Lawrence Lessig

00:01three two one and we're live how are you sir hey I'm great thanks for being here man I really appreciate it it is the coolest thing I've done really ever I watched your TED talk on what was the word that used Lester land Lester yeah and it felt hopeless like 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 complete completely rigged our election system is and and what what it actually takes to be elected and how much of the time they spend is involved in raising money and why yes so we've got a system where we have a money primary and then we have a regular election and in the money primary to compete you gotta raise tons of money to be able to fund your campaign and when you raise that money you raise it from a tiny tiny fraction of the 1% so unless in the in the TED talk about Lester no I said you know

01:10imagine a place called Lester land where basically it's the Lester's who rule and by the Lester's I mean the same proportion of people named Lester as in the United States right now so there's about a hundred and fifty thousand Americans named Lester I'm one of them but here we are the Lester's so imagine a world ruled by Lester land because that's essentially the world we have because of the way we fund our campaigns because there's about a hundred and fifty thousand men who give even just the maximum contribution to one political candidate if you ask who the number of people who give the maximum contribution over the course of a campaign meaning in the primary in the general election it's about twenty-two thousand Americans in 2014 who gave them maximum contribution to one political campaign so what that means is it's a tiny tiny fraction who are the most

02:05important funders of political campaigns and candidates for Congress and members of Congress spent thirty to seventy their time sucking up to this tiny tiny fraction and so is it any surprise that you see Congress bending over backwards to keep those guys happy because they know without those people they don't have a shot at getting back into Congress and the way you were describing it as when you're saying it as lesterland it was like imagine if we were this screwed up that was essentially what you're saying yeah but we're more screwed up than is lesterland yeah that was a disturbing video because I was realized it was emerging as you were speaking I was like wait a minute is it that bad yeah you know it's I actually since that video I've come to think it's even worse so guys a clarence land well it could be worse because it's even smaller number and if you look at the number of super

03:07PAC donors you know the really critical super PAC down about a hundred people who gave more than half of the super PAC money in the last presidential election you know a hundred you know so this is a really tiny tiny number but what this tiny number represents in the way we fund campaigns is the extraordinary inequality on that dimension right but since since I was focused on the money I've you know more recently but start thinking about the other screwed up dimensions so think about gerrymandering you know we gerrymander districts in America so that about 85 percent of the House seats in the United States Congress our safe seats which means if you're a Republican in a safe seat democratic district your views just never matter to the Congress person because that vote of a Republican will never determine who's in Congress or a Democrat and safe seat Republican

04:00district that's that's the same okay but that doesn't mean those Congress people are not afraid about re-election of course they are afraid about whether they'll be reelected but they're afraid not of a Democrat running against a Republican they're afraid of an even more extreme Republican running against the incumbent Republican so what those incumbents in those safe seat districts do is they obsess about what the extremists in their own party cares about so the extremists on the left and the right have this ability to leverage extraordinary influence inside of the House of Representatives simply because we've decided to gerrymander these districts to create these safe seats so those extremists are a kind of Lester's too there are more of them you know it's more democratic than lesterland but they too have enormous influence over ordinary people and most ordinary

04:52people's views then to these Congress people just don't matter that feels hopeless for a dummy like me sitting on the outside looking at this and like God if this is this deeply entrenched with 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 that I mean how do you unwind this yeah so that point is really critical it's not technically illegal hmm and what that means is the people are engaged in this are not doing wrong things they're just playing by the rules right they're playing with the system it's just that the system has become corrupted when did it start well I think that the moment the United States Congress begins to fall apart in a really dramatic and interesting way is when Newt Gingrich becomes Speaker of the House so when the Republicans take control of Congress in 95 it's the first

05:57time the Republicans have taken control of the House of Representatives in 40 years so the house becomes incredibly competitive each election you know is up for grabs who's going to control the house so Gingrich turns his members in the house into perpetual fundraisers it's basically we got to raise the money to defend ourselves the next time around and then the Democrats followed suit so the Democrats turned their members into perpetual fundraisers and they changed the rules about like who gets to be chairmen of committees it's no longer like who's the person with the most experience or the most insight increasingly becomes who raises the most money and the democratic party I know about the Democratic Party the Republicans don't talk to me much but the Democratic Party increasingly changes its focus from what are the policies that our members care about -

06:44what are we going to do to make sure that you as a member meet your fundraising target and so from 95 until today the institution becomes an institution focused on the game of getting reelected I'm Jim Cooper a Democrat from Tennessee who went to Congress first in like 1983 so he's been there for a long time Cooper says Capitol Hill has become a kind of farm League for K Street okay so what do you mean by that is members go there they learn how to raise money they become focused obsessively on raising money but one of the things that they're really focused on it's how do they go from Capitol Hill to becoming a lobbyist because that's where the real money is you know a member of Congress gets paid about as much as the students I ate at the Harvard Law School in their first year as lawyers you know so to ordinary Americans it's a lot of money but two

07:34people on Capitol Hill doesn't seem like a lot of money but then they go and become a lobbyist they can make ten times that as a lobbyist and so what Cooper says is you have this institution which has become so focused on the money that it's it's just institution for producing influence that can be sold and first the congressmen are basically sucking up to the people who want to buy influence and then the congressmen become the people buying influence themselves because they're working as lobbyists for these important interests so they're in the rigged game they understand how it gets rigged and then they work to rig it yeah yeah they could they see this is their business their honeypot yeah and there's whatever the district is outside of Washington DC in Virginia where there's some ungodly number of wealthy people per capita where there's more there's more

08:27lobbyists in that area than anywhere else in the United States right and that's this is a giant collection of wealth right Washington DC is an incredibly prosperous place and anybody who's been there um you know for a long who've seen it for a long time like I I clerked there in the early 1990s and it was a pretty grungy place but it's a really opulent City now it's like the golden city on the hill you know the Oz 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 it's a weird place though because even though it's incredibly wealthy it's also incredibly Pullen there's a vast difference yeah the the spectrum is really wide because

09:22I mean that was one in the 90s was that that's the Marion Barry time right yeah so this one I mean he won as mayor again when he came back after being arrested for smoking crack yeah and people like whatever yeah a little crack yeah it's it was an ugly place then it's becoming you know grotesque place now from the from the standpoint of the principles of what America is supposed to be yeah because the privilege there are not people who are privileged because they have you know Elon Musk like invented a great new product or they've worked incredibly hard in a competitive marketplace and succeeded their privilege because they've leveraged influence in a corrupt system to to profit and the people who are failing they're you know a lot of reasons they're failing is just we don't have a competitive powerful economy that gives them any opportunities right now because

10:16that that district Washington DC because it's got no effective representation is one of the worst represented districts in the country so essentially this all started out with Newt Gingrich's group and they decided to spend so much time concentrating on fund raising and then once that became successful everyone else followed suit yeah yeah so the game became no longer how do we legislate for America but how do we rally our troops to raise the money we need to win in the next election the game is just about the election I mean you know my mother lives in in Hilton Head which is of course a very Republican district but they elected their first Democrat Joe Cunningham and Joe my mother loved him and wanted to support him my mother's a Republican but here he was she wanted to support a Democrat so I said I check for on her behalf - this Democrat the day he was elected

11:07he started raising money for the next election his whole focus from that moment on and now he started a big membership organization where they can get members to sort of help him sort of get back to Congress the next time around their sole focus is the elections and this is really different in the 1980s you know they would go to Washington for 18 months they would do the work of governing and then for six months they do the work of politicking so you know to a year and a half they could figure out how to solve the problems of America and then for a half a year they figured out how to get reelected that's no longer the game the game now is from day one how do we raise the funds we need to make sure we can get reelected and with the Democrats extraordinary turnaround in this last election you can be damn sure that's exactly the obsessive focus that will be

11:56going into 2020 and if there's no other viable alternative this is a game that they have to play yeah good people have to play it this is the point it's not like you can have the good people who say I'm not gonna play this game I mean there are some famous people who could say I'm not gonna play this game you know Alexandria okay Joe Cortez I mean she doesn't have to raise money I'm sure and people on the right - you know who are the famous people all right they don't have to worry about this but the ordinary Congress person knows given the way the system is right now they've got to obsessively focus on how to raise money you know what they not but that means is they develop a sixth sense a constant awareness about how what they do will affect their ability to raise money become in the words of the x-files shapeshifters as they constantly adjust their views in

12:44light of what they know will help them to raise money there's a congressman 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 she went on you know he was not an environmentalist so the point is like you know in your heart of hearts which way you got to go to make sure and if you're good and you're smart you'd never say anything to indicate it but it's operating but sometimes you're not so smart so in the tax bill the leading up to the passage of the last tax cut you know the one point six trillion dollar gift to corporations and Elfi people primarily a 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 I should never call him again I should never call them again so it's basically

13:34you know as simple and clear as possible you don't reduce our taxes don't ever ask us for more money and and that's the reality of what Washington has become now once this gets started and it moves in this direction we don't have a long history of this to understand the the waves and the ins and the outs of the tide it just this is what it is and it keeps moving in the same general direction how would at that ever stop how would there ever be some sort of reform that puts this back into a position where it makes sense and it's tenable yeah so you know I've been in this business for about 12 years now in the business of like trying to figure out what can we do yeah to reform this corrupted system and you know part of me feels as you said like it's hopeless but part of me feels like it's the most hopeful moment we've seen because like a decade ago when I would go around and

14:29say you know we got this really corrupted system and like money is really people say no when are you talking about no we just have to focus on getting the people we want elected and if we get the people we want to like it we'll get the policies we all want past now almost everybody realizes that until we fix this broken Congress nothing else can happen so it's not like this is the most important issue out there you know you can think climate change or healthcare or jobs or competitive you can think those are the important issues but what people increasingly seeing is that this is the first issue if we don't fix this we don't fix anything and what's really encouraging to me is that that frame is increasingly being embraced by important leaders so you know about six years ago I think Nancy Pelosi was on Jon Stewart's show The Daily Show and Stewart said you know the

15:23whole system is corrupt and Nancy Pelosi's no no the system's not corrupt it people in the system are corrupt but the Pistons not corrupt and Jon Stewart just had a field day because of how ridiculous that statement is now but now Nancy Pelosi is going to introduce as HR 1 the most ambitious and comprehensive reform package that Washington I think has ever seen I mean it is unbelievable in its breadth so it has public funding of congressional campaigns so that congressmen don't spend 30 to 70 percent of their time sucking up to look to the Lester's it has a mandate to end gerrymandering political partisan gerrymandering exercising Congress's power under the Constitution to tell the states clean this mess up it has an incredible ethics package to kind of close block the revolving door so congressman or not running off to K Street and it has an incredible restoration of voting rights the

16:25reservoir rate restoration was Voting Rights Act automatic voter registration it's the most comprehensive package of political reform I think the civil rights bill of the generation but of course nobody outside of Washington has heard anything about it because most people look at what Washington does and says it's just a game the Democrats are playing to embarrass the Republicans how would they stop congressmen from becoming lobbyists well one thing they do and then the loopholes into it but one thing they can do is they can basically say once your Congressman you can't be a lobbyist for five years and for five years yeah or whatever the time is but the more fundamental fact is you know if you change the way you fund campaigns if it was no longer the lobbyists who were kind of channeling the money in or that were getting their clients to channel the money in then

17:15it's not like there wouldn't be lobbyists anymore they just wouldn't be so well paid they wouldn't be as valuable hmm 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 konk lobbyist you know they would become almost like you know lawyers policy wants they kind of go to Capitol Hill and say here's what will happen if you adopt this legislation you know that's an important part of the process but they wouldn't be the mockers in the system they wouldn't be the people who called the shots and so the value of their services would fall and if the value of their services fell then it wouldn't make so much sense to go and become a lobbyist maybe you'd come home and be a doctor again or come home and like be a businessperson again or do whatever you want back in your district so I think if you change the way you

