The midterms are just a few weeks away and both sides are ramping up their efforts to get their supporters out to the polls. However, is there any reason to think that both parties will have a better turnout than they did in previous midterms?
00:00:39.240Who actually, when the day comes, says, yeah, I'm going to go vote.
00:00:45.060And how many are just revved up now for, you know, valid reasons, but then say, eh, I, you know, speaking out is enough and not going out to vote.
00:00:59.480It's interesting because we've seen these turnout numbers.
00:01:04.380Generally, they've been applying lately to presidential elections.
00:01:08.180Since 2000, we've seen a massive jump in the amount of people who are super passionate and paying attention at high levels to presidential campaigns.
00:01:18.620That's certainly what happened with Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012.
00:01:22.940And it's also one of the things we've noticed is in the off years, that doesn't happen all that much.
00:01:29.400But midterm elections do not seem to inspire, particularly among Democrats recently, the amount of passion that has been coming from the right.
00:01:39.860You remember 2010, the Tea Party wave, the biggest wave election in a century, basically.
00:01:45.2802014 was also a little mini, you know, sort of Tea Party related wave where the candidates weren't maybe as much Tea Party, but they were still a pretty strong year for Republicans in 2014.
00:01:58.540You saw Democrats in the last years of the Bush administration have a really strong midterm in 2006.
00:02:04.740But, you know, generally speaking, people aren't as passionate.
00:02:07.360The numbers, however, for this midterm election are off the charts.
00:02:11.780And it's interesting, Glenn was pointing out before the show that when Barack Obama was a sort of celebrity presidential candidate and he would have these huge rallies in 2008.
00:02:37.000And if you remember, by midterms, you had these huge turnouts in the street, but no one was going to see the president in those stadiums and arenas.
00:03:21.980So there's no drop in the passion seemingly among Republicans.
00:03:26.260And the same thing seems to be happening with Democrats as much as it is a positive for for Republicans to keep those crowds.
00:03:35.580One of the reasons why people are passionate is because the other side is so passionate and we're seeing we're going to see go through some of that mob stuff that's going on right now with Republicans.
00:03:43.900But the numbers are interesting on this.
00:03:46.140If you look at the passion among Republicans and Democrats, you kind of can see what happened in the election.
00:03:54.420Again, we talked about 2006 big win for Democrats.
00:03:57.580Well, when we went into that election, 69 percent of Democrats said they had the highest levels of interest in the election.
00:04:25.540Fifty nine percent said they were really interested.
00:04:28.540Only forty eight percent of Democrats said that.
00:04:31.200And what's interesting is leading up to, I would say, Brett Kavanaugh, you had the same type of thing playing out again in this time in favor of the Democrats.
00:04:55.540So that is, you know, a big it's the type of gap that leads you to lose the Senate and lose the House or at least makes it possible since Kavanaugh.
00:05:49.260It is a we there's a level here that we don't know what's going to happen.
00:05:55.420This is this is like, you know, this is territory that has not been seen before.
00:06:00.540And, you know, while you can look at the polls and you can see the polls, as we've talked about over the past couple of weeks, relatively are relatively pointing towards a Republican victory in the Senate where they maybe pick up a couple of seats.
00:06:15.080And a Republican loss in the House where they would lose a couple of seats.
00:06:19.500There is a you know, if you want to look at the kind of the optimistic way of looking at the House right now to show you how close this is.
00:06:24.900If Republicans were to sweep the races they are favored in, OK, that's that it's not going to happen.
00:06:31.880But just kind of generally for understanding, if they would be able to sweep all of the races they're favored in and they will be able to win all of the races that they trail by one point.
00:06:43.080So all of these races are either victories or toss ups, right?
00:07:02.580The other thing is they will win some races where they're underdogs by more than one point.
00:07:06.040They will win some when they're down by five in the polls.
00:07:08.580They'll wind up winning some of those races.
00:07:10.140So the split is going to be important here.
00:07:11.920But just that gets them only to 220 to 215, which is a I think they lose.
