Making Sense - Sam Harris - #262 — The Future of American Democracy

In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, I speak with Andrew Yang about his new book, Forward Notes on the Future of Our Democracy, and his new political party, the Forward Party. We cover the obvious brokenness of our political system, the importance of open primaries and rank choice voting as a means of reforming it, and his experience running for the presidency and the job of mayor in New York City. Andrew also talks about why he decided to write a memoir of his experience as a presidential candidate and why he founded a political party to address the problems that led him to write the book and found the party. And we talk about the potential role for The Forward Party as a political platform for the future of our democracy. And we cover the three problems he identified as the root cause of our brokenness, and what they are, and how to fix them. You can find the full series of episodes on The Making Sense Podcast by searching for Making Sense, wherever you get your podcasts. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/OurAdvertisers. We don t run ads on the podcast, but we do make sure to mention them when we mention them in the show. Thank you so much for supporting the podcast! We do not endorse any of the products mentioned in the podcast. Make sure to become a supporter of Making Sense by becoming a patron of the podcast by clicking the link below. It helps us spread the word about what we're making sense. Subscribe to the podcast and get access to the latest episodes of the making sense, and learn more about what's going on in your favorite podcast, wherever else you get to learn about making sense and what you can do to support the podcast? Thanks for listening to our making sense? You'll get a discount code, and you'll get 20% off the show, and a chance to win a discount on future episodes of Making sense, too! To become a member of the Podcast? If you're listening to the Making sense Podcast, you get 10% off of our newest episode of our podcast, you'll become a discount, too get 5% of $5,000, plus a discount of $10,000 and a free of $50,000 of your choice, and we'll get an ad discount, plus other perks like that gets you get a whole bunch of perks, too much of that?

00:00:00.000 welcome to the making sense podcast this is sam harris just a note to say that if you're hearing

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00:00:38.940 okay today i'm speaking with andrew yang andrew has a new book just out today i believe

00:00:55.620 the title is forward notes on the future of our democracy and he also has a new political party

00:01:03.560 the forward party and in today's podcast we cover all of the relevant experiences and issues

00:01:11.100 that led him to write the book and found the party we cover the obvious brokenness of our

00:01:20.660 political system the importance of things like open primaries and rank choice voting as a means of

00:01:27.460 reforming it we talk about his experience running for the presidency and for the job of mayor in new

00:01:35.480 york city very different experiences and we cover many other interesting issues here politically and

00:01:44.360 socially anyway it's always great to speak with andrew and i hope you enjoy the conversation as much as i did

00:01:49.920 and now i bring you andrew yang

00:01:52.960 i am back with andrew yang andrew thanks for joining me again sam it's great to be back with you

00:02:07.660 it's uh you know anytime i talk to you something good is going on we're going to launch you in one

00:02:13.420 direction or another every time we speak that's uh that's what i'm getting used to now first we should

00:02:18.260 mention at the top that uh you have a new book uh the title is forward notes on the future of our

00:02:24.540 democracy which is um essentially your memoir of being a presidential candidate which is very

00:02:32.440 had to be a fascinating experience and um it comes across in the book and then you're basically your

00:02:39.460 pitch for the ways in which we can change our politics and the and the role for the forward party

00:02:45.300 uh in that conversation and so i think we'll we'll save that that final piece for the end but um

00:02:52.380 let's talk about the the nature of the problem you say very early in the book that um democracy itself

00:03:00.440 is losing legitimacy so much of the book is is a look at the ways in which our system is broken

00:03:07.200 and this brokenness relates to politics it relates to the media it relates to a fundamental distrust in

00:03:15.480 institutions that is now spreading to catastrophic effect and it also relates to the issue that

00:03:23.400 really launched your presidential run which is the is a growing concern around inequality you know

00:03:31.420 wealth inequality in particular as as you wanted to address by ubi but also with respect to education

00:03:39.360 and health care and other variables so i think there's really three problems we could talk about

00:03:45.140 before we start getting into solutions politics you know two-party politics the media and inequality

00:03:52.560 in general and i thought we could just kind of track through them and get your view on them as a

00:03:58.440 candidate maybe in both as you know in your presidential run and i'd be interested to hear

00:04:04.280 how the run for mayor of new york was a different experience so let's start with politics what was it

00:04:12.440 like to run for president and and what was it like let's take it from the the beginning i know we've

00:04:18.320 talked about this a little bit but i mean your book is is so interesting on this point what was it like

00:04:24.360 to do this when no one knew who you were i mean that and for the longest time that was the case

