The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1214 - Lawrence Lessig

00:00:02.000 Three, two, one, and we're live.

00:00:06.000 How are you, sir?

00:00:07.000 Hey, I'm great.

00:00:08.000 Thanks for being here, man.

00:00:08.000 I really appreciate it.

00:00:09.000 It is the coolest thing I've done.

00:00:10.000 Really?

00:00:11.000 Ever?

00:00:11.000 Well, you know, I can't remember that far back, but it's pretty cool.

00:00:15.000 I watched your TED Talk on, what was the word that you used?

00:00:20.000 Lesterland?

00:00:21.000 Lesterland.

00:00:21.000 Yeah.

00:00:22.000 And...

00:00:23.000 It felt hopeless.

00:00:25.000 For 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.

00:00:48.000 Yeah, so we've got a system where we have a money primary and then we have a regular election. 0.86

00:00:55.000 And in the money primary, to compete, you've got to raise tons of money to be able to fund your campaign.

00:01:02.000 And when you raise that money, you raise it from a tiny, tiny fraction of the 1%.

00:01:07.000 So in the TED Talk about Leicesterland, I said, you know, imagine a place called Leicesterland where basically it's the Leicesters Who rule.

00:01:18.000 And by the Leicesters, I mean the same proportion of people named Leicesters in the United States right now.

00:01:23.000 So there's about 150,000 Americans named Leicester.

00:01:26.000 I'm one of them.

00:01:27.000 But here we are, the Leicesters.

00:01:28.000 So imagine a world ruled by Leicesterland. 0.98

00:01:32.000 Because that's essentially the world we have because of the way we fund our campaigns.

00:01:38.000 Because there's about 150,000 men who give even just the maximum contribution to one political candidate.

00:01:47.000 If you ask the number of people who give the maximum contribution over the course of a campaign, meaning in the primary and the general election, it's about 22,000 Americans in 2014 who gave the maximum contribution to one political campaign.

00:02:01.000 So what that means is it's a tiny, tiny fraction.

00:02:04.000 Who are the most important funders of political campaigns.

00:02:09.000 And candidates for Congress and members of Congress spent 30 to 70 percent of their time sucking up to this tiny, tiny fraction.

00:02:18.000 And so is it any surprise that you see Congress bending over backwards to keep those guys happy?

00:02:25.000 Because they know without those people, they don't have a shot at getting back into Congress. 0.74

00:02:31.000 And the way you were describing it, when you were saying it as Lesterland, it was like, imagine if we were this screwed up.

00:02:37.000 That was essentially what you were saying.

00:02:39.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:02:39.000 But we're more screwed up than Lesterland. 0.99

00:02:42.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:02:42.000 We're more screwed up. 1.00

00:02:43.000 That was a disturbing video. 0.99

00:02:45.000 Because I was realizing it was emerging as you were speaking.

00:02:48.000 I was like, wait a minute.

00:02:51.000 Is it that bad?

00:02:52.000 Yeah.

00:02:53.000 You know, I actually, since that video, have come to think it's even worse.

00:02:58.000 So, like, Clarence Land?

00:03:00.000 Yeah.

00:03:02.000 Well, it could be worse because it's even a smaller number.

00:03:05.000 And 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.

00:03:16.000 A hundred.

00:03:17.000 So this is a really tiny, tiny number.

00:03:20.000 But what this tiny number represents in the way we fund campaigns is the extraordinary inequality on that dimension, right?

00:03:29.000 I think?

00:03:51.000 Your views just never matter to the congressperson because that vote of a Republican will never determine who's in Congress or a Democrat in a safe seat Republican district.

00:04:01.000 That's the same.

00:04:02.000 Okay, but that doesn't mean those congresspeople are not afraid about re-election.

00:04:07.000 Of course, they are afraid about whether they'll be re-elected, but they're afraid not of a Democrat running against a Republican.

00:04:12.000 They're afraid of an even more extreme Republican I think?

00:04:31.000 Have this ability to leverage extraordinary influence inside of the House of Representatives simply because we've decided to gerrymander these districts to create these safe seats.

00:04:42.000 So those extremists are a kind of Lester's too.

00:04:44.000 There are more of them.

00:04:46.000 You know, it's more democratic than Lesterland.

00:04:49.000 But they too have enormous influence over ordinary people and most ordinary people's views then to these congresspeople just don't matter.

00:04:58.000 That feels hopeless.

00:04:59.000 For a dummy like me, sitting on the outside looking at this, I'm like, God!

00:05:03.000 If this is this deeply entrenched with...

00:05:08.000 I mean, I guess it's not technically corruption, because it's all legal, but it's an entanglement with money and with influence that...

00:05:21.000 I mean, how do you unwind this?

00:05:23.000 Yeah.

00:05:23.000 So that point is really critical.

00:05:25.000 It's not technically illegal.

00:05:28.000 And what that means is the people who are engaged in this are not doing wrong things.

00:05:33.000 They're just playing by the rules.

00:05:34.000 They're playing with the system.

00:05:36.000 It's just that the system has become corrupted.

00:05:39.000 When did it start?

00:05:41.000 Well, I think that the moment the United States Congress begins to fall apart in a really dramatic and interesting way is when Newt Gingrich becomes Speaker of the House.

00:05:51.000 So when the Republicans take control of Congress in 95, it's the first time the Republicans have taken control of the House of Representatives in 40 years.

00:06:00.000 So the House becomes incredibly competitive.

00:06:02.000 Each election is up for grabs.

00:06:05.000 Who's going to control the House?

00:06:07.000 So Gingrich turns his members in the House into perpetual fundraisers.

00:06:12.000 It's basically we got to raise the money to defend ourselves the next time around.

00:06:16.000 And then the Democrats followed suit.

00:06:18.000 So the Democrats turned their members into perpetual fundraisers.

00:06:21.000 And they changed the rules about like who gets to be chairman of committees.

00:06:25.000 It's no longer like who's the person with the most experience or the most insight.

00:06:29.000 Increasingly becomes who raises the most money.

00:06:31.000 And the Democratic Party, I know about the Democratic Party, the Republicans don't talk to me much, but the Democratic Party increasingly changes its focus from what are the policies Two, what are we going to do to make sure that you as a member meet your fundraising target?

00:06:48.000 And so from 95 until today, the institution becomes an institution focused on the game of getting reelected.

00:06:58.000 Jim Cooper, a Democrat from Tennessee who went to Congress Okay, so what he means by that is members go there,

00:07:13.000 they learn how to raise money, they become focused obsessively on raising money.

00:07:17.000 But one of the things that they're really focused on is how do they go from Capitol Hill to becoming a lobbyist?

00:07:23.000 Because that's where the real money is.

00:07:25.000 A member of Congress gets paid about as much as the students I educate at the Harvard Law School in their first year as lawyers.

00:07:32.000 So to ordinary Americans, it's a lot of money.

00:07:34.000 But to people on Capitol Hill, it doesn't seem like a lot of money.

00:07:37.000 But then they go and become a lobbyist.

00:07:38.000 They can make 10 times that as a lobbyist.

00:07:41.000 And so what Cooper says is you have this institution which has become so focused on the money That it's just an institution for producing influence that can be sold and first the congressmen are basically sucking up to the people who want to buy influence and then the congressmen become the people buying influence themselves because they're working as lobbyists for these important interests.

00:08:06.000 So, they're in the rig game, they understand how it gets rigged, and then they work to rig it.

00:08:10.000 Yeah.

00:08:11.000 Yeah.

00:08:12.000 They see this as their business plan.

00:08:14.000 It's their honeypot.

00:08:15.000 Yeah.

00:08:16.000 And 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.

00:08:30.000 Right.

00:08:30.000 And that's this giant...

00:08:33.000 Right.

00:08:34.000 Washington, DC is an incredibly prosperous place.

00:08:37.000 And anybody who's been there, you know, who's seen it for a long time, like I clerked there in the early 1990s, and it was a pretty grungy place.

00:08:46.000 But it's a really...

00:08:49.000 It's like the golden city on the hill, you know, the Oz.

00:08:53.000 And 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.

00:09:11.000 It's a weird place, though, because even though it's incredibly wealthy, it's also incredibly poor.

00:09:16.000 There's a vast difference.

00:09:19.000 The picture of America.

00:09:19.000 Yeah.

00:09:20.000 The spectrum is really wide.

00:09:22.000 I mean, that was when, in the 90s, that's the Marion Barry time, right?

00:09:26.000 Yeah.

00:09:26.000 So that was when, I mean, he won as mayor again when he came back after being arrested for smoking crack.

00:09:33.000 And people were like, whatever, a little crack.

00:09:37.000 Yeah.

00:09:37.000 Yeah, it was an ugly place then.

00:09:39.000 It's become a grotesque place now from the standpoint of the principles of what America is supposed to be.

00:09:46.000 Because 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.

00:09:58.000 They're privileged because they've leveraged influence in a corrupt system to profit and the people who are failing there You know, a lot of reasons they're failing is just we don't have a competitive, powerful economy that gives them the opportunities right now because that district,

00:10:17.000 Washington, D.C., because it's got no effective representation, is one of the worst represented districts in the country.

00:10:23.000 So, essentially, this all started out with Newt Gingrich's group, and they decided to spend so much time concentrating on fundraising.

00:10:32.000 And then once that became successful, everyone else followed suit?

00:10:36.000 Yeah.

00:10:36.000 So the game became no longer, how do we legislate for America?

00:10:40.000 But how do we rally our troops to raise the money we need to win in the next election?

00:10:44.000 The game is just about the election.

00:10:45.000 I mean, you know, my mother lives in Hilton Head, which is, of course, a very Republican district.

00:10:51.000 But they elected their first Democrat, Joe Cunningham.

00:10:54.000 And Joe, my mother loved him and wanted to support him.

00:10:58.000 My mother's a Republican, but here he was.

00:11:00.000 She wanted to support a Democrat. 0.92

00:11:01.000 So I sent a check on her behalf to this Democrat.

00:11:05.000 The day he was elected...

00:11:09.000 We're good to go.

00:11:25.000 They would go to Washington.

00:11:26.000 For 18 months, they would do the work of governing.

00:11:29.000 And then for six months, they do the work of politicking.

00:11:32.000 So a year and a half, they could figure out how to solve the problems of America.

00:11:37.000 And then for a half a year, they figured out how to get reelected.

00:11:40.000 That's no longer the game.

00:11:42.000 The game now is from day one, how do we raise the funds we need to make sure we can get re-elected?

00:11:48.000 And with the Democrats' extraordinary turnaround in this lax election, you can be damn sure that's exactly the obsessive focus that will be going into 2020. And if there's no other viable alternative, this is a game that they have to play.

00:12:02.000 Yeah.

00:12:03.000 Good people have to play it.

00:12:04.000 This is the point.

00:12:05.000 It's not like you can have the good people who say, I'm not going to play this game.

00:12:08.000 I mean, there are some famous people who could say, I'm not going to play this game.

00:12:12.000 You know, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, I mean, she doesn't have to raise money, I'm sure. 0.96

00:12:18.000 And people on the right, too, you know, who are the famous people on the right.

00:12:22.000 They don't have to worry about this.

00:12:22.000 But the ordinary congressperson knows Given the way the system is right now, they've got to obsessively focus on how to raise money.

00:12:31.000 And what that means is they develop a sixth sense, a constant awareness about how what they do will affect their ability to raise money.

00:12:39.000 Become, in the words of the X-Files, shapeshifters.

00:12:42.000 As they constantly adjust their views in light of what they know will help them to raise money.

00:12:47.000 There's a congresswoman, Leslie Byrne, Democrat from Virginia, who describes that when she went to Congress, she was told by a colleague, quote, always lean to the green than to clarify.

00:12:57.000 She went on, you know, he was not an environmentalist.

00:13:00.000 So the point is like you know in your heart of hearts which way you got to go to make sure.

00:13:06.000 And if you're good and you're smart, you never say anything to indicate it but it's operating.

00:13:11.000 But sometimes you're not so smart.

00:13:12.000 So 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,

00:13:30.000 I should never call him again.

00:13:32.000 I should never call him again.

00:13:33.000 So it's basically, you know, as simple and clear as possible.

00:13:37.000 You don't reduce our taxes.

00:13:38.000 Don't ever ask us for more money.

00:13:41.000 And that's the reality of what Washington has become.

00:13:44.000 Now, once this gets started and it moves in this direction, we don't have a long history of this to understand the waves and the ins and the outs of the tide.

00:13:54.000 This is just what it is and it keeps moving in the same general direction.

00:13:58.000 How would that ever stop?

00:14:01.000 How would there ever be some sort of reform that puts this back into a position where it makes sense and it's tenable?

00:14:06.000 Yeah, so, you know, I've been in this business for about 12 years now, in the business of, like, trying to figure out what can we do to reform this corrupted system.

00:14:17.000 And, you know, part of me feels, as you said, like it's hopeless, but part of me feels like it's the most hopeful moment we've seen.

00:14:25.000 Because, 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?

00:14:34.000 We just have to focus on getting the people we want elected.

00:14:37.000 And if we get the people we want elected, we'll get the policies we want passed.

00:14:41.000 Now, almost everybody realizes that until we fix this broken Congress, nothing else can happen.

00:14:50.000 So it's not like this is the most important issue out there.

00:14:53.000 You know, you can think climate change or healthcare or jobs or competitive market.

00:14:56.000 You can think those are the important issues.

00:14:58.000 But what people are increasingly seeing is that this is the first issue.

00:15:02.000 If we don't fix this, we don't fix anything.

00:15:06.000 And what's really encouraging to me is that that frame is increasingly being embraced by important leaders.

00:15:14.000 So, you know, about six years ago, I think, Nancy Pelosi was on Jon Stewart's show, The Daily Show, and Stewart said, you know, the whole system's corrupt and Nancy Pelosi's, no, no, no, the system's not corrupt.

00:15:27.000 People in the system are corrupt, but the system's not corrupt. 0.91

00:15:30.000 And Jon Stewart just had a field day because of how ridiculous that statement is now.

00:15:34.000 But now Nancy Pelosi is going to introduce as HR1... The most ambitious and comprehensive reform package that Washington, I think, has ever seen. 0.89

00:15:48.000 I mean, it is unbelievable in its breadth.

00:15:51.000 So it has public funding of congressional campaigns so that congressmen don't spend 30 to 70 percent of their time sucking up to the Lester's.

00:16:01.000 It has a mandate to end gerrymandering, politic partisan gerrymandering, exercising Congress's power under the Constitution to tell the states, clean this mess up.

00:16:11.000 It has an incredible ethics package to kind of close, block the revolving door so congressmen are not running off to K Street.

00:16:21.000 And it has an incredible restoration of voting rights, the Restoration of the Voting Rights Act, automatic voter registration.

00:16:29.000 It's the most comprehensive package of political reform, I think the Civil Rights Bill of the generation.

00:16:34.000 But 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.

00:16:45.000 How would they stop congressmen from becoming lobbyists?

00:16:49.000 Well, one thing they do – and then I build loopholes into it – but one thing they can do is they can basically say, once you're a congressman, you can't be a lobbyist for five years.

00:17:00.000 For five years?

