It's sponsorship time.

But you know what, it's really great when you get a sponsor that you already use.

And guess what.

Quint's is something that in the Todd household we already go to.

Why do we go to Quint's Because it's a place you go where you can get some really nice clothes without the really expensive prices.

And one of the things I've been going through is I've transitioned from being mister cot and ty guy to wanting a little more casual but to look nice doing it.

Is I've become mister quarter zip guy.

Well guess what.

Guess he's got amazing amounts of quarter zips.

It is Quints.

I have gotten quite a few already from there.

The stuff's really nice.

They have Mongolian cashmere sweaters for fifty dollars.

I just know, hey, cashmere, that's pretty good.

You don't normally get that for fifty bucks or less.

Italian wool coats that look and feel like designer the stuff.

I'll be honest, right, you look at it online, you think, okay, is this really as nice as it looks?

Well, when I got it, I was like, oh, this is real quality.

So yeah, I'm going to end up making sure I take it to my dry cleaner so I don't screw it up when I clean it.

But I've been quite impressed.

In Hey, it's holiday season.

It is impossible to shop for us middle aged men.

I know this well.

Tell your kids, tell your spouses, tell your partners.

Try Quints.

Or if you're trying to figure out what to get your adult child, what to get your mom or dad, I'm telling you you're gonna find something that is going to be comfortable for them on Quints.

So get your wardrobe sorted and your gift list handled with Quints.

Don't wait.

Go to quints dot com slash chuck for free shipping on your order and three hundred and sixty five day returns now available in Canada as well.

That's qui nce dot com, slash chuck, free shipping and three hundred and sixty five day returns quints dot com slash chuck.

Use that code.

Hello there, Happy Monday, and welcome to another episode of the Chuck Podcast.

We are ticking ever so closer to the holiday break first night of Hanukkah, ten days to Christmas, the New sixteen days to New Year's Eve, and of course when I'm counting down five days until the University of Miami's debut in the college football Playoff, I've got a pretty good I've got a pretty sort of robust show today that's going to hit a bunch of topics.

A fascinating and an incredibly important study by some from some folks from the Council on Foreign Affairs about the state of the United States and its democracy.

It's extraordinarily important read.

I'm going to pass on the highlights in a minute.

Fascinating new poll from the Searchlight Institute on corruption and more and portantly, it's not about the concern about political corruption.

It's about what voters believe is corrupt versus sometimes what lawmakers view as corrupt.

Here's a hint it let's just say that they don't share the same definition of what is political corruption these days.

The interview today is with Nick Troyana.

He is a founder and runs an organization called Unit America.

They've been He also wrote a book called The Primary Problem, meaning it is the primaries, a partisan primaries that are at his thesis, that are at the root of our polarization, the root of pretty much, probably seventy percent of our problems, particularly our problems and our inability to get things done.

We talk about a lot about various small the democratic reforms that could be necessary, would be necessary.

He's somebody that tried to run as an independent and saw all of the barriers to entry for third party third parties and independents.

And part of the goal I think of United America is just simply to open up the democracy to everybody.

Right now, this democracy is not open to everybody.

When it comes to competition for political parties or ideas.

There is a major barrier to entry.

And it's not financial, it is structural, and that is the heart of that conversation.

It is Monday, which means we're going to hop into the time machine, and I'm just going to give you one hint at what I'm going to be talking about in the time machine monorail, monorail, monorail.

How many of you will figure out what I'm going to talk about based on that hint?

Guess what.

I won't actually find out the answer to that, but I thought that would be a fun little clue.

We'll do some ask Chuck and I have a few thoughts on the state of college athletics, given what happened what we're watching at the University of Michigan.

But I'm going to start with the news out of Australia.

It's pretty painful first Ia Hanka around the world that this is what all of us had to wake up to on Sunday morning here in the United States and what the world is grappling with, and that is just yet another reminder that anti Semitism is at an ugly level globally right now.

Look, this is anti Semitism is not new.

We've gone through fits and starts.

Anybody who's Jewish knows the history.

We know the history of this quite well, the rise and falls of attempts eradicating Jews, blaming Jews for financial problems, blaming Jews for cultural problems.

We are the smallest of the major religions.

We are the smallest of groups that there are.

It's amazing how much power so many people try to attribute to us, and we're not even three percent of the world's population.

Obviously, what we've been you know, there's a lot of people that are looking at this and immediately trying to make a political argument, to make the case that it's the left that is supercharging antisemitism or the right that is supercharging antisemitism.

I will remind you all once again, I have only experienced it in stereo.

All right, before twenty fifteen, I experienced very little anti semitism, if any at all.

I think I shared a story with you an old friend of mine.

We were talking about this one time, and sort of right right when the rise of sort of it was those of us in the press that were starting to feel at first, and then it sort of broke open out into the mainstream.

But in twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen, you can say it was coincidental with the timing of the rise of Donald Trump, or if that is what sort of essentially lifted up the pretext on all of this.

But essentially the rise of the populace left with Bernie Sanders and the rise of the populist right with Donald Trump has given a permission slip to anti semits to either to either use it to promote a left wing ideology or use it to promote a right wing ideology.

Here's what I will say.

If you're using anti semitism to try to promote the left or the right, you're obviously doing it wrong and you're not very small d democratic and you certainly don't believe in freedom, that's for sure, freedom of anything, let alone freedom of religion on that front.

But I remember talking with this old friend of mine and we were talking about how our mothers would tell us these stories about anti about their butt, their anti Semitic experiences in grade school and high school.

My mother's second generation in America.

I believe his parents were first generation, and you know, they would tell us these stories, and my friend and I would sit there and go, you know, my mother would tell these stories about you know, kids in her high school looking for her horns or asking about her tale.

And you know, he would say that, you know his mother would you share similar things?

And we would just look at them like they were strange beings.

That's this can't be the case.

What do you tell?

You know, I didn't dec I didn't want to say I was dismissing mother.

But you know, you think, well, maybe our parents are exaggerating a little bit, you know, maybe, And I'll tell you ten years later, All right, eleven years now, we're almost we're getting close to the eleventh year of sort of this what has been a consistent uptick, really really you can.

I do believe the line of demarcation is June twenty fifteen.

But you can see this uptick and it is this is not something that either side if we're going to try to make this always a two way fight between whose fault is it is that the left is of the right.

This is collective and there's a lot of there's a lot of blame to go around, but I think the one that's sing singularly singular for blame and most important is social media.

In this, we've always had to anti semis.

We've always had a hate in the world.

Okay, just it's just a fact.

We've always had small minded people who have wanted to blame an ethnicity or a religious sect for their for their own personal problems.

That's in it, and that is that is not new.

Sometimes these sick people end up leaders of countries see Hitler, Comma Adolph.

Sometimes these sick leaders end up leaders of political movements.

And then there's always this what about is that comes along with with folks that are trying to defend their side from charges of anti Semitism, And it'll be like, yeah, but you know, yeah, but this disselected leader of Israel's bad about X, Y and Z.

That doesn't justify hate on little kids celebrating Hanukah in Australia.

There's nothing that justifies that.

So I don't want to hear the Abbots and I ignore.

And I'll tell you this the beauty of social media and stories like this is it becomes self selecting.

You see the people that immediately want to point fingers and say, aha, it's the left, A hats the right, And I'm like, aha, it's somebody that doesn't have a mirror in their own frickin' house.

But I want to put the emphasis on the distinguishing characteristic here of this era of anti Semitism, and that is social media.

I put my.

I want to align myself with some remarks that Spencer Cox, the Governor of Utah, Republican governor of Utah said last week.

And it wasn't on a specific thing, wasn't specifically about anti Semitism, but it was more about the toxicity, the toxic culture, the increase in violence that we've seen in politics.

And what's interesting is my friend Jonathan martin Wright wrote in Politico this week.

The following comment received the loudest applause he did a joint form with Josh Shapiro on this issue Spencer Cox and Josh Shapiro in conversation with my friend Savannah Guthrie, And the loudest applause at the form was when he said the following, If you want to be angry at someone, be angry at the social media companies.

These are the wealthiest and most powerful companies in the history of the world, and their profiting off of destroying our kids and destroying our country.

And the amplification the algorithms, the fact that fellow crazy anti semites can find other fellow crazy anti semites online and think, oh, I'm not the only one that thinks this, And the minute you think you're not the only one, that you're not alone.

It's somehow rationalized.

Is it makes you feel better?

It makes you think, oh, and then when you set up an ecosystem and a bubble that sort of is self reinforcing, you think you're the mainstream.

Everybody thinks their own media diet is a mainstream diet, right.

It is the inability of so many people to put their feet in other people's shoes and other people's media filters.

In fact, I think there's been some experiments.

I really would like to see people sort of spend a day in a media filter of somebody else, and you do these various media filters just you know, I look at it as an academic exercise to try to understand the electorate.

As you guys know, I have been referring to myself as a political anthropologist, meaning that that is constantly what I'm ultimately always trying to figure out is what is why are we in this place?

And if you're trying to figure out why, you have to understand the various political tribes in America.

Some of these tribes overlap.

People are members of multiple tribes, sometimes remember of only one.

But ultimately that's why I say I'm a political anthropologist.

I'm trying to figure out how do these tribes align?

Hey, gress what I know, I'm in my own tribe.

I just try my best to roll down the window in my bubble and see what's going on outside of my bubble.

But you have to It is hard to do it.

You have to intentionally do it.

You have to have the crazy ass Twitter feed that I have.

That I promise you most people at America probably don't because I do try very hard to get the normies and the extremes because I want to understand what the conversation that is going on.

Trust me, I'm sure some of you go some of you listening to me wouldn't even know who Candice Owens is.

And by the way, God bless you, I'd love not to know who this woman is.

But there are people, there's an entire community on the right that is consumed with trying to extricate this crazy woman from the mainstream of the MAGA world because of her just outlandish conspiracy theories.

I can't tell if she's mentally ill or just simply a shameless grifter, or perhaps the two of the two go hand in hand.

But there are plenty of people in mainstream America.

I'm sure if I said the words Candice owned, my mother and my brother in law, my sister in law, who all are pretty pretty smart about this, would be like, who the hell is that?

And I wouldn't blame them.

But that's because this is the world that we've all constructed.

But it's the world that social media has gone out of their way to construct.

And this is why, you know, I look at this rise of anti Semitism, and I look the fact that this was not a lone nut right, but there appears to be some coordination down there in Australia.

I do I can't, you know, I know that ultimately individuals are to blame, not a computer, not an algorithm, but these tech platfor to amplify, and you know, you know, I think they have a responsibility to make sure that what they're doing is not putting more people in harm's way, and their amplification, their algorithms, are doing just that, they deserve no protection on Section two thirty, the part of the law that supposedly says, hey, we're just you know, we're not doing the minute they put an algorithm on these things, the minute they amplify, the minute they allow for the connection.

Look, our First Amendment guarantees free speech.

It doesn't guarantee if bullhorn, It doesn't guarantee a right to be the loudest voice in the room.

It just simply guarantees that you have a right to free speech.

So you have a right to be a hateful anti semi okay, but you don't have the right to have your extreme, hateful and hurtful political views be the dominant piece of conversation and be mainstreamed in to America.

No, because, by the way, we don't want it mainstream, and the tech companies do not have to protect you and do not have to amplify your speech.

In fact, they can dial it down.

In fact, there's plenty of academic studies that show if you dial down hateful content, you're not getting rid of it, you're just prioritizing it less than these algorithms.

It's shocking how much turning that temperature down actually helps the conversation.

So it's troubling, but I really, you know, you look at the situation we're in, and there's no doubt we have bad leaders around the world that are exploiting hate and anger to try to make a political argument.

You have people on both sides of the aisle attempting to weaponize anger at Israel or anger at the economy and trying to somehow connect that to Jewish folks.

The left does it with bb at times.

The right does it with George Soros.

I mean George Soros.

There is no greater victim, there's no greater victim of anti Semitic mythology, uh and gross mischaracterizations than George Soros.

And I don't know where he gets to go to get his reputation back considering the character assassinations that have taken place through the prism of his faith.

There's there's no no, no doubt in my mind on that front.

But ultimately, why do we have more collective conversation about this?

Why is there more collective talk about this?

Why is there, frankly more insecurity for many Jewish Jewish people around the world.

Why do we feel so less secure today than we ever have before.

I think we can thank social media.

I think the tech companies have not only not gotten the focus of this, they've not taken responsibility, but I think they need They need to be the focal point.

Which brings me to that column that my friend Jonathan Martin wrote, which he says, you know, perhaps Spencer Cox needs to be the anti tech candidate.

Somebody needs to take it to the tech community.

Right, the tech community has brought us a lot of positives.

