would immediately make every state in play competitive.
00:59:21.000But 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.
00:59:31.000And if I can get it from Arizona, I'm going to care about Arizona.
00:59:33.000If I can get it from Arkansas, I'll care about Arkansas.
00:59:36.000So it's not going to just be the big states or the big population centers.
00:59:41.000So if we can get a court to say this violates the constitution, then you can have states forced to allocate their electors proportionally and if they did that, then the problem that you identified at the start,
00:59:57.000which I think is the problem, could be solved overnight.
01:00:00.000You would no longer have these battleground states deciding everything.
01:00:03.000You'd have a president who cares about getting elected by all of America and that would be an incredible improvement.
01:00:08.000That seems like, in and of itself, would be a game changer, if they could do that.
01:00:29.000So there is support for the idea that every state have a role and there's a support for the idea that small states got a kind of thumb on the scale, which is what the Electoral College does.
01:00:54.000But the point is to change the constitution You need the state legislatures or state conventions to agree with the change.
01:01:03.000And what many states, at least 13 states, I fear, would say is that we actually win more under this system than we lose.
01:01:11.000So we're not going to change the system.
01:01:13.000And 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.
01:01:25.000I don't see how you're going to build a political movement to get there.
01:01:30.000This 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.
01:01:46.000So when they get to 270, the problem of this electoral college goes away.
01:01:51.000Because at 270, according to the plan, the winner of the popular vote wins the electoral college.
01:01:56.000They right now have 172 electors pledged.
01:02:01.000So they have less than 100 more to go.
01:02:03.000But the problem is they've got to convince states to join the compact.
01:02:09.000And they've kind of hit this red wall now because many Republicans think the only way to win the presidency is through the Electoral College now.
01:02:43.000So they like the system as it is and 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.
01:02:53.000It's not hard to understand why they're there.
01:02:55.000I think – again, I don't think they're right about this.
01:02:58.000In 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.
01:03:12.000And if that had happened in 2004, I think the Electoral College would be dead today.
01:03:16.000Because a Republican won in 2000, a Democrat won in 2004, people would say, this system is just crazy.
01:03:24.000But now people think, well, Republicans benefit from this, so if I'm a Republican, I'm going to block the change.
01:03:29.000And 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 reforms.
01:03:37.000And the reinforcement of that is that Donald Trump won without having the popular vote.
01:03:41.000And you know, of course, there's no hypocrisy that touches this president, but remember in 2012, 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.
01:04:01.000Trump started tweeting vigorously about how this is a denial of democracy.
01:04:05.000We have to march on Washington to end this banana republic-like system because the Electoral College was the worst possible thing in the world.
01:04:12.000And of course, after 2016, he had different views about the Electoral College.
01:04:16.000I wasn't old enough to understand what was going on during Watergate.
01:04:44.000Is that what the official individual number one is?
01:04:48.000This is a very unusual moment for us to be watching this all unfold and to see this slow dissection.
01:04:58.000What Mueller seems to be doing is slowly closing off all the escape routes and slowly circling the troops around this one area that he's attacking.
01:05:14.000And so I think it's clear that the worst for Donald Trump is yet to come.
01:05:21.000And I do think the parallel is Watergate, but there's a really important difference here.
01:05:26.000So I'm old enough to remember Watergate.
01:05:28.000I was like 12 or 13 when this happened.
01:05:30.000And 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.
01:05:39.000And that weekend when Nixon resigned, he came to visit us.
01:05:42.000We lived in the Kentucky part of Pennsylvania, the kind of right-wing middle part of the state.
01:05:47.000He came to visit us and he told me this was going to happen and that was the event.
01:05:52.000That was the weekend that I decided I wanted to become a lawyer.
01:05:56.000But the big difference between these two times is that when that happened, the way most people got access to news was three television networks.
01:06:08.000Every day they watched the news at the same time because there was nothing else on.
01:06:13.000And those three television networks kind of shot right down the middle and told the story as they saw it.
01:06:18.000It was kind of the Walter Cronkite era of news.
01:06:27.000And as they saw it, it was a pretty damning indictment of the president.
01:06:32.000And what's amazing is he watched the polling among Republicans and their support for the president.
01:06:37.000Six months before the president resigns, the poll says among Republicans he has about an 83 percent support rate.
01:06:45.000And then when he resigns, his support rate about Republicans is about 50%.
01:06:49.000And that's because the news, newspapers and television, had like 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.