17:59fund campaigns you would change 70% of the problem you would just fix it right then and these other things are good additions but not as critical but without changing the way you fund campaigns I think all of these other changes are irrelevant I just can't get over the money you always hear the phrase take money out of politics it's a constant phrase but that's not really possible no and I don't think it's really good but no it isn't the point isn't to get money out the point is to get money that doesn't represent a tiny fraction of the special interests controlling how Congress people think so I think today a congressman from California wrote Kahana is gonna introduce a bill that he hopes will be eventually part of whatever this big reform package is that would create a way of funding campaigns where everybody gets a voucher or a set of vouchers you

18:52know so Seattle has done this for city elections where everybody gets four twenty five dollar vouchers that are only usable to fund campaigns so a candidate comes around and tries to persuade you to give him or her the voucher and then they take that voucher and they use it to fund campaigns okay if roe kahan is 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 fifty dollars to the federal government you take that first fifty dollars you give it back and you give it in the form of a voucher and you say take this voucher and help fund campaigns with it congressmen would still be raising money they'd still be spending a large time raising money but they wouldn't be raising money from the tiny fraction of the 1% they'd be

19:39raising money from everybody and so the point is that you would be using that money to spread the influence in the way that a democracy is supposed to spread the influence to every American as opposed to the influence in a tiny tiny fraction of the 1% so that wouldn't get less money I think that could be more money in the system but it wouldn't be corrupting money because it would be money that is product accountable but the Lester's of the world would probably try to put the kibosh on yeah before it ever got moving yeah I mean you know the biggest block to anything like HR 1 happening is that the most influential people in Washington have the most to lose right the lobbyists you know the value of the industry of lobbying just collapses and those people are gonna fight like hell to block it yeah which is why as wonderful as it is to me to see somebody like Nancy Pelosi

20:31take up the charge and say here it is here's a package of reform it can be the first thing we do fix democracy first what what's true what's obvious about this is without a president taking up the charge it's never gonna happen and what's most depressing to me is that right now in the Democratic Party you don't have any candidate for president who's making reform even an important issue let alone a primary issue and of course we had a president who was elected under the drain the swamp slogan but of course nobody believes he has any plan or have any intent to do anything to trade in that swamp yeah I'm hoping that having him in office is such a that the whole thing was such a and and that so many people are so disturbed that it's gonna make people more politically active yeah and more aware of the consequences of having someone like that in office yeah and

21:23actually weirdly unifying yeah because even though the Democrats are not doing this right now which is really depressing to me you know we we have these things that we know we disagree about and we like fuel the politics of hate as we kind of yell at each other about these things but there's a set of issues that we all agree about and the the most important set of issues we all agree about is the deeply corrupted nature of this government there was a poll done by a University of Maryland the middle of 2016 but asking about anger and frustration with government found the highest level of frustration in the history of polling and then when they asked the reasons why they were so angry and so disaffected with her government the reasons people gave were all the same things like the influence of money the influence of lobbyists the parties care more about corporations

22:14about and then then we broke them down about how do Republicans think about this and how do Democrats think about this there was no statistical difference between Republicans and Democrats hmm you know sometimes the Democrats were more concerned sometimes the Republicans and the levels were at like eighty and ninety percent so literally eighty four percent of Americans would say it is big money that is corrupting the way our Congress functions right so here is common ground and what was so extraordinary about the 2016 election is watch a Republican candidate stand on a debate stage you know in September of 2015 Donald Trump stood on a debate stage and pointed to every one of those candidates and said I own all of you I've given all of you money and I know the way the system works and the system is corrupt and he called super PACs an abomination and he attacked the idea of money in

23:01politics and so what that signaled is that Republicans too could be rallied to this cause of addressing this deeply corrupted political system if only we could find the candidates who would do it and I think what Donald Trump has done is teed up this moment where we can step back and say look we disagree about a lot of things whether it's GMO or climate change whether it's health care for all or college for all whatever we disagree about a loving we got to work a lot of things out but here is something we all agree about and we should be smart enough to realize if we don't fix this the none of the things were arguing about matter you know you can't it's not serious to stand on a debate stage and say you you support single-payer health care without also saying but first we're gonna fix this corrupted system because there's no way to get single-payer

23:51health care in a world where doctors and pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies are funding elections you can't say you're going to get climate change legislation in America without addressing the corrupting influence of money in politics because the oil come that the dirty energy industry has an enormous opportunity to block this change through the way we fund campaigns so this is a moment where we should be able to get everybody in this political system to step back and say hey wait the system is broken we can see it's broken the first thing we have to do is to fix the broken Congress and if we fix that Congo then we have a chance to have an argument about what policy makes sense for America and and we each have our views but no views are different but the thing we don't agree about we should be able to agree on now if that's a universal agreement amongst Republicans

24:41and Democrats that funding and that money and that all this is what's ruining politics the the people that are donating all this money that the these the Lester's of the world what could they possibly do to stop this reform and what's their reaction to this kind of reform yeah yeah so let me be clear about one really important thing I when I say Republicans and Democrats what I mean is people in the districts across magazine Washington right you know like Mitch McConnell is you know I think the focus of evil in the modern world Mitch McConnell will block any reform here at all so you know Nancy Pelosi can offer what she wants but it'll never get through the Senate because of Mitch McConnell and so there are many Republicans in Washington we're gonna block in it reform but um but when you ask you know the Republicans in Washington and the Lester's what can they do to stop it

25:37well again the game strategy is clear they've deployed it before right so you know they'll say things like this is welfare for politicians this is just corrupting free speech you don't believe in the First Amendment if you don't believe that you know the Koch brothers or the Soros is have the right to spend unlimited amounts of money in political speech and so I think the way around that fight is to agree free speech is the fundamental value and nothing of the reforms I support would like try to restrict people's ability to speak what we're talking about is congressmen raising money we're not talking about individuals speaking in the marketplace so you have a very loud voice Joe your voice is heard by millions and nothing in our Constitution should permit the government to be able to suppress you at all so long as you're within the bounds of decency or at least not decency

26:37because that's not a bound boundary yes obeys often but but at least if you're not you know spreading false rumors and causing great harm but the point is on even though this free speech needs to be protected we still should be able to focus on the influence the economy of influence congressmen live under when they spend 30 to 70 percent of time sucking up to the Lester's to fund their campaigns that should be a focus of regulation without the First Amendment getting in the way because we want a congress filled with people who care about what their voters want not what their funders want the framers didn't create a constitution to replicate an aristocracy they were fighting an aristocracy they had a system where there was a house the House of Lords they had to ask the aristocracy what do you want and everything could be blocked if the aristocracy didn't like

27:31it well we've replicated that system more efficiently in America than they had there because we have a system where both the House of Representatives and the Senate is filled with people who are obsessed with a single question what - my funders want and if they can't answer that question in a way that supports the legislation and they're not going to support the legislation or if it's important for them to block legislation they will block legislation and that's the dynamic of Washington right now um francis fukuyama describes our government as a V tock receive veto ah cracy and what he means by that is that there are so many places or influence powerful influence can block the ability of the government to do something that it just can't do anything anymore and that's I think the consequence of allowing this corruption of money to be so deeply woven into our political

28:24system is it possible to fix yeah it is possible to fix because you know for example HR 1 + Row kahana's bill all perfectly constitutional you don't have to amend the Constitution to do it I think that bill alone would solve 80% of the problem the possibility the problem isn't like conceiving of what changes have to happen the question is how do you build the political movement to get there and what that takes is leaders willing to say we have to fix this corrupted democracy first and and leaders who stop like pretending that we can get like a Christmas list of great changes in government without fixing this democracy first so you know Bernie published last month in the Washington Post list of the ten things that should happen in the first hundred days in the next democratic administration ten great ideas not a single one of those ideas address the corruption of our political

29:24system you know it was just a it was just a Christmas list of all the things that the progressives want and you know I'm a progressive I want some of those things but the point is like what things were there well you know things like a trillion dollar infrastructure project single-payer health care free college you know all the things that bernie is pushing and has made so sale it and things that I think it's great that he has made salient I mean he's a hero and like making these issues central to at least the debate but what frustrates me is that instead of focusing our anger on the billionaire's which he does we need to focus more anger on the congressmen the politicians which he does not I mean the guy's been in Congress for almost thirty years now and so it might be natural for him not to notice that the people around him are the problem is it a natural thing or do you think that

30:12he's possibly aware of the consequences of stirring up that hornet's nest because you know if anybody has a right to complain when the DNC conspired to rig the primaries against him he's the number one guy he should be screaming from the rooftops you're dealing with a corrupt system and this is disgusting and he didn't 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 just kept his mouth shut yeah well I think you know that was a responsibility I think that was a kind of you know I was a person reflecting on the horrendous outcome if he took Hillary Clinton down and so I think he restrained himself you know now perfectly I mean the fact is after it was clear he was not gonna be the nominee he's still continued to talk

31:05about the court corruption hillarie which Donald then picked up and moved into a weapon against her but I think he recognizes you know as every responsible politician does that you know it's not just about him it's about the future of America so when he restrained himself and didn't want to take the whole system down then um I I get that but what I'm talking about now right I'm talking about when you've got the House of Representatives talking about fundamental reform it'll be the first thing they take up we at least ought to have a presidential campaign where candidates are saying hell yes the first thing we will do is to end the corruption that makes it impossible for this Congress to function and stop pretending like we can get all these wonderful things given to us by Santa Claus without fixing this first you got to do the hard work of convincing

31:51America that there is a solution because you know the reality is I think most of America is where you started this podcast most of America thinks it's deeply corrupted and there's nothing that can be done they're half right it is deeply corrupted but it's not true there's nothing that can be done we can do something and in fact I think we can solve almost you know 80% of it I I still think there's constitutional changes it might be necessary and I've been working like how do we get constitutional changes and talking to people up my my podcast which of course has about one one thousandth of the one one millionth of the people listening to it yours does what is your progress so people can listen it's another way so season two is released today which is about an article five convention but season one is about how to think about the 2020 election but you know I I think

32:41that we might have to have constitutional change and I have been supporting the efforts to think about that but what we've got to do is to give people a sense that there's something we can do before we amend the Constitution you know we did a poll and found 96% of Americans believe it important to reduce the influence of money in politics ninety-one percent didn't think it was possible so that's the politics of resignation you know if you've 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 they would have said you know we hate Mubarak and then say why aren't you doing anything about it and they say because nothing can be done or you know african-americans didn't I 1800 in America what do you think about Jim Crow you know we hate Jim Crow why aren't you doing anything about it well

33:26because there's nothing to be done about it well that's how Americans think about this political corruption they hate it they think it's deeply unjust inconsistent with what they thought America was about but they don't do anything about it because they don't think there's anything to be done about it and that's where leaders have a role and what we need are leaders running for president right now to begin to explain to people here's what we could do if only we built the power to do it recognizing the most important opposition here the lobbyists in Washington are going to be an incredibly difficult group to to defeat but we can do that and if we do that every other issue becomes easier to resolve in a sensible way now there's no public support for lobbyists right there's no there's no people out there that are super psyched that lobbyists are out there and in exerting their influence on