00:17:00.000 Yeah, or whatever the time is.

00:17:02.000 But 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.

00:17:17.000 They just wouldn't be so well paid.

00:17:19.000 They wouldn't be as valuable.

00:17:21.000 And if they're not as valuable, it's not as valuable for them to pay the congressman an incredible amount of money to become lobbyists.

00:17:27.000 They 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.

00:17:35.000 That's an important part of the process.

00:17:37.000 But they wouldn't be the machers in the system.

00:17:39.000 They wouldn't be the people who called the shots.

00:17:42.000 And so the value of their services would fall.

00:17:45.000 And if the value of their services fell, then it wouldn't make so much sense to go and become a lobbyist.

00:17:51.000 Maybe you'd come home and be a doctor again or come home and like be a business person again or do whatever you want back in your district.

00:17:57.000 So I think if you change the way you fund campaigns, you would change 70% of the problem.

00:18:03.000 You would just fix it right then.

00:18:05.000 And these other things are good additions but not as critical.

00:18:08.000 But without changing the way you fund campaigns, I think all of these other changes are irrelevant.

00:18:14.000 They just can't get over the money.

00:18:15.000 You always hear the phrase, take money out of politics.

00:18:18.000 It's a constant phrase, but that's not really possible.

00:18:21.000 No, and I don't think it's really good.

00:18:23.000 The point isn't to get money out.

00:18:26.000 The point is to get money that doesn't represent a tiny fraction of the special interests controlling how congresspeople think.

00:18:35.000 So 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.

00:18:46.000 That would create a way of funding campaigns where everybody gets a voucher or a set of vouchers.

00:18:52.000 You know, so Seattle has done this for city elections where everybody gets four $25 vouchers that are only usable to fund campaigns.

00:19:00.000 So a candidate comes around and tries to persuade you to give him or her the voucher and then they take that voucher and they use it to fund campaigns.

00:19:07.000 Okay, 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.

00:19:22.000 You take that first $50, you give it back, and you give it in the form of a voucher, and you say, take this voucher and help fund campaigns with it.

00:19:29.000 Congressman 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%.

00:19:38.000 They'd be raising money from everybody.

00:19:40.000 And so the point is that you would be using that money to spread the influence in the way that a democracy is supposed to, spread the influence to every American as opposed to the influence in a tiny, tiny fraction of the 1%.

00:19:54.000 So that wouldn't get less money.

00:19:56.000 I think that could be more money in the system, but it wouldn't be corrupting money because it would be money that is democratically accountable.

00:20:03.000 But the lesters of the world would probably try to put the kibosh on that before it ever got moving. 0.94

00:20:08.000 Yeah.

00:20:09.000 I mean, you know, the biggest block to anything like HR1 happening is that the most influential people in Washington have the most to lose.

00:20:19.000 Right.

00:20:20.000 The lobbyists, you know, the value of the industry of lobbying just collapses.

00:20:24.000 And those people are going to fight like hell to block it.

00:20:26.000 Which is why as wonderful as it is to me to see somebody like Nancy Pelosi take up the charge and say, here it is.

00:20:33.000 Here's a package of reform.

00:20:34.000 It's going to be the first thing we do.

00:20:36.000 Fix democracy first.

00:20:38.000 What's true, what's obvious about this is without a president taking up the charge, it's never going to happen.

00:20:45.000 And 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.

00:20:57.000 And of course, we had a president who was elected under the drain the swamp slogan.

00:21:02.000 But of course, nobody believes he has any plan or any intent to do anything to drain that swamp.

00:21:07.000 Yeah, I'm hoping that having him in office is such a – that the whole thing was such a clusterfuck and that so many people are so disturbed that it's going to make people more politically active and more aware of the consequences of having someone like that in office.

00:21:22.000 Yeah, and actually, weirdly, unifying.

00:21:27.000 Yeah.

00:21:28.000 Because even though the Democrats are not doing this right now, which is really depressing to me, you know, we have these things that we know we disagree about.

00:21:37.000 And we like fuel the politics of hate as we kind of yell at each other about these things.

00:21:43.000 But there's a set of issues that we all agree about.

00:21:46.000 And the most important set of issues we all agree about is the deeply corrupted nature of this government.

00:21:52.000 There was a poll done by University of Maryland in the middle of 2016 asking about anger and frustration with government found the highest level of of frustration in the history of polling.

00:22:03.000 And then when they asked the reasons why they were so angry and so disaffected with their government, the reasons people gave were all the same.

00:22:09.000 Things like the influence of money, the influence of lobbyists, the parties care more about corporations than about And then we broke them down about how do Republicans think about this and how do Democrats think about this.

00:22:20.000 There was no statistical difference between Republicans and Democrats.

00:22:24.000 Sometimes the Democrats were more concerned, sometimes the Republicans.

00:22:27.000 And the levels were at like 80 and 90 percent.

00:22:31.000 So literally 84 percent of Americans would say it is big money that is corrupting the way our Congress functions, right?

00:22:37.000 So here is common ground.

00:22:40.000 And what was so extraordinary about the 2016 election is watch a Republican candidate stand on a debate stage in September of 2015. Donald Trump stood on a debate stage and pointed to every one of those candidates and said, I own all of you.

00:22:53.000 I've given all of you money and I know the way the system works and the system is corrupt.

00:22:57.000 And he called super PACs an abomination and he attacked the idea of money in politics.

00:23:02.000 And so what that signaled is that Republicans too I think we're good to go.

00:23:33.000 And we should be smart enough to realize if we don't fix this, then none of the things we're arguing about matter.

00:23:40.000 It's not serious to stand on a debate stage and say you support single-payer healthcare without also saying, but first we're going to fix this corrupted system because there's no way to get single-payer healthcare in a world where doctors and pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies are funding elections.

00:23:57.000 You can't say you're going to get climate change legislation in America.

00:24:06.000 We're good to go.

00:24:21.000 The system's broken.

00:24:22.000 We can see it's broken.

00:24:23.000 The first thing we have to do is to fix the broken Congress.

00:24:26.000 And if we fix that Congress, then we have a chance to have an argument about what policy makes sense for America.

00:24:32.000 And we each have our views, but no views are different.

00:24:35.000 But the thing we don't agree about, we should be able to agree on.

00:24:38.000 Now, if that's a universal agreement amongst Republicans and Democrats that funding and that money and that all this is what's ruining politics, The people that are donating all this money, the Lesters of the world,

00:24:54.000 what could they possibly do to stop this reform?

00:24:58.000 And what's their reaction to this kind of reform?

00:25:01.000 Yeah.

00:25:02.000 So let me be clear about one really important thing.

00:25:05.000 When I say Republicans and Democrats, what I mean is people in the districts across America.

00:25:11.000 I don't mean in Washington.

00:25:12.000 Like Mitch McConnell is, I think, the focus of evil in the modern world.

00:25:19.000 We'll block any reform here at all.

00:25:21.000 So, you know, Nancy Pelosi can offer what she wants, but it'll never get through the Senate because of Mitch McConnell. 0.89

00:25:26.000 And so there are many Republicans in Washington who are going to block any reform.

00:25:29.000 But when you ask, you know, the Republicans in Washington and the Lesters, what can they do to stop it?

00:25:37.000 Well, the game strategy is clear.

00:25:40.000 They've deployed it before, right?

00:25:42.000 So, you know, they'll say things like, this is welfare for politicians.

00:25:48.000 This is just corrupting free speech.

00:25:51.000 You 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.

00:26:02.000 And so I think the way around that fight is to agree free speech is the fundamental value.

00:26:11.000 And nothing of the reforms I support would try to restrict people's ability to speak.

00:26:17.000 What we're talking about is congressmen raising money.

00:26:20.000 We're not talking about individuals speaking in the marketplace.

00:26:23.000 So you have a very loud voice, Joe.

00:26:25.000 Your voice is heard by millions.

00:26:27.000 And nothing in our constitution should permit the government to be able to suppress you at all.

00:26:34.000 I think we're good to go.

00:26:53.000 We 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.

00:27:05.000 That should be a focus of regulation without the First Amendment getting in the way because we want a Congress filled with people who care about what their voters want, not what their funders want. 0.98

00:27:15.000 The framers didn't create a constitution to replicate an aristocracy.

00:27:20.000 They were fighting an aristocracy.

00:27:22.000 They had a system where there was a House, the House of Lords, that had to ask the aristocracy, what do you want?

00:27:28.000 And everything could be blocked if the aristocracy didn't like it.

00:27:31.000 Well, we've replicated that system more efficiently in America than they had there, because we have a system where both the House of Representatives and the Senate is filled with people who are obsessed with the single question, what do my funders want?

00:27:46.000 And if they can't answer that question in a way that supports the legislation, they're not going to support the legislation.

00:27:53.000 Or if it's important for them to block legislation, they will block legislation.

00:27:57.000 And that's the dynamic of Washington right now.

00:28:00.000 Francis Figuillama describes our government as a vitocracy, vetoocracy.

00:28:07.000 And what he means by that is that there are so many places where influence, powerful influence, can block the ability of the government to do something that it just can't do anything anymore.

00:28:16.000 And that's, I think, the consequence of allowing this corruption of money to be so deeply woven into our political system.

00:28:25.000 Is it possible to fix?

00:28:27.000 Yeah, it is possible to fix.

00:28:30.000 Because, you know, for example, H.R. 1 plus Rokohana's bill...

00:28:39.000 I think that bill alone would solve 80% of the problem.

00:28:44.000 The possibility – the problem isn't like conceiving of what changes have to happen.

00:28:48.000 The question is how do you build the political movement to get there?

00:28:51.000 And what that takes is leaders willing to say – We have to fix this corrupted democracy first.

00:28:58.000 And leaders who stop pretending that we can get a Christmas list of great changes in government without fixing this democracy first.

00:29:09.000 So, 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.

00:29:19.000 Ten great ideas.

00:29:20.000 Not a single one of those ideas We're good to go.

00:29:53.000 Is that instead of focusing our anger on the billionaires, which he does, we need to focus more anger on the congressmen, the politicians, which he does not.

00:30:02.000 I mean, the guy's been in Congress for almost 30 years now.

00:30:05.000 And so it might be natural for him not to notice that the people around him are the problem.

00:30:10.000 Is it a natural thing or do you think that he's possibly...

00:30:13.000 aware of the consequences of stirring up that hornet's nest because you know if anybody has a right to complain when the DNC conspired to rig the primaries against him he's the number one guy he should be screaming from the rooftops you're dealing with a corrupt system and this is disgusting and he didn't 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

00:30:43.000 just kept his mouth shut.

00:30:45.000 Yeah, well, I think, you know, that was a responsibility.

00:30:47.000 I think that was a kind of, you know, I was a person reflecting on the horrendous outcome if he took Hillary Clinton down.

00:30:58.000 And so I think he restrained himself.

00:31:00.000 You know, not perfectly.

00:31:01.000 I 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.

00:31:17.000 It's about the future of America.

00:31:19.000 So when he restrained himself and didn't want to take the whole system down then, I get that.

00:31:25.000 But I'm talking about now.

00:31:26.000 I'm talking about when you've got the House of Representatives talking about fundamental reform.

00:31:31.000 It'll be the first thing they take up.

00:31:33.000 We at least ought to have a presidential campaign where candidates are saying, hell yes, the first thing we will do is to end the corruption that makes it impossible for this Congress to function and stop pretending like we can get all these wonderful things given to us by Santa Claus without fixing this first.

00:31:49.000 You got to do the hard work of convincing America.

00:31:53.000 That there is a solution because, you know, the reality is I think most of America is where you started this podcast.

00:31:58.000 Most of America thinks it's deeply corrupted and there's nothing that can be done.

00:32:03.000 They're half right.

00:32:04.000 It is deeply corrupted.

00:32:05.000 But it's not true there's nothing that can be done.

00:32:08.000 We can do something.

00:32:10.000 And in fact, I think we can solve almost – You know, 80% of it.

00:32:14.000 I still think there's constitutional changes that might be necessary.

00:32:18.000 And I've been working like how do we get constitutional changes and talking to people.

00:32:23.000 My podcast, which of course has about one millionth of the people listening to it as yours does.

00:32:30.000 What is your podcast so people can listen to it?

00:32:31.000 It's another way.

00:32:32.000 So season two is released today, which is about an Article 5 convention.

00:32:36.000 But season one was about how to think about the 2020 election.

00:32:39.000 Yeah.

00:32:40.000 But I think that we might have to have constitutional change and I have been supporting the efforts to think about that.

00:32:47.000 But what we've got to do is to give people a sense that there's something we can do before we amend the constitution.

00:32:54.000 We did a poll and found 96% of Americans believe it important to reduce the influence of money in politics.

00:33:01.000 91% didn't think it was possible.

00:33:04.000 So that's the politics of resignation.

00:33:06.000 You 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?

00:33:13.000 They would have said, you know, we hate Mubarak.

00:33:15.000 And they'd say, well, why aren't you doing anything about it?

00:33:17.000 And they'd say, because nothing can be done.

00:33:19.000 Or, you know, African-Americans in 1900 in America.

00:33:21.000 What do you think about Jim Crow?

00:33:23.000 We hate Jim Crow.

00:33:24.000 Why aren't you doing anything about it?

00:33:26.000 Well, because there's nothing to be done about it.

00:33:27.000 Well, that's how Americans think about this political corruption.

00:33:30.000 They hate it.

00:33:32.000 They think it's deeply unjust, inconsistent with what they thought America was about.

00:33:37.000 But they don't do anything about it because they don't think there's anything to be done about it.

00:33:41.000 And that's where leaders – Have a role.

00:33:44.000 And what we need are leaders running for president right now to begin to explain to people, here's what we could do if only we built the power to do it.

00:33:54.000 Recognizing the most important opposition here, the lobbyists in Washington are going to be an incredibly difficult group to defeat, but we can do that.

00:34:04.000 And if we do that, every other issue becomes easier to resolve in a sensible way.

00:34:10.000 Now, there's no public support for lobbyists, right?

00:34:13.000 There's no people out there that are super psyched that lobbyists are out there and exerting their influence on our world.

00:34:19.000 But they obviously have enormous financial backing behind them, and they have incredible influence in our culture.

00:34:28.000 But if you had...

00:34:31.000 Some magic wand that you could wave across this system and fix it.

00:34:36.000 Wouldn't removing lobbyists be one of the first things that you would do?

00:34:41.000 No.

00:34:42.000 Why so?

00:34:43.000 Well, 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.

00:34:51.000 They don't know squat diddly about 99% of what they're legislating about.

00:34:56.000 They need information.

00:34:58.000 One of the other things Gingrich did was to completely emaciate Congress's own information service.

00:35:05.000 They used to have a really powerful information service that helped congressmen figure things out.

00:35:08.000 All of that's basically gone.

00:35:10.000 So they rely on outsiders to come in and help them understand it.

00:35:14.000 Now, my view is that's an imperfect system because there's great inequality among the quality of lobbyists.

00:35:22.000 But if all lobbyists were doing was providing information, like, Congressman, here's what's going to happen if you pass this bill.

00:35:29.000 Like, these jobs will disappear, or this lead will reappear in the water system.