01:07:01.000We don't live in that news environment today.
01:07:04.000We live in an environment where half of America, I think we're good to go.
01:07:36.000I don't think you should be impeached, but that's a separate question, is not possible.
01:07:41.000And that's what's so terrifying about it.
01:07:43.000When you live in a democracy, Where we don't all live in the same universe.
01:07:51.000How do you knit together a public that can address these critical issues of national import?
01:07:58.000And that's, I think, our biggest challenge right now.
01:08:00.000Well, it gets grayer than that, right?
01:08:02.000With 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.
01:08:20.000It's very strange to watch because I don't remember that at any point in time.
01:08:24.000No, it wasn't the past, but I think the thing we need to realize is it is the future because it pays.
01:08:55.000So Sean Hannity looks to, you know, old geezers like me like an abomination from the perspective of what news should be like.
01:09:03.000But from the standpoint of what the future is going to be, he is the future.
01:09:07.000And 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?
01:09:15.000And, you know, I've begun to talk about the slow democracy movement, which I think, you know, I think I pointed to you as part of that.
01:09:22.000I 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.
01:09:35.000And podcasting, I think, is a core part of that.
01:09:37.000Is it entirely possible that something could be profitable that does shoot down the middle because people are so tired of this CNN, Fox, bipolar distribution of information?
01:09:48.000I 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.
01:10:20.000Literally 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.
01:10:29.000And you know in the context of like the tweet thinking of cable news, they can't afford to go deep on anything.
01:10:37.000And everything they're going to talk about are the things they can talk about sensibly in 25 seconds or 30 seconds or 40 seconds.
01:10:43.000And 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.
01:11:28.000I think it's important that people start thinking about these issues in a richer, deeper way.
01:11:33.000And I think the challenge we have now is how do we begin to produce understanding Realizing that the world of Walter Konkite is never coming back.
01:11:43.000And it might be a good thing, but it is just never coming back.
01:11:46.000And the world of Sean Hannity is a world that will destroy democracy.
01:11:50.000So how do we rebuild democracy outside of that?
01:11:53.000And, you know, if you had to pick the three things that are the most hopeful, I think podcasting is number one.
01:11:58.000I 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.
01:12:47.000Because after watching that season, you understand the tensions between the CIA and the president and what's actually going on with Israel.
01:12:56.000And 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.
01:13:11.000I understand the current season's 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.
01:13:47.000You're like, wow, this really powerful guy, Frank Underwood, actually can actually get important bills passed.
01:13:52.000And I remember watching that saying, holy shit, this is just completely not the truth.
01:13:57.000This is just not the way the system works.
01:13:59.000I mean, it would be good if it worked like that because at least it could do stuff.
01:14:03.000But 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.
01:14:11.000And the tentacles of funders added together would be don't do anything.
01:14:37.000Yeah, just gives them a richer understanding.
01:14:40.000Well, an understanding, period, because for the most part, what people...
01:14:43.000I 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.
01:15:17.000The only way to get people to see the truth is to expose it to them in a way that they want to see it.
01:15:22.000And, you know, my point is that's not going to be Fox News.
01:15:26.000Fox News can never cover it at the depth and the interest level that it needs to be covered.
01:15:30.000It's going to be things like what you do or things like what, you know, great television can do.
01:15:36.000Is our system of government analogous to taking 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?
01:15:48.000I think the better analogy is an operating system that has been taken over by malware or some virus.
01:16:12.000But there's something malicious in this failure.
01:16:14.000There 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.
01:16:24.000So the Koch brothers have this amazing bipolar character.
01:16:31.000On 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.
01:16:40.000So basically 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.
01:16:50.000What they want is not change of a particular kind except for tax cuts.
01:17:29.000So, I think most of the experts who are disinterested, meaning they're not working for Debold or something like that, I would tell you that we don't yet have the infrastructure to be able to be confident about this.
01:17:44.000Now, 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.
01:17:56.000And so I don't foreclose it in the long run.
01:18:00.000But 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.
01:18:11.000You know, look at these voting machines.
01:18:15.000This 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.
01:18:30.000Because the companies that build these technologies are not filled with a bunch of rocket scientists.
01:18:35.000Like if you're really good, you're going to go work for Google or for Facebook or something like that.
01:18:39.000So the proprietary software has all of these bugs and holes and intended backdoors built into it.
01:19:12.000Well, because I've seen so much that contradicts some of the claims about the extent to which there was real differences in the numbers.
