Build a Better Democrat? | Gregg Hurwitz | EP 151

[Music] I'm talking today with Greg Hurwitz, president of Los Angeles, California, a former student of mine from Harvard and someone I've known for a long time. Greg's a novelist and, although he has very many other occupations, which we'll talk about today, it's a pleasure to see you, Greg. It's been a while since we talked.

Good to see you too, Jordan. Maybe we could start by you just outlining some of the things that you do, and then I think we'll focus on the political stuff more today, not necessarily from a political perspective though.

Well, I came in from novels; I'm a novelist, all right? The Orphan X series. I've also worked in screenplays, and TV, and comics, and some other stuff. I started to get involved in politics around 2016, in large part because before that I kind of thought democracy would be fine without me. I didn't really feel any responsibilities as a citizen. I kind of had a lot of opinions but didn't do a whole lot about it. One of the things that I wanted to do when Donald Trump was elected was... he was not a candidate or a president to my liking or who was a match with my value set. The first thing that I asked myself—it's funny you give that lecture about the Old Testament—that one of the answers that that Old Testament answers is always like God’s angry, we screwed up.

So I really took that approach all the way down. I thought rather than starting to go on offense and tackle people who voted or thought differently, that I had different ideologies, I would try and think about the failings of the Democratic Party, the status quo, all the parts of society that I was part of, and how badly we would have to have fallen short for him to be seen as a viable and preferable alternative to the candidate that we were putting forth.

So I started to work with a lot of candidates. I was mostly interested in candidates in purple districts, talking to red voters. For the midterms, we worked with 30 candidates, Democrat and in deep red districts, talking about making good faith arguments the way it's supposed to be, right? I have an opinion; I have a preference for a political party to make good faith arguments to people, to try and win them over to a different point of view.

We had a lot of success. I'd say that the 30 candidates that we worked with, 21 won in terms of flipping those seats.

Well, you all have foreign viewers here, so when you talk about deep red states, deep blue states, purple states, what do you mean?

Uh, Republican versus Democrat. Right? I wasn't interested in figuring out how I—I'm not interested in any conversations that take place in the bubble of like-minded people. So I was interested in races in Oklahoma and New Mexico and Ohio and, you know, Virginia. So we really went there.

And long story short, off that we started to—I wrote a bunch of op-eds. I wrote one with you for the Wall Street Journal, and I did a lot for The Bulwark, trying to talk across the aisle. I went out and talked to I think about a 360-degree arc of Americans, whether it was military, evangelicals, Black Lives Matter, you know, Hispanic, you know, Texas Mexicans, different populations than, you know, Miami Cubans, right? Different populations from California Mexicans. And really talking to different groups and listening and figuring it out. I wound up doing about 200 digital and television commercials, all this political work as pro bono with a small team of us here.

Yeah, do you want to describe the team?

Yeah, I... it's me. It’s Marshall Hirschkovetz, who's a TV showrunner and creator. He created 30-something. Billy Ray, Oscar-nominated screenwriter, he wrote Captain Phillips; he just did The Comey Rule. Shawn Ryan, the creator of The Shield, the TV producer, and Lita Calagras, she, you know, has a ton of credits from Shutter Island to—you know, she worked on Avatar and wrote a good amount of that with James Cameron.

What was interesting was, in terms of the Hollywood system, like you know, after Trump was elected I think the Democrats were humbled, and then they're always kind of willing to meet with Hollywood people. But the washout rate was—there weren't a lot of people who were interested in having different kinds of conversations. I decided if I could actually get in front of Democratic leadership—and Marshall too was on that first trip with me—that I would say exactly what I thought all the time to the best of my ability.

Okay, so let me walk through this. So a couple of years ago, maybe that was in 2016, about yeah, you had some political awakening, let's say. And I guess that was attendant on Trump’s election. Your response to that was, how did the Democrats sink so low as to allow this to happen? Is that a reasonable way of summarizing it?

Rather, what the hell is wrong with all those Trump voters? Yeah, and let me start to explore in earnest my confirmation biases and blind spots and talk to everybody who has a different perspective or point of view than me, in earnest, to try to figure that out.

Yeah, well you guys decided that you were going to produce messages for the Democrat Party.

Yeah, and that's—that was to do that on your own accord, in some sense, or on your own?