Okay, there's a ton of positives, and there's a ton of tools that have been invented that have helped me create a better communications system with you guys.

Right, There's no doubt there's plenty of upsides from the tech community, but what they have done with social media, And this is why I don't think the public is going to be supportive at all of this light touch, non regulatory process that the President's trying to do an artificial intelligence.

The same industry, the same industry that gave us social media without regulation, now wants to give us artificial intelligence without regulation.

Considering how well social media went, how the hell are we doing this right?

This is the most illogical thing you could come up with.

I can't believe the President is doing this.

I think this is you want to talk about convincing more mainstream Americans to go get a pitch for it and start sharpening up, sharpening that sucker up.

It is just crazy that we don't want to put any guardrails on the growth and expansion of the AI industry.

It is absolute insanity.

Okay, if you think social media created more toxicity in our culture and more violence in our culture thanks to the lack of regulation, what do you think is going to happen with artificial intelligence if we don't have some attempt at making sure there are constant guardrails being erected as we build this super highway.

It is something that I think I've talked about this before.

I think it is politically absolutely going to be frankly an easy thing to exploit potentially.

And you know, that's why the tech community is really making a mistake here that they are not grasping just in what kind of precarious position that they're in.

And maybe they think we don't need America and if America shuts us down, we'll just go somewhere else where we will be treated with lot we can just buy our way into a policy that we want.

And obviously, right now we have a situation where they can get whatever the hell they want from this administration if they just write a check.

And that's disturbing, but that's why we still have a competitive democracy, although I'm going to get to that in a minute, where the voters can sort of have a say in this, because right now we have zero say in what social media has done to us, and we don't seem to have the collective will.

It's growing.

I mean, look, I think it's a huge start that you've got.

I mean, look, Australia is trying to ban social media for people under the age of sixteen.

Spencer Cock made Cox made this mention that we wait to hand the keys to a car to a kid until sixteen, Yet we give them an algorithmic driven phone at twelve.

You know, perhaps we can give them a phone at twelve with no social media on it.

Right, maybe it's flip phones from twelve to sixteen, because plenty of parents want to have some access to their kids and all that.

I think that that's a legitimate concern.

But you know, we can essentially say, you know, no, just you can't have a you know, because I don't know how else you're going to be able to monitor this.

But if you actually just make the device itself against the law for somebody under the age of sixteen to have, that might be a start.

It is the one area where we're starting to see some bipartisan consensus, which is about access to screens and social media for people under sixteen.

And we've decided this is a problem.

Well, guess what do you think that our minds are only fragile from sixteen and younger, or that we've got these fragile minds that are much older too, and that social media warps those warps those over the age of sixteen almost as badly as they could warp those under the age of twelve.

One other point on the social media front, Jonathan mentioned an interesting new report that noted about.

It was a poll about the mano sphere, if you will, what do men want?

And it revealed that a majority of males sampled in that survey said social media feeds have gotten a lot more extreme.

I mean, most of this is thanks to Elon Musk and his insanity and what he's done to Ax and taking away all guardrails on acts, and of course every other social media company followed because they didn't want to get left behind.

But what's interesting is that men themselves revealed in this poll that most controversial content reaches the men who are online the most, especially younger men, white men, black men, Hispanic men across the board.

And we're seeing a more radical youth thanks to warped social media algorithms.

So when we see this rise of hate, we see this rise of violence, and we're looking, you know, the easy thing is to try to point left, point right, point at Israel, point Gaza, point a Hamas, point of protesters.

People want to point it.

A whole bunch of figures, except for the culprit that is in charge of the information ecosystem that destroyed the information ecosystem.

And trust me, I'm aware of the irony that I am speaking to you in that ecosystem, and hopefully it gets to you it doesn't get shut down by the algorithms of these big tech companies.

But they're the culprits here.

They've created this environment that has made it a lot easier for these hateful, awful, mentally ill people to find comfort in their bubbles because it looks like they're not alone and that they're somehow namestream.

Having good life insurance is incredibly important.

I know from personal experience.

I was sixteen when my father passed away.

We didn't have any money.

He didn't leave us in the best shape.

My mother, single mother, now widow.

Myself sixteen trying to figure out how am I going to pay for college and lo and behold, my dad had one life insurance policy that we found.

It wasn't a lot, but it was important at the time, and it's why I was able to go to college.

Little did he know how important that would be in that moment.

Well, guess what.

That's why I am here to tell you about Etho's life.

They can provide you with peace of mind knowing your family is protected even if the worst comes to pass.

Ethos is an online platform that makes getting life insurance fast and easy, all designed to protect your family's future in minutes, not months.

There's no complicated process, and it's one hundred percent online.

There's no medical exam require you just answer a few health questions online.

You can get a quote in as little as ten minutes, and you can get same day coverage without ever leaving your home.

You can get up to three million dollars in coverage, and some policies start as low as two dollars a day that would be billed monthly.

As of March twenty twenty five, Business Insider named Ethos the number one no medical exam instant life insurance provider.

So protect your family with life insurance from Ethos.

Get your free quote at ethos dot com slash chuck.

So again, that's ethos dot com slash chuck.

Application times may vary and the rates themselves may vary as well, but trust me, life insurance is something you should really think about, especially if you've got a growing family.

I want to pivot quickly to my Newsphere interview this week because some alarming new facts that I had not seen anywhere else from Mark Warner.

He's the vice chair of the Senate Intel Committee.

Mark Warner has seen the second He has seen the video of both the September second second strike on those survivors from the first strike of the boats off the coast of Venezuela, and he revealed two facts that I had not seen anywhere.

Fact number one is that the time that elapsed between the first strike and the second strike was somewhere between thirty and forty minutes because of cloud cover, so thirty to forty minutes, and then the clouds come up, and then apparently what is revealed, according to Senator Warner, was not fully clothed survivors clinging to their life, and then the second strike.

Let's just say this is what look He believes that if Americans see this video, they will be appalled.

There will be and there's a reason why the Pentagon is fighting the release of this video.

There is no defense.

There apparently is going to be no defense of what this video looks like.

This is appalling, and there are probably going to be concerns that there are people that might have legal jeopardy here.

But realistically, I don't know where you get the legal jeopardy when the president will likely just pardon anybody that is investigated.

But there's a reason people are fighting very hard not to release this second video because if what is what Warner described to me a delayed thirty to forty minutes and they were not fully clothed, Essentially, just put yourself for the situation.

Your boat explode, You're alive, you're swimming, You're clinging to the remnants of a boat in order to stay afloat not drown.

Half your clothes are gone, been blown off.

Maybe you're just sort of trying to use it, and we decide to use the second shot.

No wonder there are questions why the phrase war crime is being tossed around although we're not at war, because you know, as many a person has pointed out, the question is whether there is not whether this second strike was legal, but we still have real doubts about whether the first strike is legal.

And it is worth noting that earlier this week, earlier last week, Trump offered a veiled threat at Colombia because the president of Colombia has been critical of this, saying that he might not be out of the crosshairs.

And then the President has said that they might target some of these folks on land.

Whose land is it?

Venezuela is a Colombia.

Where's this headed?

And again there is no Senator Warner could not give me the authority that that he could not explain very well the authority that the White House was using that they claimed these strikes were legal.

I mean, they've cited an authority.

It's not the for if you're wondering what Senator Warner said, it is not the am au m F that was passed by Congress that that allowed for the invasion of Iraq, but and which has been used, which was used by Obama as justification for strikes, and I believe Yemen and some other places.

So that is not there.

So we still don't have a clear picture of the legal authority the White House is claiming to go after these folks.

But he has threatened land strikes without asking for any authority from Congress and additional authority from Congress, nor has he made his case to the American public.

And by the way, the decision to essentially commandeer an oil tanker rather than just blow it up, although blowing up an oil tanker would have been catastrophic, essentially starting a fire on the Pacific Ocean potentially or the Caribbean Sea, depending on where they were hitting this tanker.

But if we can board a tanker, we could have boarded these boats.

And I think the decision not to attack that tanker and simply to just commandeer it under totally undermines the rationale and justification of the strikes themselves.

Why there is no good explanation for why we're not just essentially stopping these boats, grabbing these people and getting some intelligence so that we can actually learn something.

And I want to just keep one thing in mind here, just one more thing in mind, which is the president's political standing is not great.

He has had a terrible month.

He had a terrible Friday, excuse me, Thursday last week when his retribution campaign.

You know, basically he's the Emperor with no clothes as far as Indiana Republicans are concerned.

Grand Juries in Virginia are not.

Might might want to indict at Ham Sandwich, but they won't indict Leticia James when he's not feeling, when he feels as if things are going bad, that's just when he might do crazier stuff and might attempt crazier stuff to either change the subject or change the picture.

One more thing before I get to an important essay that I think you guys have to make note of the president.

It is notable to me that the President did an interview with the Wall Street Journal over the weekend, and the most fascinating aspect of it was his tone change.

He essentially is admitting that he's going to lose the mid terms.

He said, you know, he basically said, we're going to try our best to win.

We'll see what happens.

We should win, but you know, statistically it's very tough to win.

Yeah, I know, it doesn't make So it's the beginning of the excuse making.

It's the beginning of the his way of admitting this economy, that the public doesn't like this economy.

This was the interview saying, Oh, it's going to take time, my investments haven't gone through.

It will happen.

Just be patient, and as he said, hopefully it happens before the election.

But it's notable, right he went from this is a hoax two weeks ago to at least in this interview with the Wall Street Journal sort of accepting the premise.

Yes, we realized the public doesn't feel it or see it yet, but they will, But they will, he promises, He swears.

These are these stages.

It's we should call it stages of political it's not quite political grief.

But it's sort of like, you know, first there's a dial right, then there's you know, somehow you're argumentative.

Then there's a form of acceptance.

He's getting into the form of acceptance, but he's not accepting the premise that his policies are a problem.

He's just simply saying his policies haven't kicked in yet, And that says he's no different than any other president trying to defend a bad economy.

No, no, no, no, my policies haven't kicked in yet.

It's always my policies haven't kicked in yet.

I'm dealing with the predecessor's policies.

So in that sense, it's a familiar pattern.

Perhaps the best part of that Wall Street Journal interview was the fact that you know, he's doing the interview with the Wall Street Turnal reporters, but he's taking calls and doing all sorts of stuff at the same time, right, And here's the I'm going to read directly from the article.

At one point, the President, sitting at the resolute desk with a glittering Christmas tree at its side, asked an aid to show him the latest market data.

He took calls from friends and allies multiple times during the interview, including from Interior Secretary Doug Bergham, who joined by speakerphone to discuss the administration's plans for Washington, d C.

Area public golf courses.

That is right, the President seems to not be worried about the price of groceries as much as he's worried about the designs and who's in charge of redesigning Washington d C's three public golf courses, Rock Creek Park, Haines Pointston.

I mean, if you're trying to hand Democrats easier fodder to say, you know, he promised this, to focus, laser focus on this, this and this, and instead he cares about building a ballroom, changing the name of the Kennedy Center, singing ymca UH, and redesigning Washington DC's golf courses, all of course extraordinarily important priorities to bringing down the costs of electricity and groceries in your home.

Anyway, just uh not not the smartest politician, but Donald Trump's never been the smartest about messaging in that front.

But that brings me to I think a very important essay from a quarterly journal.

I'm a politically like I say, I'm a want to be political scientist, I call myself a political anthropologist.

That means I actually read political science quarterlies.

And there's an extra jordinarily important one that's out this week.

It's an essay in Foreign Affairs, which is the flagship journal of the Council on Foreign Relations.

This isn't a partisan outlet, it's not a resistance blog.

It's the magazine where American presidents, Secretary of States, national security advisors have gone for generations debate how the world works and how the United States role it should be.

So three of the most respected democracy scholars in the world from Harvard Toronto and the Council on Foreign Relations, Steven Levitzky, Luke and Way and Daniel Ziblat.

They're not cable pundits.

They're not people you're going to see in the round tables of Sunday shows.

They're not political activists.

They're simply political sciences who spent their career studying how democracies erode around the world, how they fail, and occasionally how they recover.

Well, they have an essay called with about out competitive Authoritarianism, and in fact this is what they write, and this is why I took it very seriously.

This was not something I read, no offense to my friends at the Bulwark.

It's not something I read in the Bullwark.

Not something you're going to see it here in pod Save of America certainly, now you might.

I doubt you'll hear this from my friend Eric Ericson either.

But here's this essay.

In twenty twenty five, the United States ceased to be a full democracy in the way that Canada, Germany or even Argentina are democracies.

Okay, they're just making a classification.

And then comes the line.

The game, however, is far from up.

They're not saying all is lost.

Okay.

It is an important essay because they deal with this tension of yes we have had erosion and no, this isn't permanent.