00:35:35.000 If that's all they were doing, that's a really valuable thing.

00:35:38.000 Information to the Congress to help Congress decide what to do is an essential part of making democracy work.

00:35:43.000 The part of lobbying that is the corrupting part Where they become the machers for the money, not so much that they give it directly, but they call their clients and they say, you need everybody at the C-level in your corporation to send $2,700 to this person,

00:36:00.000 and they steer it like that.

00:36:02.000 When they become the kind of source of resource...

00:36:06.000 For members of Congress, that's when they have this influence which is not related to their argument.

00:36:12.000 So, you know, I've met lobbyists who hate the system as it is right now.

00:36:16.000 They'll say things like, look, I want a system where I win because my ideas are good.

00:36:21.000 My arguments are better.

00:36:22.000 I don't want a system where I win because I'm able to channel more money than that guy because that's not a democracy.

00:36:28.000 Like a democracy should be these representatives are listening to us and then they do the right thing based on what they think helps their constituents, not how much they're going to raise if they do this over that.

00:36:40.000 Trevor Burrus How many lobbyists are there?

00:36:43.000 Oh man, I can't answer that question.

00:36:46.000 One of the big problems we've got is that the law has been weakened in registering lobbyists.

00:36:52.000 So we have tens of thousands of people who are functioning effectively as lobbyists but don't have to call themselves lobbyists.

00:36:58.000 You have these members of Congress who go to government relations departments, and they oversee the government relations department.

00:37:05.000 As 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.

00:37:13.000 So if you look at the lobbying numbers, it looks like we peaked in lobbying about three years ago and now are declining.

00:37:19.000 But what that is, in fact, is that The rules have been interpreted or allowed to be unenforced so that many people who are lobbyists actually aren't actually functioning as lobbyists today.

00:37:30.000 So they are lobbyists but they don't wear the label as lobbyists.

00:37:33.000 What do they call themselves?

00:37:35.000 Government relations people, experts.

00:37:37.000 You know, and they aren't, they could say they're not technically lobbyists.

00:37:42.000 And, you know, I got into a huge fight with Scott Brown.

00:37:47.000 You remember Scott Brown, who ran for, who was a senator in Massachusetts.

00:37:54.000 He ran on a Tea Party ticket.

00:37:56.000 And it was like this amazing Republican to win as a senator in Massachusetts.

00:37:59.000 And then Elizabeth Warren defeated him in the election two years into his term. 0.50

00:38:09.000 He then went to New Hampshire and ran for Senate.

00:38:12.000 And I was helping a Republican in New Hampshire who was a reformer running for Senate.

00:38:15.000 And we've referred to him as a lobbyist.

00:38:17.000 And he went ballistic.

00:38:19.000 He said, I'm not a lobbyist.

00:38:21.000 And then he said, I'm not technically a lobbyist.

00:38:24.000 He'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.

00:38:32.000 So merely because the IRS wouldn't refer to him as a lobbyist, he thought it was outrageous and fraud for me to refer to him as what we all know he is, which is a lobbyist.

00:38:44.000 So being a lobbyist is not defined by your actions.

00:38:47.000 It's defined by your label.

00:38:49.000 It's defined by...

00:38:50.000 Do you have to fill something out to be a lobbyist?

00:38:53.000 Well, once you are a lobbyist, according to the law, you've got all sorts of obligations of reporting who you're spending your time with, what you're spending money on.

00:39:02.000 But government relations...

00:39:03.000 Yeah.

00:39:03.000 These government relations people at a certain level that do certain things aren't called lobbyists.

00:39:08.000 But yet they have the exact same function.

00:39:10.000 Even more because they've got tons of people working for them.

00:39:13.000 They get to deploy in their work of doing lobbying.

00:39:17.000 Trevor Burrus How would that ever be – how would you ever put a dam up there?

00:39:22.000 Well, you only put a dam up there if you got the political will.

00:39:28.000 Right.

00:39:52.000 As opposed to representative of the Leicesters in America, we could do it. 1.00

00:39:57.000 It's not rocket science.

00:39:59.000 It really is not that hard.

00:40:01.000 You got to think carefully about what kind of incentives you're producing.

00:40:04.000 I'm not saying it's obvious.

00:40:05.000 We're not going to sketch the full plan here.

00:40:08.000 But it's possible.

00:40:09.000 It is constitutional to do it.

00:40:11.000 And if we just built the political will to get there, we could do it.

00:40:15.000 And the only way we build the political will, it's really important right now.

00:40:18.000 Because right now, people, especially people like you, need to be saying to every one of the politicians who's going to be sucking up to try to be on your show, to try to have a chance to get their voice out to the 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?

00:40:35.000 This problem in particular, is it a priority?

00:40:37.000 Or is it like one of 12 things on your list?

00:40:40.000 I mean, I imagine it's 11 for Bernie or 12, somewhere on the list.

00:40:43.000 But the question isn't, you know, is it on the list?

00:40:45.000 Because every one of them is going to say, yeah, of course I support reform.

00:40:49.000 The question is, are you going to bring America around so that America thinks on day one, this is what will happen.

00:40:56.000 Whatever else happens, this is going to happen.

00:40:58.000 And my view is, if there were a Democrat running for president, Who said, look, hold on.

00:41:06.000 We're going to fix this.

00:41:08.000 And 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.

00:41:17.000 That guy filled the swamp.

00:41:19.000 Swamp monsters are bigger and more vital now than they ever were. 1.00

00:41:24.000 But come with me, we actually will do it.

00:41:26.000 I think there's a way to break this election so that it becomes an election about the unity around this recognition rather than the disunity, which is the screaming left against the screaming right, which is the way things right now are evolving.

00:41:40.000 To a person sitting on the outside who doesn't have any involvement in politics like myself, it seems so unbelievably complicated that it exhausts you.

00:41:49.000 When 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.

00:42:03.000 Right.

00:42:03.000 So in 2010, the United States Supreme Court decided a case called Citizens United.

00:42:10.000 Citizens United said that you couldn't limit a corporation's ability to spend money independently of a political campaign.

00:42:20.000 So 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.

00:42:31.000 But what Citizens United said is that the Constitution protects the right of the corporation to engage in political speech independent of a political campaign.

00:42:39.000 So if some congressman is running for Congress, Exxon Corporation can come in and spend a million dollars to say why that congressman is a good congressman or why that congressman is a terrible congressman but they have a constitutional right to do that.

00:42:54.000 There were a bunch of us who were chicken littles about this who said, oh, this is the end of democracy because these corporations are just going to spend unbelievable amounts of money in the political process, like spending their money to affect the results.

00:43:07.000 And that was not correct.

00:43:09.000 Because what happened is corporations quickly discovered the high price of free speech.

00:43:16.000 So corporations like Target backed an anti-gay candidate for governor and all of a sudden found their stores being picketed across the country because people were furious that they would be supporting such a candidate for governor.

00:43:32.000 So corporations quickly found that it's not cheap to engage in political speech in the marketplace.

00:43:37.000 They didn't want to do it like that.

00:43:39.000 Instead, they wanted to find a way to channel their money into dark money organizations or into what evolved after Citizens United, something called super PACs.

00:43:49.000 So super PACs were created not by the Supreme Court.

00:43:53.000 Super PACs were created by a lower court that said, well, if you can spend unlimited amounts of money, you should be allowed to give unlimited amounts of money to an independent political action committee.

00:44:04.000 That was the super PAC. Supreme Court has never...

00:44:08.000 Rule on that question.

00:44:10.000 We have a case that we're taking up through Alaska that's trying to appeal to the Supreme Court to get them to actually decide whether super PACs are mandated by the Constitution.

00:44:20.000 And what's different about this case is the argument we're making is to the conservatives.

00:44:25.000 What we're saying is the framers of our Constitution were obsessed with corruption.

00:44:30.000 That was the issue that they were overwhelmingly trying to avoid.

00:44:33.000 And they weren't focused on bribery.

00:44:36.000 They were focused on institutional corruption, these institutions that became unconnected to their purpose, representing Americans.

00:44:43.000 And what our view is, is these conservatives on the Supreme Court, like Neil Gorsuch or Justice Thomas or Brett Kavanaugh, who say that we interpret the Constitution the way the framers would have interpreted it.

00:44:56.000 We're going to make the argument to them which is, there is no doubt the framers of the Constitution would have looked at these super PACs and said, these are an abomination.

00:45:04.000 These are outrageous from the perspective of the democracy they were trying to create.

00:45:10.000 And those justices, should at least one of them be willing to stand up and defend the framers' values against this modern corruption?

00:45:20.000 And if just one of them Voted with the four liberals who've already said they think super PACs are an abomination.

00:45:27.000 Then we could have a way to end the super PACs in this system.

00:45:31.000 And that would be an enormous benefit because they've become so powerful.

00:45:36.000 But the courts alone can't save us.

00:45:39.000 Even if you ended super PACs tomorrow, you still have Lesterland.

00:45:45.000 Because the super PACs are not what I was talking about in Lesterland.

00:45:48.000 What 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.

00:46:02.000 That's the sort of thing H.R.1 is trying to do.

00:46:04.000 That's the sort of thing Rokohan is trying to do.

00:46:06.000 But that's the sort of thing that we don't have a president to support right now.

00:46:10.000 We don't have Democratic presidential candidates who are making it the champion issue right now. 0.57

00:46:14.000 And it won't get done unless they do.

00:46:16.000 Well, it seems complicated to people when you try to explain campaign finance and you try to explain contributions to candidates and contributions to sitting senators and congressmen.

00:46:26.000 It's complicated.

00:46:27.000 And there's so many different things to think about when you're discussing this, that to a person who's on the outside, well, how do you fix this?

00:46:35.000 Well, what are the laws now?

00:46:37.000 Well, how did it get that way?

00:46:38.000 Well, how about make it so they can't give them money?

00:46:42.000 And there's all these real simplistic views of it from the outside.

00:46:46.000 But it seems that, at the very least, limiting the amount of money that someone's allowed.

00:46:52.000 Like, what is the maximum amount of money someone can give to a candidate?

00:46:55.000 Right now, in the primary and the general, it's $5,400, $2,700 in each.

00:47:01.000 And that goes up according to inflation.

00:47:03.000 And that's pretty small potatoes compared to what the super PACs are doing in the election.

00:47:08.000 So you have these people running.

00:47:13.000 I think we're good to go.

00:47:28.000 Super PACs.

00:47:29.000 Those are the Adolphs in America. 0.94

00:47:32.000 People named Adolph.

00:47:34.000 This tiny, tiny, tiny number of people who are contributing to those things.

00:47:39.000 But you're right.

00:47:39.000 Look, there's no reason why most Americans should understand the complexities of campaign finance law, and they don't need to.

00:47:46.000 What they need to ask is, do we have a system of integrity?

00:47:51.000 In the way we select representatives.

00:47:53.000 And if you're not brain-dead in America, you believe the answer to that question is no.

00:47:58.000 We do not have a system of integrity.

00:48:00.000 There's no representational integrity.

00:48:02.000 It is corrupted in all the obvious ways.

00:48:05.000 And nobody should be forced to study campaign finance in order to have the entitlement to say, hell no, this system has got to end.

00:48:15.000 I think you're right.

00:48:16.000 If people are forced to articulate all the 34 different changes that have to happen, we're never going to get there.

00:48:22.000 But let's not go there.

00:48:24.000 Let's just start and end with, it is a corrupted system and we want politicians to fix it.

00:48:29.000 And if they don't fix it, we'll throw them out until we get the politicians who do.

00:48:33.000 And if we could build that as the movement, the recognition, the core message of 2020, I think there's a real shot because we've primed the Republican Party.

00:48:43.000 There are a lot of people in that party who are now so disgusted with the corruption of this system.

00:48:48.000 Not necessarily Mitch McConnell.

00:48:49.000 He loves it.

00:48:50.000 But, you know, ordinary Republican voters.

00:48:53.000 And the Democrats have now committed themselves to fixing this corrupted system.

00:48:57.000 This is the moment to do that.

00:48:59.000 And we don't have to get into the details of how much you should be allowed to contribute to say there is a way to fix this that would give us a representative democracy.

00:49:06.000 Maybe not again, but for the first time.

00:49:09.000 Why is Mitch McConnell so uniquely evil?

00:49:12.000 This guy has had it in his DNA from the first moment he went to Washington to end any regulation of money in politics.

00:49:26.000 He engineered the selection of the FEC, this is the Federal Election Commission, commissioners, so that they would block basically every enforcement action of the FEC. The FEC does nothing now because it's a commission that has half Republicans and half Democrats.

00:49:42.000 So...

00:49:43.000 If the Republicans disagree from the Democrats, then nothing gets done.

00:49:46.000 They can't enforce the most simple rules anymore because Mitch McConnell has populated the FEC with people who don't believe in campaign finance rules.

00:49:54.000 He has said Citizens United, this decision that said corporations could give unlimited amounts of money to independent political speaking, says one of the greatest decisions of the Supreme Court.

00:50:03.000 And he said he was going to fight like hell to defend it.

00:50:06.000 And 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.

00:50:15.000 This man is obsessed with the idea that money should have the power in Washington that it has right now.

00:50:23.000 And people who are talking about reforming it are the enemy.

00:50:26.000 And so, you know, the thing about Mitch McConnell is he's actually an incredibly smart man.

00:50:31.000 And he's an incredibly smart strategist.

00:50:33.000 And he's been playing this game for a long time.

00:50:36.000 And I think he's like responsible for 85% of the judicial structure that makes it possible for this to be blocked.

00:50:43.000 There's an amazing series of debates happened 20 years ago between John McCain and Mitch McConnell.

00:50:50.000 So this is when Congress was passing something called the McCain-Feingold Law, which was the last great effort to deal with this problem.

00:50:55.000 It was flawed in a bunch of ways, but it was an important success.

00:51:00.000 Mitch McConnell stood on the floor of the Senate and said, Mr. McCain says that the Senate – he can't say Mr. McCain.

00:51:08.000 He said the senator from Arizona has said that the system is corrupt.

00:51:11.000 I want him to name the corrupt people.

00:51:14.000 McCain stands there and said, I'm not talking about particular individuals.

00:51:17.000 I'm talking about the system.

00:51:18.000 It's the system is corrupt.

00:51:20.000 McConnell, almost clueless, just said, if the system is corrupt, there must be corrupt people.

00:51:25.000 If there's not corrupt people, then the system is not corrupt.

00:51:28.000 So the only corruption he could imagine was corruption where somebody was taking a bribe.

00:51:33.000 And if that's the only corruption we're allowed to remedy, then the whole system of influence we have right now is not to be touched.

00:51:44.000 But 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.

00:51:53.000 But they know how to bob and weave and bend and speak and say the right things to attract the right kind of money.

00:52:00.000 And that's as much corruption as bribery is.

00:52:03.000 And McCain's view was we had to end it.

00:52:06.000 So he was the last great Republican fighter for reform of this corrupted system.

00:52:13.000 There have been many before.

00:52:14.000 Barry Goldwater was an incredibly vocal opponent to the role of money in politics.

00:52:20.000 But 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.

00:52:34.000 Another thing that's very weird is that every four years or so, there's this cry to eliminate the Electoral College.