00:04:32.200 and so i mean at the outset it seems like a completely quixotic enterprise to declare your candidacy for the

00:04:39.740 presidency and you know the reactions of friends and people uh who would support you uh out of out of

00:04:47.120 some prior relationship without any expectation that you could possibly get anywhere yeah take us back to

00:04:53.480 that to the beginning sure i i do tell some fun stories in the book about how i'd go to my son's

00:04:59.420 birthday party and another dad would say oh what do you do and then i didn't want to say i'm running

00:05:04.180 for president because i would have seemed crazy so i would say i'm in policy or i'm an author that

00:05:12.780 my evasiveness would often not work and then i'd wind up saying i'm actually running for president now and

00:05:18.360 then we'd have a 30 minute conversation about that and at the end of it they would not sign up to

00:05:24.360 volunteer for my campaign they'd be like oh that's really interesting good luck with that so you you can

00:05:28.720 imagine why i wouldn't really want to have that conversation over and over again yeah and during

00:05:33.540 that time i'm so grateful to you sam because you and i sat down for a conversation like this one and

00:05:40.400 your podcast really launched my campaign in multiple ways one the people who listened decided

00:05:49.920 to take an interest in my campaign and supported and donated uh which i was incredibly grateful for

00:05:55.080 but then this iowan who was organizing something called a wing ding was a huge fan of yours

00:06:00.960 and decided to invite me to iowa to speak in 2018 on the basis of our conversation

00:06:07.960 so you were a better friend to me than a lot of others despite the fact that at that point we were

00:06:15.740 uh still just you know getting to know each other and you said something to another journalist that i

00:06:22.500 really appreciated you said well you know i don't know andrew that well but he seems like a fairly

00:06:27.000 normal fellow who just decided to ruin his life by running for president i heard that i was like oh i'm

00:06:34.020 so glad that came through but the early months of the campaign were like that where i had a vision

00:06:40.220 for what the campaign could be and uh that vision slowly started to grow thanks to people like you

00:06:46.240 and the people who worked on my campaign yeah this this is one of the the points you make in the book

00:06:51.220 which um was a genuine surprise for me i mean it shouldn't have been i've certainly noticed this

00:06:58.380 process i mean it was it was all on the surface but until you pointed it out i was someone who

00:07:06.080 along with i think most people assumed that there is a kind of egocentricity and narcissism and just

00:07:15.700 a search for ego gratification that is informing many presidential runs and i mean that that may be the case

00:07:25.560 in in certain candidates but what you make clear again which really should not have been surprising

00:07:32.780 but you you make it so vividly clear in discussing the experience of marianne williamson and joe sestak

00:07:39.620 that the process for most people unless you you already happen to be a front runner for some reason or

00:07:47.580 another the process is just ego annihilating uh maybe you can talk about that yeah you show up my

00:07:55.260 first trip to new hampshire there were literally two people there waiting for me maybe one and one

00:08:00.280 person just happened to be there and politely pretended they were there for me and that was

00:08:05.480 an entire day uh i went to a rally in iowa labor day in 2018 that drew 12 people maybe and none of them

00:08:15.400 were there for me either uh and these were everyday occurrences and keep in mind at this point

00:08:21.020 uh though i was a very very anonymous presidential candidate you know i'd still done some things in

00:08:26.300 my life like i'm still like a person who like values his time and you know has a family and stuff so

00:08:34.220 you you would do things all the time that weren't positively reinforcing and the the media uh as i write

00:08:41.800 in the book is a huge part of this dynamic where the media will completely sideline you if you're not

00:08:48.180 one of the major candidates and when they do mention you they will mock you it really is the way it goes

00:08:54.180 as happened with uh many other candidates and happened to me to some measure uh and so when you

00:09:01.340 talk about the problems i outline in the book the media gauntlet was such a huge part of running for

00:09:08.120 president and i'm now convinced that that's core to our problems like it's core to why we can't seem to

00:09:13.940 make any real progress if memory serves you weren't mocked so much and when i think about

00:09:20.960 the mocking part i do think about marianne williamson who as you point out in her own

00:09:26.520 life you know had a you know a very successful career lots of people loved her she made a lot of

00:09:33.380 money she had a very big platform she ran a successful charity but she's she's very accomplished

00:09:39.940 in her world i mean you might not agree with her metaphysics in the end but she really had a very

00:09:47.580 comfortable life that you know she didn't need to screw up and then she runs for the presidency