Okay.

So they argue that Donald Trump's second term the United States crossed a definitional line into something political scientists call competitive authoritarianism.

Here's how they define it a system in which parties compete in elections, but incumbents routinely abuse their power to punish critics untilt the playing field against their opposition.

So elections still happen, but perhaps you threaten lawmakers to redraw the maps to make more favorable elections.

Opposition parties still exist, but perhaps you raise the threshold for petition signatures to get on a referendum, or you change the dates and stuff see Missouri.

But the referee is no longer neutral, right, and the House rules keep changing.

And importantly, they're not saying this might happen, because it's already happened in this country.

A year ago, this group predicted that this would be Trump's trajectory, that he'd weaponized state institutions the way elected autocrats have done in Hungry, Turkey, Venezuela, and India.

And those are the four most important examples to follow here, because Venezuela obviously the helm election the leader loss, and he wouldn't leave Turkey, Hungary and India have are what are considered faiish elections.

But we'll find out when the ruling party loses one day just how fair they are.

But they write this indeed, the Trump administration has done exactly that.

But here's what the authors say.

They didn't anticipate.

What's surprised even then wasn't the speed, but it was the scope.

And they write, this, one form of authoritarian behavior that we did not anticipate a year ago was the Trump administration's routine subversion of the law and even the US Constitution.

Well, we've seen that with the strikes, with that as well.

I mean, there is very little, very little doubt here that this is not yet not constitutional.

The question is whether they'll even try to give some congressional authority on that.

So let me outline a few more things that they write here, weaponizing the state.

They call it the blueprint.

Every competitive authoritarian regime follows a familiar playbook.

Purge, then pack, so removing professional civil servants who see their job as the law, and replace them with loyalists who see their job as the leader.

Just look at the FBI.

That's exactly what they document happening inside the Justice Department, the FBI, and other key agencies.

When officials resisted, they were just simply removed.

We've seen US attorneys, deputy US attorneys just summarily fired when replacements were chosen, they weren't selected for experience, but for loyalty, including, as the author's note, Trump's own personal lawyers installed as senior Justice Department officials.

It's just right out of, right, out of sort of.

There's a fun parody about authoritarianism called Moon over Parador with Richard Dreyfus.

I do to write that what seemed like parody is now real.

Right, And then even when prosecutions don't lead to convictions, the authors explain why that doesn't matter.

Such investigations themselves are the powerful form of harassment, right, making Adam Shift hire a lawyer, making Letitia James deal with this, making James Comy deal with this, legal fees, time, reputational damage, career disrupt eruption.

The punishment is often the process itself.

They don't care if they ca convictions.

They just want them constantly made to be, you know, unhireable, don't get them on corporate boards, make them seem as if they're controversial figures.

Then of course you got to follow the money.

Because this is what's happened with their next move, going after civil society.

How's the Trump administration done this?

They've ordered investigations into Act Blue, the primary arm of the Democratic Party, Open Society Foundations, the George Soros founded organization.

The Wall Street Journal reported that that there are plans to target Democratic donors through the IRS.

That's right out of the competitive authoritarian handbook that these political scientists know.

Then there's the pressure campaign against the media.

Trump sue the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

The FCC opened silly investigations into ABC, CBS, PBS, NPR, Comcast, which owns NBC.

We've seen the FCC chair act like a thug in threatening Jimmy Kimmel, Disney and NBC.

It is it is, and what makes this so dangerous and so effective is is not just what happened, but because of what didn't happen.

In fact, our authors are arguing that the most insidious change isn't the repression, it's been the self censorship.

They point that outlets i've become realigning and pull back, like the Washington Post, like the editorial page is kind of a clown show.

Now it is just outside of George Well, there's not a readable columnist left in that place.

It is just a joke.

The editorial page itself is sort of.

It's like they have one thing they do every time if there's some economic controversy, they write some convoluted editorial attacking Elizabeth Warren.

I guess that makes Chef Bezos feel better, but it has nothing to do with the point itself or any of the actual rational debate that's gone on.

You've had the teen Vogue has sort of gotten rid of their political coverage.

CBS clearly just has a new owner and they just wiped out, you know, brought in virtue signaling new editors to run thing.

We've seen Disney cave in, We've seen plenty of again, all of these legacy media, these corporate owned, shareholder driven media organizations that all fall under Donald Trump's potential influence due to government regulation, they've all capitulated, which is why frankly, we're doing so well here at the podcast, So in some ways, thank you, But unfortunately, this is why we've all gone down this independent road.

Because if you want to be honest and if you want to tell the truth, you're gonna have to find a different outlet because you're not gonna be able to do it at the Washington Post.

You're not gonna be able to do it at the major legacy TV networks that are left.

I'm not saying individuals aren't trying, but collectively they're not even giving the chance.

And here's the other thing.

Here's the part we don't know.

What makes self censorship so insidious is that it is virtually impossible to ascertain its full impact.

So wrote these authors, right, we can see a firing, we can see a cancelation.

What we can't see are the stories that are never pitched, the investigations that get quietly abandoned, or the headlines that are softened out of fear, or the questions that don't get asked on camera because executives in New York tell their correspondence please don't do it.

Because our corporate overlords are afraid of blowback from the president that is happening.

You can guess where that's coming from.

That's how democracies hollow out.

And this is where the essay draws a crucial historical line.

America has had its stark chapters Jim Crow read Scare, Japanese Internment, McCarthys, and Nixon.

But the authors also argue that after Watergate, the overt authoritarian abuse largely disappeared.

Since nineteen seventy four, no democratic or Republican administration had systematically politicized law enforcement or targeted political rivals the way Donald Trump is doing.

George W.

Bush his Justice Department investigative Republicans and Democrats.

Barack Obama appointed James Comey, a Republican, to be the head of the FBI.

Joe Biden kept Christopher Ray as head of the FBI and a pointee of Donald Trump.

Mind you, Merrick Garland bent over backwards as Attorney General, sometimes to a fault, to avoid the appearance of political interference.

So the conclusion is fun in each of those critical areas that Trump administration stands alone in its authoritarianism.

Now, none of this is inevitable.

And here's where the essay shifts from diagnosis to prognosis.

He says, the US still has advantages that most competitive authoritarian regimes do not.

There's still an independent judiciary.

There's still a professional military, though Pete hagg Seth is trying to erode it.

There's still strong federalism.

I mean, look at the way Ron DeSantis is pushed back on the AI issue in the AI moratorium that Trump is done.

There's still a vibrant civil society.

Helloo, and there's a unified opposition party.

And Trump himself lacks the single most important asset the author's note for authoritarian consolidation overwhelming popularity.

Successful autocrats often rule with approval ratings over eight.

Trump is stuck in the low forties.

And it's actually trending downward that matters.

So that brings us to what they argue is the greatest danger of them all.

The greatest danger is not repression, but demobilization.

It's not tanks, it's not mass arrests, its acceptance and resignation.

It's people deciding not to run, not to donate, not to sue, not to vote.

And then this line, which is really the thesis of the piece, The outcome of this struggle remains open.

It will turn less than the strength of the authoritarian government than on whether enough citizens act as though their efforts still matter, because for now they still do.

So there you go, Levitzky, Way and Ziblat.

They aren't telling Americans to panic, They're just telling you what is okay.

This is what has happened to America the first year of Trump's second term.

We have slipped into something called competitive authoritarianism.

He is trying to create an authoritarian regime.

There is democracy still, there is still competition, okay.

And our future is not set in stone or the cement is still wet.

Okay.

They're warning against two equally dangerous instincts, complacency and fatalism.

The future is going to be unstable, okay.

Neither full democracy nor entrenched dictatorship is going to happen.

It's going to be a struggle.

This is going to be a fight.

The next elections may be fought in theory over policy differences, but they're really going to be about the larger issue of what kind of system are we choosing to live under?

And that danger isn't that democracy disappears overnight.

It's the dangers people stop believing that they can defend it.

So please go read this piece.

It's extraordinarily important.

It's well argued, it is you know, evidence based, it is data driven.

Is it is not just alarmist cable commentary.

And that's the most important thing.

And it comes from a place in the Council on Foreign Relations where important ideas sort of get launched for debate, and this is one that more and more mainstream Americans need to understand what is happening and what it's taking place.

All Right, I've gone on a little bit longer with my first half monologue here before than I have, But in some ways that goes right into the need for open primaries, the need to structure our politics so that we have more voices that have a shot here, not fewer voices.

The manipulation of our political system sort of begins with this attempt at picking who your voters are, if you will, and that is a huge problem.

So we'll sneak in a break and when we come back, we're going to talk to Nick Troiano ahead of United America on how we make this democracy great again.

Do you hate hangovers?

We'll say goodbye to hangovers.

Out of Office gives you the social buzz without the next day regret.

They're best selling out of office companies.

We're designed to provide a mild, relaxing buzz mood and enhance creativity and relaxation.

With five different strengths, you can tailor the dose to fit your vibe, from a gentle one point five milligram micro doose to their newest fifteen milligram gummy for a more elevated experience.

Their THHC beverages and gummies are a modern, mindful alternative to a glass of wine or a cocktail.

And I'll tell you this, I've given up booze.

I don't like the hangovers.

I prefer the gummy experience.

Soul is a wellness brand that believes feeling good should be fun and easy.

Soul specializes in delicious HEMP derived THHD and CBD products, all designed to boost your mood and simply help you unwine.

So if you struggle to switch off at night, Soul also has a variety of products specifically designed to just simply help you get a better night's sleep, including their top selling Sleepy gummies.

It's a fan favorite for deep, restorative sleep.

So bring on the good vibes and treat yourself to Soul today.

Right now, Soul is offering my audience thirty percent off your entire order.

So go to getsold dot Com.

You who's the promo code toodcast.

Don't forget that code.

That's getsold dot Com promo code toodcast for thirty percent off.

Joining me now to talk a little bit about reforming are the infrastructure of the democracy.

It's somebody I've had conversations with before.

Somebody I've known a long time, Nick Triano.

He's the executive director of Unite America, the organization that brought ranked choice voting to the state of Alaska in particular, had been fighting to get essentially to get rid of partisan primaries, whatever form that can be done.

If it's ranked choice voting, it's ranked choice voting simply getting rid of the need for party registration, then it's getting rid of the need for that.

But it has been the through line of Nick's work.

But I know that he's essentially been in this game.

He look he ran for Congress as an independent, he's and he realized these bare to entry were extraordinarily high.

You know, if you're not a far left or a far right person, is there a home for you in American politics?

Is there a home for you in primaries?

And I think Nick has been devoting himself to trying to find that place for those of us that aren't stuck in the wings.

And he joins me, now, Nick, good to see you.

Good to see you.

Check.

So let's start with sort of your this is United America, what are we up ten years.

Coming up on ten years running the organization, and we're not more united than I then we started.

However, we're still working on it.

So look, the let's start with ranked choice voting, because I think the first time you and I had a conversation, there was a lot of there's a lot of bullishness, a lot of excitement about the idea.

It kind of worked right pretty It seemed like it worked the way it was supposed to work in Alaska, it worked the way many people were hoping it would work.

In New York City in twenty twenty one, you know, the main experiment has been less successful because of the decision that main lawmakers made to to only have this somehow count for federal not for state, which is just a head scratcher.

And frankly, I find the whole New York City set up so the Democrats use rank choice voting, but that trust me, there are a lot of voters who wanted rank choice voting, I think during the general election.

But I know you know this, over the last four or five years, I feel like there's been a movement against it, even people that were supportive going it's hard to explain.

You and I've had this conversation I've always said it, you know, hey, as somebody who has walked people through election nights and talks about, you know, vote dumps and things like that, explaining ranked choice voting getting it out of the black box is very difficult.

So that's a long lined up.

Where are you on this?

Where's United America on rank choice voting?

And is this a method that you still think is the answer?

Well, I in you in America are focused on solving what we call the primary problem, which is the role that party primaries play in exacerbating our divisions, in increasing dysfunction and government because they incentivize candidates and elected officials to play to the base of both parties in order to win the only elections that really matter these days, which is not the November election when most people vote, but the primaries when the candidates are nominated, because most districts and states right now lean so heavily one way or another.

So that's the problem, in our view, low turnout party primaries dictating the outcomes of most elections before most Americans can even vote.

The solution set for what we can do to solve that problem is varied, and when we talk about solutions to the primary problem.

It could look like opening up primary so that all voters can participate, including independent voters that are currently locked out of primaries in sixteen states.

It can look like getting rid of party primaries and replacing it with all candidate primaries, so there's a single ballot in the primary, everyone gets to vote for whomever they want, and the top finishers go to the general election.