34:18our world but they obviously have enormous financial backing behind them and they have incredible influence in our in our culture but if you had some magic wand you could wave across this system and fix it wouldn't removing lobbyists be one of the first things that you would do no no why so well because look you know Congress especially in the current government legislates on a whole bunch of issues mm-hmm that they don't have a clue about right they don't know squat diddly about 99 percent of what they're legislating about they need information um one of the other things Gingrich did was to completely emaciate Congress's own information service they used to have a really powerful information service to help congressmen figure things out all that's basically gone so they rely on outsiders to come in and help them understand it now my view is you know that's an imperfect system because

35:19there's great inequality among the quality of lobbyists but if all lobbyists were doing was providing information like congressman here's what's going to happen if you pass this bill like these jobs will disappear or this lead will reappear in the water system if that's all they were doing that's a really valuable thing information to the Congress to help Congress decide what to do is an essential part of making democracy work the part of lobbying that is the corrupting part where they become the mockers for the money not so much that they give it directly but you know they call their clients and they say you need everybody at the sea level in your corporation to send twenty seven hundred dollars to this person and and they steer it like that when they become the kind of source of resource for members of Congress that's when they have this influence which is not related to their

36:11argument so you know I've met lobbyists who who hate the system as it is right now they'll say things like look I want a system where I win because my ideas are good my arguments are better I don't want a system where I win because I'm able to channel more money than that guy because that's not a democracy like a democracy should be these representatives are listening to us and then they do the right thing based on what they think helps their constituents not how much they're going to raise if they do this over that how many lobbyists are there oh man I can't answer that question you know one of the big problems we've got is that the law has been weakened in registering lobbyists so you know we have tens of thousands of people who are functioning effectively of lobbyists but don't have to call themselves lobbyists you have these members of Congress who go to

37:00government relations departments and they oversee the government relations department 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 so if you look at the lobbying numbers it looks like we peaked and lobbying about three years ago and now are declining but what that is in fact is that the rules have been interpreted or allowed to be unenforced so that many people who are lobbyists actually aren't actually functioning as lobbyists today so they are lobbyists but they don't wear the label is lobbyists what do they call themselves government relations people experts yeah you know and they aren't they could say they're not technically lobbyists and you know I got into a huge fight with Scott Brown you remember Scott Brown who ran for who was a senator in

37:53Massachusetts he ran on a Tea Party ticket and I was like this amazing Republican to win as a senator in Massachusetts and then Elizabeth Warren defeated him in the in the in the election two years into his term um he then went to Massachusetts to New Hampshire and ran for Senate and I was helping a Republican in New Hampshire who was a reformer running for Senate and we've referred to Amazon lobbyists and he went ballistic said I'm not a lobbyist and then he said I'm not technically a lobbyist he's a government relations person who's like calling people on Capitol Hill he used to be with him the Senate trying to get them to do things for him but he doesn't quote a technical lobbyist so merely because the IRS wouldn't refer to him as a lobbyist he thought it was outrageous and fraud for me to refer to him as what we all know he is which is obvious so lobbyists being a lobbyist is not

38:46defined by your actions it's defined by your label it's defined by did you have to fill something out to be a lobbyist well once you are a lobbyist according to the law you've got all sorts of obligations of reporting who you're spending your time with what you're spending money on government relations yeah government relations people at a certain level the to certain things aren't caught lobbyists but yet they have the exact same function even more because they've got tons of people working for them they it gets into ploy in their doing how would that ever be how would you ever put a dam up there well you know you only put a dam up there if you got the political will to make it happen right you only get the political will to make it happen if you have a political process that focuses America on this deeply corrupting problem and says god damn it we have to fix this and if you

39:39had that will if you said we're just gonna fix this and you had like the you know the geeks then go down the list of 25 things that have to happen to make it so we have our Congress that's worried about being representative of America as opposed to representative of the Lester's in America we could do it it's not rocket science it really is not that hard you got to think carefully about what kind of incentives you're producing I'm not saying it's like obvious we're not going to sketch the full plan here but it's possible it is constitutional to do it and if we just built the political will to get there we could do it and the only way build a political will it's really important right now because right now people especially people like you need to be saying to every one of the politicians is going to be sucking up to try to be on your show to try to have a chance to get their

40:28voice out to the class of you to the people who are listening to your podcasts it's important people like you to say okay what are you gonna do about this problem this problem in particular is it a priority or is it like one of 12 things on your list I mean I imagine it's 11 for Bernie or 12 somewhere on the list but the question isn't you know is it on the list because every one of them is gonna say yeah of course I support reform the question is are you gonna bring America around so that America thinks on day one this is what will happen whatever else happens this is gonna happen and my view is if there were a Democrat running for president who said look hold on we're gonna fix this and the Trump errs who were draining the swamp you know the 25% of that base that's drained the swampers come with me because that guy did not drain the swamp that guy filled the swamp swamp monsters

41:20are bigger and more vital now than now than they ever were but come with me we actually will do it I think there's a way to break this election so that it becomes an election about the unity around this recognition rather than the disunity which is the screaming left against the screaming right which is the way things right now we're evolving to a person on sitting on the outside who doesn't have any involvement politics like myself it seems so unbelievably complicated that it exhausts you when you start examining it and trying to pay attention to it and how the system works correct me if I'm wrong but in the recent past there was something that was changed that allows corporations to donate money the same way that an individual would right so in 2010 the United States Supreme Court decided a case called Citizens United and citizens united said that you

42:13couldn't limit limit a corporation's ability to spend money independently of a political campaign so corporation is not allowed to contribute directly but that's not worth that much because you're only allowed to give a total of fifty four hundred dollars to a candidate over the course of the life of his campaign but what citizens united said is that the Constitution protects the right of the corporation to engage in political speech independent of a political campaign so if you know 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 know why that congressman is a terrible congressman but they have a constitutional right to do that now when that happened there are a bunch of us who were you know chicken littles about this who said how this is the end of

42:58democracy because these corporations are just going to spend unbelievable amounts of money in the political process like spending their money to affect the results and that was not correct because what happened is corporations quickly discovered the high price of free speech alright so corporations like Target backed a anti-gay candidate for governor and all of a sudden found their stores being picketed across the country because people were furious that they would be supporting such a candidate for governor so corporations too quickly found that it's not cheap to engage in political speech in the marketplace they didn't want to do it like that instead they wanted to find a way to channel their money into dark money organizations or into what evolved after citizens united something called super PACs so super PACs were created not by the Supreme Court super PACs were

43:54created by a lower court that said well if you can spend unlimited amounts of money you should be allowed to give unlimited amounts of money to an independent political action committee that was the super PAC Supreme Court has never ruled on that question we had a case that we're taking up to Alaska that's trying to appeal to the Supreme Court to get them to actually decide whether super PACs are mandated by the Constitution and what's different about this case is the argument we're making is to the Conservatives what we're saying is the framers of our Constitution were obsessed with corruption that was the issue that they were overwhelmingly trying to avoid and they weren't focused on bribery they were focused on institutional corruption these institutions it became unconnected to their purpose representing Americans and what our view is is you know these

44:45conservatives on the Supreme Court like you know Neil Gorsuch or Justice Thomas or Brett Cavanaugh who say that we interpret the Constitution of the way the framers would have interpreted it we're gonna make the argument to them which is there is no doubt the framers of the Constitution would have looked at these super PACs and said these are an abomination these are outrageous from the perspective of that democracy they were trying to create and those justices should at least one of them be willing to stand up and defend the framers values against this modern corruption and if just one of them voted with the four liberals who have already said they think super PACs are an abomination then we could have a way to end the super PACs in this system and that and that would be an enormous benefit because they've become so powerful but the courts alone can't save us even if you

45:40ended super PACs tomorrow you still have lesterland because the super PACs are not what I was talking about in lesterland when I was talking about Lester lamb was giving two candidates directly and the small number of people would still be giving two candidates directly and the only way to solve that is for Congress to pass new laws that change the way campaigns get funded that's the sort of thing HR 1 is trying to do as the sort of thing Roe kahan is trying to do but that's the sort of thing that we don't have a president to support right now we don't have Democratic presidential candidates who are making it the champion issue right now and it won't get done unless they do well it seems complicated to people when you try to explain campaign finance and you try to explain contributions to candidates and contributions to sitting senators and congressmen it's it's complicated and

46:28there's so many different things to think about when you're discussing this that to a person who's on the outside well how do you fix this well what it what are the laws now well how did it get that way well well how about make it so they can't give them money and there's all these like real simplistic views of it from the outside but it seems that it at the very least limiting the amount of money that someone's a lot like what is the maximum amount of money someone can give to a candidate right now in the primary in the general it's fifty four hundred dollars twenty seven dollars in each and that goes up according to inflation and that's pretty small potatoes compared to what the super pacs are doing right so you have these people running who expect they're going to raise the money to run their office from their direct contributions but they're counting on

47:15the super PACs to come in and spend ungodly amounts of money like tens of millions of dollars to support their candidate or to oppose their Optima their opponent and so the supporters for those super PACs aren't even tiny those are the Adolf's in America people named Adolf this is a tiny tiny tiny number of people who are contributing to those to those things but you're right people look there's no reason why most Americans should understand the complexities of campaign finance law and they don't need to what they need to ask is do we have a system of integrity in the way we select representatives and if you're if you're not brain-dead in America you believe the answer to that question is no we do not have a system of integrity there's no representational integrity it is corrupted in all the obvious phrase and like nobody should like be forced to study campaign finance

48:09in order to have the entitlement to say hell hell no the system has got to end and so I think you're right if we've you know people are forced to like articulate all the 34 different changes that have to happen we're never going to get there but let's not go there let's just start and end with it is a corrupted system and we want politicians to fix it and if they don't fix it we'll throw them out until we get the politicians who do and if we could build that as the movement that recognition the core message of 2020 I think there's a real shot because we've primed the Republican Party there are a lot of people in that party who are now so disgusted with the corruption of this system not necessarily Mitch McConnell he loves it but you know an ordinary Republican voters and the Democrats have now committed themselves to fixing this corrupted system this is the moment to do that and

48:59we don't have to get into the details of how much you should be allowed to contribute to say there is a way to fix this that would give us a representative democracy maybe not again but for the first time why is Mitch McConnell so uniquely evil this guy has had it in his DNA from the first moment he went to Washington to end any regulation of money in politics he engineered the selection of the FEC this is the Federal Election Commission commissioners so that they would block basically every enforcement action with the FEC the FEC does nothing now because it's a commission that has half Republicans and half Democrats so if the Republicans disagree from the Democrats then nothing gets done they can't enforce the most simple rules anymore because Mitch McConnell has populated the FEC with people who don't believe in campaign finance rules he has said citizens united this decision that said

49:56corporations could give unlimited amounts of money to independent political speaking it says one of the greatest decisions of the Supreme Court and he said he was going to fight like hell to defend it and when this proposed HR 1 was raised to him Mitch McConnell said there is not a chance in hell this will ever even get a debate in the Senate this man is obsessed with the idea that money should have the power in Washington that it has right now and people are talking about reforming it are the enemy and so you know the thing about Mitch McConnell is he's actually an incredibly smart man and he's an incredibly smart strategist and he's been playing this game for a long time and and I think he's like responsible for 85% of the judicial structure that makes it possible for this to be blocked there's an amazing series of debates happened 20 years ago between John

50:47McCain and Mitch McConnell so this was when Congress was passing something on the mccain-feingold law which was the last great effort to deal with this problem it was flawed in a bunch of ways but it was an important success Mitch McConnell stood on the floor of the Senate and said mr. McCain says that the Senate we can't say must regain so the senator from Arizona has said that the system is corrupt I want him to name the corrupt people and McCain stands there and said I'm not talking about particular individuals I'm talking about the system it's the system's corrupt and then McConnell almost clueless just said if the system is corrupt there must be corrupt people if there's not corrupt people then the systems not corrupt so the only corruption he can imagine was corruption where somebody was taking a bribe and if that's the only corruption we're allowed to remedy