On our own, yeah. I mean the line we used was—and I remember sitting in my living room talking about this—I said we asked for no money, no credit, and no permission. You said to me, that's exactly what Orphan X does; my protagonist of my thriller series. It was this really funny confluence of my political life and the things that I was writing in the fiction world. What we realized is we can't go—we couldn't go through everything. We did was on our own. We raised our own money. One of the things we realized is the cost of admission for getting through messaging that I thought was a more—more persuading good faith persuasion arguments. But also, that was fair; every single economic fact that I put in any of the 200 commercials that I produced, I ran through a friend of mine who’s like a Wall Street Republican. Like, I always wanted opposition fact testing. We tried to do nothing fair that wasn't fair. I'm not suggesting we got this right all the time, but I tried to not do—I didn't want ads that went after Trump's kids in certain ways that were off bounds and personal. I was trying, you know, because look, you're—if you're—if your messaging and making propaganda, is really what it is, that's—Google's your in Goebbels arena. That's dangerous stuff. You got to take it really, really seriously to try to engage and make arguments without getting corrupted by what that is in the world.

Well, that's why it's dangerous, is that you don't understand people don't understand when they start to mess with the truth that they're starting to mess with their own psyches. Because you—if you start playing in the domain of deceit, you'll get tangled up in that so fast and make your head spin, and then you undo yourself. I mean, you can undo yourself even if you stick pretty close to the truth.

Okay, so I mean what happened? What you guys did and the way you went about it has struck me as quite, I don't know, unbelievable, I guess, and that's why I want to dwell on it a bit. So you decided that you had a political responsibility. You organized yourself with a group of people—what? A group that was much larger to begin with but that shrank quickly to those that were actually dedicated over some long period of time to putting a lot of work into this. And it's not surprising you got a bunch of attrition as a consequence of that. Then you decided that you would make messages that were in alignment, at least in principle, with the Democratic Party, but you didn't get permission from the party brass, so to speak, to do that. You did that independently.

Well, there's a weird—well, two things about the attrition rate. One of them was I quickly discovered that a lot of people who were interested in the sort of loudest online outrage are equally devoted to the status quo as the opposition. And so one of the things I came to very quickly was it matters much more—much more important than language policing, right? And permission structures of who’s allowed to say what is an orientation on people's intentions and the actual outcomes. And that's one way you can assess the groups of people, of whether someone's going to be useful if you roll up your sleeves and actually get something done, whether that's winning a race in Oklahoma, right? Or trying to talk in good faith and respectfully to voters in western Pennsylvania.

It's going to be messy. You have to—there's no—

If I describe that—what do you mean messy? Like what's messy about it?

We’ve talked a little bit about the psychological consequences of this, this kind of action, even these kinds of discussions. By messy I mean—I mean good meaning. I’m—the further along I get with this, the more convinced I am that you cannot have a perfect conversation, that where everyone is contained and all the language goes seamlessly, about race, about gender, and about class in America. So when there's too much constriction around language from the left and/or from the right, basically they're barking around the perimeter of the fertile solutions. They're barking around the perimeter to make sure that nobody can have the kinds of conversations that you need to have. You have to talk about those things imperfectly. You have to—

So why wouldn't people be motivated to not allow that to happen, do you think?

Well, because that—look, so for the—there's different SKUs and everything is a generalization, right? So I'm gonna generalize a little bit. I think that there’s—in the far right we see a kind of corruption and ossification around sort of Donald Trump and what he represents. But he was saying things that hit people in a way that were things that they weren't allowed to say. I have a whole bunch of theories about the Republicans; I’m going to keep it focused on my looking in the proverbial mirror. I think that a lot of the language policing of the left is actually a way to maintain the status quo.

Because what status quo and to whose advantage? Let’s say that you’re a rich Hollywood elite, much like me, right? Or, you know, or somebody who is in the kinds of groups that I move in, that you move in. But let’s say further left of you, like I am, or more—you know, we're both liberal. But if you can pull—if you can talk and have all of the lingo and know exactly what the permission structures are, and you say “Latinx” instead of “Latino,” and you do all this stuff and in a way, what you're doing is you're making sure that the conversations that are the real conversations that bring change, that are messier, don't necessarily occur.

But if you have all the language down, you can sort of maintain your position and your money and your relative stature.