There's a system that's called top two that's used in California and Washington for example, or what Alaska adopt it in twenty twenty, which is a top four system.

And when you advance four candidates from the primary to the general election, you want to ensure that one of them wins with majority support, not just plurality.

And there are two ways of accomplishing that.

One is you can hold a runoff election if no one gets over fifty percent, or the other is you can have an instant runoff where people rank their candidates according to preference, and if no one gets a majority, there's a process of elimination using voters' backup choices.

That's what ranked choice voting refers to specifically, which is the part of the reform in a top four primary, that is focused on ensuring a majority winner.

Ranked choice voting is used in other circumstances, and in our view, it's most powerful when it's combined with a reform to the primary system.

So Alaska's reform is a top four primary reform plus ranked choice voting in the general election.

And other places like New York City or Maine are what we would think of as partial reforms because they only have ranked choice voting and they don't really have any other kinds of reforms to the primary system that could improve governing incentives by widening the electorate.

Let's talk about the mechanics of ranked choice voting, because I think that's been the stumbling block.

Can you is there any way to make this feel more transparent where you feel like you can see the You know, I have not come up with one, but I'm curious if if you have, or you know of other folks who tried.

Well, there's two parts to the ranked choice voting process.

There is the part where voters show up to the voting booth or get their ballot in the mail and they fill out their ballot.

And that part is simple, which is you have the option of ranking your candidates or you can just vote for your favorite, and in all of our exit polling, we found that eighty plus percent of voters say that they find this simple to do, and that number goes up over time as people get used to it.

The second part is how the votes are tabulated, and that is done by election administrators.

They have a range of options for how they do it, and some jurisdictions in the country, particularly those that have been using it for a decade or more, have found ways that this can be an instantaneous process and it could be fully transparent, which is to say, they release the cast vote records so that there is a way that anyone can audit the results.

There is a way to make sure that there's results delivered on election night, and there's ways of displaying the results that make it intuitive for people to understand exactly what happens at each round of the tabulation.

So the charge sometimes that it's a complicated or confusing system is really used by opponents to say, you know, let's not change the way that the elections are currently working, because the current way works for them.

It works for the two major parties, it works for the incumbent politicians.

They're afraid of change.

But you know, election reforms like the ones we champion have been used successfully in America and abroad for many years, and it's a necessary part of what it's going to take to foster a more functional and representative government.

Look, I am, I am.

If we could get if we could go to a top four I fully believe we should be a top four democracy.

I'd love to see that in our presidential race, you know where, and then and that I wouldn't do rank choice.

I think the country suit there's a runoff, then the top two face off, we have one more debate, like there's a runoff, right Like it feels like that that is that we you know, we wouldn't have a big drop in turn you know, the concern and when we got rid of general election runoffs, the concern is always, well, you're not going to have a good turnout.

Well that's not true anymore.

I mean, my god, I look at the special election in Tennessee earlier this during the earlier part of December, and for a special election in December.

Uh, you know, there were something like one hundred and fifty thousand total votes.

I mean, that's impressive for that.

I mean, I think the engagement with the democracy.

And you know, I think there's a I think there's a commentary about our country that our electric gets engaged when when they when they think they feel it slipping away.

But you know, it turns out that apathy was a sign of stability.

But it is, so I don't mind that.

What but if we had thirty states holding runoffs but the other two and he didn't, then I could see that that would be an issue.

Well, runoffs get a bad rap for some good reasons, including that they have been used historically in ways.

To diss It was about denying black representation in the South.

Right, that's why why did we have Southern runoffs?

Every Southern state had runoffs for one reason, and one reason only, to prevent black people from winning elections.

Right, And two things can be true, which is that there are systems that have runoffs today that don't necessarily have that negative impact that you actually do see turnout increase in the runoff.

That is the case in Louisiana, for example, in their governor's races.

Louisiana has a very interesting election system where there is effectively no primary, there is a general election.

Everyone gets to be on the ballot.

They're kind of top two, right, just like Washington, and if no one gets majority, there's a runoff, and so in that case, the top two finishers advance, or if someone gets a majority of the vote, it's a one and done election.

And by the way, it's simpler for election administrators, it's simpler for voters, and it's better for democracy because the election that matters is the one in which most people are already voting, and so you get a more representative outcome and there's not this initial primary filter where only ten percent of voters, who are usually on the most extreme fringes of the political spectrum are deciding you know, election outcomes.

And so this will sound wonky and maybe mechanical to people, but it has an impact on public policy because when you look at Louisiana, it's one of the only Deep South.

It is the only Deep South state that's expanded medicaid, for example, and was one of the first states to really lean into charter school reform.

And when you think about the purpose of government and is it representing people, in Louisiana, more citizens have access to healthcare and too education than a lot of other peer states.

And the reason for that is they have a more functional political system with leaders who are intended and focused on solving problems rather than just these partisan squabbles every day, and so performing our elections improve and center, but ultimately in per his governance so that we can solve problems that matter to people.

Of course, I think Bill Cassidy wishes that they would have kept the old system, but now they're going to go to a primary system, which certainly complicates his path to renomination.

Let's talk about where you're active on the playing field here.

What's the status in Alaska, what's the status in Nevada.

I know, those are two places that you've been active.

And where else are you guys active in trying to expand access to primaries.

So Alaska is a great success story for primary reform because after the state adopted it through the ballot initiative process in twenty twenty, it's now gone through two election cycles where more voters than ever before have been able to cast what we call a meaningful ballot, you know, which is a ballot in election that's truly competitive in which of their vote matters.

And what that resulted in Chuck is the State House and the state Senate now have bipartisan governing majorities.

It's not just one party that's in charge.

There's a coalition of members Democrats, Republicans, and independents by the way, that are working together to address the problems important to the state, most recently overriding a governor's veto to increase education funding.

And so Alaska has been a success story of how better elections result in better governance, and it's produced a backlash from those who used to be in power and liked elections when it only represented a handful of people, and so they've been trying to repeal this system.

They were unsuccessful in that.

Last year, a majority of voters in Alaska voted to defend the system, and opponents are going to likely try again next year.

And I suspect that support for the system is going to continue to grow over time, not just because people in theory like the concept of the freedom to vote for whomever they want, but now they're getting real and better results from the system that they voted in a few years ago.

Did you think you were going to have to fight multiple election years in Alaska to keep the system in place.

I don't think it's a surprise that every action has an equal opposite reaction.

There's the forces of trying to make government better fighting against the forces that are trying to protect the status quo.

I think that the period of defense is most important in the immediate years after the adoption of reform, but that it gets better over time because the new incumbents, there are those elected under this system who actually like it and want to defend it.

And so it's not the legislature that's trying to repeal it, right, it's a small faction of partisan activists that are.

The other perception problem rank choice voting has, and I say it's a perception problem because it obviously depends on where you sit, is that it appears to have benefited the center left more than it has benefited anybody on the right.

Well, I think the challenge that we saw in twenty twenty two was that the candidates who were running the two Republicans were late to adopt their campaign strategy to this new system.

So instead of telling voters vote for me first and the other Republican second, they ran against the system that the voters just adopted.

And so without that adoption of a new strategy to build broad coalitions.

A moderate Democrat, Mary Potola, you know, was able to win that US House race.

By the way, a couple of years later, voters voted differently and the Republican now represents that US House seat.

So I do think that there's this transition period in which the parties and the politicians have to get smarter in how they campaign under the new rules of the system, rather than campaigning under what the old rules used to be.

So that's Alaska.

So you're likely having a is it the same ball on initiative that the opponents are putting up or are they rewarded.

It they actually expanded what they're trying to repeal to include repealing dark money disclosure requirements that were originally passed in twenty twenty.

Oh wow, that actually helps your cause.

People don't like dark money.

People don't like dark money, and they don't like party primaries, and they don't like plurality winners and elections, and so opponents are trying to do something unpopular for the sake of protecting, you know, what was their own political power.

And I'm confident that, you know, the system will continue to endure and be a proof of concept that other states could you know, potentially replicate.

And that's what we did see in last year's elections.

You know, multiple other states pursued ballot initiatives for an Alaska style kind of system, and while none passed, three states came within three percentage points of passing.

In a pretty to be honest, though, five years ago, I thought all of those were going to get pass easily.

You know, I remember when we were first talking, and you know, you're like, yeah, we got to do Nevada twice.

You were pretty you had you were kind of bullish about Missouri, I believe, if I'm not mistaken, And it did seem as if the opponents got savvier in pushing back at you guys in Nevada and elsewhere.

Well, what we're up against is the two party do optly that wants to.

Protect actually working with each other this one.

Right, It was the Democrats that spent over fifteen million dollars against this in Alaska and Republicans who spent over seven million in Montana to try and fight it, and they would sort of weaponize the issue and say like, actually, these reforms are about the stocking horse for the other party.

Well, they both can't be right when they're saying that, and so we have work to do to build more early and durable support among voters for these policies.

We don't need to convince anyone that our political system is broken.

What we do need to do is educate voters about the benefits of these systems and why it is worth a change.

And as you know, the threshold of getting a voter to vote yes on an initiative is much harder than getting them to vote no, because you have to kind of prove your case beyond a reasonable doubt.

And I think that's the that's the task that you know, we've signed up for and we're going to continue to work on because the status quo is unacceptable and it's leading us in a direction in which we're seeing our politics unravel, you know, even further.

There's a reason results matter more than promises, just like there's a reason.

Morgan and Morgan is America's largest injury law firm.

For the last thirty five years, they've recovered twenty five billion dollars for more than half a million clients.

It includes cases where insurance companies offered next to nothing, just hoping to get away with paying as little as possible.

Morgan and Morgan fought back ended up winning millions.

In fact, in Pennsylvania, one client was awarded twenty six million dollars, which was a staggering forty times the amount that the insurance company originally offered that original offer six hundred and fifty thousand dollars twenty six million, six hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

So with more than one thousand lawyers across the country, they know how to deliver for everyday people.

If you're injured, you need a lawyer, you need somebody to get your back.

Check out for the People dot com, Slash podcast or now pound law, Pound five two nine law on your cell phone.

And remember all law firms are not the same.

So check out Morgan and Morgan.

Their fee is free unless they win.

So if I were in your shoes, I'd actually think that this is about as opportunistic of a period of a year as you can have.

And when you think about the re redistricting orders, it is taking you know, the issue of political party manipulation and putting it right in the voter's face, right, so you know, I throw that in there, you throw in that the electorate that you're likely to get in a midterm environment.

Is an electorate that's going to be more open to changes in the primary system.

I think the electric you would get in a mega induced environment.

I think we I think you know where I'm going there.

So what states do you expect to be on the ballot in trying to do primary reform and is and let me know and differentiate whether it'll be the top four or it's just open primaries, et cetera.

There is a lot of activity happening in the movement to reform our politics.

There is litigation happening to open close primaries in states like Maryland or Pennsylvania.

I'm convinced there's an equal protection argument on this.

I do not the idea that that there is a poll tax against me as an independent voter, and you're telling me that the only way I could participate in a taxpayer funded election is I have to join a private club.

I believe that's a poll tax.

I don't see how that's constitutional.

It's certainly not in our belief under many state constitutions that have even more protection for voter rights than maybe the federal constitution.

And so there's work happening on that there's work happening in legislatures to at least open the primaries to all voters.

We saw earlier this year in New Mexico, after a multi year campaign, there was a bipartisan bill that passed to allow unaffiliated voters to start to participate in party primaries starting next year, over three hundred and thirty thousand of them.

And then, of course there is the ballot initiative pathway, and there's at least two states where local groups are pursuing the top two all candidate primary initiative.

And that's in both Massachusetts and Oklahoma, two very different states politically, but what they have in common is that all of their congressional seats are decided in the party primaries, and in Oklahoma those are closed to unaffiliated voters.

And so those are two states I think to be watching for.

And to your point, the environment has never been more ripe because our political system has never been more dysfunctional.

We just emerged from the longest government shutdown that we've seen in history, motivated by in this case, democratic leaders who just want to fight.

I mean, that's what this has become.

I mean the of the year.

The Oxford Dictionary new word is rage bait.

That's reflective of where our politics is.

Right.

I'm still trying to understand how the word of the year is two words.

But that's a good question.

But that's reflective of our politics, which is it's about playing to the base.

It's about demonstrating the fight, not about solving problems.

And that's why this primary problem, the incentives, is behind so much of the dysfunction that we see our inability to solve problems.

Another issue we can look at is immigration.

As you know, Chuck, a decade ago, there was a bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform bill that passed the Senate, it goes to the House.

Why does it fail?

Well, the House majority leader was primaried out of office that summer because he was open to some compromise on this issue.

And then here we are a decade of pendulum politics.