00:52:41.000 Every four years ago, people realized that the battleground states are so critical and that so much money is being spent on this small handful of states because they give you all the electoral votes.

00:52:53.000 And this is how you win an election.

00:52:54.000 And then people say, well, why is that?

00:52:56.000 That doesn't make any sense.

00:52:57.000 It should be one person, one vote.

00:52:58.000 Are we really that divided as a nation that we need to isolate ourselves into these small little lines on the dirt where this part is worth this amount and that part's worth that amount?

00:53:08.000 And so everybody plays this weird electoral college game.

00:53:13.000 And then you get a situation like what just happened where Hillary Clinton wins the popular vote but is not the president because the electoral college is what makes everything.

00:53:21.000 Yeah.

00:53:22.000 So the way you just described this problem is exactly the way people have to think about it.

00:53:26.000 The problem isn't – I mean it is a bad thing that the loser wins.

00:53:30.000 I mean that's just not the way an election is supposed to work.

00:53:33.000 So that's happened twice in our lifetime and it happened 100 years before that and it's going to happen more frequently going forward.

00:53:41.000 We can show that demographically.

00:53:43.000 But that's not the real problem.

00:53:44.000 The real problem is that in every election – I think we're good to go.

00:54:08.000 And those states don't represent America.

00:54:10.000 They're older.

00:54:11.000 They're whiter. 0.90

00:54:12.000 Their industry is kind of 19th century industry.

00:54:14.000 There are seven and a half times the number of people in America working in solar energy as mine coal.

00:54:20.000 But you never hear about solar energy in a presidential campaign because those people live in California and Texas.

00:54:26.000 They don't matter to the presidential election.

00:54:29.000 What you hear about is coal mining because the 50,000 coal miners left in America happen to live in these battleground states.

00:54:35.000 So this is just a product of the way the electoral college, the way states count their votes to allocate their electors.

00:54:44.000 Something called the winner-take-all system.

00:54:46.000 So all but two states.

00:54:49.000 Say that the winner of the popular vote gets all of the electoral votes for that state.

00:54:54.000 So in 2000 in Florida, George Bush won that state, based on a stopped recount, by 531 votes.

00:55:02.000 He got all the electoral college votes in that state, even though he just barely won that state.

00:55:08.000 Winner-take-all is what makes it so that it doesn't make sense for anybody to pay any attention to any of the non-battleground states and spend all of your time in the battleground states.

00:55:19.000 In 2016, 99% of campaign spending was in 14 states.

00:55:25.000 Ninety-nine.

00:55:25.000 Ninety-nine percent.

00:55:27.000 Ninety-five percent of time.

00:55:29.000 But 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?

00:55:36.000 So this is a system designed to give power to these battleground states.

00:55:41.000 And then you say, well, why?

00:55:43.000 Is it something the Constitution requires?

00:55:46.000 And the answer to that is absolutely not.

00:55:48.000 The Constitution does not say how the states will allocate their electors.

00:55:52.000 And indeed, when states started adopting this winner-take-all system, Many thought it was an outrageous perversion of the constitutional design.

00:56:03.000 So Jefferson was outraged.

00:56:06.000 But then he said, well, if some states are going to do it, then all states have to do it.

00:56:10.000 Because if you're a state that allocates all of your electors to the winner, you're going to have more power than your neighboring state that only gives half the electors to the winner.

00:56:19.000 So very quickly, there was a race to the bottom, and that's kind of where it stuck.

00:56:23.000 And so the question is now what we can do about it.

00:56:25.000 Well, there are two big reform efforts out there.

00:56:29.000 One of them is called the National Popular Vote Compact.

00:56:33.000 I mean, I should say, you know, you can imagine amending the Constitution, but it takes three-fourths of the states to change the Constitution, and three-fourths of the states are not going to agree with abolishing the Electoral College.

00:56:44.000 So this is not going to happen anytime soon through the Constitution.

00:56:47.000 But there are two ways, without amending the Constitution, we could fix this problem.

00:56:51.000 One, the National Popular Vote Compact is basically states who say, look, we're going to pledge our electors to the winner of the National Popular Vote.

00:57:00.000 So 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.

00:57:11.000 So in a state like New York, if the Republican won the national popular vote, even though most people in New York are Democratic, they would allocate their electors to the Republican, vice versa in Texas.

00:57:21.000 That's the way that system would work.

00:57:25.000 And, you know, I personally like this system because I believe in the idea of one person, one vote.

00:57:29.000 Everybody's vote as an American citizen for the American president should be equal.

00:57:32.000 It shouldn't matter that you're having to live in Wyoming versus Pennsylvania versus New York.

00:57:37.000 But 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.

00:57:50.000 I actually don't think that's right, but I get the understanding.

00:57:53.000 I think they're wrong about the way the campaigns work, but I understand why they're anxious about it.

00:57:57.000 So 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,

00:58:15.000 your vote never matters.

00:58:16.000 If you're a Democrat in Texas, your vote never matters because we just count your vote up and then we throw it away because we allocate all the electors to the dominant party in your state.

00:58:28.000 David Boies is our chief litigator.

00:58:30.000 We've got a case in California, Texas, South Carolina, and Massachusetts asking the courts to declare winner-take-all unconstitutional and instead say that electors have to be allocated proportionally.

00:58:43.000 So if you get 40 percent of the vote in the state, you get 40 percent of the electors.

00:58:47.000 If you get 50 percent, you get 50 percent of the electors.

00:58:49.000 What that would do overnight It would make every state in the nation competitive.

00:58:56.000 Like there'd be a reason for a Democrat to go to Texas because you're not going to get all the electoral votes. 0.98

00:59:02.000 You're not going to get half the electoral votes, but you'll get 40%, maybe 45%, and that could matter.

00:59:08.000 Or 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.

00:59:14.000 There are a lot of Republicans in California.

00:59:16.000 So this change would immediately make every state in play competitive.

00:59:21.000 But unlike the national popular vote alternative, there are many people who look at this and say this would be better because small states would still have a pretty important role, like an elector is an elector.

00:59:31.000 And if I can get it from Arizona, I'm going to care about Arizona.

00:59:33.000 If I can get it from Arkansas, I'll care about Arkansas.

00:59:36.000 So it's not going to just be the big states or the big population centers.

00:59:40.000 It's going to be every state.

00:59:41.000 So 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,

00:59:57.000 which I think is the problem, could be solved overnight.

01:00:00.000 You would no longer have these battleground states deciding everything.

01:00:03.000 You'd have a president who cares about getting elected by all of America and that would be an incredible improvement.

01:00:08.000 That seems like, in and of itself, would be a game changer, if they could do that.

01:00:14.000 That would change a lot.

01:00:15.000 But one of the things that you said, you said you don't think that it's possible that we would ever vote out the Electoral College.

01:00:23.000 But is there support for the Electoral College?

01:00:26.000 Is there a good argument for it?

01:00:29.000 So there is support for the idea that every state have a role and there's a support for the idea that small states got a kind of thumb on the scale, which is what the Electoral College does.

01:00:42.000 So there is some support.

01:00:43.000 But most people, 70 percent of people, don't like the idea that the president is not chosen from the majority of voters voting.

01:00:52.000 So most people would oppose it.

01:00:54.000 But the point is to change the constitution You need the state legislatures or state conventions to agree with the change.

01:01:03.000 And what many states, at least 13 states, I fear, would say is that we actually win more under this system than we lose.

01:01:11.000 So we're not going to change the system.

01:01:13.000 And so unless you get like some overwhelmingly popular movement to support it, or again, you know, you can imagine a presidential candidate who kind of made fixing this part of the democracy part of the plan too.

01:01:25.000 I don't see how you're going to build a political movement to get there.

01:01:30.000 This National Popular Vote Compact, which is going around state to state and getting states to join, right now has about 100. And so the way this works is that when the equivalent of 270 electoral votes have been committed, then the compact kicks in.

01:01:46.000 So when they get to 270, the problem of this electoral college goes away.

01:01:51.000 Because at 270, according to the plan, the winner of the popular vote wins the electoral college.

01:01:56.000 They right now have 172 electors pledged.

01:02:00.000 Right?

01:02:01.000 So they have less than 100 more to go.

01:02:03.000 But the problem is they've got to convince states to join the compact.

01:02:09.000 And 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.

01:02:17.000 So many state legislatures...

01:02:19.000 Why do they believe that?

01:02:20.000 I think many Republicans just think that their great benefit is from the Electoral College.

01:02:25.000 It's not surprising.

01:02:26.000 Because the battleground states are primarily Republican.

01:02:29.000 And because the base number of Republican states is so high, right?

01:02:32.000 Because these small rural states get disproportionately more electors than states like California.

01:02:39.000 So Wyoming gets three electors. 0.81

01:02:41.000 Aaron Ross Powell Disproportionate in terms of the population.

01:02:42.000 Aaron Ross Powell Population, right.

01:02:43.000 So 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.

01:02:53.000 It's not hard to understand why they're there.

01:02:55.000 I think – again, I don't think they're right about this.

01:02:58.000 In 2004, if 50,000 votes had switched to John Kerry in Ohio, Then John Kerry would have won the Electoral College, but lost the popular vote.

01:03:12.000 And if that had happened in 2004, I think the Electoral College would be dead today.

01:03:16.000 Because a Republican won in 2000, a Democrat won in 2004, people would say, this system is just crazy.

01:03:22.000 We've got to get rid of this system.

01:03:24.000 But now people think, well, Republicans benefit from this, so if I'm a Republican, I'm going to block the change.

01:03:29.000 And if that's true, then it's never going to happen at a constitutional level because the Constitution requires three-fourths of the states to support the reforms.

01:03:37.000 And the reinforcement of that is that Donald Trump won without having the popular vote.

01:03:40.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:03:41.000 And 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.

01:04:01.000 Trump started tweeting vigorously about how this is a denial of democracy.

01:04:05.000 We have to march on Washington to end this banana republic-like system because the Electoral College was the worst possible thing in the world. 0.99

01:04:12.000 And of course, after 2016, he had different views about the Electoral College.

01:04:16.000 I wasn't old enough to understand what was going on during Watergate.

01:04:21.000 What year was that?

01:04:25.000 Well, the break-in happens in the lead-up to the 72 election, and then he eventually resigns after that.

01:04:31.000 But this is our Watergate, right?

01:04:32.000 This moment right now, Cohen's going to go to jail for three years.

01:04:36.000 I mean, he's testifying against Trump, and all these people are testifying, and they're calling him – what are they calling him?

01:04:43.000 Co-conspirator number one?

01:04:44.000 Is that what the official individual number one is?

01:04:48.000 This is a very unusual moment for us to be watching this all unfold and to see this slow dissection.

01:04:58.000 What 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.

01:05:10.000 Yeah, so he's a brilliant tactician.

01:05:14.000 And so I think it's clear that the worst for Donald Trump is yet to come.

01:05:21.000 And I do think the parallel is Watergate, but there's a really important difference here.

01:05:26.000 So I'm old enough to remember Watergate.

01:05:28.000 I was like 12 or 13 when this happened.

01:05:30.000 And my uncle happened to be the lawyer who worked in the House of Representatives, convincing the House of Representatives to vote the articles of impeachment.

01:05:38.000 So he...

01:05:39.000 And that weekend when Nixon resigned, he came to visit us.

01:05:42.000 We lived in the Kentucky part of Pennsylvania, the kind of right-wing middle part of the state.

01:05:47.000 He came to visit us and he told me this was going to happen and that was the event.

01:05:52.000 That was the weekend that I decided I wanted to become a lawyer.

01:05:56.000 But the big difference between these two times is that when that happened, the way most people got access to news was three television networks.

01:06:08.000 Every day they watched the news at the same time because there was nothing else on.

01:06:13.000 And those three television networks kind of shot right down the middle and told the story as they saw it.

01:06:18.000 It was kind of the Walter Cronkite era of news.

01:06:22.000 And as this story broke...

01:06:25.000 They just reported it as they saw it.

01:06:27.000 And as they saw it, it was a pretty damning indictment of the president.

01:06:32.000 And what's amazing is he watched the polling among Republicans and their support for the president.

01:06:37.000 Six months before the president resigns, the poll says among Republicans he has about an 83 percent support rate.

01:06:45.000 And then when he resigns, his support rate about Republicans is about 50%.

01:06:49.000 And 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.

01:07:01.000 We don't live in that news environment today.

01:07:04.000 We live in an environment where half of America, I think we're good to go. 0.99

01:07:36.000 I don't think you should be impeached, but that's a separate question, is not possible.

01:07:41.000 And that's what's so terrifying about it.

01:07:43.000 When you live in a democracy, Where we don't all live in the same universe.

01:07:49.000 We don't know the same facts.

01:07:51.000 How do you knit together a public that can address these critical issues of national import?

01:07:58.000 And that's, I think, our biggest challenge right now.

01:08:00.000 Well, it gets grayer than that, right?

01:08:02.000 With characters like Sean Hannity, that they separate the line between not just being some sort of a political pundit, but actually campaigning for the president, showing up at speeches, Addressing the crowd, making these big statements in support of the president.

01:08:20.000 It's very strange to watch because I don't remember that at any point in time.

01:08:24.000 No, it wasn't the past, but I think the thing we need to realize is it is the future because it pays.

01:08:32.000 Cable news pays.

01:08:34.000 Tremendously.

01:08:35.000 I think?

01:08:50.000 And the loyalty to those tribes translates into advertising dollars.

01:08:53.000 It is the business model of cable.

01:08:55.000 So Sean Hannity looks to, you know, old geezers like me like an abomination from the perspective of what news should be like.

01:09:03.000 But from the standpoint of what the future is going to be, he is the future.

01:09:07.000 And so then it becomes a question, like, how do we knit together a democracy given there will be people like the Sean Hannity's on cable television?

01:09:15.000 And, 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.

01:09:22.000 I think that there's a need to begin to think about how do we build political understanding, not through broadcast television, but through something else that gives people a chance to think in more than 30 second bites.

01:09:35.000 And podcasting, I think, is a core part of that.

01:09:37.000 Is 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?

01:09:48.000 I mean, I remember when the elections were going on, I would flip back and forth between the two channels and it was like two alternative universes.

01:09:56.000 There were different worlds.

01:09:57.000 Different worlds of focus, different worlds of what they're projecting.

01:10:02.000 Yes, but I don't think the point is that it has to be down the middle.

01:10:06.000 Right.

01:10:06.000 I think it has to be deep.

01:10:08.000 So this is what I think is so powerful about podcasting.

01:10:11.000 Like, you know, the fact that you get people to listen to you talk about an idea for an hour, two hours, sometimes three hours...

01:10:18.000 It's astonishing.

01:10:20.000 Literally astonishing in an age where the most a cable news channel will allocate to a news story is a minute and a half, two minutes, three minutes.

01:10:29.000 And you know in the context of like the tweet thinking of cable news, they can't afford to go deep on anything.

01:10:37.000 And everything they're going to talk about are the things they can talk about sensibly in 25 seconds or 30 seconds or 40 seconds.

01:10:43.000 And what you know because you've lived this life of like having deep conversations about things that are important, Is that it sometimes takes more than 30 seconds to understand something.