Yeah, so you can assume that if there was a solution that was being proposed, you'd be part of the solution and not part of the problem. You signal that with the language. But you're also—you're casting—like look, I made a—I’ll give you an example. I made a video about the—for me, I was exceedingly opposed from day one to messages of chaos from the Democratic Party. Right? I think conservatives particularly have a reaction to chaos. I think they have a legitimate reaction when people announce sort of, you know, police-free zones in Seattle and in Portland. And from day one, I was saying this whole notion of sanctuary cities doesn't make sense to me for a variety of reasons.

Let’s say we have the next president; people decide that voting rights are not going to be applied to, you know, Birmingham, Alabama, right? And they're going to be a sanctuary city for that. There’s all these complexities around it. I made some commercials about Black leadership calling for a lack of violence in the protests. Keisha Lance Bottoms, the mayor of Atlanta, gave a speech that I think was a speech with the most thundering moral authority that I’ve heard from a public figure when Atlanta was tearing itself apart. It's an extraordinary speech. I reference—try to reference other people. The only blowback that I got from that was from incredibly affluent, sort of coastal elite saying how dare you selectively quote, you know, African-American people decrying violence, you know, when they watch somebody get murdered, and they're protesting how they can.

And it’s the epitome of white privilege, and it’s all this stuff. What’s interesting is I’ve long thought that Trump works through projection. Trump will—everything with Trump that he makes is a claim for others. There’s a lot of projection that goes on, and I’ve increasingly seen that from aspects of the left where I thought, wow, how far do you have to be removed from the ramifications of violence to not be worried? Like how many houses and mansions and security guards and gated communities do you have to have access to to be unconcerned with violent action? Whether that community is a community of color or whether it’s a white working-class community, to simply say violent protest is something that we're not for?

Like how dare you advocate that when you're rich enough to never have to be there when the tourists—violent protesters leave and, let’s say, the Black community is left there with the wreckage of their community? Like to be opposed to that message is basically saying I want to keep letting people protest as loud as they want; it’s in a way that won’t ever affect me or my children; aren’t at risk; my family's not at risk; my house doesn't feel at risk. But I'll use all the right language so that I can be protected and sort of maintain all of that.

And when you're trying to wade in to really like win an election so that we don’t—the African-American community doesn't have to contend with another, with more, I'll call it more voter rights being thrown out, like real concrete issues. There are real concrete issues there. But if you can chirp about something that's a slogan like that, you don't have to get into the real solutions or fixes. But at the same time, right? But you can take on the—you can take on the assumed status of someone who's actually working to solve the problem.

I think a lot of that, a lot of politically correct language, I don't know, I guess that would be language that’s in alignment with any given doctrine is an attempt to take on the moral virtues of that doctrine without necessarily having to bear any of the responsibility for actions in alignment with that doctrine or to bear any responsibility for the consequences.

Like, I was furious. I was furious when the protest erupted with Jordan Floyd. There were video after video of African Americans protesting. Some of them were like turning in people who were either, you know, anarchists who were throwing bricks into and committing property damage of saying you know grabbing people, handing them over to the police. A lot of people in the African American community were like, “This is our community; we live here.” And of course, I'm not implying that nobody in the African American community crossed the line in the course of those protests; I'm not saying that.

But I'm saying there was an awareness within that community that when the cameras are gone and the lights go up, nobody's gonna come in and rebuild that community. And when all the tourists leave and everybody's had their march and their protest, they have to contend with it. And there was a measure of discipline in that community, whether it was Keisha Lance Bottoms; I think the president of the NAACP in either Oregon or Washington had a great op-ed. Killer Mike, the rapper, was out there saying we cannot have violence; we’re not tearing down our own city. This isn’t simple disobedience. The point of civil disobedience of course is that you bear the cost; you bear the moral responsibility of your transgression.

Right, exactly. The African community understood this by and large, and a lot of the loudest voices who were protesting against it who were, for me, was a frustration were from incredibly affluent and here, I’ll use the word privilege, which I don’t like to use, people in the white community. And that for me was—it’s a similar kind of projection as I would see Trump doing. Like, there’s screaming about privilege all the time, and you’re like, how do you not understand that the destruction of property, destruction of small businesses, risks to families?