We had, you know, effectively open borders under the Bided administration, and now we have ice raids with even American citizens being snatched off the streets under President Trump.

People don't want these extra dream policies that we've been seeing of late.

They want these issues to be addressed in a sensible way.

That's not going to happen until we change the incentives of our political system.

You and I go back, I think almost two decades now, our mutual mentor the late Doug Bailey, and you know you've been in this, You've been in this what I call radical centrism, you know, movement for some time.

I use that phrase.

I'm going to be a bit self referential and name drop here.

Bono called me a radical centrist one time at a salon dinner that we were at together, and I said, are you I'm going to take it as a compliment.

He says, Okay, he wasn't.

He goes, it's sort of a compliment.

He goes, there's sometimes that I wish you would take up this cause here, this cause there.

And I always say, I'm not a centrist.

I'm an incrementalist, meaning late are some things I'm on the left and some things I'm on the right.

But I know that the only way to make change in america's one step at a time.

And I don't think you try to do big things.

You try to do baby steps and eventually you get your hockey stick moment.

Why do you think it's been so hard to galvanize the frustrated center in America.

Well, first I would, I would.

I was also say on this topic of what, you know, what is the ideology of this movement that wants to make politics better?

I think centrism comes short in describing it because it really is not about living in what many people view as a mushy middle.

It is about No, it's not about just everything's a compromise.

It's just that it's that's that's not what it is.

That's why I always say no, no, no, I'm an incrementalist.

You know, I empathize with your idea on here, let's try with let's try one step.

Yeah, it's about also people that want to find common grounds and no matter where you are in the political spectrum, you can work with others to see what you have in common to actually get something done.

And that's how the biggest, most durable change that we've seen as a country work.

When we look at the landmark pieces of legislation that have passed the Congress, whether that was civil rights or social security, or medicare or welfare reform and a balanced budget, these things were votes of a majority of both parties doing it together and to be sustainable, not what we're seeing today.

The promise of primary reform is that for every state that adopts it, it effectively liberates both senators and the representatives from those states from being beholden to the base to being representative of the whole.

And so you don't need to win in all fifty states.

If we can abolish party primaries in ten states, that's twenty US senators.

It's a fifth of the Senate that actually can have more leaders who are willing to work with each other on issues of national importance.

That's never been more important for the country.

When I think about where we're at right now facing the rise of artificial intelligence.

Whether we get this right in terms of setting the right rules for the road, having the right over set in place, making the right investments, that's going to be hugely consequential for our economy and national security in our society.

And if we don't have a representative Congress that can do that, other countries will, or the corporations themselves will, and we're all going to be worse off for it.

So whether we have a Congress that works affects us all, and the reason why it doesn't today is not just because of this partisan paralysis.

It's because without competitive elections, we wind up getting career politicians who stay in office for way too long.

We have a quarter of the Congress that's over the retirement age, over a third of the sentence above age seventy.

It's how we get congressional hearings where they're asking about tik tak instead of TikTok.

And these aren't the folks that we needed making the decisions that are to affect maybe the biggest transformation our economy and society, you know, going forward.

The biggest difficult I have.

And I'll just speak for myself, and I'm curious where you're where you are on this what I'm about to bring up, which is I am I am easily persuaded in the reform movement, right, I think there's a lot of I'm I look at the last sort of crisis moments in American history, and each one of them came with serious periods of reform.

You know, after the Civil War, during the basically after the Gilded Age, and the and the and the robber barons right after, you know, during and after FDR, and you know, both for good and for bad, right like when when, And so I'm optimistic that we're about to hit one of those periods that we know, look, we've got to do something about the pardon power.

We've got to do something.

You know, it's clear the Constitution is going to have to deal with campaign finance issues because you can't do it legislatively.

And we've got to deal with age limits.

Right, I'm all for this age issue, but they're only you have to do it in the Constitution.

So the point is is that I can be I'm almost like a squirrel with this.

I'm like, oh, I like that reform.

Oh yeah, I want to do this.

There's a lot of I've been you you go to these gatherings too.

I get invited to many of these sort of gatherings, whether it's a fledgling third party movement, fledgling reform movement, you know, those advocating a constitutional convention, the folks at the Forward Party.

You've got the World Open Primaries, which is another organization that's working in a similar fashion.

I know there's a loose connectivity between these groups, right you guys, you know, you're all rowing in the same direction, but everybody has their own sort of lane in their own thing, and maybe it's you already are biased that you have got to start.

Do you think you feel like there is an order to the reform that's necessary here, that you know, before we get to we've got to do why, and before we get to why, we got to do z.

Well, I think two things are true.

One is, we have a beautiful system of federalism in our country, and we can do this in an experimental way at the state level.

I mean, and that is the way that these reforms have gotten done in the past and will today, which is states can change these rules without an Act of Congress or a constitutional amendment, and by virtue of building momentum around reform, it will put more pressure on Congress and potentially create an environment in which constitutional change is possible.

So I think the state by state route is both a strategy and an opportunity to try different things.

And the second thing is I and we did not start with primary reform as being our north star.

We got there through examining what sits at the center of both what is most viable and could be most impactful.

And I do think that abolishing party primaries is the biggest possible change that we can make right now that can open the window for other potential changes down the road, particularly changes that will require legislatures to do something, because for them to do something on this issue, they need to be more representative of the population who supports these reforms than they are today.

So I both support an experimental approach to this and we support primary reform for a very particular reason, which I do think it is the most solvable problem right now.

Well, and that's the key, which is what's a problem you could solve first?

And I think there's no doubt about that.

This feels like a you know again, I called myself an incrementalist.

This is an incremental step that could actually, you know, open the door to a whole bunch more of ideas.

Do you find yourself frustrated that other reform minded folks don't see this as the core problem?

I think I was frustrated in year one when more, you know, or year two, when we're back at the same table and arguing no this one, no this one, and realize, like we're thirty people in the room, there's three hundred and fifty million people out there.

Those are the folks that we need to be kind of talking to.

And so my orientation changed, like this is a positive sum approach to a movement.

You know, when you look at the environmental movement or other movements, there's not just one policy that they're behind.

It's a diversified approach, including what could be done on the state or federal level.

And so it doesn't frustrate me that there are multiple potential pathways to making our democracy better.

The thing that's frustrating to me is around apathy or defense of the status quo, because can anyone look around today and say, oh, no, this is actually fine and we're moving in an okayed direction.

If you can't, then choose something, choose one of these things to be for and get behind it, because I don't think the path that we're on, you know, is sustainable.

What's been You know, there's a lot of statistics that show that the the youngest voting generation is not registering D or R.

The registering is I or no party affiliation.

So in theory, this should be the core of the activists that you're able to recruit to make this change.

Are you making some inroads?

Is this something that can be turned into a something that's galvanizable with the college crowd.

I do believe that.

And what we saw last year was that the number one predictor for voters that would support election reform at the ballot was not by party affiliation, It was really by age.

Younger voters disproportionately in favor of changes to a political system they've only known has been broken.

An older voter is sort of more hesitant around any potential changes to a system they've known the same way while all of their lives.

And that's good news, because young voters become all voters and just a question of time.

And so I think time is a really important lever here when you look back as your reference before or to the progressive era, when we got major reforms down the women won the right to vote, the direct election of the Senate, banning of corporate campaign contributions, income tax, the big party primaries.

People don't realize the income tax amendment was important because it also helped create the property tax structure in America, which is, you know how we fund so many local services.

And that didn't happen in just a couple of years.

That was a thirty year period of time.

And so when I think about, oh, Alaska won this transformational reform four years ago.

It suggests to me we're at the beginning of a very exciting decade plus era of reform in reaction to you know, historic levels of polarization and partisanship.

The country knows is just not working for them right now.

You know, we've sort of danced around this issue, but the biggest opponent to everything you're trying to do is the duopoly, and it's you know, the Democrats in party, in the Republican Party doesn't really work together on anything other than this right, which is sort of protecting their status at the ballot.

You can sometimes win over local members of a party or local party organizations if they're in a state where they've been marginalized.

But I imagine donors are hard to come by because a donor usually is a partisan right.

They usually are passionate about something.

Is it hard to find people passionate in the very wealthy space about reform.

But unit in America over the years is built across partisan community.

Now over one hundred and twenty what we call political philanthropists, and many of them have not traditionally been partisan donors, investing in politics for a partisan outcome.

That's fine.

But there's been a lot a lot of people who have come into this movement because their interest is not trying to elect or oppose one political party or another.

It's about people who have been philanthropically mind who care about an issue, that knows we're not going to make progress on that issue, but for government being able to be functional and representative of the electorate.

So I would say it's a different profile oftentimes of a donor that gets involved in this space, and from across the political spectrum as well.

It's really interesting in this work, not just at our team or board level, but also in the donor community of people that may not agree a lot on particular candidates or particular policies, but we do agree that government should represent a true majority of Americans.

And then let's have the argument once we have a government that can represent us.

I know you said in a few states where there's not a referendum option that you're trying to work in the state legislature, obviously you have to go with the lowest common denominator.

Stuff is it?

Is it simply allowing independence in primaries?

That's about the about the best you can hope for in convincing a legislature to do.

Something in the near term.

I do think that legislatories will take more time to bring along to more ambitious reforms.

But let's remember that California adopted its all candidate primary system by legislative referral, so some states legislators might be willing to at least put it on the ballot.

It takes leadership, though Governor Schwarzenegger was instrumental, you know, in that campaign.

And when I look at incoming governors like an Abigail Spanberger who serves in you know, have one term, there's in Virginia.

Maybe this is something that schol champion is part of her legacy there to say this will be good for the commonwealth out into the future.

Let's get this done.

I think when we have executive leadership that leans into the issue, legislatures may be more likely to follow.

Look, I mean, I'm just ecstatic that is a Virginia voter.

I don't have to register by party, and I at least get a choice what primary, you know, and I always just find the competitive primary and I vote in it.

So I you know, Virginia is a place where where you feel like no matter where what your ideological stripe is you at least have some say in the conversation.

But Virginia may also repeal a constitutional amendment on redistricting reform in a couple of months, and California just did it.

And I look at what happened there.

There was real momentum on redistricting reform just four or five years ago.

And I would bet frankly that movement had more momentum than your movement.

Did.

We were part of that, actually, yeah for.

Me, but it had a and and it's amazing how that flipped that quickly.

Are you at all I mean, are you at all demoralized at how people who are reformers are going?

Yeah?

But on this, I mean I just have struggled, you know.

And I've had this debate with friends out in California.

I said, look, I just don't understand why if disenfranchising voters in Texas is bad, why is the answer disenfranchising voters in California.

I'm with you.

I think fighting fire with fire means everything just burns down.

So it was not in favor of what California.

Is a good expression.

However, a fair way the instinct which is that I get it, I get it.

Yep.

And I also think it's important to bring it back to why it's happening When Texas redistricted, when Missouri followed suit, and now there's pressure in Indiana.

It's because the president right now is weaponizing the primary system to get it done.

When he goes sweeps into a state, it is get this, find me five more seats, or I'm going to primary you in your next election.

So I think it's important we connect the dots to the political incentives piece, which is how primaries can be weaponized not just to push people to the extremes, but to push them to do undemocratic things to consolidate power.

The opposite is true as well, or the other side of the coin, which is that if we didn't have party primaries, this challenge of safe districts or districts that are heavily lapside would matter less check because there would be more competition in the general election if we advanced more than two candidates rather than what it is you know right now.

And so I think the answer to go ahead and create a partisan primaries.

Right, go ahead and create a partisan plus twenty district in California.

At least there'll be a top two in the same party and then they fight over you know, you know, left versus center.

I mean, I always thought Berman Sherman was the first one of these, and it was Howard Berman and Brad Sherman.

They got redistricted into the same thing together and they both advanced to the they were in the top to and so.

It was a D on D general election.

And I remember the dividing issue was actually tart at the time, and one of them had been you know, voted against it, one of them voted for it.

And then essentially they were wooing the third of Republicans that were in their district.

Right, they were both Democrats, and there was a third of Republicans that were the swing voter.

And I thought, boy, that could really if we could have that system everywhere where, at any point in time, even if you're in the minority, your vote could be the swing vote.

You get to decide do I want, you know, do I want a libertarian conservative or do I want a evangelical conservative?

Right, if that's the two choices, well, I you know, it may not like either, but I have a preference of which I want less, you know exactly, Yeah.

You think about it.

The midterm elections that we're going to go into in ninety percent of the districts, these elections are over before people show up in November, and their vote, if they cast, it really doesn't matter.

We're one hundred and ten million, you know, I think we'll get one hundred and ten million midterm voters.

Maybe one hundred and fifteen.

It's turnout.

It's been amazing in the Trump era again.

And.