51:37then the whole system of influence we have right now is not to be touched but you know I didn't Kane's point was you can have a system filled with lots of honors Congress people and lots of honest senators who never engage in bribery but they know how to bob and weave and Bend and speak and say the right things to attract the right kind of money and that's as much corruption as bribery is and McCain's view was we had to end it so he was the last great Republican fighter for reform of this corrupted system they've been many before Barry Goldwater was an incredibly vocal opponent to the role of money in politics but I think what we have to do is to find a way to revive that and to leverage from this president's assertion that this is a corrupt system and we have to change the system into actually building the political power to make that change happen another thing that's

52:35very weird is that every four years or so there's this cry to eliminate the Electoral College every four years ago people realized that the battleground states are so critical and that so much money is being spent on this small handful of states because they give you all the electoral votes and this is how you win an election and then people say well why is that that doesn't make any sense it should be one-person one-vote are we really that divided as a nation that we need to isolate ourselves into these small little lines and the on the dirt where you know if this part is worth this amount and that parts worth that amount and so everybody plays this weird electoral college game and then you get a situation like what just happened where Hilary Clinton wins the popular vote but is not the president because the electoral college is what what makes everything yeah so the way you just

53:23described this problem is exactly the way people have to think about it the problem isn't I mean it is a bad thing that the loser wins I mean that's just not the way elections supposed to work so that's happened twice in our lifetime yeah and it happened 100 years before that and it's gonna happen more frequently going forward we can show that demographically but that's not the real problem the real problem is that in every election the presidential candidates are focused on just 14 states the battleground states the purple states and those 14 states are the only states that matter to those candidates and and what scholars have demonstrated is the presidents and campaigns Bend themselves and their policies to make those states happy and those states don't represent America they're older they're whiter their industry is kind of 19th century industry there are seven

54:15and a half times the number of people in America working in solar energy as mine coal but you never hear about solar energy in a presidential campaign because those people live in California and Texas they don't matter to the presidential election what you hear about is coal mining because the fifty thousand coal miners left in America happened to live in these battleground states so this is just a product of the way the electoral college of the way states count their votes to allocate their electors something called the winner-take-all system so all but two states say that the winner of the popular vote gets all of the electoral votes for that state so in you know in 2000 in Florida George Bush won that state based on a stop to recount by 531 votes he got all the electoral college votes in that state even though he just barely won that state and so

55:08winner-take-all is what makes it so that it doesn't make sense for anybody to spay pay any attention to any of the non battleground states and pend all of your time in the battleground states in 2016 99% of campaign spending was in 14 states 99 99 % ninety-five percent of time but the only time they were not 99% in those battleground states as the other 5% they were in New York and California raising money rights okay so this is a system designed to give power to these battleground states and then you say well why is it something the Constitution requires and the answer to that is absolutely not the Constitution does not say how the states will allocate their electors and indeed when states started adopting this winner-take-all system many thought it was an outrageous perversion of the constitutional design so Jeff so Jefferson was outraged but then he said

56:07well some states are going to do it then all states have to do it because if you're a state that allocates all of your electives to the winner you're gonna have more power than your neighboring state did against half the electors to the winner so very quickly there was a race to the bottom and that's kind of where it's stuck and so the question is that what we can do about it well there are two big reform efforts out there one of them is called the national popular vote compact I mean I should say you know you can imagine amending the Constitution but it takes three-fourths of the states to change the constitution and three-fourths of the states are not going to agree with abolishing the electoral college so this is not going to happen anytime soon through the Constitution but there are two ways without amending the Constitution we could fix this problem

56:50one the national popular vote prot compact is basically states who say look we're going to pledge our electors to the winner of the National popular vote so the state you know looks at who won the National popular vote and then picks the slate of electors from their state with the party of the person who won the national popular vote so in a state like New York if the Republican won the national popular vote even though most people in New York are democratic they would allocate their electors to the Republican vice versa in Texas that's that's the way that system would work and you know I personally like the system because I believe in the idea of one-person one-vote everybody's vote is an American citizen for the American president should be equal it shouldn't shouldn't matter that you're having to live in Wyoming versus Pennsylvania versus New York but there are people are

57:38worried about this because they fear that it'll become a kind of flyover democracy but the only places that candidates will care about will be posted like you know LA or New York or Chicago I actually don't think that's right but I get the understanding I think they're wrong about the way the campaigns work but I understand why they're anxious about it so then that leads to the alternative solution which is something you know my group equals citizens that US is litigating this right now which is trying to declare this winner-take-all system violates the Constitution because it basically says that if you're a Republican in California your vote never matters if you're a Democrat in Texas your vote never matters because we just count your vote up and then we throw it away right because we allocate all the electors to the dominant party in your state and so we've got David Boies as

58:29our chief litigator we've got a case in California Texas South Carolina and Massachusetts asking the courts to declare winner-take-all unconstitutional and instead say that electors have to be allocated proportionally so if you get 40% of the vote in the state you get 40% of the electors if you get 50% you get 50% of the doctors and what that would do overnight is it would make every state in the nation competitive like there'd be a reason for a Democrat to go to Texas because you're not gonna get all the electoral votes you're not gonna get 1/2 the electoral votes but you'll get 40% maybe 45% and that could matter or a Republican would go to California because you know you're not gonna get all the votes in California but you're gonna get a lot there a lot of Republicans in California um so this change would immediately make every state in play but unlike the

59:22national 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 as an elector and if I can get it from Arizona I'm gonna care about Arizona if I can get from Arkansas I'll care about Arkansas I'm so it's not gonna just be the big states or the big population centers it's going to be every state and so if we can get you know a court to say this violates the Constitution then you could have states forests to allocate their electors proportionally and if they did that then the problem that you identified at the start which I is the problem could be solved overnight you would no longer have these battleground states deciding everything you never president who cares about getting elected by all of America and that would be an incredible improvement

60:08though that seems like in in and of itself would be a game-changer yes if they could do that that would change a lot but one of the things you said you said you don't think that it's possible that we would ever vote out the Electoral College but is there support for the electoral college is there a good argument for it so there is support for the idea that every state have a role and there's a support for the idea that small states got a kind of thumb on the scale which is what the Electoral College does so there is some support but most people you know 70% of people don't like the idea that the president is not chosen from the majority of voters though right so most people would oppose it but the point is to change the Constitution you need the state legislatures or state conventions to agree with the change and what many states at least 13 states I fear would

61:07say is that you know we actually win more under the system than we lose so we're not gonna change the system and so unless you get like some overwhelmingly popular movement to support it or again you know you can imagine a presidential candidate who kind of made fixing this part of the democracy part of the plan too I don't see how you're gonna build the political movement to get there another way of putting it is you know this national popular vote compact which is going around state to state in getting states to join right now has about a hundred and so the way this works is that when the equivalent of 270 electoral votes have been committed then the compact kicks in so when they get to 270 the problem goes you know the problem of this electoral college goes away because at 270 according to the plan the winner of the popular vote wins the electoral college they right now

61:57have a hundred and seventy two electors pledged right so they have less than 100 more to go but the problem is they've got to convince states to join the compact and they're kind of they kind of hit this red wall now because many Republicans think the only way to win the presidency is through the electoral college now so many state legislators why do they believe that I think many Republicans just think that their great benefit is from the electoral college it's not surprising because the battleground states are primarily Republic and because the base number of Republican states is so high right because you know these small rural states get disproportionately more electors than states like California so you know Wyoming has three electors disproportionately turns with the population right so they like the system as it is and you know you look back and

62:46you say well they got George Bush even though he didn't win the national vote and they got Donald Trump even though he didn't win the national vote it's not hard for to understand why they're there I think again I I don't think they're right about this you know in 2004 if fifty thousand votes had switched to John Kerry in Ohio then John Kerry would have won the electoral college but lost the popular vote and if that had happened in 2004 I think the Electoral College would be dead today really because a Republican won in 2000 a Democrat run in 2004 people would say this system is just crazy we got to get rid of this system but now people think well Republicans benefit from this so I'm a Republican I'm gonna block the change and if that's true that it's never going to happen at a constitutional level because the Constitution requires three-fourths of

63:35the states to support the reform and the reinforcement it does that Donald Trump won without having the popular one yeah yeah and you know of course nothing there's no hypocrisy that touches this president but we remember in 2012 when there was a moment for about 10 minutes when the national media was reporting that that Romney was going to win the popular vote but Barack Obama was going to be elected by the electoral college Trump started tweeting vigorously about how this is a denial of democracy we have to march on Washington to end this banana republic like system because the electoral college was the worst possible thing in the world and of course after 2016 he had different views about the electoral college I wasn't old enough to understand what was going on during Watergate what year was that well 70 so you know the break-in happens in the lead-up to

64:27the 72 election and then he eventually resigns after that but this is our Watergate yeah at this moment right now Cohen's gonna go to jail for three years and I mean he's testifying against Trump and all these people are testifying and they're calling him what do they call him co-conspirator number one is that the individual official individual number one this is a very unusual moment for us to be watching this all unfold and to see this slow dissection what Mueller seems to be doing is like slowly closing off all the escape routes yeah and slowly circling the troops around this one area that he's trying to that he's that he's attacking yeah so on he's a brilliant tactician yeah and and and so I think it's clear that the worst for Donald Trump has yet to come and I do think the parallel is Watergate but there's a really important difference here you know um so I'm old enough to

65:27remember what Watergate I was like 12 or 13 when this happened and my uncle happened to be the lawyer who worked in the House of Representatives convincing the House of Representatives to vote the articles of impeachment so he and that weekend when Nixon resigned he came to visit us we lived in the Kentucky part of Pennsylvania the kind of right-wing middle part of the state he came to visit us and he told me if this was going to happen and that was the event that was the weekend and I decided I wanted to become a lawyer but but the big difference between these two times is that when that happened the way most people got access to news was three television networks every day they watched the news at the same time because there was nothing else on and those three television networks kind of shot right down the middle and told the story as they saw it you know it's kind

66:19of a Walter Cronkite era of news and as this story broke they just reported it as they saw it and as they saw it it was a pretty damning indictment of the President and what's amazing is he watched the polling among Republicans and their support for the president six months before the president resigns the poll says among Republicans he has about an 83 percent support rate and then when he resigns his support rate about Republicans is about 50 percent 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 he had to go we don't live in that news environment today we live in an environment where half of America lives in one news world and the other half of miracle is in another news world and the half of America living in

67:12the Breitbart Fox News world are not being told the stories that the people living in the MSNBC NPR and news universe are and so in this world the opportunity for Americans to like see the facts the same facts and have a reflective judgment about and and come to a view that this president you know needs to resign or be impeached I don't think you should be impeach but let's that's a separate question is is not possible and that's what's so terrifying about it when you live in a democracy where we don't all live in the same universe you know right we don't know the same facts how do you knit together a public that can address these critical issues of national import and and that's I think our biggest challenge right well it gets greater than that right with characters like sean hannity that they separate the line between not just being some sort of a political pundit but

68:10actually campaigning for the president showing up at speeches addressing the crowd making making these big statements in support of the president it's very strange to watch because i don't remember that at the only point in time no it wasn't the past but i think the thing we need to realize is it is the future because it pays cable news pays tremendously when these people become partisan hacks inside of a politics of hate which is the current politics of like both of democratic member of publican parties and the cable news stations they build tribes who are deeply loyal to them and the loyalty of those tribes translates into advertising dollars it is the business model of cable so Sean Hannity looks to you know old geezers like me like an abomination from the perspective of what news should be like but from the standpoint of what the future is gonna be he is the future and