01:19:19.000I remember at the election really being anxious about it because it seemed to me, Ohio in particular, A really compelling case was made that there was something weird going on.
01:19:30.000But, you know, the point is not so much the particulars of a particular election.
01:19:33.000It'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.
01:19:44.000You know, it's not like they are intending to make themselves vulnerable to the Russians.
01:19:49.000They're just going to make themselves vulnerable to the Russians.
01:19:51.000And 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.
01:19:58.000An open source system, like a Linux-based, something that would go onto your phone?
01:20:02.000Well, 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.
01:20:11.000What I'm saying about being on your phone is the biometrics that we use on our phone today are some of the most secure...
01:20:18.000In terms of being able to establish that it's you that's making that vote.
01:20:22.000Like iris scanners that you have on the...
01:20:24.000I have a Samsung Note 9 that has an iris scanner.
01:20:50.000And that's why I say, I agree with you, that in the long run, we should imagine a world where it would 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, money.
01:21:06.000But 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.
01:21:20.000And these companies basically have bounties that they post on the web for people who will come forward and find certain holes and hacks.
01:21:29.000And once they get those hacks, they use them to leverage power.
01:21:35.000And governments play this game all the time.
01:21:37.000And there's a pretty strong argument that the Khashoggi murder It 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.
01:21:52.000So the basic idea is that these companies and many of them – the most prominent ones here are Israeli companies who facilitate the ability of governments to buy access to your phone.
01:22:05.000The 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.
01:22:14.000You see it and no way that it can be blocked.
01:22:17.000But 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.
01:22:26.000But the point is these companies have a market now for selling this type of insecurity.
01:22:34.000So they'll, like, sell the ability for you to get access here.
01:22:37.000And the story that, you know, I don't have a lot of There's no reason to be absolutely confident about this except that I trust the person who's inside the security world that says this to me.
01:22:49.000The 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 Khashoggi went down.
01:23:06.000So this is the point to recognize about these phones.
01:23:09.000On the one hand, for the ordinary life, it's more secure than anything you've ever had.
01:23:14.000But on the other hand, systematically, it's building insecurity into our lives in a way that can be exploited by powerful people.
01:23:23.000And for most people, it doesn't matter.
01:23:25.000Like 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.
01:23:35.000When I hear that from a person justifying why they don't worry about it, it drives me crazy.
01:23:44.000But that's not what we're talking about.
01:23:47.000Right, because if we have a system where systematically powerful people can just push a button and find a way to control you or control anybody, then we've got a system that no longer makes it possible for ordinary people to stand up to power.
01:24:31.000So 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,
01:24:48.000especially considering open source variants where they can be checked by the community?
01:24:56.000So the problem is not the kind of particular technologies working the way you intend them to work.
01:25:02.000If 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.
01:25:12.000The problem is the code is so big and so complicated that there's always going to be little bugs.
01:25:22.000What 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.
01:25:35.000So the exploits are never – well, I won't say never.
01:25:37.000There's another story that's important to recognize.
01:25:55.000And when you have a world like the iPhone, which is this monoculture, like everybody has the same operating system or the same versions of the operating system.
01:26:03.000If 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.
01:26:11.000You can, you know, do a lot of damage to a lot of people's lives before anybody gets around to blocking it.
01:26:17.000Now, you know, that's even in the best case where everybody's working hard to make their system as secure as it can be.
01:26:24.000You know, there was this period after the 9-11.
01:26:29.000There'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.
01:26:41.000And there's strong allegations that, in fact, many of the most important technology companies complied.
01:26:48.000And what they quickly discovered is that the back doors intended for the United States government trying to attack terrorists were being exploited by the Chinese trying to steal trade secrets from American companies.
01:26:58.000So 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.
01:27:10.000Again, because it's so complicated to get it perfectly right.
01:27:15.000And the return from exploit is so huge that you can just expect the market is always going to supply it.
01:27:22.000What was the other example that you were going to bring up?
01:27:55.000And all of this follows from the fact that we bizarrely in America, unlike most mature democracies around the world, We're good to go.
01:28:28.000For 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 voting 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.
01:28:44.000We're to create it so that it takes seven hours to vote in some districts and 20 minutes to vote in other districts.
01:28:49.000There's no incentive to do that if your job is simply to make it possible for people to vote efficiently.