01:10:52.000 Always.

01:11:13.000 I don't care if it's balanced.

01:11:14.000 I care that it is attempting to be serious and in-depth, understanding the issue.

01:11:19.000 So I don't care if Cato wants to have podcasts to try to tell us the deep story of Ayn Randian economics or something like that.

01:11:27.000 That's fine.

01:11:27.000 That's good.

01:11:28.000 I think it's important that people start thinking about these issues in a richer, deeper way.

01:11:33.000 And 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.

01:11:43.000 And it might be a good thing, but it is just never coming back.

01:11:46.000 And the world of Sean Hannity is a world that will destroy democracy.

01:11:50.000 So how do we rebuild democracy outside of that?

01:11:53.000 And, you know, if you had to pick the three things that are the most hopeful, I think podcasting is number one.

01:11:58.000 I think some of the reflective, deep, funny, playful, but in the end, at the end of the hour-long segment of a podcast, you understand something you didn't understand before.

01:12:09.000 I think that's number one.

01:12:10.000 I think comedy, like comedy television, brings people into understanding things in a way that's not possible on Fox News.

01:12:18.000 I think that's number two.

01:12:21.000 I think shows like Homeland...

01:12:25.000 I watched it until the redheaded guy died. 1.00

01:12:27.000 Yeah, yeah, I know. 0.94

01:12:28.000 And then it went through this dark period in the middle, but the recent seasons are just un-fucking-believable. 0.60

01:12:34.000 Really?

01:12:35.000 And they're unbelievable because they are such a deep, rich understanding of the tensions.

01:12:41.000 You want to understand the Iran nuclear deal?

01:12:46.000 Watch the last season.

01:12:47.000 Because after watching that season, you understand the tensions between the CIA and the president and what's actually going on with Israel.

01:12:56.000 And I think that if you imagine television shows aspiring to tell the story, In an entertaining way, in a way that brings people in, that they voluntarily want to watch it, but that in the end, at the end of watching a season, you understand something.

01:13:11.000 I 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.

01:13:20.000 Did you watch House of Cards?

01:13:22.000 I did.

01:13:23.000 Up until this season?

01:13:24.000 Did you quit at this season?

01:13:25.000 I watched the season.

01:13:26.000 I was very disappointed.

01:13:28.000 I watched episode one and I said, this seems like they just gave it to some different writers.

01:13:32.000 It's just craziness.

01:13:33.000 It just seemed like somebody just got a hold of it and they said, I'll take it and I'm going to write it my own way.

01:13:39.000 But even in the very beginning, the striking thing about House of Cards is it made it seem like stuff actually could happen in Washington.

01:13:46.000 Yes.

01:13:47.000 You're like, wow, this really powerful guy, Frank Underwood, actually can actually get important bills passed. 0.98

01:13:52.000 And I remember watching that saying, holy shit, this is just completely not the truth. 0.97

01:13:57.000 This is just not the way the system works. 0.97

01:13:59.000 I mean, it would be good if it worked like that because at least it could do stuff.

01:14:03.000 But the way it actually works is that these guys would be scurrying around trying to figure out, you know, what the tentacles of funders are directing them to do.

01:14:11.000 And the tentacles of funders added together would be don't do anything.

01:14:15.000 That's not what you're there to do.

01:14:18.000 But what it at least did is sort of highlight the influences these people experience.

01:14:24.000 And it showed how...

01:14:29.000 Yeah, I mean, I don't want to talk it down at all.

01:14:31.000 Man, I want a million different things like this on television.

01:14:36.000 Just something that gives people...

01:14:37.000 Yeah, just gives them a richer understanding.

01:14:40.000 Well, an understanding, period, because for the most part, what people...

01:14:43.000 I mean, you go to school, you learn about democracy and our system of representative government, and then you become an adult and you forget most of what you learned.

01:14:52.000 Yeah.

01:14:52.000 And then you hear something about the Electoral College and the popular vote and then you see bills getting passed.

01:14:59.000 What the hell is that?

01:15:00.000 And the stuff you learn at school is so politically correct, it can't actually give you an understanding of anything.

01:15:06.000 Like you actually taught kids in high school the way Congress worked.

01:15:10.000 You know, the school board would go crazy and they're like, no, no, no, you can't talk down American democracy like this.

01:15:15.000 So the truth is not teachable.

01:15:17.000 The only way to get people to see the truth is to expose it to them in a way that they want to see it.

01:15:22.000 And, you know, my point is that's not going to be Fox News.

01:15:26.000 Fox News can never cover it at the depth and the interest level that it needs to be covered.

01:15:30.000 It's going to be things like what you do or things like what, you know, great television can do.

01:15:36.000 Is 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?

01:15:48.000 I think the better analogy is an operating system that has been taken over by malware or some virus.

01:15:57.000 Because it's not innocent.

01:16:00.000 DOS was a fun system, and it cranked to a halt after a while when you tried to pile more and more on top of it.

01:16:06.000 But that was just kind of the limits of what it could do.

01:16:08.000 There was nothing malicious in its failure.

01:16:11.000 Mm-hmm.

01:16:12.000 But there's something malicious in this failure.

01:16:14.000 There are people who are eagerly focused on how to make sure our government can't govern because if our government can't govern, they win.

01:16:24.000 So the Koch brothers have this amazing bipolar character.

01:16:31.000 On the one hand, they're talking about the ideals of government but the reality is their interventions Make it so we don't have an EPA that can regulate their companies.

01:16:40.000 So 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.

01:16:50.000 What they want is not change of a particular kind except for tax cuts.

01:16:54.000 What they want is nothing to happen.

01:16:57.000 So that's the kind of malware that's taken over the system of our government that's blocked the ability of the government to function. 0.98

01:17:05.000 And rather than having leaders at the center who say, hold it, let's just pause for a second and realize this is a fucking broken system. 0.92

01:17:13.000 We have politicians that continue to pretend as if everything's working. 0.98

01:17:16.000 You just have to elect more Democrats and we'll get what we want.

01:17:19.000 Yeah.

01:17:20.000 Voting online.

01:17:23.000 What would be the pitfalls of that and why hasn't that been implemented?

01:17:26.000 If you can bank online, why can't you vote online?

01:17:28.000 Yeah.

01:17:29.000 So, 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.

01:17:44.000 Now, there are lots of people working on, I think, really great open source implementations that could eventually produce the kind of confidence that we need to have to be able to vote online.

01:17:56.000 And so I don't foreclose it in the long run. 0.99

01:18:00.000 But I think what we've seen in the short run is that when we turn to these proprietary providers of technology to enable us to vote, they give us shit. 0.99

01:18:11.000 You know, look at these voting machines. 0.99

01:18:12.000 There's a recent story about...

01:18:15.000 This 11-year-old who was able to, within like 15 minutes, hack into the Florida election system and change the results from one candidate to another.

01:18:30.000 Because the companies that build these technologies are not filled with a bunch of rocket scientists.

01:18:35.000 Like if you're really good, you're going to go work for Google or for Facebook or something like that.

01:18:39.000 So the proprietary software has all of these bugs and holes and intended backdoors built into it.

01:18:47.000 Intended backdoors.

01:18:48.000 Yeah, because they need – the company itself needs a simple way to get in to check or to fix things.

01:18:52.000 But then they don't worry about the fact that other people will get backdoors to be able to get in.

01:18:56.000 This is the argument for a dibold system that did have a third party – Tons of allegations about that.

01:19:04.000 Yeah.

01:19:04.000 Did you ever see the documentary, Hacking Democracy?

01:19:06.000 Yeah.

01:19:07.000 Is that disturbing to you?

01:19:08.000 Incredibly.

01:19:09.000 I don't know how much I believe about it.

01:19:12.000 Why is that?

01:19:12.000 Well, because I've seen so much that contradicts some of the claims about the extent to which there was real differences in the numbers.

01:19:19.000 I 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.

01:19:30.000 But, you know, the point is not so much the particulars of a particular election.

01:19:33.000 It's recognizing that if you turn this over to proprietary software companies who are going to build these closed systems nobody can inspect, There's no reason to trust them.

01:19:44.000 You know, it's not like they are intending to make themselves vulnerable to the Russians.

01:19:49.000 They're just going to make themselves vulnerable to the Russians. 0.96

01:19:51.000 And there are alternative systems, like open source systems that I know some people are building right now that I think eventually could get us there.

01:19:58.000 An open source system, like a Linux-based, something that would go onto your phone?

01:20:02.000 Well, it could be on your phone, but the point about the open source is that anybody can inspect the code and be confident that the code is doing what it says it's doing.

01:20:11.000 What I'm saying about being on your phone is the biometrics that we use on our phone today are some of the most secure...

01:20:18.000 In terms of being able to establish that it's you that's making that vote.

01:20:22.000 Like iris scanners that you have on the...

01:20:24.000 I have a Samsung Note 9 that has an iris scanner.

01:20:26.000 It checks my eyeballs.

01:20:27.000 You know, my iPhone checks my face.

01:20:30.000 I mean, they're pretty amazing.

01:20:33.000 Fingerprints, obviously.

01:20:35.000 But the fact that this is probably, in terms of our own personal security in terms of information, this is probably the most secure...

01:20:43.000 Our smartphones are probably the most secure devices we've ever possessed.

01:20:48.000 So, on the one hand, yes.

01:20:50.000 And 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.

01:21:05.000 That should be the way the future is.

01:21:06.000 But on the other hand, we need to realize that these technologies are also incredibly insecure, in the sense that There is now a commercial market to exploit insecurities inside of these phones.

01:21:20.000 And these companies basically have bounties that they post on the web for people who will come forward and find certain holes and hacks.

01:21:29.000 And once they get those hacks, they use them to leverage power.

01:21:35.000 And governments play this game all the time.

01:21:37.000 And 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.

01:21:50.000 I didn't know this.

01:21:51.000 What is this about?

01:21:52.000 So 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.

01:22:05.000 The standard way in which this is done is to pierce the security by sending you something that you click on and it then embeds itself in the phone and there's no way.

01:22:14.000 You see it and no way that it can be blocked.

01:22:17.000 But there's rumors now that, in fact, we've got something more than that going on where all they need to do is get your telephone number and they're able to hack into the system to get access to your phone.

01:22:26.000 But the point is these companies have a market now for selling this type of insecurity.

01:22:34.000 So they'll, like, sell the ability for you to get access here.

01:22:37.000 And 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.

01:22:49.000 The story is that this is part of what happened in the Khashoggi context that the Saudis had exploited this in a way that was going to be revealed and the simple solution to that eventual revelation was to remove the person who would reveal it and that's why Khashoggi went down.

01:23:06.000 So this is the point to recognize about these phones.

01:23:09.000 On the one hand, for the ordinary life, it's more secure than anything you've ever had.

01:23:14.000 But on the other hand, systematically, it's building insecurity into our lives in a way that can be exploited by powerful people.

01:23:23.000 And for most people, it doesn't matter.

01:23:25.000 Like most people, ordinary Joes, they're never going to be vulnerable because nobody's going to spend a million dollars to get a hack against an individual person. 1.00

01:23:35.000 When I hear that from a person justifying why they don't worry about it, it drives me crazy.

01:23:40.000 I don't do anything.

01:23:41.000 What are they going to do?

01:23:42.000 I'm clean.

01:23:43.000 Don't worry about me.

01:23:44.000 But that's not what we're talking about.

01:23:47.000 Right, 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.

01:24:03.000 That's basically what it is.

01:24:05.000 This is a structure that allows powerful people, if it is insecure, To protect themselves because they can just leverage that against us.

01:24:14.000 And I think, you know, this is a completely unfocused problem.

01:24:18.000 Like nobody is talking about this politically.

01:24:20.000 But the market for this commercialized security exploits is hugely important.

01:24:27.000 And we've got to find a way to address it.

01:24:30.000 Hmm.

01:24:31.000 So is it feasible that as technology advances and as the security advances as well, I mean the biometrics that we have today are far greater than the passwords that we used just a few years ago, that there could be something that you can't exploit,

01:24:48.000 especially considering open source variants where they can be checked by the community?

01:24:56.000 So the problem is not the kind of particular technologies working the way you intend them to work.

01:25:02.000 If you've got great biometric technologies, those are really good at making sure, in the ordinary case, that you're the right person using your phone.

01:25:12.000 The problem is the code is so big and so complicated that there's always going to be little bugs.

01:25:22.000 What these exploits are are like coders who like poke at the code looking for these little hooks and they link one hook to another hook to another hook and then they find the way in to exploit the system.

01:25:35.000 So the exploits are never – well, I won't say never.

01:25:37.000 There's another story that's important to recognize.

01:25:39.000 I'll talk about that in a second.

01:25:40.000 But the exploits are not in the main case intended by anybody.

01:25:44.000 It's just the natural consequence of having literally hundreds or millions of lines of code that go into making this machine work.

01:25:53.000 And that's what's being exploited.

01:25:55.000 And 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.

01:26:03.000 If you find an exploit in the iOS and Apple doesn't know about it, And you can exploit it for six months or a year.

01:26:11.000 You can, you know, do a lot of damage to a lot of people's lives before anybody gets around to blocking it.

01:26:17.000 Now, you know, that's even in the best case where everybody's working hard to make their system as secure as it can be.

01:26:24.000 You know, there was this period after the 9-11.

01:26:29.000 There's very strong, incredible allegations that the United States government went around to these technology companies and said, we need you to build back doors into your technology so we can track down the terrorists.

01:26:41.000 And there's strong allegations that, in fact, many of the most important technology companies complied.

01:26:48.000 And 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. 0.83

01:26:58.000 So this infrastructure that was intended to be secure to protect American companies so that they could do their work without being – for an espionage on top of them became an infrastructure of espionage.

01:27:10.000 Again, because it's so complicated to get it perfectly right.

01:27:15.000 And the return from exploit is so huge that you can just expect the market is always going to supply it.

01:27:22.000 What was the other example that you were going to bring up?

01:27:25.000 That was it.

01:27:25.000 That was the idea that the intended back doors that turn out to be exploited for other purposes.

01:27:32.000 But isn't the system itself like when you deal with hanging chads or paper?

01:27:38.000 Terrible.

01:27:39.000 It's ridiculous. 0.99

01:27:40.000 You're giving it up to human beings. 0.95

01:27:44.000 The potential for error is massive, right?

01:27:47.000 Just to count things up.

01:27:48.000 Or the potential for corruption, the decision to ignore certain collections.

01:27:52.000 I mean, this has all been documented, right?

01:27:54.000 Yeah.

01:27:55.000 And all of this follows from the fact that we bizarrely in America, unlike most mature democracies around the world, We're good to go.

01:28:28.000 For the government to allocate money to fix voting machines just in Republican districts and not in Democratic districts, or there's no incentive to shut down a 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.

01:28:44.000 We're to create it so that it takes seven hours to vote in some districts and 20 minutes to vote in other districts.

01:28:49.000 There's no incentive to do that if your job is simply to make it possible for people to vote efficiently.

01:28:54.000 And 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.

01:29:02.000 We don't get that kind of efficiency.

01:29:04.000 We don't get that kind of innovation because it's a rigged game.