Maybe there'll be thirty five congressional seats decided by ten points or less out of four hundred and thirty five maybe, right.

So that's tens of millions of people, you know, who is A vote effectively does not matter.

It's impooring people vote, but on participation without competition does not result in representation.

If we want your vote to matter, you have to have a choice that is real.

And so the idea that in red districts you get to choose what kind of Republican you want, during blue districts, what kind of Democrat you want in the general election, is much better than showing up to an election that's already been you know, decided.

You know, it's funny.

I grew up growing up in Miami, up in the seventies and eighties, and I remember my dad was a Republican Conservative, but he was a registered Democrat, and I remember asking him, I said, why are you Originally he says, well, there's no Republicans down here because at the time the South, this was back in the seventies, every politician in the South, everybody was a Democrat, but half the Democrats were really Republicans.

But all the local offices, he said, if I want to have to say in local primaries, you know I got to vote.

So in some ways, conservatives, older conservatives in the South have actually been participating in primaries this way for a long time.

I mean, it all boils down to the idea that every American should have the freedom to vote fro whenever they want and every taxpayer funded election period.

Right seventy eighty percent of voters, regardless of party, believe in that.

In addition, though to the attacks on redistricting, what we're also seeing in nine states right now is attempts by legislators to close the primaries and actually start to register voters by party in order to do so.

That is extremely unpopular.

I mean, we just released a poll today from Republican polster in Texas that found two thirds of Republican primary voters support the current system.

They like to have the freedom to vote.

They don't like the idea of government overreach and starting to have to register publicly what party you're from.

So these attempts are driven by insiders, driven by extreme factions.

What they're trying to do is unpopular, and that's one of the reasons why you Know in America is working hard in these states to defend the current system from going backwards.

And what we have found is that our allies in this in many cases are Republican legislative leaders who know that not only is this bad for America, it's bad for their party.

When the largest and fastest growing part of the electorate are those that don't belong to either party, How can you expect to win those voters over if you're kicking them out of the process in which you're choosing your candidates.

And so it really is, you know, courageous Republican leaders in many of these states that are standing up to forces within their own party that want to close elections to create more pure ideological purity that might wind up costing them elections.

Is there a good privacy argument.

I mean, you know, I don't want to have to join one of these two clubs.

Don't make me join a club.

I want the privacy of keeping my you know, I may lean one way or the other, but I'd prefer the government and anybody that checks my voter registration to just see I'm a registered voter period.

I don't think you should know my politics.

Now.

You may learn it over time, but I don't want to have to identify.

I mean, it's sort of a strange thing that government is making people do this in a quote unquote democracy percent.

I mean, we adopted the secret ballot a century ago to give people privacy over their right to vote.

In many states, however, we force people to register publicly with a political party.

Go in some database, I can see what party you belong too.

In many states don't have this system today, and that's what those those states are trying to change.

And I agree with you that it's an invasion of privacy, particularly in an era of politics in which one's party affiliation can be used against them.

No, it gets weaponized culturally, it can be weaponized at your job, it can do this.

I mean, you know the local part well, the local Democratic Party here in Arlington County if you want to participate in some of the county primaries, because Virginia, each county can sort of party can decide how they want to do it.

So they don't have party primaries, they don't have taxpayer fund of primaries, but they do have their own party primary and you have to sign a pledge if you want to participate in it, and I just won't do that.

I know the pledge is meaningless, but I kind of feel, you know, but I don't think they have the right to ask that right now.

It is a privately funded election that they run, so okay, it's a private organization.

They can have that say.

So I just don't particip in.

I won't justicipad in because there're sometimes the Republicans have gone off and on about doing the same thing where they make you sign an oath because there isn't a there isn't party registration in this state.

So let me shift in our last few minutes here to the other areas of reform to focus on.

So I agree with you.

I think primaries number one are sort of easy to communicate to people that it's a problem, right, it's a we're polarized.

Hey, it's this primary issue.

People get it, So I'm with you.

I think it is the good first reform to focus on what's next.

What's two, three, and four in your head?

I think it's a good question.

I think we need to do something on campaign finance.

It's a salient issue for most voters.

They don't like the idea of special interests or wealthy interests having disproportionate say in our political system.

That will likely require a constitutional amendment.

There's something the other number two when you ask people what's wrong with politics today ones money in politics.

The next is career politicians.

And I think there is something to do with age limits and term limits to make sure that we have a Congress that can reasonably turn over with time and remain both nimble to the issues of the day, you know, and representative of people.

Again, those may require amendments, so those are harder, you know, lifts.

I'm also frankly interested in what may not be a reform that requires a change in law or state constitutions.

But how do we think about other ways we do democracy outside of an electoral context, And there's a growing movement around deliberative democracy.

And citizen assemblies, which are essentially randomly assembled groups of citizens that can deliberate on issues and make recommendations to government.

I think they're interesting ways where they can actually be integrated into the government, like.

A jury pool, but instead of for deciding somebody's guilt or innocence.

Okay, Arlington County is going to do a random jury of one hundred citizens because we want to decide whether we want to put bike lanes.

Everywhere, right, yeah, I mean, and this goes back to Athenian democracy.

I mean, this is not a new idea.

This is actually how democracy was done in the very early days, and.

The idea it's what Datokville loved about our democracy.

It was how local it was and how engaged we were at the township level.

And I think it's gonna be even more important as our information ecosystem is transformed and in many ways polluted and distorted by artificial intelligence.

How do we protect the spaces in which democracy can be done.

So mean, this intrigues me is who's trying this?

Any community out there trying this?

There are local communities in fact here in Montrose, Colorado and for Collins have done citizen assemblies there have been.

How does it work?

Give me an example of how the citizen assembly work.

Poor columns especially.

People will approach in different ways.

The sort of ideal way is a process of what they call sortition, which is random selection of citizens.

They are incentivized for participation, like compensated for their time, but they might meet a few times on a weekend over the course of a few weeks.

They're presented with information and arguments from different perspectives on an issue, and then they deliberate in a facilitated way together to render a particular you know, recommendation or perspective that then say, goes to the city council and so binding.

No, although it could be set up in a binding way, but right now many of the ones that are being done are advisory, you know in nature.

I think there are interesting ways in which may be integrated into the citizen initiative process itself.

We can use CITIS assemblies to determine what gets to go to the ballot.

I mean, it's just it's an improvement in what direct democracy you know, can look like.

So I'd say like over the next decade plus, there's going to be needs to reimagine what democracy looks like.

I mean, we're coming up on our two hundred and fiftieth anniversary as a country.

We've gotten here.

I think by continuing to look at and innovate and improve the way that we can self govern and we need to be responsive to the times.

And so whether it's these election reforms or citizen assemblies, the idea is that we need to keep democracy fresh to keep it working.

I'll tell you I would.

I would.

I've always thought about this, and you know, I joke that if you live in the state of New Hampshire for more than ten years, you're going to end up in the state legislature at some point when you have a four hundred members state House.

But I used to think, what if that were just a four hundred random people that were selected to be in the you know, and then you brought them together just like you would a jury, and Okay, this is the legislature.

We're going to compensate you for your time.

You're the citizen legislature for the leg Any.

Look, if you feel like any, you vet them, maybe you know certain people can't serve, and you know whatever, you can come up with some criteria, but compulsory representation is something that I've actually been curious about, where you basically, Okay, yeah, once every twenty years, I got to sit on the city council, you know, once every twenty twenty years, I got to do six months.

I got to do six weeks at the state capitol.

You know.

I think we would get better.

I think we would certainly get outcomes that were more reflective of the population.

I mean, if you put in a poll right now and ask most Americans, would you rather keep the five hundred and thirty five leaders we currently have in Congress or do a lottery and try out something new for a couple of years.

I'd be interested in how to come back.

But I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people would be open to trying something a bit new.

And this model, like you said, it is not a foreign concept.

Juries make life or death decisions.

Surely they are also capable of informing what our marginal tax rate could be.

Now you look at it, it feels like there are a couple of rural states that would be more open to trying this first, you know, And it could be interesting whether it's a you could see easily see one of the new England states being open to this concept.

I mean, the New Hampshire State House can be such a pain in the ass with how many specials, you know, we have foreigner members.

There's always somebody who's you know, can't do it, or can't go or this or that.

If you told me they transition to something like this in twenty years would shock me.

By the way.

The pathway that many of these reforms take at the state level is through the initiative process, where citizens get to decide this and shape their own government directly, and that process needs to be protected.

It is under attack in many states right now by legislatures that are trying to increase the threshold of what it takes to pass the ballot initiative to make it harder to qualify.

So I think everyone who cares about democracy, and especially in the reform movement, ought to be working together to make sure that we protect and improve the citizen initiative process.

There will be initiatives on the ballot next November that will both attempt to make things worse that we need to defeat, and a couple of states actually innovating with constitutional protections of the initiative process so that legislatures can't undo them in the future.

I scared Jack dan Forth on the idea of a constitutional convention.

He fears it that you know that, you know it implies that we're scrapping the Constitution.

And he's like, I love our constitution, we just need to amend it.

And I'm like, well, it's a gathering to basically consider amendments, is what I'm what I'm advocating, But not everybody is.

There's always when when you throw the idea out there, it's more folks on the left who are skeptical of it these days than folks the right.

And in fact, at Clinton won in ninety six, I think it was Greg Abbott at the time as governor of Texas was basically wanting to to lead a movement of states to call for a constitutional convention.

And you know, had Clinton one in sixteen, that might have been what the right would have focused on.

It might have been an interesting exercise.

But you think it would Is that a fool's errand in your mind?

Or is it something that whose time might might be now?

I think the time was before now for a convention to re examine some of the not principles of our constitutional design are checks and balances our separation powers.

But the structures, I mean, whether you believe there ought to be an electoral college or not, no one can argue that it's functioning in the way the founders designed it.

So what does it look like to improve and modernize it.

That Well, I got a simple solution to that.

Double the size.

Go back to increasing the size of the House every ten years, and then your electoral college and your popular vote will no longer I mean right now every four years, the likelihood of a split decision between the electoral college and the popular vote is more likely, not less likely, because we have not expanded the numerator of the electoral vote of the electoral college.

And if we double the size of the House, I promise you nobody'd be complaining about the electoral college.

As you know, what people fear about a convention?

Is it the runaway convention?

Will they do something to radically But we're skipped.

But those critics forget there's a ratification process.

Whatever.

The practician comes up quite high.

Yes, right, you don't fear the voter.

Yeah, I don't think we should fear it.

I think we need to treat it seriously.

Be cautious and smart about it and embrace it as a tool the founders gave us to sure that we can continue to endure as a representative republic for centuries to come.

Why isn't someone trying to be the leader in convening this.

I think that there's this sort of psychological barrier about whether constitutional change is possible.

It's been what thirty years since the last amendment, you know past, But I think pressure is going to build, especially because of how if power continues to consolidate in the way that it does, if the initiative process deteriorates, then the other levers we have to make change become harder, and I think people may view this other pathways becoming increasingly necessary.

Yeah, it's been I just feel like that the I think that there's agreement with this, but in some ways you have to have a leader right to galvanize people to get there.

Well, your next project, Chuck.

Oh man, We've all got a lot of projects.

Right.

Let me get you on this.

You ran for office once before, you still have the itch.

Not under today's party primary system.

I can tell you that.

No, you live in Colorado, it's the least partisan or the least primary impact.

I mean, certainly primaries have some certainly or but it's less so, right.

Yeah, Although I think Colorado is heading in the direction of many other places where the primary sism is causing our state to become a lot more partisan.

It's one of the states that we can tine to work on for form.

But we'll say having had the experience of running for office early on was good in being grounded and how voters actually think about democracy and elections, not just an academic perspective on this.

And I feel grateful to be in a role right now to make the biggest impact I can that can impact how people who runs and how they govern and at scale.

You ran as an independent, So let me get you out of here actually on this topic, which is what do you think Mike Duggan is running into right now?

Running is independent in Michigan?

That he expect that you would have been able to tell him how he asked you that, Oh yeah, this is how many voters view third party candidates are independent.

Yeah, be wary of the early polls that show voters would like the idea of an independent.

And looks really good at first, doesn't it exactly?

But I think the most important thing for any independent is to achieve escape velocity, which is to say, you have to be able to prove that you are viable before voters really start paying attention and ask if you are and that happens well before election day.

So unlike the traditional playbook where you spend most of your resources in the last ninety days, you know your November election is actually months earlier because you have to be interesting that you can be a.

What does that look like being showing up in the conventional places that other candidates do?

Is it money?

What is it that you think?

And I know this is a bit subjective, but generally, what do you think that voters are looking for to decide, oh, you're legitimate.