00:09:54.380 and is immediately framed as a kind of punchline and it's um i think you could have predicted it with

00:10:03.160 something like a hundred percent certainty that that would have happened but that version happens but

00:10:07.960 then they're they're the people who have have have a fair amount of gravitas in terms of their

00:10:13.540 biographies where there's there's no obvious joke to make at their expense but they're just utterly

00:10:20.300 ignored by the media and and for you you kind of you fell more into that bin and and there were there

00:10:26.840 were some egregious i mean the example maybe say something about joe sestak for a second because

00:10:32.100 you know i wrote in the margin of your book when you mentioned him i i literally wrote who

00:10:36.760 a question mark because i i have never heard of joe sestak right so did you then google him and look

00:10:43.240 him up no i i haven't yet i'm a blank slate with apart from what i read in your book he's got you

00:10:49.400 know give me a little color on on joe for a second joe as a phd from harvard uh was uh an admiral in

00:10:58.520 the u.s navy was entrusted with thousands of lives and was a two-term member of congress from

00:11:06.040 pennsylvania so he's a very very serious person who had spent decades in service and had put his

00:11:13.080 life on the line for the country when he decided to run for president it was like he didn't exist

00:11:19.480 and it was somewhat mystifying i spent time with joe so that's another thing that happens on the

00:11:24.640 trail sam is that i have hung out with virtually all of the other candidates in union halls and

00:11:33.180 people's driveways and at the fair and the steak fry so you do get a sense of people and i have spent

00:11:42.460 time with joe and marianne and uh many others but joe's a great guy a great man a real patriot

00:11:49.560 uh he does have a lot of gravitas where he's commanded thousands of people the media treated

00:11:56.200 him like a non-entity and because he's a committed individual he even walked across the state of new

00:12:02.660 hampshire as a way to try and generate attention for his campaign completely ignored and when it was

00:12:08.720 mentioned it was mentioned as kind of a look at the crazy person sort of thing i thought that was

00:12:13.680 deeply unfair because you know again if you look at right joe's record he's a very serious individual

00:12:18.180 who should have been uh given a fair hearing yeah and in your case there were was um some fairly

00:12:26.960 stark and egregious efforts to ignore you literally like like fundraising memory serves there were like

00:12:35.540 fundraising graphics where you like you know showing the candidates who had raised a certain

00:12:40.180 amount of money or gone up in the polls enough to make debates and you were left out where people

00:12:46.340 who had raised less money and were ranked lower than you were left in the graphics this happened most

00:12:52.960 on msnbc how much of this i think you uncovered at one point that there was a policy that you should

00:12:59.560 just not be talked about you know how much of this was inadvertent and how much of it was actually

00:13:04.300 an explicit effort to disappear your campaign it happened consistently enough where you really

00:13:12.260 could not chalk it up to neglect or incompetence or omission i think the exact count was a dozen times

00:13:21.200 and uh we heard later from a producer ariana pacari who was at msnbc during that time that she was given

00:13:28.800 a list of candidates not to ever invite on the show or interview and i was on that list so there was

00:13:35.280 definitely a decision made at some point and if you wanted to hypothesize you know i i believe that

00:13:40.400 there is an ownership structure at msnbc where you could draw a pretty direct line to people who were

00:13:45.200 backing joe but at the time i tried to give them the benefit of the doubt and it was only later in

00:13:52.260 the campaign when i had just gone through a debate that msnbc had moderated where they clearly wanted

00:13:59.240 nothing to do with me where i decided to say look like i'm not going to appear on msnbc unless they

00:14:05.480 start actually treating us fairly and at that point they completely omitted any mention of me from the

00:14:12.780 race for the following month plus during really the final stretch of the campaign so it was an important

00:14:20.000 time it was most stark when i actually made the seventh debate stage which was a very significant

00:14:25.720 piece of news i was the last non-white candidate to make the debate stage and msnbc decided not to

00:14:32.040 mention that even though that was uh mainstream news for just about everybody so there's gonna be more to

00:14:38.360 say about the media in a minute because it's just an enormous problem on many fronts now but going

00:14:44.360 back to your presidential run before well really at any point what was the most surprising part about

00:14:52.480 this process to you i mean you must have had some expectations of what it would be like in in what

00:14:58.900 ways were those expectations violated it was around my treatment by certain types of institutions where i kind

00:15:08.120 of imagined that maybe some people would be excited to have a conversation about the automation of jobs and

00:15:15.220 technology and ai and some people might even be interested in or excited by by my being the first asian