01:29:09.000 You might have people who – I'm sure many of these people are above partisan motivation.

01:29:14.000 But we also know that many of these people are deeply motivated by partisan politics, especially at that kind of middle level of party politics.

01:29:21.000 If 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.

01:29:35.000 I think we're good to go.

01:29:43.000 And the governorship is decided in such a very close way by the decisions that he made about how they're going to throw people off the voting rolls or which allocations of voting system technology will be made across the state.

01:29:59.000 This is a product of just making it political.

01:30:01.000 We could make it nonpolitical and might not have all of these kinds of problems.

01:30:05.000 We're dealing with this very unique landscape now of Google and Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and all these different social media groups that have a vested interest in a specific narrative being portrayed.

01:30:21.000 And one thing specifically is, and this is being addressed right now in Congress, is the discrimination against conservative voices.

01:30:30.000 And there's a lot of denial of that, but there's also a lot of evidence that that is the case and that they feel like they have some moral or ethical obligation to suppress certain conservative voices for whatever reason and push the narrative of progressive and liberal voices.

01:30:49.000 This is...

01:30:50.000 Very 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.

01:31:02.000 And the CNNs and the traditional news outlets.

01:31:07.000 Yeah.

01:31:08.000 So no doubt.

01:31:09.000 You know, there's a big debate about whether they were more important in 2016 than the cable stations.

01:31:16.000 My colleague, Gilchite Benkler, has a book that argues pretty powerfully.

01:31:19.000 I think that it was actually the cable stations that were more responsible for the result than the Facebooks.

01:31:25.000 But whether in 2016 they were more powerful, someday in the future they're going to be more powerful.

01:31:29.000 It's certainly powerful.

01:31:31.000 Absolutely.

01:31:32.000 And, you know, the question is what we mean by bias or discrimination here.

01:31:38.000 Like, you know, in 2017 in the fall, it was revealed that Facebook was selling ads for people who wanted to target, quote, Jew haters.

01:31:48.000 So you could go and you could buy ads for Jew-haters.

01:31:51.000 Now, there was never...

01:31:52.000 How did that work?

01:31:53.000 Okay.

01:31:53.000 I mean, you know, they have lots of categories you get to pick when you buy Facebook ads.

01:31:57.000 You know, liberals or people who voted, people over 60, whatever.

01:32:00.000 This was one of the categories that was exposed.

01:32:03.000 You could buy ads for Jew-haters.

01:32:04.000 There was an actual choice?

01:32:06.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:32:07.000 What?

01:32:07.000 Yeah, now...

01:32:08.000 I think?

01:32:31.000 So 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.

01:32:43.000 But from another perspective, you're like...

01:32:46.000 The machine's doing it, no doubt.

01:32:48.000 But to what extent do you want to say Facebook is doing it?

01:32:51.000 And I think that's often what you're going to see in this argument about whether they're, quote, biasing the system against one side or the other.

01:32:59.000 You know, like this hilarious hearing that was just held on Capitol Hill two days ago, I think.

01:33:05.000 Yes.

01:33:09.000 If you don't want negative results in the search, then don't do bad things.

01:33:14.000 That was quite funny.

01:33:16.000 It was really funny.

01:33:17.000 This is like nobody's intent.

01:33:20.000 We should explain that to people who don't know what we're talking about.

01:33:22.000 Yeah, so there was an argument about whether Google was tilting the ads to embarrass one side or the other.

01:33:31.000 I guess it was a congressman from Iowa, everybody.

01:33:35.000 That's the guy who didn't know that Google didn't make the iPhone?

01:33:38.000 Yeah, he got really embarrassed by that.

01:33:40.000 But 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.

01:33:51.000 And he's, like, outraged by this.

01:33:54.000 And, you know, so one theory is, you've got Google engineers down there saying, let's get Congressman Smith, so we're going to make it so every time you put Smith in there, up comes race-baiting.

01:34:01.000 But Google's response is, look...

01:34:03.000 We don't do individualized search results.

01:34:05.000 Like, we give people what we think people want based on what they've done in the past and what they've shown interest in.

01:34:11.000 And so that's what's producing this.

01:34:13.000 It's the machine that's producing this result.

01:34:15.000 And 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.

01:34:24.000 Yeah, if you don't want negative search results, don't do negative things.

01:34:28.000 Yeah, which is a pretty...

01:34:29.000 But I do think that there's a really hard problem here.

01:34:34.000 When 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?

01:34:41.000 This is just Facebook, though.

01:34:43.000 When you're talking about, or Google, rather, when you're talking about Twitter, Twitter has a different issue, and their issue is there's accusations of shadow banning.

01:34:54.000 That they have decided that they're going to silence certain voices or make them much more difficult to find or eliminate them from certain people's feeds.

01:35:03.000 And they're doing this, this is the allegation, that they're doing this based on their own personal preferences, their beliefs, their progressive ideology.

01:35:15.000 It wants them to lean left and somehow or another distribute that information in a much more left-leaning way.

01:35:24.000 Yeah.

01:35:24.000 And I hear these and I'm not an expert on what they're doing.

01:35:30.000 And I wouldn't be surprised if certain complaints come in about certain feeds and they say, we're going to take these off.

01:35:35.000 That's the allegation.

01:35:36.000 They haven't denied that.

01:35:38.000 And 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,

01:35:57.000 there's something wrong with what's going on there. 0.97

01:36:00.000 A child sex slave operation.

01:36:02.000 So I understand why they feel like they're responsible there and, you know, it was recognized from the very beginning these companies have said we're going to try to create a certain kind of environment. 0.72

01:36:11.000 Like, 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.

01:36:20.000 But look, I think the more fundamental problem here, you know, so what I've said so far people like Google and Facebook might like, here's stuff they're going to hate.

01:36:28.000 The more fundamental problem here Is that we have no antitrust enforcement of any of these companies – against any of these companies.

01:36:36.000 And we've allowed them to become so incredibly powerful without any justification under the law.

01:36:42.000 Trevor Burrus Isn't the issue though that this was never anticipated?

01:36:45.000 That 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.

01:36:53.000 But that's what it is.

01:36:55.000 Yeah.

01:36:56.000 They didn't expect – no doubt.

01:36:58.000 They didn't expect it to work exactly the way it worked.

01:37:00.000 But the antitrust law has, from the beginning, had standards that should have said we need to step in in certain places.

01:37:06.000 So, for example, in 2010, Facebook is facing a pretty powerful competitive threat from Instagram.

01:37:15.000 And the question is what they're going to do.

01:37:18.000 It's cooler to be Instagram.

01:37:20.000 Kids are using it.

01:37:21.000 The growth rate is much faster.

01:37:24.000 In an ordinary competitive market, what they would do is they would build a better product to compete with Instagram.

01:37:30.000 Their response was to write a check for a billion dollars, and they bought Instagram.

01:37:35.000 And 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.

01:37:44.000 Trevor Burrus Didn't they buy Boston Dynamics too?

01:37:47.000 Have they?

01:37:47.000 That's amazing.

01:37:48.000 There's a Wikipedia page that has like endless list of companies that they've never bought.

01:37:53.000 Yeah, they're buying robots.

01:37:54.000 Yeah, that makes sense.

01:37:57.000 Find out if that's true.

01:37:59.000 But the point is antitrust law in any of these moments should have and historically would have stepped in and said, wait a minute, wait a minute, you can't buy your way into complete dominance of these markets.

01:38:12.000 I 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.

01:38:22.000 So if we had a more competitive internet environment where companies had to compete against each other, You'd have companies that try to compete by protecting your privacy differently, by refusing to sell your information differently.

01:38:38.000 You'd have lots of pressure on companies like Facebook to behave, not because idiot senators who don't know how Facebook works are calling them before hearings, but because the market itself is creating the competition that drives them to behave in a way that actually conforms with what consumers want.

01:38:53.000 So I agree with you. 0.76

01:38:55.000 These are real questions and important questions to figure out.

01:38:58.000 Are they biasing in one way or the other?

01:38:59.000 And if they're biasing systematically, that's a really important problem.

01:39:03.000 But the solution to that problem might not be more government regulation.

01:39:07.000 The solution to that problem might be governments making sure we have the right kind of competition going on here so that they can't get away with behaving in this bad way.

01:39:16.000 What would be that right – is that a fact?

01:39:18.000 Google bought it and they actually sold it last year.

01:39:21.000 Oh.

01:39:21.000 Yeah.

01:39:22.000 Interesting.

01:39:23.000 Probably sold to the Russians! 1.00

01:39:24.000 The Japanese.

01:39:25.000 The Japanese.

01:39:29.000 What would be the right kind of competition?

01:39:31.000 It would have to be something that balances it out, right?

01:39:34.000 Like some sort of a right-wing social media platform.

01:39:37.000 But those tend to get infested with trolls and 4chan-type people.

01:39:42.000 As soon as you say, we're not going to have any regulation...

01:39:46.000 The idea would be, right?

01:39:48.000 You say...

01:39:49.000 Oh, Google and Facebook, they are so progressive.

01:39:52.000 They lean left.

01:39:53.000 They suppress conservative voices, and they don't believe in freedom of speech.

01:39:57.000 So we're going to create a right-wing platform that allows freedom of speech and doesn't suppress conservative voices.

01:40:05.000 And you know what happens to those things?

01:40:06.000 They get infested by 4chan people and the Pepe the Frog people, and they start saying racist things.

01:40:13.000 If I can say anything, I'll say anything.

01:40:15.000 Anything means anything.

01:40:16.000 And 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.

01:40:29.000 And people think, well, this is indicative of a person's actual real beliefs.

01:40:33.000 Eh, sometimes. 0.99

01:40:35.000 Sometimes it's bored people that are trying to fuck with people. 0.98

01:40:38.000 And they're trying to get a rise out of folks. 0.99

01:40:40.000 And they know that if they write a bunch of N-words and Heil Hitler, that it's going to get a reaction.

01:40:46.000 And then they'll check it every couple minutes to see what kind of...

01:40:48.000 Well, look at all these people getting mad.

01:40:50.000 Ha, ha, ha.

01:40:50.000 Like, this is what happens.

01:40:52.000 So it's...

01:40:53.000 Progressive tends to...

01:40:56.000 When you think of someone as being...

01:40:58.000 Progressive or having a progressive voice, you tend to think of being inclusive, not supporting homophobia, being open to all sorts of different marginalized groups' rights.

01:41:11.000 But when you think of conservative, you open the door for a lot of people that are rejected by these progressive groups, and they might not necessarily be conservative.

01:41:23.000 But they are not welcome in these progressive spaces.

01:41:26.000 So they come onto these new places and it turns into a dumpster fire.

01:41:31.000 Yeah.

01:41:32.000 Look, the story you just described is the story of cable television, right?

01:41:37.000 So 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.

01:41:46.000 And so they funded not just magazines like The New Republic, but they funded the beginning of cable television.

01:41:52.000 And 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.

01:42:04.000 Like what the nature of truth is on cable television on the right is different from what it is on the left.

01:42:10.000 I think that's all fair.

01:42:12.000 And I don't think anybody has a clear sense of what the right answer looks like in this space.

01:42:18.000 I mean, the reality is, you know, Facebook is a technology.

01:42:22.000 I mean, here, Facebook friends are going to really hate me for this.

01:42:24.000 But here, Facebook is a technology to exploit insecurity for the purpose of selling ads.

01:42:30.000 That's what it does.

01:42:31.000 What it does is make you feel like you check and you're like, why didn't she like that photograph?

01:42:36.000 Or why isn't he friended me?

01:42:38.000 And so you constantly engage because you're constantly trying to feed this, you know, feedback.

01:42:46.000 And that is exploiting Tristan Harris' work is really a powerful hero.

01:42:51.000 It's exploiting your insecurity.

01:42:53.000 Is that really what it is?

01:42:54.000 Because I've always thought about it as being a fast food version of the nutrients that we're missing in an actual real community.

01:43:01.000 That's so good.

01:43:02.000 That's exactly the right way to think about it.

01:43:04.000 But just in the same way that fast food companies figure out how to exploit the brain chemistry that makes it so that you eat chicken wings, you know, barbecue chicken wings, because they know that's what's going to feed that kind of addiction.

01:43:17.000 And just like gaming companies, We're good to go.

01:43:42.000 The better their ads are in feeding you information.

01:43:46.000 So this is a technology for the purpose of engendering advertising.

01:43:51.000 And so that advertising gets really, really good.

01:43:53.000 And so, you know, you could say that Facebook is tilted to the left, but the reality is there is an extraordinary amount of exploitation of the advertising inside of Facebook to feed information to the right in this last election.

01:44:05.000 I mean, this is what Kathleen Hall Jamison's book about this is really quite amazing and documenting.

01:44:11.000 And that's because it's gotten really good in being able to segment markets on the basis of what people know or care about.

01:44:18.000 Again, not because anybody planned it.

01:44:19.000 Nobody wrote Jew Hater, but because the AI is smart enough to figure that out.

01:44:23.000 And so when you build this technology that is driven to the purpose of making it easier to sell ads, You produce this world that has no necessary connection to people figuring out what the truth is.

01:44:37.000 Again, think of cable television.

01:44:39.000 Cable television is about building really loyal community, building the tribal sense of the community.

01:44:45.000 If telling the truth did that, they would tell the truth.

01:44:48.000 If not telling the truth does that, they will not tell the truth.

01:44:51.000 The question is not whether you're telling the truth or not.

01:44:54.000 The question is what builds the advertising base.

01:44:57.000 And so this reality that we have these platforms that are ad-driven, constructs, drives that platform to develop in certain ways.

01:45:08.000 And 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?

01:45:18.000 And this is something that, again, I think- How would they fund those?

01:45:21.000 Isn't that the reason why something like Google or Facebook has gotten so big is because there's so much money behind it?

01:45:26.000 Well, two things.

01:45:27.000 Because they've been allowed to get so big and because so much money behind it.

01:45:30.000 Well, who would stop them?

01:45:31.000 The antitrust departments.

01:45:32.000 So the antitrust department would step in and say, Facebook, you've become too successful.

01:45:36.000 The way you're buying up competitors is disturbing to us.

01:45:39.000 Well, but again, think of the difference in that sentence.

01:45:42.000 You've become so successful.

01:45:43.000 That's one sentence.

01:45:44.000 And what we want to do in America is encourage companies to become successful.

01:45:48.000 I believe in innovators and markets working.

01:45:51.000 That's really great.

01:45:52.000 But you've bought your competitor is a separate statement.

01:45:55.000 Like you have a bunch of money because the stock is so valuable because people think you're the future of money.

01:46:00.000 But then you turn and use that money to buy competitors.

01:46:05.000 What are you putting up, Jamie?

01:46:06.000 What is this?

01:46:06.000 That's the total number they've spent in the last, I don't know, I think it was seven years.

01:46:11.000 That's all the companies they bought.

01:46:12.000 Scroll back, don't move.

01:46:14.000 Total cost of acquisitions, what is that, $23 trillion?

01:46:18.000 No, billion.

01:46:18.000 Billion.

01:46:19.000 $23 billion, more than the gross domestic product of Fiji, Zimbabwe, and Maldives combined.

01:46:26.000 $19 billion of that was for that one WhatsApp.