01:28:54.000And if we measure you and reward you based on how easy have you made it for people in this state to vote easily and efficiently.
01:29:04.000We don't get that kind of innovation because it's a rigged game.
01:29:09.000You might have people who – I'm sure many of these people are above partisan motivation.
01:29:14.000But we also know that many of these people are deeply motivated by partisan politics, especially at that kind of middle level of party politics.
01:29:21.000If they can set it up so that their side wins because of the way they've played the game for allocating I think we're good to go.
01:29:43.000And 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.
01:29:59.000This is a product of just making it political.
01:30:01.000We could make it nonpolitical and might not have all of these kinds of problems.
01:30:05.000We'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.
01:30:21.000And one thing specifically is, and this is being addressed right now in Congress, is the discrimination against conservative voices.
01:30:30.000And 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 progressive and liberal voices.
01:30:50.000Very strange thing because 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.
01:31:02.000And the CNNs and the traditional news outlets.
01:32:31.000So you might say, you know, if you were the Anti-Defamation League, you would say, oh my god, Facebook is, you know, discriminating to encourage Jew haters.
01:32:43.000But from another perspective, you're like...
01:32:48.000But to what extent do you want to say Facebook is doing it?
01:32:51.000And 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.
01:32:59.000You know, like this hilarious hearing that was just held on Capitol Hill two days ago, I think.
01:33:20.000We should explain that to people who don't know what we're talking about.
01:33:22.000Yeah, so there was an argument about whether Google was tilting the ads to embarrass one side or the other.
01:33:31.000I guess it was a congressman from Iowa, everybody.
01:33:35.000That's the guy who didn't know that Google didn't make the iPhone?
01:33:38.000Yeah, he got really embarrassed by that.
01:33:40.000But anyway, there was this, you know, the exchange was basically, here, I'm going to show you a demonstration, and they put in a certain name, and that's, yeah, Congressman Smith, and then up comes this sort of reference to his race-baiting.
01:33:54.000And, 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.
01:34:13.000It's the machine that's producing this result.
01:34:15.000And that let Congressman Lou 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.
01:34:24.000Yeah, if you don't want negative search results, don't do negative things.
01:34:29.000But I do think that there's a really hard problem here.
01:34:34.000When you say it's the machine who's doing it, you know, 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?
01:34:43.000When 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.
01:34:54.000That 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.
01:35:03.000And they're doing this, this is the allegation, that they're doing this based on their own personal preferences, their beliefs, their progressive ideology.
01:35:15.000It wants them to lean left and somehow or another distribute that information in a much more left-leaning way.
01:35:38.000And quite frankly, some of these feeds, the Alex Jones stuff, if 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,
01:35:57.000there's something wrong with what's going on there.
01:36:02.000So 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.
01:36:11.000Like, so Facebook required you to identify yourself so that under the shadows of anonymity you wouldn't be causing, wreaking lots of havoc inside the system.
01:36:20.000But 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.
01:36:28.000The more fundamental problem here Is that we have no antitrust enforcement of any of these companies – against any of these companies.
01:36:36.000And we've allowed them to become so incredibly powerful without any justification under the law.
01:36:42.000Trevor Burrus Isn't the issue though that this was never anticipated?
01:36:45.000That this is – like when they created Twitter, they didn't think of it as going to be some voice of distribution of information that's unprecedented worldwide.
01:37:24.000In an ordinary competitive market, what they would do is they would build a better product to compete with Instagram.
01:37:30.000Their response was to write a check for a billion dollars, and they bought Instagram.
01:37:35.000And they've bought a whole bunch of other companies, including WhatsApp, which was a very important competitor and people believed a really secure way to communicate.
01:37:44.000Trevor Burrus Didn't they buy Boston Dynamics too?
01:37:59.000But 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.
01:38:12.000I think one of the biggest changes that's happened in the last 20 years is that the antitrust department has just shut up its doors and just stopped doing its work.
01:38:22.000So 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.
01:38:38.000You'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.
01:38:55.000These are real questions and important questions to figure out.
01:38:58.000Are they biasing in one way or the other?
01:38:59.000And if they're biasing systematically, that's a really important problem.
01:39:03.000But the solution to that problem might not be more government regulation.
01:39:07.000The 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.
01:39:16.000What would be that right – is that a fact?
01:39:18.000Google bought it and they actually sold it last year.
01:40:16.000And that's a real problem 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.
01:40:29.000And people think, well, this is indicative of a person's actual real beliefs.