00:15:22.260 american man to run for president as a democrat like some people who really love to talk about the firsts in

00:15:28.500 various categories and neither of those things was true it turns out that that that what i think of as

00:15:36.920 journalistic organizations of fact did not seem to care about the decimation of millions of

00:15:41.180 manufacturing jobs and the ongoing automation and dehumanization of the economy and what it made me

00:15:46.740 realize sam and made me more grateful to thinkers like you is that there is a particular discourse and

00:15:55.000 language in media there's a particular discourse and language in politics and they aren't the discussion of

00:16:02.860 fact in the way that you'd hope and i thought they were going in and so my relative success and

00:16:10.620 performance ended up being based upon all of these behaviors and adaptations that i adopted

00:16:16.680 in order to try and compete but it was very discouraging to me that it seemed like when i was talking about

00:16:24.960 economic facts and figures it was like i was speaking a foreign language yeah so yeah that's something

00:16:30.600 that you go through in the book as well i mean just the hacks you found for a system that really

00:16:36.380 didn't care to hear from you on substantive issues but what could be exploited by a a dance video

00:16:45.300 uh or a workout video what did you begin to think i guess what do you think now about this system by

00:16:52.520 which we pick our leaders right i mean it's just i mean we're going to get into the the political

00:16:57.560 reforms you you recommend but what i mean it's just it had to be bizarre to see that the way to get

00:17:05.040 traction i mean the the classic moment of this from years past which has been much remarked upon but like

00:17:11.540 the moment where you know hillary clinton's campaign was transformed when she shed a tear in a diner

00:17:19.580 over whatever it was you know it's like the fact that the attention of the media can be swung

00:17:26.960 by i guess the human interest component of a story without any substance and it really can't be swung

00:17:37.040 by substance it seems yes i characterize it as a reality tv show at one point during the debates

00:17:43.220 but there are narratives and characters that the media in particular is interested in enhancing and

00:17:50.540 elevating and that's really the crux of the coverage in my case my leaning into humor or

00:18:00.940 physical activities or whatever it was uh ended up being positive in terms of our coverage

00:18:10.360 and the energy but ezra klein said something about how we're collapsing systemic issues into

00:18:16.220 personalized narratives and i i think that's like a reasonable characterization of of a lot of the

00:18:21.320 political coverage though there is a real agenda behind a lot of it uh where the the media just decides

00:18:28.100 to elevate certain characters and ignore others i think ignore is their main weapon of choice

00:18:34.740 when they want someone not to get anywhere i think uh and then kind of like slightly

00:18:42.280 mocking snide ridicule might be like their second weapon of choice and then among the approved characters

00:18:50.100 then they'll constantly be trying to characterize people and talk about something around their

00:18:58.840 relationships behavior emotions one thing that happened to me a lot on the trail and this is very

00:19:04.640 true of this process is they are constantly digging for vulnerability 99 times out of 100 if they find

00:19:11.540 a vulnerability it's not going to be good for you like they're not going to be like oh this person's

00:19:18.520 really human and vulnerable isn't that nice they'd be like oh look at this so that that that's one of

00:19:23.760 the things that unfortunately makes politicians into automatons over time so how is running for mayor

00:19:30.820 of new york different i mean one is a different office although you know unlike most uh mayor races it

00:19:39.120 does have a national uh lens on it but what strikes me the way one big difference had to be that by the

00:19:45.920 time you you ran for mayor you were pretty famous you know you were not you were i think naturally viewed

00:19:53.680 i certainly viewed you as a front runner without even looking at the polls because of your your

00:20:00.380 national platform at that point how was your experience of being a candidate different it was

00:20:06.900 a completely different dynamic to your point sam where on the presidential trail i was continuously

00:20:11.660 trying to build up energy and race against oblivion whereas in the mayoral i was the center of

00:20:18.220 attention essentially from day one i will say that the media coverage tended to be quite negative or

00:20:25.640 questioning and they would chalk it up to my being the front runner though i think there might have been a

00:20:30.200 couple of other dynamics and so in many ways it was kind of the opposite of my presidential run

00:20:35.120 where where instead of being the unlikely underdog constantly doing things to get energy um instead i was like

00:20:45.720 the front runner who was continuously under attack by other candidates through the press often

00:20:52.440 because that was their best way to try and win yeah yeah and so what do you

00:21:00.200 what do you make of the fact uh that you didn't win maybe if you had to ascribe it to

00:21:05.280 a couple of uh most important causes what what what happened i think the single biggest variable