01:46:29.000 Really?

01:46:29.000 Yeah.

01:46:30.000 Nineteen billion?

01:46:31.000 Yeah.

01:46:31.000 Holy.

01:46:32.000 That's insane.

01:46:34.000 Anyway, yeah.

01:46:34.000 But the point is when you're talking about acquisitions, you're not necessarily talking about companies that are succeeding because they're so good, right?

01:46:42.000 So when you say what are the alternatives going to look like, it's a really hard question.

01:46:46.000 But we have some of it in real space.

01:46:48.000 Like we understand NPR has a different set of incentives from Fox News.

01:46:54.000 We understand podcasts have a different set of incentives from YouTube videos, right?

01:46:59.000 YouTube videos have a different kind of constraint.

01:47:01.000 If you did a three-hour YouTube video, you would not live in the same way that you get to live in the context of podcasts.

01:47:09.000 But we do do a three-hour YouTube video.

01:47:11.000 But it doesn't get the success that it gets because it's a three-hour YouTube video.

01:47:15.000 It's because people are committed to your podcast.

01:47:17.000 I mean, I know these guys.

01:47:18.000 I carry it around.

01:47:19.000 And when you get to a place where it sounds like it's going to be interesting to see what's on the video, then they flip up the video.

01:47:25.000 But the average successful YouTube video, if you do a political YouTube video, you're told you can't be more than two and a half minutes.

01:47:32.000 Then you've lost people.

01:47:34.000 But the point is the environments...

01:47:36.000 I don't necessarily think that's correct.

01:47:38.000 Jordan Peterson is doing a lot of really long YouTube videos that are very successful.

01:47:41.000 I heard his podcast.

01:47:42.000 Yeah, there's a hunger right now for unedited thought.

01:47:49.000 Not unedited and uncensored in terms of language, but in terms of no one influencing what you're saying.

01:47:56.000 So if you decide to do a podcast or a thing on YouTube, Right.

01:48:09.000 Right.

01:48:11.000 Right.

01:48:19.000 I agree.

01:48:20.000 This is why I feel like there's got to be a market for news in that regard.

01:48:24.000 Like an actual, unbiased, uncensored, truly objective, centrist news station.

01:48:31.000 Well, again, I think that's the slow democracy movement that podcast feeds.

01:48:37.000 You know, because the reality is, if you had a simple way to be watching...

01:48:43.000 In every second of your two-hour, three-hour podcast, what was working and what was not.

01:48:50.000 It would be really hard for you to resist.

01:48:52.000 I would resist.

01:48:53.000 Okay.

01:48:53.000 I wouldn't pay attention to that thing for a second.

01:48:55.000 More power to you.

01:48:55.000 I've already been faced with that before.

01:48:57.000 People have said to me, you know, oh, well, this is when people start tuning in.

01:49:01.000 I'm like, throw that away.

01:49:02.000 Yeah.

01:49:02.000 But, you know, I know friends, Chris Hayes will tell you about life on MSNBC. See, that's because of advertiser dollars.

01:49:11.000 Okay, that's my point.

01:49:14.000 This is my whole point about this platform.

01:49:16.000 This platform is an advertising-driven platform.

01:49:19.000 That fact steers it in a certain way.

01:49:22.000 And I'm saying we need to build alternative platforms, which is what you're building in the podcast.

01:49:27.000 It's not like advertising is not important to your stuff.

01:49:30.000 Of course, you start with talking about certain products that help sponsor what you're doing.

01:49:34.000 So it's not anti-market.

01:49:35.000 It's all for market.

01:49:36.000 But the point is, it allows you to develop the content in a way that's not micromanaged.

01:49:42.000 By the advertising dollar or the market incentive.

01:49:46.000 And that's critically important.

01:49:47.000 It's also other people's incentive to get you to do things in a way that they feel will be more profitable so that everybody gains.

01:49:56.000 I don't have those other people.

01:49:58.000 So there's no one else.

01:49:59.000 But if I've done television shows before, when you do television shows before, you will have meetings with producers and they will have notes and they will tell you that this is hurting our bottom line and this is not good for that or we have to emphasize more this or the network wants that.

01:50:14.000 And it's really just about accentuating your ability to make more money.

01:50:18.000 Right.

01:50:18.000 Which is why we have to build these alternatives that can compete with the advertising-driven platforms.

01:50:24.000 Well, if you could get a really entertaining news show on YouTube, or, I mean, I guess the Young Turks sort of tried doing that, but they leaned so hard left.

01:50:34.000 But they attract an extraordinary number of people, and that's good.

01:50:38.000 But again, you know, we have this image of, like, news shows, you know, of a version of Walter Cronkite.

01:50:44.000 Maybe that's not what it is.

01:50:46.000 Maybe, you know, the Colbert Report is a news show.

01:50:49.000 Right, a joke, someone who's mocking it as they're delivering you the information.

01:50:52.000 But they're giving you the information, right?

01:50:54.000 I would like someone who's objective.

01:50:55.000 I would like someone who's really objective, who talks about the negative applications of whatever law or bill that's being discussed.

01:51:02.000 Like, what would be bad for everyone?

01:51:04.000 What would be good for Democrats, Republicans, poor people, rich people?

01:51:09.000 You don't get that.

01:51:10.000 There's no version of that available right now.

01:51:12.000 Every version leans towards whatever platform they're on, whether it's Fox News or MSNBC. Yeah.

01:51:19.000 I think not for a want of trying.

01:51:22.000 I just think the world doesn't support it right now.

01:51:25.000 But the world doesn't support it because people are so tribal.

01:51:29.000 Because they want to be either on the Fox News camp or they want to be in the MSNBC camp.

01:51:35.000 I really feel like there's a lot of people that just aren't being represented.

01:51:39.000 And folks like me, I want to know, what is happening?

01:51:43.000 Why is this the case?

01:51:45.000 Why is this leaning in this direction?

01:51:46.000 What's the real motivation behind this bill?

01:51:50.000 What's the real motivation behind these actions?

01:51:52.000 Yeah.

01:51:53.000 And the question is whether you're going to get it from a single person who purports to be, quote, objective, or whether you're going to get it from three or four people, like reading across these different perspectives.

01:52:05.000 When I was a kid, I was obsessed with the Soviet Union.

01:52:08.000 And in 1982, I went to the Soviet Union.

01:52:11.000 I was like, I guess I was 20, just turned 21. And I was hitchhiking through Eastern Europe, and then I went through the Soviet Union, and I was on a train in I'm from Leningrad to Moscow and sitting next to a professor.

01:52:27.000 I always seem to be followed by people who spoke English, but this guy spoke English.

01:52:31.000 And he said to me, you know, we have a better system of free speech in the Soviet Union than you do in America.

01:52:37.000 How dare he?

01:52:37.000 Yeah.

01:52:38.000 So I said, what the hell could that possibly mean?

01:52:40.000 And 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.

01:52:52.000 But we know when we read our newspapers, everybody's lying to us.

01:52:56.000 So we have to read seven or eight newspapers and triangulate on the truth.

01:53:01.000 And that makes us a more critical free speech society than America is.

01:53:07.000 And, you know, it's kind of funny at the time because, like, you realize they didn't have any—but there's a kernel of truth to that.

01:53:13.000 You know, when my dad gets an email that says, Barack Obama's a Muslim, he comes from the time when you just believe what's printed, even though it's not printed. 0.74

01:53:25.000 It's just an email.

01:53:26.000 And so he just kind of like, oh, my God, the president's a Muslim. 0.96

01:53:29.000 Right.

01:53:30.000 But my kid gets an email that says, Barack Obama is a Muslim.

01:53:34.000 He's like, yeah, well, I mean, what else?

01:53:37.000 He's going to be like you.

01:53:38.000 You want to see different views.

01:53:40.000 And so I think that in some sense, we are producing a culture, especially among our kids, Or at least one hopes.

01:54:08.000 I do definitely agree that young people are more skeptical and more aware of the possibilities of fuckery today than ever before.

01:54:16.000 Here's a funny story.

01:54:18.000 Michael 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.

01:54:39.000 So I look at that and I go, what kind of bullshit is this? 1.00

01:54:42.000 Would you get hacked? 1.00

01:54:43.000 So I sent him a message.

01:54:45.000 Say, hey dude, did you get hacked?

01:54:47.000 They sent him the message.

01:54:49.000 And he said, what?

01:54:50.000 There's a story about me.

01:54:51.000 And he logged in. 1.00

01:54:52.000 Oh, shit. 1.00

01:54:52.000 He's a fucking professional skeptic! 1.00

01:54:55.000 They got him! 1.00

01:54:56.000 But why?

01:54:56.000 Because he's older.

01:54:57.000 You know, I mean, I think guys that didn't grow up with that, or they don't know tricksters, they don't know the ways of it.

01:55:07.000 And it was a nightmare for him.

01:55:08.000 I mean, his whole system was screwed up.

01:55:12.000 Every time he would make a tweet, it would get deleted.

01:55:15.000 It was really bad.

01:55:17.000 I had to email them and go, dude, you got hacked.

01:55:20.000 Yeah.

01:55:20.000 No, it's a problem with us old people.

01:55:22.000 This is the way we live.

01:55:23.000 Well, it's just you grow up with one system and then all of a sudden you go, I don't know what to do here.

01:55:28.000 Oh, it says it needs my login.

01:55:30.000 Let me just give you...

01:55:31.000 And then all these pop-up boxes and...

01:55:34.000 Oh no!

01:55:35.000 The number of people who are being tricked into believing the IRS is calling them on the telephone and demanding that they pay.

01:55:42.000 Hilarious.

01:55:42.000 Hilarious and tragic.

01:55:44.000 Dude, they called me and told me they were going to put my whole family in jail.

01:55:48.000 My whole family.

01:55:49.000 They left a message, since you did not return our call, we will put your whole family in jail. 1.00

01:55:54.000 I'm like, damn, my whole family? 0.99

01:55:57.000 The dog, too? 0.99

01:55:58.000 Everybody!

01:55:59.000 What about the cats? 1.00

01:56:02.000 It's like, what the fuck, man? 0.99

01:56:03.000 Like, they're trying to freak people out, and it's, you know, an automated voice message. 1.00

01:56:07.000 But many people fall for it.

01:56:09.000 It's so sad.

01:56:11.000 A lot of old folks, yeah. 1.00

01:56:12.000 Yeah, old folks get roped into that stuff real hard. 0.99

01:56:15.000 It's very sad.

01:56:15.000 It's very sad because, you know, a lot of them are lonely, and, you know, they don't have a lot of companionship, and they get these messages, and they don't know who to turn to to explain it to.

01:56:24.000 Oh, my God, yeah.

01:56:25.000 Yeah.

01:56:26.000 And, you know, so is there a reason to be hopeful here?

01:56:29.000 Well, younger kids.

01:56:31.000 Yes.

01:56:32.000 And the other thing that makes me really hopeful is places like Reddit.

01:56:38.000 Which forums are you going to?

01:56:40.000 I know. 1.00

01:56:41.000 There's so much shit. 1.00

01:56:42.000 So much really bad stuff. 1.00

01:56:44.000 No, some of them are great, though.

01:56:45.000 But many of them are great.

01:56:46.000 But 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.

01:56:57.000 Like you kind of looked at the world in the 1970s, which I remember.

01:57:00.000 The 1970s, you kind of thought there were great people at the top.

01:57:03.000 You know, they were all on television and everybody else was kind of a troll.

01:57:07.000 But what Reddit does every day – I'm obsessed with certain of these feeds that just are amazing.

01:57:13.000 But it's like you read them like here's just some Joe Schmo out there that's taken a bunch of data and data is beautiful and like demonstrated something amazing by the way he's built it.

01:57:22.000 And you get the sense that the world is filled.

01:57:27.000 I think?

01:57:41.000 And the army is filled with so many incredibly talented people.

01:57:45.000 And the internet surfaces it.

01:57:47.000 It makes it possible for us to at least reach them.

01:57:51.000 And then the question is, can we use this power, leverage this power, and actually do something with the forces of evil that now control?

01:57:59.000 I 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.

01:58:15.000 Everybody was having a good time.

01:58:16.000 It was pretty crazy.

01:58:18.000 Even as they were getting kicked out, the rest of the audience was having a good time because we were making fun of it.

01:58:23.000 And I said, as these people were getting kicked out, I said, this is basically us.

01:58:29.000 Most of us are cool.

01:58:31.000 There's 150 people in here and out of the 150 people, 148 of them are having a great time.

01:58:39.000 Everyone's drinking and laughing and we're all these comedians and no one wants any extraordinary attention.

01:58:46.000 No one wants any special attention. 0.98

01:58:47.000 But two people fucked it up. 0.98

01:58:49.000 Now if you were next to those people... 1.00

01:58:52.000 You would say, oh, the crowd there sucks. 0.99

01:58:54.000 The people are always yelling things out and they're drunks and they heckle. 0.97

01:58:58.000 Well, because those two people require an exorbitant amount of attention.

01:59:02.000 They ask for more attention than anyone else.

01:59:05.000 And if you use that biased sample group, And say, well, this is the crowd.

01:59:10.000 The crowd is these drunk people that yell things out.

01:59:12.000 No.

01:59:13.000 The vast majority of the crowd are really polite, fun people, out having a good time, and they approached it with the perfect attitude.

01:59:20.000 I think this is the world.

01:59:23.000 I think the world is there's a small percentage of people that fuck things up for everybody.

01:59:28.000 And I think that this is in terms of politics, in terms of business, in terms of everything. 0.82

01:59:34.000 In terms of the net.

01:59:35.000 Yes, in terms of the net for sure.

01:59:37.000 And I think the net is a perfect example of that.

01:59:40.000 If you're a person that gets – if something happens to you and – People start attacking you online for it.

01:59:47.000 If you just noticed the number of people, like say you're involved in some sort of a story, right?

01:59:52.000 Say maybe there's a million people that know about this story, and you get 150 people send you mean things, you think it's the end of the world.

02:00:01.000 150 people!

02:00:02.000 You don't notice, you just see all these messages and it's unmanageable.

02:00:08.000 You're like, oh my god, everyone hates me.

02:00:10.000 No, 150 people have decided to take action and make you feel bad because they feel bad.

02:00:16.000 It's a small number in terms of the overall number of human beings.

02:00:20.000 But if you're Louis C.K. and it's coming at you, you're like, holy shit, the world fucking hates me. 1.00

02:00:29.000 The situation that we're in right now, we just have so many voices. 0.98

02:00:34.000 It's incredible though, because out of all those voices, as long as you're not personally trying to figure it out and filter it yourself, 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.

02:00:53.000 In our past, there's never been this many voices.

02:00:56.000 In our past, there's been, like you were talking about, a select few voices, the Walter Cronkites, whoever it is at the top, and then everyone else sort of had to wait for the narrative to be spelled out for them.

02:01:08.000 That's not the case anymore.

02:01:09.000 That's right.

02:01:09.000 And again, I think it's the best of times and the worst of times.

02:01:13.000 So it's the best of times because all these new voices...

02:01:16.000 Are bringing all sorts of great perspective and insight and intelligence to the story that wasn't there before.

02:01:22.000 And that's great.