01:40:58.000Progressive 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.
01:41:11.000But 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.
01:41:23.000But they are not welcome in these progressive spaces.
01:41:26.000So they come onto these new places and it turns into a dumpster fire.
01:41:32.000Look, the story you just described is the story of cable television, right?
01:41:37.000So the story of cable television is that at a certain point, people like Roger Ailes and the Murdochs decided that we didn't have enough conservative media out there.
01:41:46.000And so they funded not just magazines like The New Republic, but they funded the beginning of cable television.
01:41:52.000And that created this bifurcation in media with cable television and one could make these observations about – I mean this is what Yochai Benkler's book is all about.
01:42:04.000Like what the nature of truth is on cable television on the right is different from what it is on the left.
01:43:02.000That's exactly the right way to think about it.
01:43:04.000But 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.
01:43:17.000And just like gaming companies, We're good to go.
01:43:42.000The better their ads are in feeding you information.
01:43:46.000So this is a technology for the purpose of engendering advertising.
01:43:51.000And so that advertising gets really, really good.
01:43:53.000And 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.
01:44:05.000I mean, this is what Kathleen Hall Jamison's book about this is really quite amazing and documenting.
01:44:11.000And that's because it's gotten really good in being able to segment markets on the basis of what people know or care about.
01:44:18.000Again, not because anybody planned it.
01:44:19.000Nobody wrote Jew Hater, but because the AI is smart enough to figure that out.
01:44:23.000And 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.
01:44:39.000Cable television is about building really loyal community, building the tribal sense of the community.
01:44:45.000If telling the truth did that, they would tell the truth.
01:44:48.000If not telling the truth does that, they will not tell the truth.
01:44:51.000The question is not whether you're telling the truth or not.
01:44:54.000The question is what builds the advertising base.
01:44:57.000And so this reality that we have these platforms that are ad-driven, constructs, drives that platform to develop in certain ways.
01:45:08.000And that's why I think it's important to think, what if we could create a competitive environment where there were different platforms available, ones that were not focused on driving ads?
01:45:18.000And this is something that, again, I think- How would they fund those?
01:45:21.000Isn't that the reason why something like Google or Facebook has gotten so big is because there's so much money behind it?
01:46:34.000But 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?
01:46:42.000So when you say what are the alternatives going to look like, it's a really hard question.
01:49:59.000But 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.
01:50:14.000And it's really just about accentuating your ability to make more money.
01:50:18.000Which is why we have to build these alternatives that can compete with the advertising-driven platforms.
01:50:24.000Well, 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.
01:50:34.000But they attract an extraordinary number of people, and that's good.
01:50:38.000But again, you know, we have this image of, like, news shows, you know, of a version of Walter Cronkite.
01:51:53.000And 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.
01:52:05.000When I was a kid, I was obsessed with the Soviet Union.
01:52:08.000And in 1982, I went to the Soviet Union.
01:52:11.000I 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 in I'm from Leningrad to Moscow and sitting next to a professor.
01:52:27.000I always seem to be followed by people who spoke English, but this guy spoke English.
01:52:31.000And he said to me, you know, we have a better system of free speech in the Soviet Union than you do in America.
01:52:38.000So I said, what the hell could that possibly mean?
01:52:40.000And he said, well, when you wake up in the morning, he said, 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.
01:52:52.000But we know when we read our newspapers, everybody's lying to us.
01:52:56.000So we have to read seven or eight newspapers and triangulate on the truth.
01:53:01.000And that makes us a more critical free speech society than America is.
01:53:07.000And, 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.
01:53:13.000You 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.
01:54:18.000Michael Shermer, who is a professional skeptic, I get a DM from him, says, there's a story about you on BC... What is the British BBC? It's a story about you on BBC. You have to log in to your Twitter to read it.
01:54:39.000So I look at that and I go, what kind of bullshit is this?
01:56:15.000It'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.
01:56:46.000But the point – what the greatness in here is in their demonstrating – Incredible talent that's out there in the world that, you know, in the 1970s just would have been invisible.
01:56:57.000Like you kind of looked at the world in the 1970s, which I remember.
01:57:00.000The 1970s, you kind of thought there were great people at the top.
01:57:03.000You know, they were all on television and everybody else was kind of a troll.
01:57:07.000But what Reddit does every day – I'm obsessed with certain of these feeds that just are amazing.
01:57:13.000But 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.