00:21:12.800 was the reopening of the city and then the crime surge in new york where it was on the front page of

00:21:20.800 at least some of the papers every day and that being the number one concern heavily favored

00:21:28.020 eric adams because he was a police officer earlier the main narrative was around reopening and economic

00:21:35.420 recovery and those were things that people saw as a strength of mind right right okay so let's just

00:21:43.920 talk about our the the the the political system as it is and uh what to do about it because i i think

00:21:52.060 wherever someone is on the on the spectrum of of political concern bias persuasion i think everyone

00:22:00.480 agrees that there's something less than optimal about our system as it exists uh what do you what do you

00:22:08.180 ascribe the the main dysfunction to at this point how is it broken and this is the heart of my book

00:22:15.900 the deeper i got into the machinery so to speak and now at this point i would consider myself either

00:22:24.420 friends or friendly with dozens of political figures most of them on the democratic side because i i ran as a

00:22:32.420 democrat but you know all of these people and you start to get a sense of the environment that they

00:22:39.440 operate within why we're stuck really and so i i do want to go back to some first principles because

00:22:47.520 i've been learning myself about some things that i'd taken for granted but the core argument in my book

00:22:54.140 is that people will do what their incentives demand and if you are a political figure today your incentives

00:23:01.640 are to generally cater to the most polarized and extreme points of view and voters in your district

00:23:09.120 because that's who's going to vote you back in one numerical contrast that i cite is that congress

00:23:18.300 has a 28 approval rating nationwide right now which probably doesn't surprise anyone listening to this

00:23:24.180 it's like yeah three out of four of us don't think things are going well the individual re-election rate

00:23:29.160 for members of congress is 92 percent so even though seven out of ten of us are really really sad

00:23:37.060 without things are going uh you're almost assured of re-election if you decide to run which most of them do

00:23:44.680 because they they really like this job the people that will decide whether you come back are not

00:23:49.440 the mainstream public but the 10 to 20 percent most extreme voters in either the democratic party or the republican party

00:23:58.480 because 83 percent of the congressional districts are now safely democratic or republican

00:24:04.520 so your incentives are to be less reasonable and more ideological and unfortunately that's what we're seeing on both sides

00:24:11.920 which is leading us to this historic level of polarization that we all can feel

00:24:18.340 that is resulting in political violence and could end up being a new civil war that ends up bringing down

00:24:27.020 our democracy as it currently exists

00:24:29.720 i just want to reiterate your your opening point about the power of incentives because

00:24:36.020 what when viewed from outside there are so many institutions and there's so many human dramas

00:24:45.040 where you where you where you where it's very easy to believe that the people involved who are doing 1.00

00:24:51.200 these inexplicably stupid heinous things either are sociopaths or malignantly selfish or total morons 1.00

00:25:03.920 and it's very easy to believe the worst of the individuals involved until you have some insight into the system 1.00

00:25:13.280 in which they're forced to function and if it's a system where the incentives are terrible 0.98

00:25:18.980 even very good people very competent people very smart people wind up doing disastrously stupid destructive 0.97

00:25:27.340 and even seemingly evil things 0.98

00:25:30.380 it's not to say there aren't narcissists and incompetence and people who you wouldn't want in power

00:25:37.240 in these systems but it's got to be for the most part a story of decent fairly competent people

00:25:46.620 incentivized terribly by the system that's in place

00:25:50.560 that's exactly right sam and a result of understanding this is that we should not expect it to change or get

00:25:57.380 any better because people will if anything the incentives are higher now than they've ever been

00:26:03.480 and the political incentives toward the extremes are now compounded by the media

00:26:09.480 which at this point is separating us into ideological camps

00:26:13.380 and ginning up support for the good guys and you know hatred for the bad guys

00:26:18.700 and then pouring gasoline on the whole thing is social media

00:26:21.940 which obviously is going to reward the most inflammatory and aggressive language and behavior

00:26:30.340 so we're being set up we're being set up to turn on each other to eventually end up disintegrating

00:26:39.560 in terms of the society we currently regard as you know like a normal safe environment

00:26:45.820 and that's what i concluded from my journey into this which is that these people are not bad people

00:26:52.920 some of them are not great people but like for the most part they're they're reasonable people

00:26:56.880 responding to perverse incentives and so then the great project becomes how can you in real life

00:27:03.320 improve their incentives and i do want to give a shout out to you and this is something that is a

00:27:09.540 major theme of the book is that to me you represent the antidote in many ways sam it's like what are the