02:01:24.000 The 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.

02:01:35.000 So 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.

02:01:45.000 Then the question is, how do we run a democracy?

02:01:48.000 Because if we could have all these different – I like to think about the difference between the culture channel and the democracy channel.

02:01:54.000 So in the culture channel, this is the best of times by orders of magnitude.

02:01:58.000 The stuff on television today is a billion times better than anything from the 1970s and 1980s.

02:02:04.000 And that's a product of this incredible competition and the fact that you can have – Anything, and any niche market, and as long as it's enough, it makes sense to do it.

02:02:14.000 And that's what's great.

02:02:16.000 But when you turn to the democracy channel, the same fragmentation, the same niche market, the same reality of us all living in these different universes means...

02:02:26.000 We can't address problems as a democracy with even the same facts.

02:02:30.000 And that's a real problem.

02:02:32.000 Because if we all live in our own fact universe, but we have to face the same real problems in the same real earth, then we're not going to decide them in any sensible way.

02:02:42.000 And how you solve that problem is really hard.

02:02:45.000 Like, we're not going back, thank God, we're not going back to the 1960s.

02:02:49.000 It's just not going to be the case that there are three channels we get to watch.

02:02:52.000 That's just not going to happen.

02:02:54.000 And it's a great thing because we've got all this amazing culture.

02:02:57.000 But what do we do on the democracy side?

02:02:59.000 How do we build a democracy recognizing that everybody's not going to spend all their time geeking out about campaign finance reform legislation?

02:03:07.000 And that's why I think we need to think about these other ways to bring people to some sensible understanding.

02:03:13.000 And, you know, Brian Callen and Hunter Matz were the first people that brought me into this.

02:03:18.000 Like they put me on their podcast podcast.

02:03:20.000 And 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?

02:03:30.000 How long did you guys talk for?

02:03:31.000 I think we talked for an hour, you know?

02:03:32.000 We're already done two hours and 15 minutes. 1.00

02:03:35.000 Holy shit. 0.99

02:03:36.000 Yeah, there's a time warp in this room. 1.00

02:03:37.000 Wow.

02:03:38.000 I can see that, yeah.

02:03:40.000 I mean, but I remember thinking, like, in the middle, like, I stopped, and I thought, whoa, this is the changing of the world.

02:03:47.000 This is it.

02:03:47.000 As opposed to those panel shows, those three talking heads talking over each other for five minutes.

02:03:51.000 When you're on these cable television shows and you've got 30 seconds to say something.

02:03:55.000 And, you know, you linked it before, and I think this is really the key.

02:03:59.000 It's exactly like diet.

02:04:01.000 Like, we recognize that we have been, like...

02:04:05.000 Put into a world right now where we all eat shitty food because it's been designed to make it so tasty.

02:04:10.000 Like, we love it, you know?

02:04:12.000 And the only way we reform that is if individuals, one by one, begin to decide to eat the right stuff, right?

02:04:19.000 You gotta decide.

02:04:20.000 To engage in the right kind of healthy behavior, to be able to survive in this world.

02:04:26.000 Because the incentives of the market are to sell you stuff that doesn't necessarily do that.

02:04:31.000 It's the same thing with the information space.

02:04:33.000 That's why the slow food movement is like the slow democracy movement.

02:04:38.000 Like 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.

02:04:45.000 I think the slow democracy movement, how do you feed a democracy?

02:04:48.000 And the elements to that have got to be contexts where people are free to get deeper than 30 seconds.

02:04:56.000 And if we don't build more of those, we're going to have a really desperate time for democracy.

02:05:01.000 We're going to have what we have, which is the rise of authoritarians around the world.

02:05:05.000 Do you foresee the possibility of alternative social media outlets sort of viewing all the issues that people do have with Google or Facebook or Twitter and any of these are perceived to be biased sources of information and coming up with something that has clear protections in there,

02:05:27.000 sort of like the Founding Fathers did when they established Our system of government.

02:05:33.000 Listen, we don't want that.

02:05:35.000 Let's organize that as we're starting to make sure that this doesn't ever turn into some sort of an echo chamber.

02:05:42.000 Yeah.

02:05:43.000 Look, it's way above my pay grade.

02:05:46.000 But what I know gets us there is competition.

02:05:49.000 I know that the only thing that has ever gotten us to the next great innovation is the enforcement of competition.

02:05:57.000 Which is why it's a problem when someone like Facebook buys Instagram.

02:06:00.000 What gave us the internet was interventions by the government against AT&T, which was the dominant telecommunications company for more than a century that finally said enough of this.

02:06:12.000 You can't leverage your power to control all innovation.

02:06:15.000 And once that Intervention happened.

02:06:18.000 People could layer on top of their wires a new network called the internet.

02:06:22.000 And when they did that, government said to companies like cable television companies, okay, yeah, you've got broadband across your cable line.

02:06:32.000 But that doesn't mean you get to decide what applications go on that cable line.

02:06:37.000 So you're the cable company.

02:06:40.000 You can't say that there can't be Netflix on the cable or you can't slow Netflix down.

02:06:46.000 Now, obviously, they would want to slow Netflix down because Netflix is a competitor with their basic business model.

02:06:53.000 But the intervention to assure competition Created the opportunity for these great new innovations.

02:07:00.000 Now, nobody at the beginning of that had any clue about what would come out of it.

02:07:04.000 All that they knew was that the only way to get something new and great was to assure competition.

02:07:10.000 And that's the commitment we've given up.

02:07:12.000 Since 2000, since George Bush became president, 2001, there's been no major enforcement action by the antitrust department against any of these companies.

02:07:23.000 And that is a huge problem.

02:07:25.000 And until we rediscover the importance of competition, not because we're geniuses and we can figure out what the future will bring, but because we know from the past that the only way the future comes is if you guarantee competition, unless we do that, we're never going to solve any of these problems.

02:07:41.000 Yeah, 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.

02:07:50.000 Right.

02:07:51.000 And 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.

02:08:02.000 But 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.

02:08:15.000 And this is the idea of political antitrust.

02:08:18.000 And the idea of political antitrust is you should also worry.

02:08:21.000 If companies are so big that they can corrupt the government, like this is a dimension to worry about too.

02:08:28.000 Because if they get to be so big that they can corrupt the government, then you know that they will use that power to protect themselves against innovation.

02:08:35.000 Because if an innovator comes, he doesn't come with 50 lobbyists.

02:08:39.000 He just comes with a great idea.

02:08:41.000 I mean, you know, Elon Musk saw this dramatically as he's developing this incredible alternative.

02:08:47.000 And tried to figure out how to sell it inside of states and then the lobbyists for the car companies would go state by state and forbid them from being able to sell cars without a local dealership in the state, right?

02:08:58.000 There was a huge fight as the incumbent industries leveraged their power over government.

02:09:04.000 To protect themselves from this new competitor.

02:09:06.000 And this is the fight we have to make central again.

02:09:11.000 Because if we don't do that, then the dinosaurs will have the power through this corrupted political system to protect themselves against the future.

02:09:18.000 And this is just the moment when we need to figure out how to make the future come.

02:09:22.000 I'm glad you're raising these warning flags, but I feel like from talking to you that you're fairly optimistic.

02:09:30.000 You're the first person who's ever said that about me.

02:09:32.000 Really?

02:09:33.000 I feel like you're optimistic.

02:09:34.000 Your 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.

02:09:49.000 Right?

02:09:49.000 I mean, there's more voices now, and there's a lot of...

02:09:54.000 Look, in the past, when you had to be selected in order to speak, it was very difficult to get through that selection process, and it's not necessarily the best voices that got through, it's just sometimes the most persistent and the most influential, whatever the reason why they got to be one of those people with the tie in that block on those panel shows.

02:10:14.000 That's not the case anymore.

02:10:16.000 Right.

02:10:16.000 You 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,

02:10:33.000 but they have a pretty influential voice.

02:10:35.000 Absolutely.

02:10:35.000 And 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.

02:10:49.000 It would be very, very difficult.

02:10:50.000 So you're optimistic too?

02:10:52.000 I'm very optimistic.

02:10:52.000 Okay, so I'm optimistic in that space.

02:10:54.000 I guess everything outside of the Beltway of Washington, I'm optimistic about.

02:10:58.000 I think America has an incredible capacity to innovate out of its problems.

02:11:03.000 What I fear and what I'm not sure any rational person should be optimistic about, but that doesn't mean you don't fight it.

02:11:09.000 What I fear is Washington.

02:11:10.000 And so I've said many times that the power of corruption in Washington might be so great that it cannot be defeated.

02:11:22.000 But that doesn't affect what we should be doing.

02:11:24.000 We should be fighting it whether or not we think we can win.

02:11:28.000 Like, winning is not the only reason you fight.

02:11:29.000 You fight because it's the right thing to do.

02:11:31.000 And we need to rally because we might be wrong.

02:11:34.000 It could be.

02:11:35.000 It could just be that if we got the political force, we could take them down.

02:11:40.000 And I think that's what we've got to be setting up for right now.

02:11:42.000 When you see people like Tulsi Gabbard or when you see the young woman in New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to me, that's very promising that people are leaning in this direction and that they're saying, let's look at this in a different way and let's see some new voices.

02:12:02.000 Let's hear people that are clearly not influenced by corporate America.

02:12:07.000 They don't have all of their veins hooked up to the matrix yet.

02:12:12.000 Yeah.

02:12:13.000 No, Tulsi, I had known before your interview with her.

02:12:17.000 Your interview with her, I think, gave people an incredible understanding of the depth of her soul, which is deep. 0.98

02:12:22.000 How about when she tweeted to the president, making us Saudi Arabia's bitch is not putting us America first? 1.00

02:12:27.000 So she can both do the deep and also the shallow. 1.00

02:12:31.000 She can do both.

02:12:31.000 That's amazing.

02:12:32.000 That is an unprecedented thing, too, because what Trump has done is, like, he's opened up the door for this kind of very hostile communication, but what he's also done is open up the door for it to come back at him.

02:12:45.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:12:46.000 Not that he notices, but you're right.

02:12:48.000 Exactly right.

02:12:48.000 The rest of the world notices, though.

02:12:50.000 But what I think is interesting about Alexandria is she is very disciplined.

02:12:54.000 Yeah.

02:12:54.000 I think about saying, look, we got to fix the system if we're going to get any of these things done.

02:12:59.000 So I like to think about like Exandio versus Bernie.

02:13:02.000 So she like – every time she gets up there and talks about her green energy New Deal, it's like you got to fix the political system and then we're going to be able to get this stuff.

02:13:13.000 As opposed to like putting a list of 10 things you want to do without anywhere even mentioning the fact that you're going to make these things possible by fixing the political system.

02:13:22.000 I think we need new people.

02:13:24.000 This new Congress is filled with them.

02:13:26.000 There 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.

02:13:36.000 And Nancy Pelosi gave them not just that but all these other reforms too. 0.89

02:13:40.000 That's H.R. 1. The younger people coming into Congress realize the system is broken.

02:13:45.000 I fear the older people in Congress have gotten so used to the system that they don't even notice anymore just how broken it is, how outrageous it is. 0.68

02:13:52.000 And they need to rage, so they're going to rage against the billionaires or whatever, but I think we need to focus the rage on the problem, and that problem is Congress.

02:14:01.000 If we don't fix Congress first, nothing else matters.

02:14:04.000 Nothing else will happen.

02:14:06.000 And we need to build the movement, which I think could actually be a movement that brings people on the right and people on the left in to make that change possible.

02:14:15.000 That's the philosophy that you have to have darkness in order to inspire light, and that there's some sort of a balance to be achieved in this managing of those two energies.

02:14:25.000 And that when you have an administration that's clearly fucked up, and then people come along and say, it's time that I get into politics and make a difference.

02:14:35.000 These are the people that are motivated because they see a need for change, whereas... 0.96

02:14:40.000 Some people with other administrations are like, I like the way things are going.

02:14:43.000 I'm going to go pursue the private sector.

02:14:45.000 I'm going to go do this.

02:14:46.000 People see something like what's happening with Trump and they say, I want to stop this.

02:14:53.000 This is not the America that I know.

02:14:54.000 Right.

02:14:55.000 There are people entering politics for the best possible reasons.

02:14:58.000 And I think people on the right have entered politics for the best possible reason and people on the left too.

02:15:02.000 The question is, how quickly do they get bent?

02:15:09.000 The dark side of the force.

02:15:26.000 You know, to be a member of Congress right now is a pretty miserable job.

02:15:30.000 You don't get much done. 0.94

02:15:31.000 Like you're spending all your time like rats in a maze.

02:15:34.000 Like the bell goes off.

02:15:35.000 You got to run to the floor.

02:15:36.000 Your aide tells you how you're to vote.

02:15:38.000 You vote, then you leave from the floor.

02:15:40.000 It's nothing like what the framers imagined.

02:15:42.000 Like they were sitting on the floor listening to debate about ideas. 1.00

02:15:45.000 All that's bullshit. 0.99

02:15:45.000 The only debate is debate to C-SPAN. It's like a speech to C-SPAN and that's what it is. 0.99

02:15:51.000 So the life of a congressman is pretty miserable.

02:15:54.000 But when they fundraise, it's kind of like push-ups.

02:15:58.000 You know, it's like they sit down and they're told, okay, you've got to raise $20,000.

02:16:03.000 And the aides sit there and say, call Joe, he cares about this.

02:16:07.000 And call Fred, and he cares about that.

02:16:08.000 And you go through.

02:16:09.000 And when you hit your numbers, it's like, hooray, I did something.

02:16:12.000 So it's like you feel like you're accomplishing something.

02:16:16.000 But 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.

02:16:25.000 You've won under that system.

02:16:27.000 And so your openness to changing the system becomes really sketchy.

02:16:31.000 So I think the critical moment right now is to solidify the recognition.

02:16:36.000 This Congress is corrupted, and we have to fix it.

02:16:41.000 And, 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.

02:16:47.000 It's like the Democrats care about it.

02:16:48.000 So the Republicans are supposed to not care about it.

02:16:50.000 The critical thing now is to get Republicans to support the idea of reform and then make it something other than just a traditional tribal fight between left and right.

02:16:59.000 Are you optimistic?

02:17:01.000 Was I correct in that?

02:17:04.000 I'm optimistic about everything outside of the Beltway, and I'm going to fight like hell to prove that we can fix stuff inside the Beltway.

02:17:12.000 But if you told me I had to bet on my son or daughter's life, I'm not going to tell you that I think we're going to.

02:17:17.000 Yeah, I would never ask you to do that.

02:17:18.000 Okay, good.

02:17:19.000 All right.

02:17:19.000 That we're clear.

02:17:21.000 Thank you for doing this.

02:17:21.000 I really appreciate it.

02:17:22.000 I really enjoyed talking to you.

02:17:23.000 Let's do this again.

02:17:24.000 Hopefully you'll be right.

02:17:25.000 Every time you ask.

02:17:27.000 All right.

02:17:27.000 We'll do it.

02:17:28.000 Thank you, sir.

02:17:28.000 Appreciate it.

The Joe Rogan Experience - December 13, 2018

Joe Rogan Experience #1214 - Lawrence Lessig

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