00:07:17.600That's them losing 10 seats from where they are now, but also a very narrow majority to the point where some conservative things could be derailed by just, you know, your generic moderate House member that you've never heard their name before when they decide they're going to vote against the president.
00:07:33.460So it's an interesting way of looking at it.
00:07:37.200And it shows that this really could go either way.
00:07:39.620I mean, when they say that there's about a 20% chance the Republicans lose the Senate and about a 20% chance the Republicans win the House.
00:07:48.000That's the way that these models are all kind of looking at it.
00:07:53.400So it is very possible that one of these things could happen.
00:07:57.140But right now it looks like those are going to wind up getting split.
00:08:00.280And then, of course, even though you're not going to be able to pass Democratic bills because they would either get vetoed or overturned in the House, you're still going to have investigative power, you're going to have subpoena power, you're going to have impeachment talks.
00:08:13.940Okay, so here's what I found interesting.
00:08:18.080In watching the news and watching just the flow of it, have you noticed that, you know, places like the Atlantic and the Times and the Post are now starting to publish stories about, you know, it's an uphill battle to win some of these races in the House.
00:08:41.460Well, they have changed their tone from, you know, an absolute positive, oh, we're on a blue wave to now almost laying the foundation of, yeah, we lost.
00:08:57.240But it was, you know, it was really kind of a long shot anyway.
00:09:01.040I mean, that's how badly I think the Kavanaugh thing has backfired on them.
00:09:05.860I mean, it's made the Senate basically, I mean, again, I just said it's one out of five chance.
00:09:10.400But, I mean, they had a better chance of this two months ago.
00:09:14.240I mean, they had a legitimate path to victory.
00:09:17.040When Cruz was only up by three points, all of these races that looked like leaning Republican were all toss up and some of them looked like they might be leaning Democrat.
00:09:25.620They had a chance to win the Senate before the Kavanaugh thing.
00:09:28.500Now, I mean, I think it's a real, real, it's really going to come to the independents.
00:11:05.340But, yeah, I mean, so that's never going to happen.
00:11:07.100So, the fact that I'm independent, you can't look at that line as, these are people who could go either way at any time between these two parties.
00:11:56.700As we're talking about the caravan of immigrants coming, migrants, whatever, which will be illegal immigrants if they get it all the way here.
00:24:47.920But he also met with Oprah Winfrey, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Chuck Schumer,
00:24:52.420Dwayne The Rock Johnson, for some unknown reason, Barack Obama, John Kerry, Condoleezza Rice, George W. Bush, Henry Kissinger, Michael Bloomberg, Thomas Friedman from The New York Times, Bill Gates, Madeline Albright, Rupert Murdoch, Jeffrey Goldberg from The Atlantic, Tim Cook, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Alan Garber from Harvard, Bob Iger, and Jeff Bezos.
00:25:35.880Or does he have a point of view that Washington happens to like about Saudi Arabia?
00:25:44.940And that is the Muslim Brotherhood perspective.
00:25:47.420So you remember the Muslim Brotherhood founded in the 1920s in Egypt.
00:25:53.680The only reason for being was to reject the West and establish global Sharia law.
00:26:01.460They exported this organization all over the Middle East.
00:26:05.940Anti-Semitism towards Jews, their biggest and most effective tool at harnessing the Arab rage.
00:26:13.040Muslim Brotherhood, they're the ones who invented modern day jihadism.
00:26:18.300They are the ones who inspired Osama bin Laden and the other founding members of Al Qaeda.
00:26:24.160To any administration member from the Obama administration, you cannot call them a largely secular organization.
00:26:39.240When you read just their motto, Allah is our goal, the prophet, our model, the Koran, our constitution, jihad, our plan and death for the sake of Allah, the loftiest of our wishes.
00:26:50.880They are not primarily a secular organization.
00:26:54.820The Muslim Brotherhood calls jihad the industry of death.
00:27:00.100And they mean that in a good way, in their own words, to a nation that protects the industry of death and which knows how to die nobly.