00:27:14.960 you know media incentives for you i mean you're just like a highly reasoned individual

00:27:20.780 like you don't have the same um you know i don't think your producer is uh giving you a list

00:27:27.240 of people not to talk to or anything like that you know that there's like a search right now people

00:27:32.460 are groping for trusted perspectives and voices more and more and i i just want to thank you personally

00:27:38.640 for being uh such a a huge figure uh for people who are looking for wisdom and truth really

00:27:47.420 oh well it's it's great to hear and um i happen to be in a spot where there are there are almost

00:27:56.060 no incentives that aren't of my own making you know and i have consciously designed my life that way

00:28:02.780 and it's uh you know it's not that it's impossible to um be badly incentivized even in this space but

00:28:08.740 it's much harder and it's you know and that's why i'm here and it's it's a relief frankly to be able

00:28:14.520 to say whatever i want to say and to talk to whoever i want to talk to and to not be calibrating

00:28:20.740 any of that against any kind of outside pressure you know even pressure from my audience and i don't

00:28:27.120 know how much you followed me down these various byways but you know whenever i've discovered that a

00:28:32.940 significant percentage of my audience really disagrees with me about something that's the one the one

00:28:40.080 signal for me that i need to take pains not to be trained by in any way because i notice other people

00:28:48.180 being captured by their audience in various ways you know i just have never wanted that so when i

00:28:53.960 discovered that you know a significant percentage of my audience i never really drilled down to what

00:28:59.620 it was but it seemed like something like 20 percent favored trump for reasons that i still cannot

00:29:06.740 fathom i just made it a point to not care how much pain i got from them every time i wanted to

00:29:12.020 trample on trump because i just it felt important and so it is with the equally large percentage of

00:29:18.620 my audience that is very far to the left and hates everything i have to say about wokeness and identity

00:29:23.760 politics the pain i get from them i i i have decided to take as noise rather than signal because i it just

00:29:32.660 is just very important for me to preserve my my freedom to say what i think is true and important

00:29:37.820 rather than to be course correcting based on what's rewarding me from my audience and what what you get

00:29:43.540 on on any of these pain points and this is this is obviously amplified by social media is there's so

00:29:50.000 much more energy from the haters than from the people who agree with you that it really you can really

00:29:58.220 get blown around by it's highly disproportionate the noise yeah yeah if someone's virulently opposed

00:30:04.100 it just seems like the most prominent thing in the world even though there could be a hundred people

00:30:08.100 who just silently nodded yeah yeah so we're living in the system where it's something less than 10 percent

00:30:15.100 of any population can really steer the conversation on a polarizing issue because they just have so much

00:30:23.920 more energy that i mean so we've got these various activist groups on the left and we've got you know

00:30:29.940 all the noise that comes out of trumpistan and you know the most extreme voices over there you do get

00:30:36.280 the sense that on many points you have a lot of reasonable people that have been cowed into silence

00:30:42.480 and therefore aren't influencing the conversation and and it's just and the media doesn't seem to

00:30:49.660 care except i mean the media just they just keep amplifying the extremes well again that's where

00:30:57.000 their incentives are i mean they've figured out that their ratings will be higher and their ad revenue

00:31:02.380 will be higher if they cater to a particular point of view and then reinforce it yeah there was an

00:31:08.800 anecdote about a cable tv producer who said look our people don't even regard us as news they regard us as

00:31:15.520 comfort which then will justify all sorts of things that you might do journalistically if you're like

00:31:21.860 hey it turns out we're not uh even reporting the news here you know and the fact that you have to take

00:31:27.760 such great pains i mean you're acutely aware of the kind of pressures that some of these media figures

00:31:33.940 and organizations would be under but in their case they don't have to you know self-regulate to that

00:31:40.080 extent just be like oh what like my people like this let me give them more of that and then you'll be

00:31:44.620 thanked for it and paid more for it yeah at the political level what are the reforms that you

00:31:52.700 think will really change the system and the pressures that are on all of the all of the the various parties

00:31:59.860 here i'm happy to say that i can use a real life example that you're going to love sam this isn't my

00:32:07.920 book because it didn't happen yet but there was a handful of republican senators who decided to impeach

00:32:14.480 trump and only one of them is up for re-election in 2022 and that is senator lisa murkowski of alaska

00:32:24.200 she decided to if you'd like to continue listening to this conversation you'll need to subscribe at

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - October 05, 2021

#262 — The Future of American Democracy

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