69:07so then it becomes a question like how do we knit together a democracy given there will be people like the Sean Hannity's on cable television and 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 I think that there's a need to begin to think about how do we build political understanding not to broadcast television but through something else that gives people a chance to think in more than 30 second bites yes and podcasting I think is a core part of that 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 I mean I remember when the elections were going on I would flip back and forth between the two channels and it was like two alternative universes there were different worlds yeah different worlds

69:58of focus different worlds of what they're projecting yes but I don't think the point is that it has to be down the middle right I think it has to be deep so this is what I think is so powerful about podcasting like you know the fact that you get people to listen to you talk about an idea for an hour two hours of them three hours is astonishing literally astonishing in an age where the most a cable news channel will allocate to a news story is a minute and a half two minutes three minutes right and you know in the context of like the tweet thinking of cable news they can't afford to go deep on anything and everything they're going to talk about are the things they can talk about sensibly in 25 seconds or 30 seconds or 40 seconds and what you know because you've lived this life of like having deep conversations about things that are important is that it sometimes takes

70:50more than 30 seconds to understand something always yeah and the point is if we have media that's focused at the 30-second chunk and that's how America understand the issues we're never gonna get anywhere and the only way to get to that's to get someplace is to begin to have conversations that are at the hour-long chunk or the two-hour long Chuck and it's not important that that be neutral or balanced I don't care if it's balanced I care that it is attempting to be serious and in-depth understanding the issue so I don't care if Kato wants to have podcasts they try to tell us the deep story of an Randi in economics or something like that that's fine that's good I think it's important that people start thinking about these issues in a richer deeper way and I think the challenge we have now is how do we begin to produce understanding realizing that the world of Walter

71:41Cronkite is never coming back and it might be a good thing but it is just never coming back and the world of Sean Hannity is a world that will destroy democracy so how do we rebuild democracy outside of that and you know if you if you had to pick the three things that are the most hopeful I think podcasting is number one I think some of the reflective deep you know funny playful but in the end at the end of the hour-long segment of a podcast you understand something you didn't understand before I think that's number one I think comedy like comedy television like brings people into understanding things in a way that's not possible on fox news I think that you know that's number two I think shows like homeland I don't have you know watch rights watched it until the read yeah yeah I know and then that went through this dark period in the middle but the recent seasons are just

72:32un-fuckin'-believable really and because they're unbelievable because they are such a deep rich understanding of the tensions at issue like you want to understand the Iran nuclear deal watch the last season because after watching that season you like understand the tensions between the CIA and the president and what's actually going on with Israel and 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 there that they voluntarily want to watch it but that in the end at the end of watching a season you understand something I understand the current seasons about the you know struggle and I can't wait to watch it because it's going to be a richer understanding of that story than anything on television did you watch house of cards I did up until the season did you quit at this season I watched the season I was very

73:27disappointed right I watched episode one and I said this is seems like gave it to some different writers and it's just craziness it just seems like like somebody just got a hold of it and they said I'll take it you know I'm gonna write it my own way Yeah right but even at the very beginning you know the striking thing about house of cards is it made it seem like stuff actually could happen in Washington yes you're like wow this really powerful guy Frank Underwood actually can actually get important bills passed right and I remember watching that saying holy this is just completely not the truth this is just not the way the system works I mean it would be good if it worked like that cuz at least it could do stuff but the way it actually works is that these guys would be scurrying around trying to figure out you know what the tentacles of funders are directing them to do and

74:11the tentacles of funders added together would be don't do anything that's not what you're there to do hmm but what it at least did is sort of highlight the influences these people experienced and it showed how deeply entrenched everything is yeah yeah I mean I don't want to talk it down at all man I want a million different things like this on prize just something that gives people just give them a richer understanding well an understanding period because for the most part what people you go to school you learn about democracy and our system of representative government and then you become an adult and you forget most of what you learned and then you hear something about the electoral college and the popular vote and you know then you see bills getting passed you know what the hell is that and and the stuff you learn at school is so politically correct it can't actually

75:04give you an understanding of anything like you actually taught kids in high school the way Congress worked you you know the school board would go crazy and they're like no no no you can't talk down American democracy like that so the truth is not teachable the only way to get people to see the truth is to expose it to them in a way that they want to see it and you know my point is that's not going to be Fox News Fox News can never cover it at the depth and the interest level that it needs to be covered it's going to be things like what you do or things like what you know great television can do is our system of government analogous to like taking like DOS or Windows 95 or something like that just continuing to patch it and never revisit it and never come up with a new operating system I think the better analogy is an operating system that has been taken over by malware virus yeah

75:56because it's not innocent you know das you know it was a fun system and it like cranked to a halt after a while when you tried to pile more and more on top of it but that was just kind of the limits of what it could do there was nothing malicious in its failure but but there's something malicious in this failure there are people who are eagerly focused on how to make sure our government can't govern because if our government can't govern they win so you know the Koch brothers have this amazing diverted you know bipolar character on the one hand they're talking about the ideals of government but the reality is their interventions make it so we don't have an EPA that can regulate their companies so basically you know we have environmental policy that leaves their companies alone which means they can make tons of money by polluting our environment without ever having to pay

76:49the consequence of it and what they want is not change of a particular kind except for tax cuts what they want is nothing to happen and so that's the kind of you know malware that's taken over the system of our government that's blocked the ability to government to function and rather than having leaders at the center who say hold it let's just pause for a second and realize this is a broken system we have politicians that continue to pretend as if everything is working you just have to elect more Democrats and we'll get what we want yeah voting online what what would be the pitfalls of that and why hasn't that been implemented if you can Bank online why can't you vote online so I think you know most of the tech are the experts who are disinterested meaning they're not working for Diebold or something like that I would tell you that we don't yet have the infrastructure to be able to be

77:42confident about this now there are lots of people working on I think really great open-source implementations that that could be could eventually produce the kind of confidence that we need to have to be able to vote online and so I don't foreclose it in the long run but I think what we've seen in the short run is that when we turn to these proprietary providers of technology to enable us to vote they give us you know looky look at these voting machines there's this recent story about this 11 year old who is able to within like 15 minutes hack into the Florida election system and change the results from you know one one candidate to another because you know the companies that build these technologies are not filled with a bunch of rocket science just like if you're really good you're gonna go work for Google or for Facebook or something like that so so the

78:40proprietary software has all of these bugs and holes and intended backdoors built into an intended backdoor yeah because they need you know the company itself needs a simple way to get in to check or to fix things but then they don't worry about the fact that other people will get backdoors to be that again this was the argument for Diebold system that did have a third party entrance tons of allegations about that yeah did you ever see the documentary hacking democracy yeah is that disturbing to you incredibly I don't know how much I believe about it and was a well because I've seen so much that contradicts some of the claims about you know the extent to which there was real differences in the numbers I remembered at the election really being anxious about it because it seemed to me in Ohio in particular a really compelling case was made that there was

79:28some something weird going on but you know the point is not so that much the particular zuv a particular election it's recognizing that if you turn this over to proprietary software companies we're going to build these closed systems nobody can inspect there's no reason to trust them you know they're it's not that they are intending to make themselves vulnerable to the Russians they're just going to make themselves vulnerable to the Russians and there are alternate systems like open-source systems that something I know some people are building right now that I think eventually could get us there an open-source system like the Linux base something that would go on to your phone well it could be on your phone but the point about the open-source is that anybody can inspect the code and be confident that the code is doing what it says it's direct what I'm saying about

80:12being on your phone is the the biometrics that we use on our phone today or some of the most secure in terms of being able to establish that it's you that's making that vote like iris scanners that you have on the I have a Samsung Note 9 that has an iris scanner checks my eyeballs you know your my iPhone checks my face it takes you the I mean there's they're pretty amazing you know fingerprints obviously but the fact that this is probably in terms of our own personal like security in terms of information this is probably the most secure our smartphones are probably the most secure devices we've ever possessed so on the one hand yes and that's why I say I agree with you that in the long run we should imagine a world where to be trivially easy to vote just like it's not easy for me to venmo you or cache app you I guess is your favorite here and money that should be

81:05the way the future is but on the other hand we need to realize that these technologies are also incredibly insecure in the sense that there is now a commercial market to exploit insecurities inside of these phones and you know these companies basically have bounties that they post on the web right for people who will come forward and find certain holes and hacks and once they get those hacks they use them to leverage power and governments play this game all the time and you know there's a pretty strong argument that the khashoggi murder was a product of one of these exploits which was then going to be revealed and the need to cover up the fact that there was such an exploit out there what is this I didn't know this what is this about well so the basic idea is that you know these companies and many of them most prominent ones here are Israeli companies who

81:59facilitate the ability of governments to buy to your phone mmm right and the the standard way in which this is done is to is to pierce the security by sending you something that you click on it and then embeds itself in the phone there's no way you see it in a no way that done it can be blocked but there's there's rumors now that in fact we've got something more than that going on where all they need to do is get your telephone number and they're able to hack into the system to get access to your phone but the point is these companies have a market now for selling this type of insecurity so belt-like cell the ability for you to get access here and the story that you know I don't have a lot of reasons to be absolutely confident about this except that I trust the person who's inside the security world that says this to me um the story is that this is part of what happened to

82:52khashoggi contacts that the Saudis had exploited this in a way that was going to be revealed and and the simple solution to that eventual revelation was to remove the person who would reveal it and that's Jesus yes so this is the point about to recognize about these phones on the one hand for the ordinary life it's more secure than anything you've ever had but in the other hand systematically it's building insecurity into our lives in a way that can be exploited by powerful people and for most people doesn't matter like most people ordinary ordinary Joe's you know they're never gonna be vulnerable because nobody's gonna spend a million dollars to get a hack against an individual person when I hear that from a person justifying why they don't worry about it it drives me crazy I can't do anything what are they gonna do um I'm clean don't worry about me that's

83:45not that's not what we're doing this one we're talking about right because if we have a system where systematically powerful people can just push a button and like find a way to control you right control anybody Jamal Kosova yeah then we've got a system that no longer makes it possible for ordinary people to stand up to power that's that's basically what it is like this is the this is a structure that allows powerful people if it is insecure to protect themselves because they can just leverage that against us and I think you know this is a completely on focused problem like nobody is talking about this politically but the amar ket for this commercialized security exploits is hugely important and we've got to find a way to to address it mmm so is it feasible that as technology advances and as the security advances as well I mean the biometrics that we have today are

84:41far greater than the passwords that we use just a few years ago that there could be something that you can't exploit especially considering the open-source variants where they can be checked by the community yeah so so so the problem is is not the kind of particular technologies working the way you intend them to work you know 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 but the problem is the code is so big and so complicated that there's always going to be little bugs inside the code and what these exploits are are like coders who like poke at the code looking for these little hooks and they link one hook to another hook to another hook and then they find the way in to exploit the system so the exploits are never well I won't say never there's another story

85:38it's important to recognize I'll talk about that a second but the exploits are not in the main case intended by anybody it's just the onion it's just the natural consequence of having you know literally hundreds or millions of lines of code that go into making this machine work and that's what's being exploited and when you have a world like the iPhone which is this monoculture like you know everybody has the same operating system or the same versions of the operating system if you find an exploit in the end the iOS and Apple doesn't know about it and you can exploit it for six months or a year you can you know do a lot of damage to a lot of people's lives before anybody gets around to it to blocking it um no you know that's even in the best case where everybody's working hard to make their system as secure as it can it can be you know there was this period after the 9/11