00:28:27.600Oh, the Muslim Brotherhood still wants their caliphate.
00:28:33.380So now you have two of our allies, Turkey, Muslim Brotherhood, the Saudis, Wahhabists, who are both chasing the same exact dream, a Middle East and a world dominated by Sharia law.
00:28:49.700Both of them using jihadism as a means to their ends.
00:28:57.080So, Khashoggi or Khashoggi or whatever you're calling him today.
00:29:36.360He was fighting for the Muslim Brotherhood.
00:29:39.500In the 1980s and 90s, he was one of the king's main allies.
00:29:43.180He edited several Saudi newspapers, which he was basically Winston Smith in Orwell's 1984, sitting in the Saudi version of the Ministry of Truth, editing out all thought crime.
00:29:57.580Make sure that there was never anything hostile said about Wahhabism or the king.
00:30:03.540During this time, he cozied up to Osama bin Laden.
00:30:06.700He scored several interviews while al-Qaeda was fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan.
00:30:12.120Saudi intelligence employed him to be the middleman between bin Laden and the Saudi royal family.
00:30:18.920Well, in 2003, he fell out of favor with the Saudi royals when he allowed to be published an article critical to the Wahhabist movement.
00:32:28.720Because I thought the Muslim Brotherhood was largely secular.
00:32:34.740Ask people, how much do you know about the caliphate?
00:32:37.960How much do you know about the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood?
00:32:40.840How much do you really know about what this man wrote?
00:32:44.020This man wrote that he, it was a mistake to think that you could have any kind of state in the Middle East without some form of Islamicists.
00:33:02.180Now, that's different, remember, than Islam.
00:33:06.680An Islamicist believes you have to use Sharia law.
00:33:10.920That's the constant, wow, it sounds like the Muslim Brotherhood.
00:33:39.800Saudi Arabia, huge exporter of Wahhabism, and has done it here in the United States, has spent money building mosques that are very dangerous here in the United States.
00:42:48.760It's different than actually going out and leading and standing, you know, Martin Luther King marching through Antifa and taking the beating.
00:43:01.380Yes, but I think we should also recognize that the Antifa phenomenon is really built for short-term media clips.
00:44:56.340So yes, unum, e pluribus unum, out of the many one, right?
00:45:00.680We don't have a whole bunch of one right now.
00:45:02.540We don't have a shared sense of what you've just said.
00:45:04.780The first amendment is the beating heart of the American experiment, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, right of protest.
00:45:14.420All of those things flow from a fundamental assumption about the dignity of 320 million Americans, which is we believe imago Dei.
00:45:23.320We believe that our citizens are created in the image of God with eternal souls and with dignity that's way bigger than their policy preferences.
00:45:32.840And so what's unique in our moment, I think the grand tension that we as a people are not really wrestling through that is so far upstream from politics is this tension between rootedness and rootlessness.
00:45:43.580Almost all of the happiness literature, if you will, out there is confirming stuff that wise people, people who've had grandparents have known for millennia, which is that happiness is actually a relatively simple equation.
00:46:11.800Do you think when you leave home on Monday morning, when you go to do something, not do you make a lot of money or do you have a lot of status, but is there some neighbor who benefits from what I do?
00:46:21.020If those four things are true, or even if three of the four are true, you're pretty likely to be happy.
00:46:27.080And those things are all tied to rootedness, but we're living through a technological revolution that's tempting us to believe that we can be rootless, we can be placeless.
00:46:36.240And so a lot of what's happening is the undermining of local community and the undermining of thick relationships and the undermining of vocation or long work ends up in a world where a lot of people are using political tribalism to fill a void of the loneliness that's actually happening in their local community.
00:46:53.040And I think we need to reflect more deeply on that challenge of our time.
00:46:55.960All right, so I'm going to take a quick break, and I want to come back and talk about the press, talk about the new press, if you will, Facebook, and what you write about with deep fakes.
00:47:08.280You seem to be one of the very few in Washington that really get this, and you're looking over the horizon, and we want to talk about that.