Look, I’ll give you a stat that’s an interesting stat here: the average voter who voted for Obama and then Trump thinks about politics on average four minutes a week. Four minutes a week, right? So people in the bubble think don’t think about politics four minutes a week. And so four minutes a week is about what you can manage to worry about the emoluments clause and Russian hacking when you’re at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, right? You got a sick kid; you’re out of health insurance; you don’t have a job; you might have a special needs kid; you might have a parent in a home; you have COVID hitting; you don’t have time for any of this. You don’t have time to have the kinds of conversations around nuance of, of whether—and when everyone was shocked about the Latin vote, I was just thinking how many of you people actually have friends and family who are Hispanic who you talked to?

I mean the joke was that the big shock was that Biden won the Latinx votes and Trump won the Latino vote. Uh-huh. A lot of the Latino community, I mean—I mean, so what do you think accounted for Trump’s attractiveness to the Latino community?

This kind of ties back in; this ties some back into a broader question I want to ask you. It’s like, I’ve been interested in what you’ve been doing and supporting it to the degree that I’ve been able to and to the degree that that's useful, I suppose, because I was very interested in your willingness to look at what had gone wrong with the Democratic Party and to try to fix that. That seemed to me to be a win, no matter—that’s a win for everyone no matter where they are on the political spectrum because the higher the function of both parties, the better the political outcome, as far as I’m concerned, right? You want as little stupidity as possible all across the spectrum.

So it seemed to me that reducing some of the foolishness that characterized particularly the radical left—the careless radical left within the Democratic Party—and focusing on a more pragmatic, let’s say, but also a wiser and less resentment-driven strategy would be a good thing overall. So that opens up the broader can of worms, which is what exactly had the Democrats done so badly that they lost to Trump?

Well, so to me, there’s a couple of things and we can talk about the Hispanic vote. We should talk about that specifically, and the broader question in general.

Well, so look, if you—I mean I have friends and family who—there's such an array of—we talk about the Hispanic vote like it's a monolith, right? It's not remotely that. Cuban Americans are like, anything ever resembling socialism I will never vote for you; and if you compare Trump to Fidel Castro, read a fucking book. That's basically the attitude of the Cuban Americans—excuse my language—it’s—and they say, I don’t care what he calls us; I don’t care what he does to us; the only power that you can trust is economic power. The rest of it's an illusion. And socialism wants to come in and threaten that. I want business opportunity, right? I want less regulations; they won’t go near us. It’s very, very different.

And the Hispanic community is—it’s incredible.

So you think that’s particularly true of the Cuban Americans and Venezuelan Americans?

Venezuelans, yeah. Well, they have reason for it. A lot of the most conservative friends and associates I have, whether it's people who are friends of mine, whether it's workers or Mexican Americans in LA, they—they also—they don’t want Mexico to come over here. They don’t want open borders, many of them. They left that.

Why is that hard to understand? They tend to be, you know, Catholic families. So if you think about politics for four minutes a week and somebody comes in, all of a sudden, and they're talking about socialism, defunding the police, and then announcing all sorts of gender complexities, you know, and I say this as somebody with a—you know, I always—I preface it to say, you know, I have a—I have a trans godson, a lesbian sister; this is not like where my personal politics are for what people should be allowed to do. Where my personal politics fall are very different than what I think the priority and the ranking of discussion is.

If you're gonna go talk to somebody who thinks about politics for four minutes a week and bring up elaborate critical race theory and start to talk to them about the fact that boys aren’t boys and girls aren’t girls, and they should just announce this and have announcements at the age of 18. I don’t think any Democrats grasp when you think about politics four minutes a week and they talk about Trump and his transgressions, which I believe are more damaging and dangerous than those of the left, but I don’t think anybody has any idea the kind of transgressions that that represents to people who are either on the center or on the right.

So the four minutes a week thing really is interesting too because one of the things I was really struck by over the last four years with all my encounters with journalists, many of which were good, by the way, I had lots of good encounters with journalists, but the worst encounters I ever had were almost always with journalists as well, is that the journalists think about the world politically all the time. Like their every single decision they make—obviously this is a generalization, but if you’re in that world, everything is political.

But for the typical person, that’s just not the case at all. And that’s actually good.

One of the best political science theories I ever read was predicated on the idea, or put forth the idea, that in a highly functioning political system, especially a democratic system, the less people think about politics, the better.

The system’s working.