86:29when there's you know very strong incredible allegations that the United States government went around to these technology companies and said we need you to build backdoors into your technology so we can track down the terrorists and there's strong allegations that in fact many of the most important technology companies complied and what they quickly discovered is that the backdoor is intended for the United States government trying to attack terrorists were being exploited by the Chinese trying to steal trade secrets from American companies so this infrastructure that was intended to be secure to protect American companies so that they could do their work without being asked about foreign espionage on top of them became an infrastructure that SP anon again because it's so complicated to get it perfectly right and the the return from exploit is so huge that you can just expect the market

87:21is always going to supply it what was the other example that you're gonna bring up that was it that was the ideas that the intended backdoors that that turn out to be exploited for other purposes um but isn't the system itself like when you deal with hanging chads or paint hair blow their counters ridiculous people you living giving it up to human beings the the potential for errors massive right to just to count things up or the potential for corruption the decision to ignore certain collections I mean these this has all been documented right yeah and all of this follows from the fact that we bizarrely in America unlike most mature democracies around the world make the running of elections a partisan event like you know Republicans in a district or Democrats in a district control the voting system like why the hell would that be why don't we have like people who whose self

88:15identity and professional framework is nonpartisan independent like election commission that's about you know it's above the partisan battle so that there's no incentive in Georgia for example for the government to allocate money to fix voting machines just in Republican districts and not in democratic districts or there's no incentive to shut down a voting polling place which they did in Georgia making it so that people in that area would have to go huge distance to be able to vote or to create it so that it takes seven hours to vote in some districts and 20 minutes to vote in other districts there's no incentive to do that if your job is simply to make it possible for people to vote efficiently and if we measure you and and and reward you based on how easy have you made it for people in this state to vote easily and efficiently we don't get that kind of efficiency we

89:04don't get that kind of innovation because it's a rigged game you know you might have people who I'm sure many of these people are above partisan motivation but we also know that many of these people are deeply motivated by partisan politics especially at that kind of middle level of party politics and if they can set it up so that their side wins because of the way they've played the game for allocating voting resources then more power to them and that's exactly what happened in Georgia with this recent governor's election the kind of outrageous that the man running the election system secretary state does not resign from this job as he runs for governor and the governorship is decided in such a very close way by the decisions that he made about you know how they're going to throw people off the voting rolls or which allegations of voting system technology will be made

89:58across the state this is product as making it political we could make it non political and might not have all of these kinds of problems we're dealing with this very unique landscape now of Google and Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and all these different social media groups that have a vested interest in a specific narrative being portrayed and one thing specifically is and this is being addressed right now in Congress is the discrimination against conservative voices and there's a lot of denial of that but there's also a lot of evidence that that is the case and that they feel like they have some moral or ethical obligation to suppress certain conservative voices for whatever reason and push the narrative of progressive and liberal voices this is a very strange thing because the the amount of influence that something like Google or Facebook has today is arguably as great

90:59or greater than the Sean Hannity's of the world and the cnn's and the the the the the traditional news outlets yeah so no doubt may you know there's a big debate about whether they were more important in 2016 than the cable stations my colleague Gill - Claire has a book that argues pretty powerfully I think that it was actually the cable stations that were more responsible for the result than the Facebook's but whether in 2016 they were more powerful someday in the future they're going to be more powerful it's certainly powerful absolutely I'm and you know the question is what we mean by bias or discrimination here like you know in 2017 in the fall it was revealed that Facebook was selling ads for people who wanted to target quote Jew haters okay so you could go and you could buy ads for Jew haters now there was never how did that work okay no I mean you know

91:54they have lots of categories you get to pick when you buy Facebook ads you know liberals or people who voted people over 60 whatever this was one of the categories that was exposed you could buy ads for jew-hater it was an actual toilet yeah yeah what yeah now there was never a time that a facebook engineer or a marketing person decided we ought to create a Jew hater category right which is not a decision of any human it was the product of the Machine the AI that was developing the categories based on what they saw people happen to be interested in and then throw up categories to see what sticks and then certain categories stick and then they run with them so it so you might say you know if you were the you know if you defamation League you would say oh my god Facebook is you know discriminating to encourage jus haters but from another perspective you're like the machines doing it no

92:47doubt yeah but but to what extent you want to say Facebook is doing it and I think that's off that's often what you're going to see in this argument about whether they're quote biasing the system against one side or the other you know like this hilarious hearing that was just held on Capitol Hill two days ago yes where great congressman Lou's like if you don't want negative results in the search then don't do bad things yeah then um so you know I think this is nice and quite fun it was really funny it this is like nobody is intent we should explain that to people who don't know what we're talking about yeah so there was an argument about you know whether Google was tilting the ads to embarrass one side or the other and I guess it was a congressman from Iowa everybody liked that that's the guy who didn't know that Google didn't make the iPhone yeah he got embarrassed but anyway there was

93:41this um you know the exchange was basically here I'm gonna show you a demonstration and they put in a certain name and that's yeah congressman Smith and then up comes this a reference to his race-baiting yeah and he's like outraged by this and you know so one theory is you've got Google engineers down there saying let's get congressman Smith so we're gonna make it so every time you put Smith in there up comes Reese baiting but Google's responses look we don't do individualized search results like we give people what we think people want based on what they've done in the past and what they've shown interest in and and so that's what's producing this it's the machine that's producing this result 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 I don't doing things like don't do things like race-baiting

94:24yeah if you don't want negative search results don't do negative yeah which is a pretty but but I do think that it there's a really hard problem here when you say it's the machine is doing it mm-hm you know what's the future going to be like when we can just say it's not my promise the machine that this is just Facebook though when when you're talking about or Google rather when you're we're talking about Twitter twitter has a different issue and their issue is there's accusations of shadow banning that they have decided that they're going to silence certain voices or make them much more difficult to find or eliminate them from certain people's feeds you know and they're doing this this the allegation that they're doing is based on their own personal preferences their their beliefs that the you know their progressive ideology wants them to lean left and just somehow

95:19another distribute that information and much more left-leaning way yeah and I hear these and I don't not an expert on what they're doing um and I wouldn't be surprised if you know certain complaints come in about certain feeds and they say we're gonna take these off that's the allegation and they haven't denied that um and you know quite frankly some of these like feeds you know Alex Jones stuff you know if you're the consequence of your news show is that somebody takes a gun to a pizza shop and should cut in in Washington to try to prove that Hillary Clinton is running a sex slave operation in the basement there's something wrong with what's going on there child sex child sex slave right yeah so I understand why they feel like they're responsible there and you know was recognized from very beginning these companies have said we're gonna try to create a certain kind of environment and

96:11like so facebook required you identify yourself so that under the shadows of anonymity you wouldn't be causing wreaking lots of havoc inside the system but look I think the more fundamental problem here you know so what I've said so far people like Google and Facebook might like here stuff they're gonna hate the more fundamental problem here is that we have no antitrust enforcement of any of these companies against any of these companies and we've allowed them to become so incredibly powerful without any justification under the law well isn't the issue though that this was never anticipated that this is now when they created Twitter they didn't think of it it's gonna be it's gonna be some voice of distribution of information that's unprecedented worldwide but that's what it is yeah no they didn't expect no doubt they didn't expect it to work exactly the way it worked but the

97:01antitrust law has from the beginning had standards that should have said we need to step in in certain places so for example in 2010 Facebook is facing a pretty powerful competitive threat from Instagram and the question is what they're gonna do like it's cooler to be Instagram it's kids are using it much the growth rate is much faster in an ordinary competitive market what they would do is they would build a better product to compete with Instagram their response was to write a check for a billion dollars and they bought Instagram and and they've bought a whole bunch of other companies including whatsapp which you know was a very important competitor you know in people believed a really secure way to communicate they buy Boston Dynamics to have a that's amazing there's a there's a Wikipedia page it has like endless lists of companies that they yeah they're buying robots

97:54yeah that makes sense I'm just find out that's true yeah 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 and I think one of the biggest changes that's happening in the last 20 years is that the antitrust Department has just shut up its doors and just stopped doing its work so if we had a more competitive internet environment where companies had to compete against each other you'd have companies that try to compete by protecting your privacy differently by refusing to sell your information differently you'd have lots of pressure on companies like Facebook to behave not because idiots senators who don't know how Facebook works are calling them before hearings but because the market itself is creating the competition that

98:50drives them to behave in a way that actually conforms with what consumers want so I agree with you these are real questions and important questions to figure out are they biasing in one way or the other and if they're biasing systematically that's a really important problem but the solution to that problem might not be more government regulation the solution to that problem might be government's 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 well what would be that right comic is that in fact Google bought it and they actually sold it last year Oh interesting probably sold to the Russians these like what would be the right kind of competition it would have to be something that balances it out right like some sort of a right-wing social media platform but those tend to get infested with trolls

99:40and 4chan type people then as soon as you say we're not gonna have any regulation I mean the idea would be right you say Oh Google and Facebook they are so progressive they lean left they suppress conservative voices and they don't believe in freedom of speech so we're gonna create a right-wing platform that allows freedom of speech and doesn't suppress conservative voices and you know what happens to those things they get infested by 4chan people and the Pepe the Frog people and they start saying racist things if I could say anything I'll say anything anything means anything and that's 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 and people think well this is indicative of a person's

100:32actual real beliefs yeah sometimes sometimes it's bored people that are trying to with people and they're trying to get a rise out of folks and they know that if they write a bunch of n words and Heil Hitler that it's gonna get a reaction and then they'll check it every couple minutes to see what kind of well I look at all these people getting mad ha ha like this is what happens so it's incredible progressive team tends to when you think of someone as being progressive or having you know a progressive voice you tend to think of being inclusive you know not supporting homophobia being open to all sorts of different marginalized groups rights but when you think of conservative you open the door for a lot of people that are rejected by these progressive groups and they might not necessarily be conservative but they are not welcome in these progressive spaces so they come on to these new

101:28places and it turns into a dumpster fire yeah look the story you just described is the story of cable television right so the story of cable television is that at a certain point people like Robert Roger Ailes and the Murdock's decided that we didn't have enough conservative media out there and so they funded not just magazines like the New Republic but they funded the beginning of cable television and and that created this bifurcation in media with cable television and you know one could make these observations about this is what you hide then Claire's book is all about like what the nature of truth is on cable television on the right is different from what it is on the left so I think that's all fair and I don't think anybody has a clear sense of what the right answer look looks like in this space I mean the reality is you know Facebook is a technology I mean here the Facebook

102:23friends are gonna really hate me for this but here Facebook is a technology to exploit insecurities for the purpose of selling ads that's what it does what it does is make you feel like you've checked and you're like why didn't she like that photograph or why isn't he friended me and so you constantly engage because you're constantly trying to feed this you know feedback and that is exploiting Tristana just on Harris's work is really a powerful here it's exploiting your insecurities is that really what it is because I've always thought about it as being a fast-food version of the nutrients that we're missing in an actual real community that's so good that's exactly the right way to think about it but just in the same way that fast-food companies figure out how to exploit the brain chemistry that makes it so that you eat chicken wings you know barbecue chicken wings

103:14because they know that's what's going to feed that kind of addiction and just like gaming companies figure out how to tweak the game so that they'd know how to you know get the addiction out of your kids this company is really great about getting you to like turnover as much as you can to them to build you into this quote community why are they doing that not because Mark Zuckerberg has come some kind of freaky guy who wants to know your secrets but because the more you turn over to them the better their ads are in feeding you information so this is a technology for the purpose of engendering advertising and so that advertising gets really really good and so you know you could say that Facebook is tilted to the left but the reality is there was an extraordinary amount of exploitation of the advertising inside of Facebook to feed information to the right and it's