00:47:19.800We're talking to Ben Sass. His new book is called Them, Why We Hate Each Other and How to Heal.
00:47:27.980Our sponsor this half hour is Relief Factor.
00:47:30.840Relief Factor has been kind of around our studios for a while.
00:47:36.400Some of the guys have been taking Relief Factor here for a while, and I got to a place where my pain in the last few years has just been off the charts and didn't know what to do about it anymore.
00:47:50.880I could not go to the doctor and, you know, hey, can you give me some drugs?
00:47:55.140I just don't want to live my life that way, and I needed to be able to be out of pain.
00:49:15.160I would like to invite you to do an hour-and-a-half uninterrupted podcast with me, Senator, when you have time, because I think your voice needs to be heard and understood and parts of it challenged.
00:49:52.260So some people's shorthand for this is the uberization of the economy.
00:49:55.920I think the simpler way to think about it is just the average duration of people's jobs or their relationship at a firm is going to get shorter than ever before in human history.
00:50:49.340Average duration at a firm for a primary breadwinner then was still 26 years.
00:50:53.600Now it's four years and getting shorter, and it's going to get shorter forevermore.
00:50:58.120McKinsey, a firm I used to work with, believes that 50% of the American labor market by three years from now – this is not 20 years in the future – three years from now, they think 50% of the labor market will be primarily freelancers, meaning that most people will cobble together a bunch of different jobs.
00:51:15.540Not all of them are going to be app-enabled tech jobs like being an Uber driver with the right software that makes you more efficient than an old-school cabbie.
00:51:23.300But what's really going to happen is we're going to head toward a world where people are going to get disrupted out of their jobs at age 40 and 45 and 50 and 55 forevermore.
00:51:33.140We've never, ever done that in human history, and so it means all of the angst of what's often called now the quarter-life crisis, this sort of late adolescence crisis of trying to figure out your role in life and how do you go from just being a consumer in mom and dad's house to being a producer that can not just put bread on the table for your kids but can actually have a sense of meaning that you're serving your neighbor.
00:51:53.080That disruption that most people know in late adolescence, we're going to experience that again every three to five years for our whole life, and that means there's a lot of new potential for upheaval and, frankly, for unhappiness.
00:52:04.920There's going to be more economic output than has ever been produced before in human history, but it's not at all clear that it will redound to the median family and the median household and the median worker.
00:52:15.620We're going to have to become a civilization of lifelong workers able to get retrained when you're 40.
00:52:21.900Okay, so there's about an hour of questions just on that one, but I've got about three minutes left.
00:52:28.480Can you give me your take on the first real political upheaval that we're going to see that I think by 2020, it could change everything, could start global wars, deep fakes?
00:52:43.460Yeah, so one of the reasons I wrote them is because I spent a lot of time on intelligence issues.
00:52:49.300And in the intel community, there are people who talk about the perfect storm of deep fakes that we have coming.
00:52:56.100And the storm is these three ingredients.
00:52:57.900Number one, new technology makes it possible to sort of narrowcast a world with fake audio and fake video where lots of people can be susceptible to being sort of spoofed or persuaded that things that aren't real are real.
00:53:13.180There's always been enemies doing malicious actor, you know, information warfare since the beginning of time.
00:53:19.480You can find it in Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, to sow discord in an enemy's tent.
00:53:24.340But it used to require a prostitute and a honey trap and a fake business partner and a bribery scheme and a mar, right?
00:53:46.740The real reason we need to take the Russia type investigation so seriously is because China is right behind them running scout team offense on them and ready to do big deep fakes, hybrid war information operations against American leaders and business officials and the public at large.
00:54:03.640And number three, we have so many internal divisions about geography, about race, about gender, about guns.
00:54:12.080There's many, many issues where Americans are so divided that we are susceptible to these kind of campaigns like Russia is already trying to run on social media.
00:54:20.580They're just not very good at it where they try to exacerbate and inflame tensions on every side of every issue.