I think in the past, the houristic would be like traditional media coverage, the press taking you seriously when you get a debetia are you as the what are you pulling at?

But today I think that's changing because the metric that probably matters most in our politics is attention.

Are you getting attention?

Am I hearing from you?

Are you breaking through?

I think that works in the favor of independent candidates the extent that there are a fewer gatekeepers that are saying, whether you're credible or not, but you can reach voters directly in a more democratized way than ever has been the case.

I'm hoping that we might see a couple of these candidates actually break through what has been that glass ceiling and then show that it's possible.

Nick Treada, you always give me a little more.

Hope your your glasses have full on this.

Reform movement, aren't you yntinue to stick there?

There's no other choice, so let's get it done.

Right, There's only forward, right, there's there's my friends at a certain third party like to say, you know, we only have one choice.

You have to move forward.

Thank you, Jo great stock with me.

Well, I hope you enjoyed that conversation.

Look, I don't care where you are, left, right or center.

It doesn't make sense for our our our democracy to somehow lock people out of our You know, we don't know where we live, We don't know whether we're going to have a Republican in charge or a Democratic Democrat in charge.

We should have us say and who gets into these general elections across the board.

It is odd to me that we have just accepted this premise that you have to join a private organization in order to participate in many states in a taxpayer funded election.

We need some We need some better lawyering out there on this front, all right, We need some better lawyering, because, trust me, there's a lot of equal protection arguments that I think should be made on this front.

All right, it's time to jump into the time machine.

We're going to go back to December seventeenth, nineteen eighty nine, a young Chuck Todd was a senior in high school.

In case you were wondering what I was doing, December seventeenth, nineteen eighty nine, it was the debut of an animated series for adults called The Simpsons.

And who knew what kind of impact is?

I would argue, bigger than Saturday Night Live, Bigger than Meet the Press, right, sort of the launch Sunday Affairs conversations, right in some ways before it was the first place you ever had back and forth on politics in a first radio and televised arena.

We had Saturday Night Live sort of the king of parody, and then there the Simpsons.

And in some ways the Simpsons are probably is important of a participant into the changing ways that we satirized politics than any other program that has been launched in the last in the history of television.

So that's the subject of my time machine history lesson of the Day.

How the Simpsons rewired politics, media and animation.

And it all started December seventeen, nineteen eighty nine.

It was a Christmas special.

I remember it was a short on The Tracy Omens Show back in the day, but this Christmas special aired on Fox and it looked loud, rough and kind of disposable.

Right, thirty five years later, that cartoon hasn't just outlasted its peers, it's outlasted entire media eras Right.

The Simpsons didn't just mock American politics, that's easy.

What they did is they reshaped Americans understand power, persuasion, and performance, and in the process they what animation itself can be.

And what I loved about what the Simpsons did is they did it look.

Was there a social socially liberal lean to the show, sure, but it was not necessarily a liberal show or a conservative show.

In many ways, really mocked process and it was really good at surfacing hypocrisy and surfacing the absurdity of the professionalization of politics, and in fact one of the early ways they did it.

And I want to pop through a few shows that I think where they really were brilliant and what they did.

And when you watch these shows today, you're think, oh, I've seen this in other places, But at the time, nobody had ever done this before.

So Burns for Governor.

When Moni Burns ran for governor, the Simpsons showcased in the pop culture area that something that we political reporters already knew, we political junkies already knew that campaigns were a business.

The episode two cars in every garage and three eyes on every fish, burn earns he doesn't just run for governor because he believes in anything.

He runs because regulation threatens him.

That's why he decides he wants to run for office.

The telling moment isn't the mutant fish.

It's when Burns instructs Smithers to assemble a campaign operation the way a CEO would assemble a management team.

And so for the wider world, they understood, give me a pollster, a media handler, speech writer, an image consultant, and the episode showcase that Burns understood something essential.

Campaigns aren't moral arguments.

They're simply logistical ones.

Now he loses not because voters rejected his policies, but because he fails to convincingly perform as a relatable figure.

Right, he won't eat the fish.

It's a lesson that campaigns still learn relearn every cycle.

Another episode that I thought did a good job at sort of mocking government and politics the monorail episode and the use of Broadway to explain infrastructure failure.

The episode Marge versus the Monoail endures because it understands persuasion better than most policy memos do.

The episode is a deliberate homage to the music band Monorel Monreel.

Sorry Lyle Lanley is Harold Hill selling civic fantasy through charming song.

Well, the Monorail isn't about transportation, it was simply about identity.

Springfield doesn't choose the mono rail because it's efficient.

I don't think they really needed one.

They choose it because it made them feel important.

That's how it was sold to them.

In some ways, what it was mocking were all the smaller cities that were getting talked into debt financing arenas and other sort of supposedly public arenas or entertainment complexes or concert halls, but they were really about just helping a private entity make money.

The episode's genius, in some ways was showing that democracy can be overwhelmed by spectacle, not ignorance, and mister and mister Lisa goes to Washington.

It remained one of the smarter portrayals of civic education that we've had on television.

Lisa's faith in democracy is shaken, but it's not destroyed.

The system works barely because exposure still has power.

Sometimes the episode frequently is cited an academic work, believe it or not, because it models critical citizenship skepticism without disengagement.

It goes back to the essay I had at the beginning of this episode, right, don't give up.

Even when you think the system is rigged and it's messy and it's ugly, there are still ways that you can make the system work.

Then, of course, there was sideshow Bob Roberts good homage to that mockumentary back in the day.

That show went further side show Bob riggs an election, it's revealed and he wins.

Anyway, sound familiar.

Episode predicts scandal fatigue, the idea that information alone no longer guarantees accountability.

Unfortunately, that was something that I think when people watched it at the time.

Oh no, that wouldn't really happen.

Let's just say the episode has aged uncomfortably well.

Trash of the Titans populism, deferred costs, or moral hatcher.

Trash of the Titans is local politics done brutally right.

Homer runs for Senate Commissioner, promising more services, less effort, and no responsibility.

His slogan, can't someone else do it?

It isn't laziness, it is actually resentment.

Once elected, Homer delivers exactly what he promised, and the system collapses under the weight of deferred costs.

Right, the most revealing moment isn't the failure, it's the response.

Springfield exports its garbage to another town.

The episode captures a timeless political truth.

When costs are delayed or displaced, accountability totally evaporates.

Look, it was.

One thing about The Simpsons is after a while their success at mocking actually made it where politicians wanted to be seen as on the side of the Simpsons, that on the side of the reasonable people, that they weren't the crazy runs.

And you've had all sorts of people who have participate let their voice.

Barack Obama, I think Joe Biden did once Outdore Rush Limbaugh, did I believe you've had The George hw Bush episode when he moves across the street from Homer is really well done and it is almost, in some ways an homage hw Bush.

So it is.

It was proof and certainly plenty of media figures participated over the years Springfield became a legitimate public square.

Then, of course there's the impact that the Simpsons had on what we all watched today.

Right.

I know, I'm a fan of a lot of adult animation these days, and we have the Simpsons to thank, right, think about it, Before the Simpsons animation in America simply meant kids.

After the Simpsons animation meant tone and not age, right, And what we all figured out was it was easier to see an animated figure tell us an uncomfortable truth that a real person telling us an uncomfortable truth.

Right.

Without the Simpsons, we wouldn't have had King of the Hill, South Park, Family, Guy, Futurama, Archer, BoJack, Horseman, Rick and Morty.

I know I'm leaving a bunch out.

You want to tell me your favorite you want to tell me what you think the Simpsons did to impact political culture.

I'd love to hear from you.

And then, of course, there's one of my favorite homages to the Simpsons.

Two thousand and two, South Park aired an entire episode that might be the most honest tribute of them all.

It was called Simpsons Did It.

And the premise was simple.

Every idea of the South Park writers were trying to come up with had already been done by the Simpsons.

And the whole punchline of the episode is over and over again character shout out Simpsons did It.

It wasn't being a mockery, it was simply acknowledgment.

It was clear our friends at South Park probably had writer's block that week, and it may be why they went to decide to just stick to parroting in the moment stuff on that front.

But that episode captured something every creator understands.

The Simpsons didn't just open the door.

They mapped the room right and they and they allowed so many other creators to come in and have their own version of this in their own take an entire generation of writers to find the boundaries of what animated storytelling could do politically, culturally, and emotionally.

So the Simpsons still kicking.

They didn't just survive history, They've explained it.

They taught audiences how to spot performative leadership, civic spectacle, deferred accountability, media driven politics, and they did it while teaching animation how to grow up.

So that's why the show still matters.

And somewhere creator is still pitching an idea, only to hear a familiar voice in the room say, Simpsons did it?

All right, let's get into a little ask Chuck, Ask Chuck.

We're going to do.

Here's my promise to you.

Some of you probably been wondering, Hey, I threw a question in here a while ago.

How come you haven't dealt with it?

I thought it was a pretty good question.

Well, I'm going to have an entire episode where I'm just answering questions and trying to play catch up a little bit.

That'll happen in a couple of weeks.

And yes, if you want to chalk it up to oh, it's the holidays, but yes, okay, it's going to be new content.

I promise it is not.

It is not me just trying to well, it is me trying to have a couple of days off.

I'm not going to lie about that, but it will be timely and it will be useful, I promise.

But let me get in here.

Get three or four questions in the here.

First one comes from Tiffany and she writes, did Adam Schiff hurt or help Mandela Barnes by endorsing him for Wisconsin Governor?

I live in Wisconsin.

I have voted Republican until twenty eighteen.

I think there are a lot of people like me politically in Wisconsin.

I don't know that anyone in Wisconsin will appreciate endorsement from California.

Also, recent history shows that big endorsements from the Republican Party fail in Wisconsin.

It seems a little out of touch for the Democrats to do big endorsements like this, thoughts, thank you Tiffany well Tifically, There's one simple reason why an Adam why a Mandela Barnes would consider an Adam Schiff endorsement meaningful or helpful to him, and that is that Adam Schiff has one of the most lucrative emailress of fundraising lists in the country.

One, he's from the largest state, particularly the largest liberal state, in California.

Two by being the face of impeachment, he build a massive donor list, then being attacked by Donald Trump constantly has only served to make that donor list more active, more viable.

So you are right.

I don't think anybody, any Wisconsin voter is going to be moved by the endorsement.

And if Mandela Barnes actually puts uses Adam Shift's endorsement and paid media, he'd be a fool.

No offense to Adam Shift.

But I don't think any make cares.

I think you're absolutely right.

But if you're wondering why why does this endorsement mean something to Mandela Barnes to Ching to Ching to Ching to Jing.

It is access to that email list, That's what it is.

And Adam Shift probably only only president Presidential nominees probably have bigger and more interesting level like Kamala Harris's list that she controls was going to be a good one, but Adam Shift is probably the single best left leaning fundraising list in America.

That is not that for somebody who never ran for president.

He's just all the ingredients are there, the impeachment, the attacks from Trump's and being from California, you throw all that in there.

That was why Mandela Barnes wanted that endorsement, and why the endorsement matters to him.

It is not intended to try to persuade you, and in fact, it sounds like that that stuff might actually dissuade you.

And I think in some ways some of these endorse I don't think.

I don't think endorsements matter unless they bring you something else.

And in this case, what he's looking for is just access to grassroots dollars, and Adam Shift probably has the single best fundraising list there is.

Alright, let me go to next question comes from Max w Hey, Chuck and Chris ah Hey, Solissa, you're not answering your mail bag, so I'm gonna have to answer your leftovers here.

Max w.

Rights, I posted this as a comment for Chris Silia's mail bag already, but I want to suggest again what I think is a great wager.

Oh on the Aggies versus Kane's matchup, loser shaves his head.

Why are we doing this?

No shaving of heads or goatee's or anything like this, But okay, let me listen, he goes.

It's don monetary demonstrates actual commitment to the schools you both support.

I've made a few loser shaves bets in my day, and I'll be honest, I've never felt more invested in a result.

Maybe Reginald could handle the Clippers well if you know, you know, but you'd better get them to him before he hits the Johnny Walker blue things.

I will I have.

I'm one time let Tapper, Jake Tapper talk me into a This was back Philly's Dodgers Serica twenty thirteen, twenty twelve NLCS, maybe twenty fourteen NLCS.

I'm just trying to remember when the Dodgers were, you know, still hadn't quite gotten broken through.

They were still still you know, thinking, you know, they were still believing Matt Kemp was the best player they could sign.

Right.

They weren't quite the Dodgers yet.

They hadn't been big the juggernaut that they had become.

And the Phillies were pretty good juggernaut that team that was the sort of the last gasp of Ryan Howard in that crowd.

And Tapper wanted to create some social media fun and he wanted to make it he was going to grow and I was going to shave one.