To the end, I didn’t think politically at all. I’m not even interested in politics; you know, I didn’t—I mean it’s—I couldn’t agree with that more. I mean one of the things I think a lot about is I have a friend, one of my closest friends who you’ve met, born-again Christian; he was raised as a son of a missionary—all through other parts of the world. And, you know, but he lives in LA. He worked a bit in the industry, a very rounded conservative friend of mine.

He has gay friends, friends from whatever. But he went in the booth and told me during the election in 2016, he said, “I just went in and I thought forget it. I’m voting for Trump. I can’t bring myself to vote for Hillary Clinton.” I was really angry at him at first because it was—like—and then I realized I shouldn’t say really angry with him, but I was—I realized that I didn’t understand that for the things that I saw, or the clouds I saw massing on the horizon with Donald Trump, and we’re seeing some of that here with his—the legal threats to the election.

Trying to undermine election security, his own largely appointed Republican judges shooting a lot of that down; there’s a lot of things we don’t need to get into all that because everyone can have an answer for everything that I say. But the realization I had with him was, oh my God, he is a canary of a particular coal mine. He’s a guy who rides a motorcycle; he likes guns; he likes kind of different kinds of freedoms; he—in a different—he has a different relationship with freedoms versus security than I do.

I’m a canary down a different coal mine.

Right? Part of that might be from me looking at the sort of authoritarian shadowiness that I saw coming in with Trump, that’s what I alert to. I can’t decide that my friend, who I know and love and who has been in my house and accepts my friends, my family, everybody, and has a broad range of friends and family—I can’t determine that he’s either foolish or dumb or wrong or a bad person anymore. I can’t determine that he’s an ignorant canary down in ignorant coal mine, right? Because if he’s my friend and I’m that close to him and he’s here in LA and that’s a choice he made; I better listen to what that was, even if the gut instinct for him.

And so then I was thinking about this a lot. And one of the things that I think has been a blessing of the Trump presidency is there are some conversations we’re having now that are awful and hard. It’s sort of like, you know, it’s—we talk about this all the time. Obviously, with young—well, with Freud, you go through hell before you get anywhere else.

We wouldn’t be having any of these conversations if we were now in year four of a Hillary Clinton presidency. We’re having different conversations. They’re worse, right now, in a lot of ways about race about class. But the fact that has stuck with me the most—and one of the things I’ll say is I went in open-eyed all the way down to assess my party in the political situation. I’ve only gotten more disillusioned and angry with the Democratic Party.

Okay, okay. So, okay, let's return to that. Okay, I’m going to keep that in mind. Let’s return to that. So you put together this team or this team was organized to produce messages that would support the Democrat—Democratic Party fundamentally. But the overarching philosophy was one of self-criticism, let’s say. If the self includes the Democratic Party, what are the rules? What were the other rules for the messaging? See, I don’t think people are going to understand exactly what you did. You made these ads, but you went out and did it with your own team. And so, who were the ads generated for? How were the ads generated? Who were they targeted to? What was their consequence? And what were the rules that you used and agreed on when you were making the ads? And how did you agree on them? Sorry, that’s a lot of questions.

But part of this is it was so—it was all entrepreneurial, Jordan. It was all outside of the politic. If I’d still be waiting for the first approval from the D-Trip C to do my first, you know, 2,000 commercial, we couldn’t wait for it. The fifth domes and Baileywicks within the party and the institutional just bureaucratic mess is sufficient that a lot of what got done got done with a network of people entrepreneurially and free market, right?

That’s pretty funny, really.

So, publicans, yeah. Yeah, and it gave rise to it. And really all that it was was was our own ethical bearing. You know, I ran the thing, and so we did testing to make sure we were—that the ads were effective, that we weren't just shouting at each other on Twitter and getting the most likes.

And how—define effective. How do you know?

I mean, there’s a woman who’s incredible who did—you know, we did testing focus groups. We saw how they moved people. I mean, I can send you deck after deck after deck of the analysis.

Okay, so you were looking at pre-post exposure shift in political attitude as a consequence of the ads?

That's right. What was nice was that our gut instinct, me—and by that I mean me, Marshall, Billy, Lita, Shawn—our gut instinct was we’re not going to make Trump bashing ads. We made some when they were fair. That was a big important thing. Like, I did the one for Republican voters against Trump where it was—it was just Reagan's City on a Hill speech, and I just showed where you get. I just showed Trump doing the opposite in every regard.

"For the first time in our memory, many Americans are asking does history still have a place for America? There are some who answer no, and we must tell our children not to dream as we once dreamed."