00:54:26.180The NFL kneeling controversy, majority of the stuff online on social media in the first 72 hours after that flamed last fall, the majority of it on both sides stand for the anthem and take in the NFL.
00:54:40.840And so we're going to have a world where you're going to have things like the Kavanaugh hearings where all of a sudden audio will appear of Schumer strategizing with Michael Avenatti or video will appear.
00:54:50.940It'll be fake, but video will appear and it'll be Kavanaugh partying hard as an undergrad at Yale.
00:54:55.680It'll be fake, but in our echoed silo chambers of the way we consume media right now, it's going to be potentially much more divisive than what we know today.
00:55:04.940And so one of the reasons I wanted to write them, why we hate each other, is an awareness that there's actually national security exposures for this country and how much we hate each other around politics.
00:55:15.380We need communities of people that live in the same neighborhood that believe lots of stuff in common, even when we differ on politics.
00:55:21.920How come we can't get anybody in Washington or in the media to talk about this, Ben?
00:55:30.800It took us, what, 25 minutes to unpack some of it.
00:55:35.060And the business model of selling soap three minutes from now is, let's just say who the bad guy is.
00:55:40.560You know, there's some nut job somewhere in a McDonald's right now who probably slapped an old man wearing a MAGA hat.
00:55:46.280And that person is a weirdo and did something wrong, but they don't actually stand in for all the bait.
00:55:52.700And that's really the way we're consuming most of our media right now is that kind of nut picking.
00:55:57.040And so it's harder to do 10 and 25 year out issues.
00:55:59.760But that's the that's the strategic stuff that Washington should be focused on.
00:56:03.680How are you going to do that when you have I've got 30 I've got 30 seconds.
00:57:36.980Because there's a, you know, look, personalities a lot of times and media inflammation, kind of a lot of the stuff he's talking about in the book.
00:58:55.020It's going to matter on whether you can afford to buy a car or not in a way that you've never thought of before.
00:59:00.900I voted against raising the debt limit, extension of government funding for a couple of weeks and imposing sanctions on Russia, Iran and North Korea.
00:59:09.480Russia, another separate one imposing sanctions on Russia, another free trade thing opposing the nomination of Lighthizer.
00:59:19.920I mean, like these are all traditional conservative positions that he took.
00:59:23.620And I don't think anyone in our audience would be like, oh, well, I'm mad at Ben Sasse for for wanting for opposing additional spending.
01:00:23.480But where is the point to where you say you guys are when when you are covering for Antifa, when you are covering for people who say I want an end to the capitalist system and you say she's she's advocating socialism, not can't not Canadian socialism, socialism, communism.
01:00:45.380She's talking about state run and owned property and businesses.
01:00:49.600Now, that's that's not a welfare state.
01:03:03.900I mean, that's that shows that there's still, you know, even though we're divided and even though a lot of things come down to minute emotional politics that go minute to minute, I'm glad to see that there's still principles there.
01:03:14.860So here's where I think Ben was wrong when he said to deal with Antifa.
01:03:19.920He was right when he said, you know, it's a small group.
01:04:18.560I mean, like, I think he's saying that we get a little bit too wrapped up in the back and forth viral videos and people who are not even really engaged in politics getting freaked out over things that they're never going to have to necessarily deal with.
01:04:33.980If you dismiss a group like Antifa, though, though, that's how they grow.
01:04:38.880And at least arguably, that's how they grow.
01:04:41.460If they're unopposed, you're seeing it happen in Portland.
01:44:14.520You need the ones to get up, try, do well, hit a couple home runs, strike out sometimes, get better, become humbled, and become better leaders.
01:44:22.820In the long run, that's how you make a better organization.
01:45:24.340I want to tell you a little bit about American financing.
01:45:26.400American financing would remind you that while the sales have slowed on homes heading into fall, not for first-time homebuyers.
01:45:37.120Actually, they account now for 55% of the mortgages that are originating.
01:45:42.140And to keep the first-time homebuyers entering the market, you need a lender that can really listen to you, get the right loan, and have it happen quickly.