01:57:22.000And you get the sense that the world is filled.
01:57:47.000It makes it possible for us to at least reach them.
01:57:51.000And then the question is, can we use this power, leverage this power, and actually do something with the forces of evil that now control?
01:57:59.000I had an interesting moment last night 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 it was pretty fun.
01:59:37.000And I think the net is a perfect example of that.
01:59:40.000If you're a person that gets – if something happens to you and – People start attacking you online for it.
01:59:47.000If you just noticed the number of people, like say you're involved in some sort of a story, right?
01:59:52.000Say 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.
02:00:02.000You don't notice, you just see all these messages and it's unmanageable.
02:00:08.000You're like, oh my god, everyone hates me.
02:00:10.000No, 150 people have decided to take action and make you feel bad because they feel bad.
02:00:16.000It's a small number in terms of the overall number of human beings.
02:00:20.000But if you're Louis C.K. and it's coming at you, you're like, holy shit, the world fucking hates me.
02:00:29.000The situation that we're in right now, we just have so many voices.
02:00:34.000It'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, 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.
02:00:53.000In our past, there's never been this many voices.
02:00:56.000In 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.
02:01:24.000The problem is if the infrastructure that used to be there to kind of bring us all up to a kind of basic level so that we understood the facts disappears.
02:01:35.000So then 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.
02:01:45.000Then the question is, how do we run a democracy?
02:01:48.000Because if we could have all these different – I like to think about the difference between the culture channel and the democracy channel.
02:01:54.000So in the culture channel, this is the best of times by orders of magnitude.
02:01:58.000The stuff on television today is a billion times better than anything from the 1970s and 1980s.
02:02:04.000And 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.
02:02:16.000But 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...
02:02:26.000We can't address problems as a democracy with even the same facts.
02:02:32.000Because 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.
02:02:42.000And how you solve that problem is really hard.
02:02:45.000Like, we're not going back, thank God, we're not going back to the 1960s.
02:02:49.000It's just not going to be the case that there are three channels we get to watch.
02:02:54.000And it's a great thing because we've got all this amazing culture.
02:02:57.000But what do we do on the democracy side?
02:02:59.000How do we build a democracy recognizing that everybody's not going to spend all their time geeking out about campaign finance reform legislation?
02:03:07.000And that's why I think we need to think about these other ways to bring people to some sensible understanding.
02:03:13.000And, you know, Brian Callen and Hunter Matz were the first people that brought me into this.
02:03:18.000Like they put me on their podcast podcast.
02:03:20.000And I remember like not even knowing when he did this, like the length of that conversation and thinking, what, are you going to cut this down to like six minutes or ten minutes?
02:04:20.000To engage in the right kind of healthy behavior, to be able to survive in this world.
02:04:26.000Because the incentives of the market are to sell you stuff that doesn't necessarily do that.
02:04:31.000It's the same thing with the information space.
02:04:33.000That's why the slow food movement is like the slow democracy movement.
02:04:38.000Like the slow food movement is how do you produce food that's actually healthy in a way that feeds your body in the right way.
02:04:45.000I think the slow democracy movement, how do you feed a democracy?
02:04:48.000And the elements to that have got to be contexts where people are free to get deeper than 30 seconds.
02:04:56.000And if we don't build more of those, we're going to have a really desperate time for democracy.
02:05:01.000We're going to have what we have, which is the rise of authoritarians around the world.
02:05:05.000Do 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,
02:05:27.000sort of like the Founding Fathers did when they established Our system of government.
02:05:46.000But what I know gets us there is competition.
02:05:49.000I know that the only thing that has ever gotten us to the next great innovation is the enforcement of competition.
02:05:57.000Which is why it's a problem when someone like Facebook buys Instagram.
02:06:00.000What 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.
02:06:12.000You can't leverage your power to control all innovation.
02:06:18.000People could layer on top of their wires a new network called the internet.
02:06:22.000And when they did that, government said to companies like cable television companies, okay, yeah, you've got broadband across your cable line.
02:06:32.000But that doesn't mean you get to decide what applications go on that cable line.
02:06:40.000You can't say that there can't be Netflix on the cable or you can't slow Netflix down.
02:06:46.000Now, obviously, they would want to slow Netflix down because Netflix is a competitor with their basic business model.
02:06:53.000But the intervention to assure competition Created the opportunity for these great new innovations.
02:07:00.000Now, nobody at the beginning of that had any clue about what would come out of it.