I never agreed to the bet, but he tried to social media bully me about it anyway, So no I I lost and made a nice sizeable contribution to the charity of his choice.

Look now, I will say this, I'm probably more comfortable trying to shave my head now that I would have been ten years ago, because as you could see, it is thinning, and maybe you know, my only fear is if I totally do it, what happens if it, even this doesn't come back, right the fear us middle aged men have about what what if it doesn't come back?

I was watching a basketball game over the weekend.

The GWA Revolutionaries were in the in the Orange Bowl, this Orange Bowl tournament down in Fort Lauderdale.

We were playing GW was playing Florida.

I think they hung held pretty well, they'd hit their free throws.

They might have won that game.

I think it was a pretty good test that you know, GW, I think is a mid major that may make a strong case to get into the NCAA tournament.

But the other game was UMass versus Florida State.

And UMass is coached by a Miami native named Frank Martin.

He was the guy that took South Carolina.

Well he's gone full head shave, and he looks great.

I mean, kudos to him.

I would not have thought that he would have done the c ball thing very well.

He does it well.

He looks good, just as menacing.

I'd still be afraid of him coaching a team on the other side, but it looked like there's nothing that will grow back, you know.

So that's my fear of playing the head shave game.

We'll see.

I'd say that I think solicit fears he can't grow beer.

We'll see.

I'll ask him about this on our next episode.

All right.

Next question comes from Andre from Los Angeles An.

He writes, Hey, Chuck, why is it that when someone announces a run for office, the first focus is always on who their donors are and whether these donors will approve It feels like candidates are vetted by donors, consultants, and party brass long before they ever reached voters, which makes them seem into authentic.

Voters want real, opinionated leaders who feel genuine, not prepackaged for donor approval.

Why has the donor class become the priority over the general public?

Andre la go bruins hashtag UCLA.

Well, because of how expensive campaigns have become I'm not saying that's a good answer, in just telling you it is the answer, And there is a perception of viability has to do with access to money, whether you have it yourself, you have the donor.

You know, it's sort of this dovetails pretty well with the question about Adam Schiff.

Look, there's no doubt we have made money in politics.

The fact that there is no regulation of money in politics, right we have essentially have unregulated money in politics.

They're okay, so you have to follow a couple, You have to jump a very small hurdle or two to maybe spend money that raised a certain way on these few logistics things for a campaign.

But then you spend money over here there is no we have.

This is why I'm a huge fan of a constitutional you know, we need a constitutional amendment to deal with this.

We're going to have to.

I think there's some common sense campaign finance regulations that people could agree on.

I think the idea of keeping corporations out of politics makes a hell of a lot sense.

Figuring out how to have complete transparency, I mean, anonymous donors dark money are terrible.

We basically have one or two people that are representing somewhere between thirty and thirty percent of all money spent is probably among a group of people that's less than ten.

That is an out of democracy, right, That is a plutocracy or an oligarchy, if I to borrow some language that are out there.

I hate saying oligarchy because it sounds like I'm taking a political side, but we have the fact of the matter is the richer you are, the more access you have to political leaders hard stop.

And that's a maybe that's never going to change, but we could put some more transparency and some more limits on how that works.

But I'm not saying it should be this way.

But you're asking why does this happen?

Because viability goes through money.

Now, the good news is the Internet has been a bit of a leveler there.

Act Blue and When Red both have found a way to take to allow at least grassroots donors to power candidacies.

And you can now do that, right Marjorie Taylor Green can do it.

AOC can do it, and they've figured out how to tap into that.

So the power of the small donor is not totally in fact, in some ways small donor because of the collective nature of it have become a more powerful as powerful of an entity at times that some of these corporate super PACs can be.

So.

But look, we do this in this case, the system has broken.

We have unregulated amount of money.

I'm sort of a Nascar person in this respect.

Let's go full transparency.

But you have to actually identify your major donors, if you if you made every person have to spell out the names of donors who have given them, say more than one hundred thousand dollars or more, I promise you they'd never take a donation more than nine nine and ninety nine dollars, right, whatever threshold we create, you know, like I'm all for you want to have unlimited funding in your elections, fine, but anybody that gives you more than ninety nine hundred dollars, you have to name them in every single app and you've got to where their logos on your paraphernalia, if you will.

Right, That's what I mean by the nascarization of it.

I think that if as long as people know who's behind things, then at least you're giving the voters a fighting chance to make their decision.

All right, I'm mistaking one more question here, So I can say that at least knock out four today.

This one comes from Sean McElroy Byfield, Massachusetts, and he writes, Hey, Chuck, why is it that corporations going to absorb tariff costs for months but push back immediately when asked to raise wages?

After COVID, we saw quick inflation tied to wage increases, but terif related price hikes seem delayed.

I've read that Costco expects TARI free funds, that is, offering credit now to investors to soften consumer impacts while boosting future profits.

Curiously, if you've heard more about that, any thoughts on the disconnect between political focus and stagnant worker incomes.

Well, look, I think on the tariff, the reason some of this is you had a lot of companies stockpile right.

You know, Trump made it clear what he was going to do with this tariff, So you did have plenty of company stockpile inventory where you could.

Right you couldn't do it in food, in fresh food and produce and things like that, but you could stock up on certain goods in your and essentially warehouse them.

And a place like Costco is something that has the has the ability to do that and so I think that's why they could quote unquote absorb some of it early because they had still had a majority of their inventory out there that they had purchased without having to pay, without having to deal with extra tariffs.

But look, you're you know, why do corporations constantly look for ways to show that they're saving money?

Right?

That might be another way that you asked that question, right, They constantly It's why why are companies not hiring at the moment?

They all want to see how many jobs can they replace with AI.

They're not going to they know they can't replace all jobs with A, but they want to know which ones they can, and before they replace anybody, they want to try to see if they can replace them of AI corp.

A publicly traded companies simply have a fudiciary responsibility for their shareholders, and their shareholders only reward cost efficiencies.

That is, that is not good for rising you know, for the hopes of rising wages, and it is certainly makes stockpiling expensive inventory difficult as well if you're going to load them up with tariff.

So you know, this is why what Trump has done to this economy, that the rise of tariff costs also in it inadvertently end up costing working class people a chance at a raise.

Right, If goods were cheaper, more people might buy them, and you might need more people to actually delve out that inventory.

So you know, this is why this tariff policy of the presidents is so bad for the economy.

It just simply shrinks our GDP shrinks in a way that that will just hurt everything.

Fewer people buy items, which means you'll have fewer employees, fewer wage, fewer people gaining a wage as it is, and fewer people getting higher wages.

Bottom line is, tariffs are bad for everybody.

There is no good that comes from these tariffs.

Hard stop.

I don't know how many thousands of different ways we can put that before we go a little A few things in college football, and and look, I don't want to.

I got a few emails about the mess in Michigan.

And what's uncomfortable about the mess in Michigan is Sharon Moore and some in what happened there is is this uncomfortable truth there seem to be you know, in the world of college sports right now, if you win, your behavior will get They'll find a way to bury your behavior, overlook it, or just suspend you a game or two, slap you on the wrist.

But as long as you produce a national title, Jim Harbaugh, nothing is going to go wrong.

But when things don't go well, then and and and maybe your offense isn't going well, then suddenly people have decided that your morals or ethics are a problem.

And we don't know the full story in Michigan, but let's just say I haven't I know enough people in the sports industry world, in the world of agents.

This is not rank speculation.

You know, there was a there was a concerted effort that that more had to go, but they needed a reason, in a rationale, and they didn't want to spend on the buyout.

Now that doesn't excuse his behavior, and he and I you know, for the life of me, you know, to me, if you're if you're going to sleep with an employee at a public institution, you're consequences any institution, and you know, you get caught, you're going to live with the consequences.

And this has been a very expensive consequence for him on that front.

But we need to learn a lot more about when was this first known, how, what would this and when when did this investigation happen?

Why was it cleared once?

Right?

Sounds like there was no they had no cooperating evidence, and then suddenly they did.

Why did this person suddenly provide evidence to the school when they did?

And why didn't they do it before?

How is it that it conveniently happened after signing day?

Anyway, the point is is that the corruption of college sports, right, we know, it's there's a there's a It is a mess.

It is ugly, it is scandalous, and even an elite institution like the University of Michigan is not immune from this.

But the problem is, we have no entity who's going to investigate the University of Michigan.

Do the NC DOUBA have any credibility to do this?

Will they even listen to the NC double A?

Right?

When when Michigan was sign stealing, you know they yeah, okay, they suspended somebody, they find somebody.

But last I checked, the University of Michigan won a national title miraculously after they've suddenly figured out sign stealing seemed to improve.

You know, Jim Harbaugh was having a hard time winning nine or ten games.

Then suddenly they started sign stealing and everything got better.

So it's a I'm singling out Michigan here because I think Michigan is you know, this is sort of like, boy, how many how much rotten fish is in this program on these different things.

But it's really this is not about Michigan.

This is about the entire sport, right, you know, I love it.

I love college football.

You guys know this.

I ache for all this paid me.

Look, University of Miami, We've been through this.

We've had our own bad apples do some things in the past, don't get me wrong, So I'm not gonna you know, this is not a case we all the entire world of college football lives in not just a glasshouse.

I would call it water for crystal houses, if you will, right, And there's our broken windows everywhere.

But you know, ultimately the problem is the conferences have too much power, and we need you need a singular commissioner of college football, a singular commissioner of college basketball, a singular commissioner of sort of the for profits sports.

Right.

We probably have to separate it out a little bit, if you will.

But this the amount of influence that agents and boosters now have over and above academic leaders or institutional leaders, athletic directors, you name it.

You know the athletic directors are not in charge in most of these places.

It's the person that runs the outside nil and raises the hundreds of the tens of millions of dollars.

At these major college institutions need to make payroll.

They're in charge.

The football coaches do not work for the university residence.

The football coaches work for the entity that has promised to give the most money.

I saw that.

I saw that at my beloved institution, right some major donors were willing to give more money if a certain person was hired as coach.

That's been true of a lot of institutions.

So it is the system is broken.

It is messed up.

Perhaps you write rules that maybe allow for this in some form, but you've got to have an accepted, shared set of rules, and right now we really don't have any.

It is only media reports that at best create the opportunity for shame to kick in.

But this is you know, there's the specifics themselves of what happened at Michigan, and then there's the So there really needs to be an investigation of how the initial investigation happened and how new evidence popped up.

That's all I'm going to say here.

Okay, I I am, I've got I've got plenty of interesting sources that have that have told me some interesting things about this situation.

But the reason it needs to be rooted out because it's this is again, Michigan is just an example of what is a larger, more broken and uh and I don't think any of us would be comfortable finding out what our favorite schools were doing.

I think there would be I imagine there's not a major college football program in America that does things that would make every single alum prout, every single fan proud.

And it is I hate.

I hate having to defend the system at times as a fan because I still love it.

It's still I think college football because of the unpredictability of what kids.

There's still kids, they're still growing up, they're still learning.

There's that unpredictability.

There's the passion of fan bases, which other than the Steelers and the Packers, there's really no you know, maybe Eagles and Cowboys too, but there's really the pro fan bases are not like college fan bases.

They're just different hanging out with drunk twenty year olds is better to watch than hanging out with drunk fifty year olds too, right, if you're at an NFL game versus a college game.

But ultimately, we're going to have to have Congress step in.

They're going to have to give an antitrust exemption in some form because they're going to have to create We can't have small d democratic tools attempting to govern college sports.

You're going to need a commissioner AKA some sort of almost authoritarian type of situation, chairman of the board, board of directors CEO, that sort of thing, with some accountability because this is embarrassing the sport all the time, and there's too much money at stake, and we have that much money at stake, you're gonna have lawsuit, You're gonna have people being live and all of that stuff.

So you kind of need a structure and some sort of rule of law to govern college sports.

That is fair, all right.

I will stop with my rant there, but I felt like, as much as I want to celebrate, and I've got a lot I'm going to celebrate on the later this week, I will share with you my favorite pathways for Miami and the different storylines on different potential matchups that they can have in the college football playoff.

Let's just say, boy, for Miami's own reputational sake, they better win one.

They better win one, and we'll go from there.

All right, I've gone on a bit now.

This is a pretty thick Monday episode.

We did some dark, some light, and everything in between.

I really appreciate you listening.

Our growth has been amazing.

I know part of the why independent media is growing because you've lost so much trust in what's happened with the intimidated corporate owned media, which is sad.

I have a lot of good friends over there who are fighting a good fight, but the institutions are just trying to trying to prevent them from doing the work that they want to do, which is a huge disappointment.

But guess what, there are always alternatives, including right here.

So thank you for listening.

I appreciate it, and I'll see in forty eight hours.