104:04the last election I mean this is what Kathleen Hall Jamieson about this is really quite amazing and documenting and that's because it's gotten really good and being able to segment markets on the basis of what people know or care about it again not because anybody planned it nobody wrote jew-hater but because the AI is smart enough to figure that out and so when you build this technology that is driven to the purpose of making it easier to sell ads you produce this world that you know has no necessary connection to figure people figuring out what the truth is I didn't think of cable television cable television is about building really loyal community building the tribal sense of the community if telling the truth did that they would tell the truth if not telling the truth does that they will not tell the truth the question is not whether you're telling the truth or

104:54not the question is what builds the advertising base and so this this reality that we have these platforms that are ad driven um distort or constructs drives that platform to develop in certain ways and that's why I think it's important to think well what if we could create a competitive environment where there were different platforms available ones that were not focused on you know driving ads and this is something that I get I think probably fund those well isn't that that the the reason why something like Google or Facebook has gotten so big is because there's so much money behind it well two things because they've been allowed to get so big and because so much money but who would stop them the antitrust departments you know people the antitrust Department would step in and say Facebook you've become too successful the way you're buying up competitors is disturbing to us well but

105:40again think of the difference in that sentence you've become so successful that's one sentence and what we want to do in America is encourage companies to become successful I believe in you know innovators and markets working alright that's really great but you've bought your competitor is a separate statement like you have a bunch of money because the stock is so valuable because people think you're the future of money but then you turn and use that money to buy competitors what are you putting up Jamie what is that's the total number they've spent in the last I think it was seven years I saw the companies they bought scroll back don't don't move total cost of acquisitions what is that twenty three trillion dollars million billion twenty three billion dollars more than the gross domestic product of Fiji Zimbabwe and Maldives combined 19 billion of that

106:27for that one what's that really yeah 19 billion yeah holy saying anyway yeah so but the point is when you're talking about acquisitions you're not necessarily talking about companies that are succeeding because they're so good right so you know when you say what are the alternatives gonna look like it's a really hard question but we have some of it in real space like we understand NPR has a different set of incentives from Fox News we understand podcasts have a different set of incentives from YouTube videos right YouTube videos have a different kind of constraint if you did a three-hour YouTube video you would not live in the same way that you get to live in the context of podcasts but we do do a three-hour YouTube video but it doesn't get the success that it gets because it's a three hour YouTube video it's because people are committed to your podcast I mean I know these guys I

107:18can carry it around and like when you get to a place where it sounds like it's gonna be interesting to see what's on the video then they flip up the video but you know but you know the average successful YouTube video you know if you do a political YouTube video you're told you can't be more than two and a half minutes and you've lost people but the point is the environments I don't necessarily think that's correct Jordan Peterson is doing a lot of really long YouTube videos that are very successful there does podcast yeah there's some there's a hunger right now for unedited thought and I mean not not not edited and under the non censored in terms of language but in terms of no one influencing what you're saying so if you decided to do a podcast or a thing on YouTube and no one was leaning over your shoulder with an agenda or a guideline to follow there's a real hunger for that

108:06because people feel like they're what you describe about Facebook and cable news that they're essentially just trying to sell you things keep you on the hook so they can profit from you there's a real hunger for someone who's not doing that right I agree this is why I feel like there's got to be a market for news in that regard right like an actual unbiased uncensored truly objective centrist news station well again I think that's the slow democracy movement that podcast feeds mmm you know because the reality is if you had a simple way to be watching in every second of your two-hour three-hour podcast what was working and what was not it would be really hard for you to resist I would resist okay I wouldn't pay attention that thing for power to you I've already been faced with that before people's like said to me you know how well this is when people start tuning

109:00I'm like throw that away yeah but you know I know friends I want Chris Hayes will tell you about you know life on MSNBC where it's C that's because of advertiser doll okay that's my my point to weighted you know this is my whole point about this platform this platform is an advertising driven platform right that fact steers it in a certain way yes and I'm saying we need to build alternative platforms which is what you're building in the put in the podcast it's not like advertising is not important to your stuff of course you start with you know talking about certain products that help sponsor what you're doing so it's not an anti market it's all for market but the point is it allows you to develop the content in a way that's not micro managed by the advertising dollar or them are the market incentive and that's critically important it's also other people's

109:49incentive to get you to do things in a way that they will feel they feel would be more profitable so that everybody gains I don't have those other people so there's no one else so if I 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 they will tell you that this is hurting our bottom line and this is not good for that or we have to emphasize more this or the network wants that and it's really just about accentuating your ability to make more money right which is why we have to build these alternatives that can compete with the advertising driven platforms well if you could get a really entertaining news show on YouTube or I mean I guess the Young Turks sort of tried definitely but they lean so hard left but but they attract an extraordinary number of people yeah

110:37that's good yeah but again I you know we have this image of like news shows you know of a version of Walter Cronkite maybe that's not what it is maybe you know The Colbert Report is a news show right joke something who's someone is mocking it as they're delivering you them but they're giving you the information right look like someone who's objective I would like someone who's really objective who talks about the negative applications of whatever law or bill that's being discussed like what would be bad for everyone what would be good for Democrats Republicans poor people rich people you don't get that there's no version of that elbow right now every version leans towards whatever platform they're on whether it's Fox News or MSNBC yeah I think not for a want of trying I just think the world doesn't support it but why but the world doesn't support it because there's these people

111:28are so tribal because they want to be either on the Fox News camp or they want to be in the and an MSNBC camp I really feel like there's a lot of people that just aren't being represented and folks like me who just I want to know what what is happening why is this the case why is this leaning in this direction what's the real motivation behind this bill what's the real motivation behind these actions yeah and 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 mmm the greeting across these different perspectives when I was a kid I was obsessed with the Soviet Union and in 1982 I went to the Soviet Union I was like I guess I was 20 just turned 21 and and I was hitchhiking through Eastern Europe and then I went through the Soviet Union and I was on a train from

112:22Leningrad to Moscow and sitting next to a professor I always seemed to be followed by people who spoke English but this guy spoke English and he said to me I'm you know we have a better system of free speech in Soviet Union than you do in America how dare he yeah so I said what the hell could that possibly mean and he said well when you wake up in the morning this he said he said when you wake up in the morning you read the New York Times or The Washington Post The Wall Street Journal and you think you know the truth but we know when we read our newspapers everybody's lying to us so we have to read seven or eight newspapers and triangulate on the truth and that makes us a more critical free speech Society than America and you know it's kind of funny at the time because like you realize they didn't have any but there's a kernel of truth to that you know when my dad gets

113:15an email that says Barack Obama's a Muslim he comes from the time when you just believe what's printed even though it's not printed it's just an email and so he just kind of like oh my god the president's a Muslim but you know my kid gets an email that says Barack Obama's a Muslim he's like yeah well I mean what else I mean like he's gonna be like you want to see yeah views and so I think that in some sense we are producing a culture especially among our kids or at least one hopes where they recognize that everything is partial yes and you got it you got to do a lot of work to home to knit it together and in the end that might be a better I might be a better ecology for producing democracy and truth then one where you know you got to trust the source to be quote objective in this case that's an interesting perspective I do definitely agree that young people are more

114:10skeptical and more aware of the possibilities of today than ever before he's a funny story Michael Sherman you know yeah Michael Shermer who is a professional skeptic yeah I get a DM from him says there's a story about you on beasts what is the British BBC it's a story about you on BBC you have to login to your Twitter to read it so I look at that I go what kind of list would you get hacked so I sent him a message say hey did you get hacked they sent him the message and he said what there's a story about me and he logged in he's a professional skeptic Wow they got him but why cuz he's older no you know I mean I think guys that didn't grow up with that they don't or they don't know tricksters they don't know the ways of and it was a nightmare for him he like I mean his whole system was screwed up he had a every time make make it tweet it would get deleted like it was really

115:16bad I think mail him ago dude you got hacked no it's a problem with us old people this is the way we lived well it's just you grow up with one system and then all sudden you know I don't know what to do here oh it says it needs my login let me just give me the Oh uh-huh and then all these pop-up boxes and oh no the number of people who are being tricked into believing the IRS is calling them on the telephone and demanding hilarious hilarious and tragic I mean there's this amazing man told me they're gonna put my whole family in jail my whole family they left a message since you did not return our call we will put your whole family in jail like damn my whole family the dog to everybody cats it's like what the man like they're trying to freak people out and it's you know an automated voice message that's very beautiful yeah yeah old folks get roped into that stuff real hard it's very sad

116:15it's very sad because a lot of them are lonely and the 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 ya yeah and you know so is there a reason to be hopeful here well younger kids yeah and the other thing that makes me really hopeful is places like reddit you know so which forums are you going to great but many of them are great but the point what the greatness can in here's and they're demonstrating incredible talent it's out there in the world that you know in the 1970s just would have been invisible like you kind of looked at the world in the 1970s which I remember the 1970s you kind of thought there were great people at the top you know they are all in television and and everybody else was kind of a troll mmm but what read it does every day you know I I obsessed with certain of these feeds

117:11suggester amazing but um it's like you read them like here's just some Joe Schmoe out there that's taken a bunch of data and data is beautiful and like demonstrated something amazing by the way he's built it and you get the sense that the world is filled with these incredibly talented smart people everywhere who are you know many of them just have too much time but the point is they are out there everywhere so if you ask why should we be hopeful it's that we develop these critical attitudes we have this ability to think across and the army is filled with so many incredibly talented people and the internet surfaces it it makes it possible for us to at least reach them yes I and then the question is can we use this power leverages power and actually do something with the forces of evil that now control I had an interesting moment last night at the ice house comedy club where there was a

118:03drunk 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 everybody was having a good time it was pretty pretty crazy even as they were getting kicked out the rest of the audience was having a good time because we were making fun of it and I said as these people were getting kicked out I said this is basically us most of us are cool there's a hundred and fifty people in here and out of the hundred fifty people 148 of them are having a great time everyone's drinking and laughing and we're all these comedians and no one wants any extraordinary attention no one wants any special attention but two people it up now if you were next to those people you would say oh the crowd there sucks the people are always yelling

118:56things out and they're drunks and they heckle well because that those two people required an exorbitant amount of attention they asked for more attention than anyone else and if you use that by a sample group and say well this is the crowd the crowd is these drunk people that yell do you know the vast majority the crowd are really polite fun people out having a good time and they approached it with the perfect attitude I think this is the world this is the world I think the world is there's a small percentage of people that things up for everybody and I think that this this is in terms of politics in terms of business in terms of everything isn't that yes in terms of the net for sure and I think the net is the perfect example of that if you're a person that gets if something happens to you and people start attacking you online or it if you just noticed the the number

119:49of people like sayin you're involved in some sort of a story right say maybe there's a million people that know about this story and you get a hundred and fifty people send you mean things you think it's the end of the world yeah 150 people you you don't notice that it's a hunt you just see all these messages and it's on it's unmanageable you're like oh my god everyone hates me no a hundred and fifty people have decided to take action and make you feel bad because they feel bad it's a small number in terms of the overall number of human beings but if you are louis c.k and it's coming at you you're like holy the world hates me you know and it's it's this is this is the situation that we're in right now is we just have so many voices it's incredible though because out of all those voices as long as you're not personally trying to figure it out and filter it yourself with your own which

120:44is completely impossible but if you could just look at it objectively from afar this is going to work itself out and a far better way than has ever happened before in our past there's never been this many voices yeah and our pastors been a so like you were talking about a select few voices the Walter Cronkite's the whoever it is on at the top and then everyone else sort of had to wait for the narrative to be spelled out for them right that's not the case anymore that's right and and again I think it's the best of times in the worst of times so the best of times because all these new voices are bringing all sorts of great perspective and insight and intelligence to the to the story that wasn't there before and that's great the problem is is if the infrastructure that used to be there to kind of bring us all Paul bring us all up to a kind of basic level so