02:07:04.000All that they knew was that the only way to get something new and great was to assure competition.
02:07:10.000And that's the commitment we've given up.
02:07:12.000Since 2000, since George Bush became president, 2001, there's been no major enforcement action by the antitrust department against any of these companies.
02:07:25.000And 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.
02:07:41.000Yeah, ensuring competition is ensuring innovations, ensuring – and anybody who doesn't want competition wants to stifle innovation and it's got to be thought to be a selfish proposition.
02:07:51.000And the basic – so the basic argument in competition law – this competition law got taken over by a bunch of Chicago economists who said the only question was efficiency or consumer welfare.
02:08:02.000But there's another perspective that libertarians like Luigi Zingales, who's an economist at the University of Chicago Business School, and people who are not libertarians like Tim Wu, who's a professor at Columbia, embrace.
02:08:15.000And this is the idea of political antitrust.
02:08:18.000And the idea of political antitrust is you should also worry.
02:08:21.000If companies are so big that they can corrupt the government, like this is a dimension to worry about too.
02:08:28.000Because 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.
02:08:35.000Because if an innovator comes, he doesn't come with 50 lobbyists.
02:08:41.000I mean, you know, Elon Musk saw this dramatically as he's developing this incredible alternative.
02:08:47.000And 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?
02:08:58.000There was a huge fight as the incumbent industries leveraged their power over government.
02:09:04.000To protect themselves from this new competitor.
02:09:06.000And this is the fight we have to make central again.
02:09:11.000Because if we don't do that, then the dinosaurs will have the power through this corrupted political system to protect themselves against the future.
02:09:18.000And this is just the moment when we need to figure out how to make the future come.
02:09:22.000I'm glad you're raising these warning flags, but I feel like from talking to you that you're fairly optimistic.
02:09:30.000You're the first person who's ever said that about me.
02:09:34.000Your perception of the internet and 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.
02:09:49.000I mean, there's more voices now, and there's a lot of...
02:09:54.000Look, 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.
02:10:16.000You know, now you've got Kyle Kalinske, you've got all these, you know, these people that are, they don't necessarily fit in, you know, any traditional, Jimmy Dore, they don't fit in any traditional role on regular mainstream television,
02:10:33.000but they have a pretty influential voice.
02:10:35.000And they're very politically savvy and they're talking about things in a way that they would be, 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.
02:11:35.000It could just be that if we got the political force, we could take them down.
02:11:40.000And I think that's what we've got to be setting up for right now.
02:11:42.000When 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.
02:12:02.000Let's hear people that are clearly not influenced by corporate America.
02:12:07.000They don't have all of their veins hooked up to the matrix yet.
02:12:32.000That 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.
02:12:54.000I think about saying, look, we got to fix the system if we're going to get any of these things done.
02:12:59.000So I like to think about like Exandio versus Bernie.
02:13:02.000So 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.
02:13:13.000As 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.
02:13:24.000This new Congress is filled with them.
02:13:26.000There were 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 this corrupt political system.
02:13:36.000And Nancy Pelosi gave them not just that but all these other reforms too.
02:13:40.000That's H.R. 1. The younger people coming into Congress realize the system is broken.
02:13:45.000I 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.
02:13:52.000And 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.
02:14:01.000If we don't fix Congress first, nothing else matters.
02:14:06.000And 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.
02:14:15.000That'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.
02:14:25.000And 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.
02:14:35.000These are the people that are motivated because they see a need for change, whereas...
02:14:40.000Some people with other administrations are like, I like the way things are going.
02:14:43.000I'm going to go pursue the private sector.
02:16:09.000And when you hit your numbers, it's like, hooray, I did something.
02:16:12.000So it's like you feel like you're accomplishing something.
02:16:16.000But the point is the psychology of that increasingly makes you okay to With the system that you're in, and you realize you win in that system.
02:16:27.000And so your openness to changing the system becomes really sketchy.
02:16:31.000So I think the critical moment right now is to solidify the recognition.
02:16:36.000This Congress is corrupted, and we have to fix it.
02:16:41.000And, you know, the only thing I'm worried about with H.R. 1 is that it's going to make it into a democratic issue.
02:16:47.000It's like the Democrats care about it.
02:16:48.000So the Republicans are supposed to not care about it.
02:16:50.000The 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.
02:17:04.000I'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.
02:17:12.000But 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.
02:17:17.000Yeah, I would never ask you to do that.