121:32that we understood the facts disappears so we don't have anything that kind of makes it so that we all understand what's at issue and what's at stake and what the facts are so that we can act as a democracy in a sensible way then the question is how do we run a democracy you know because if we could have all these different you know I like to think about the difference between the culture channel and the democracy channel so in the culture channel this is the best of times by orders of magnitude yeah the stuff on television today is a billion times better than anything from the 1970s and 1980s yeah and it's that's a product of this incredible competition and the fact that you can have anything and any niche market and as long as it's enough it makes sense to do it and that's what's great but when you turn to the democracy channel the same fragmentation the same

122:21niche market the same reality of us all living in these different universes means we can't address problems as a democracy with even the same facts and that's a real problem because if we all live in our own fact universe but we have to same face the same real problems in the same real earth then we're not going to decide them in any sensible way and how you solve that problem is really hard like we're not going back thank God we're not going back to the 1960s it's just not going to be the case that there are three channels we get to watch that's just not gonna happen and and it's a great thing because we've got all this amazing culture but what do we do on the democracy side how do we build a democracy recognizing that everybody's not going to spend all their time geeking out about campaign finance reform legislation and and that's why I think we need to think about these other

123:10ways to bring people to some sensible understanding and you know Bryan Callen and Hunter Matz were the first people that brought me into this like they put me on their podcast and I remember like not even knowing when he did this like the length of that conversation and thinking what are you gonna cut this down to like six minutes how long did you guys talk we talked for an hour you know and then we're already done two hours and 15 minutes holy yeah there's a time warp in this room Wow I can see that yeah I mean but I remember thinking like in the middle like I stopped and I thought whoa this is the this is the changing of the world this is it as opposed to those panel shows as three Talking Heads oh my god like when you're on these cable television shows and you've got 30 seconds to say something and and you know you linked it before and I think this is really the key it's it's it's

124:00exactly like diet like we recognize that we have been like put into a world right now where we all eat shitty food because it's been designed to make it so tasty like we love it you know and the only way we reform that if individuals one-by-one begin to decide to eat the right stuff right you got to decide to engage in the right kind of healthy behavior to to be able to survive in this world because the incentives of the market are to sell you stuff that doesn't necessarily do that it's the same thing with the information space that's why the slow food movement is like the slow democracy movement like the slow food movement is how do you produce food that's actually healthy in a way that feeds you and you feed your body and the right way I think the slow democracy movement how do you feed a democracy and and elements to that I've got to be context where people are free

124:52to get deeper than 30 seconds and if we don't build more of those we're gonna have a we're gonna have a really desperate time for demócrata have what we have which is the rise of authoritarians around the world do you foresee the possibility of alternative social media outlets sort of viewing all the issues that people do have with Google or Facebook or Twitter and any of these are perceived to be biased sources of information and coming up with something that has clear protections in there sort of like the founding fathers did when they'd established our system of government that you listen we don't want that let's let's organize that as we're starting to make sure that this doesn't doesn't ever turn into some sort of an echo chamber yeah look I am it's way above my pay grade yeah but what I know gets us there is competition I know that the only thing that has ever gotten us to the next

125:54great innovation is the enforcement of competition which is why it's a problem when someone like Facebook absolutely buys in so what gave us the internet yeah was interventions by the government against AT&T which was the dominant telecommunications company for more than a century that finally said enough of this you can't leverage your power to control all innovation and once that intervention happened people could layer on top of their wires a new network called the Internet yeah and when they did that government said to companies like cable tell company's ok yeah you've got broadband across your cable line but that doesn't mean you get to decide what applications go on that cable line so you your HP I mean your the cable company you can't say that there can't be Netflix on the cable or you can't slow Netflix down no obviously they would want a slow nitpicks down because Netflix is a

126:50competitor with their basic business model but the intervention to assure competition created the opportunity for these great new innovations no nobody at the beginning of that had any clue about what would come out of it all that they knew was that the only way to get something new and great was to assure competition and that's the commitment we've given up since 2000 since George Bush became president 2001 there's been no major enforcement action by the antitrust Department against any of these companies and that is a huge problem and until we rediscover the importance of competition not because we're geniuses and we can figure out what the future will bring but because we know from the past that the only way the future comes is if you guarantee competition unless we do that we're never gonna solve any of these problems yeah ensuring competition is ensuring

127:43innovations ensuring and anybody who doesn't want competition wants to stifle innovation and it's got to be thought to be a selfish proposition right and the basic is so you know the basic argument in competition law you know this competition law got taken over by a bunch of Chicago economists who said the only question was efficiency or consumer welfare but there's another perspective that libertarians like Luigi Zingales who's a an economist that you nourish a Chicago Business School and and people who are not libertarians like Tim Wu who's a professor at Columbia embrace and this is the idea of political antitrust and the idea of political antitrust is you should also worry if companies are so big that they can corrupt the government like this is a dimension to worry about too because if they get to be so big that they can corrupt the government then you know

128:31that they will use that power to protect themselves against innovation because if an innovator comes he doesn't come with 50 lobbyists he just comes with a great idea I mean you know Elon Musk saw this dramatically as he's developing this incredible alternative and tried to figure out how to sell it inside of states and then the lobbyists for the car companies would go state-by-state and forbid them from being able to sell cars without a local dealership in the state right there was a huge fight as the incumbent industries leveraged their power over government to protect themselves from this new competitor and this is the this is the fight we have to we have to make central again because if we don't do that then the dinosaurs will have the power through this corrupted political system to protect themselves against the future and this is just the moment when we need to figure out how to

129:21make the future come I'm glad you're raising these warning flags but I feel like from talking to you that you're fairly optimistic you're the first person who's ever said that really you're optimistic your perception of the Internet and the young people coming up and okay that's her the the the way information is being distributed today there's so many people participating in it and there's so much competition even in that forum right I mean there's yeah there's more voices now and there's a lot of look in the past when you had to be selected in order to speak yeah it was very difficult to get through that selection process and it's not necessarily the best voices that got through it's just sometimes the most persistent and the most influential whatever the reason why they got to be one of those people with the tie in that block on those panel shows that's not

130:15the case anymore right you know now you've got kolinsky you've got all these you know these 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 but they have a pretty influential voice absolutely and they're very politically savvy and they're talking about things in a way that they would be they would be it would be very hard to get a producer to sign off on the way a lot of these guys communicate and some of the things that they do it would be very very difficult but so you're up to mystic - I'm very optimist okay so I'm optimistic in that space you know everything outside of the Beltway of Washington I'm optimistic about I think America you know has an incredible capacity to innovate out of its problems what I fear and what I'm not sure any rational person should be

131:06optimistic about but you know that doesn't mean you don't fight it what I fear is Washington and and so I've said many times that like the power of corruption in Washington might be so great that it cannot be defeated but that doesn't affect what we should be doing we should be fighting it whether or not we think we can win like winning is not the only reason you fight you fight because it's the right thing to do and we need to rally because we might be wrong it could be it should just be that if we got the political force we could take them down and and I think that's what we got to be setting up for right now when you see people like Tulsi Gabbard or will you see this the young woman in New York Alexandria Acacio is Ocasio Cortes that to me that's very promising yeah that people are leaning in this direction and that they're they're saying let's just let's let's

131:58look at this in a different way and let's see some new voices yes let's hear people that are clearly not influenced by corporate America they're clearly not they don't have all of their veins hooked up to the matrix yet yeah no I Tulsi I had known before your your interview with her your interview with her I think gave people a incredible understanding of the depth of her soul which is deep how about when she tweeted to the president making us Saudi Arabia's is not putting us America first so she can go she can both do the deep and also the the shallow she can do us that's amazing that is an unprecedented thing too because what Trump has done is like he's opened up the door for this kind of very hostile communication but what he's also done is open up the door for it to come back at him yeah yeah not that he notices but you're right exactly the rest the world

132:49notices though but I what I think is interesting about Alexandria is she is very disciplined about saying look we got to fix the system if we're gonna get any of these things done so I like to think about like eggs and ER versus Bernie you know so she like every time she gets up there and talks about you know her green energy New Deal it's like you got to fix the political system and then we're gonna be able to get this stuff right as opposed to like putting a list of ten things you want to do without anywhere even mentioning the fact that you're gonna you know make these things possible if I pick Singh fixing political system I think we need new people which this new Congress is filled with them there were a hundred and seven members of people running for Congress who wrote to the Speaker of the House and said they want as the first thing is addressing of this corrupt political

133:36system and Nancy Pelosi gave them not just that but all these other reforms to that's HR one the younger people coming into Congress realized the system is broken I fear the older people in Congress have gotten so used to the system that they don't even notice anymore just how bromine it is how outrageous it is and they need to rage so they're gonna rage against the billionaire's or whatever but I think we need to focus the rage on the problem and that problem is Congress if we don't fix Congress first nothing else matters nothing else will happen and we need to build the movement which I think could actually be a movement that brings people on the right and people on the left in to make that change possible well that's the philosophy that you have to have darkness in order to inspire light and that there's some sort of a balance to be achieved in in this managing of those

134:24two energies and that when you have an administration that's clearly up and then people come along and say it's time that I get into politics and make a difference these are the people that are motivated because they see a need for change whereas you know some people with other administration's like I like the way things are going I'm gonna go pursue the private sector I'm gonna go do this I'm gonna do this people see something like what's happening with Trump and they say I want to I want to stop this this is nothing like the America that I know right there people entering politics for the best possible yes and and I think people on the right have entered politics for the best possible reason and people on the Left too the question is how quickly do they get bent by the system right how quickly do they become part of the system the dark side yeah that force because like when

135:12you like you know when you say members of Congress been you know spend 30 to 80 percent of their 70% of the time raising money you might think that means they're miserable most but you know there's a way in which it's actually psychologically rewarding for them so um you know to be a member of Congress right now is a pretty miserable job you don't get much done like you're spending all your time like rats in a maze like the bell goes off you got to run to the floor your aide tells you how you're to vote you vote then you leave from the floor it's nothing like what the framers imagined like they were sitting on the floor listening to debate about ideas all that's the only debate is debate to c-span it's like a speech to c-span and and that's and that's what it is so the life of a congressman is pretty miserable but um but when they fundraise it's kind of

135:56like push-ups you know it's like they sit down and they're told ok you got to raise $20,000 and the aides sit there and say call Joe he cares about this and call Fred and he cares about that and you go through and when you hit your numbers it's like hey ray I did something so like you feel like you're accomplishing something but the point is the psychology of that increasingly makes you okay with the system that you're in and you realize you win in that system you've won on your own system and so your openness to changing the system becomes really sketchy so I think the critical moment right now is to is to solidify the recognition this Congress is corrupted and we have to fix it and you know the only thing I'm worried about with HR 1 is that it's going to make it into a democratic issue it's like that Democrats care about it so the Republicans are supposed to not

136:49care about it the critical thing now is to get Republicans to support the idea of reform and then make it something other than just a traditional tribal fight between left and right are you optimistic was I was that correct that I'm optimistic about everything outside of the Beltway and I'm gonna fight like hell to prove that we can fix stuff inside the beltway but if you told me I had to bet on my son or daughter's life I'm not going to tell you that I think yeah I would never ask you to okay good thank you for doing this I really appreciate it I really enjoyed talking to you let's do this again hopefully you'll be right every time you ask all right we'll do it thank you sir appreciate it