"Together tonight let us say that America is still united, still strong, still compassionate, still willing to stand by those who are persecuted or alone for those who are victims of police states or government-induced torture or terror. Let us speak for them. I believe we can embark on a new age of reform in this country that will make government again responsive to people. We can fight corruption while we work to bring into our government women and men of competence and high integrity. Tomorrow you will be making a choice between different visions of the future. Are you more confident that our economy will create productive work for our society, or are you less confident? Do you feel you can keep the job you have or gain a job if you don’t have one? Are you pleased with the ability of young people to buy a home, of the elderly to live their remaining years in happiness? Of our youngsters to take pride in the world we have built for them? Are you convinced that we have earned the respect of the world and our allies? Let us resolve tonight that young Americans will always find a city of hope in a country that is free, and let us resolve they will say of our day and of our generation that we did keep faith with our God, that we did act worthy of ourselves, that we did protect and pass on lovingly that shining city on a hill.”

[Music]

In the op-eds, I was equally harsh on Democrats and Republicans both. But, you know, part of it was for me, as I said, we can never lie to any standard. I don’t want to bend the truth; I don’t want to lie. I went out and got a hardcore lifelong Wall Street Republican to do all the fact checking, and it was down to like even if we were kind of bullshitty about something.

So you mean he’d respond—sorry, you asked him to tell you if he thought that you had been even playing with the truth rather than breaking it?

Oh, and I paid him as a researcher to say, you know, here’s the claims we’re making; are they fair? Check multiple sources. And I wanted somebody who expressly was not a Democrat to do all of that.

Yeah, well that seems to me to be—you’d want to have someone like that around you if you’re making complex political decisions.

That’s right. You need an enemy to tell you to point out your weaknesses.

Okay, so you set up this crew, which was quite large to begin with, and then got smaller. You went and met with Democrat leaders.

Yeah, we spoke. We spoke. Marshall and I addressed both caucuses, and we still—in an ongoing way we do candidate training, and we deal with—we deal with leadership also.

So how is it that you managed to—look, one of the things you said was that had you waited around for permission, you’d still be waiting. And then another thing that needs to be pointed out to people is that without permission you could go ahead anyways and make your political statement, right? You just had to go do it. But you still have positive relationships with the Democratic Party, per se, now. Isn’t that weird? How the hell do you account for that?

Why not? Because I was fair and I was respectful. And what we did was, you know, it’s like that judge's description of pornography—I don’t know what it is, but I know it when I see it.

So Marshall and I would say, look, we know how to make a unifying, uplifting message that’s positive, that brings back sort of core Democratic values and can speak across the aisle to people with a psychological profile that’s more conservative, with an understanding and respect for the fact that conservatives and liberals in concert are what hold society together.

Now, Marshall and I have an opinion that the bad, the dangerous aspects of the left are embodied mostly in academia, culture, let’s call it journalism, and then a small tiny cabal of very far-left members of the Democratic Party. And to some extent, it’s crept through the party. Some of the things that are the excess of the left that obviously you’ve discussed, the great lanes for us on the right, it is—it is codified all the way through the Senate, all the way up to Donald Trump, who holds the nuclear football.

So I was trying to figure out, well, why does this threat from the left that to me is much less but just as dangerous? And there are a lot of canaries in coal mines going, “Hey man, pay attention; that’s bad news,” the same way that we were about Trump. Why is it being given kind of this equal, if not more, weighting to what I felt was the clear and present danger of the excesses of the Trump administration and what was happening there?

And so part of it was the respectful conversation with Trump voters, mostly. I’m sure I screwed up plenty, but you know, and to do a unifying message and to show them one of the things people don’t realize is—this is that messaging becomes content. If we could get the message right, we could solidify the story, and then that could change policy, and then that can change the Democratic platform.

So we talked a lot about that when you first embarked on this venture. So—and correct me if I’m wrong about anything as far as you're concerned about anything that I’m saying. The first thing is that if you produce a message, a story, that story has an ethic; it has an implicit ethic. And if the story is accepted, then the implicit ethic is accepted, and then the implicit ethic will be made explicit over time.

So a story is like—it’s like the seed ground for explicit policy. So you took—you got a hand—you got a grip on the story. Now, one of the things that concerned me about the radical left was that because they had a story—and it’s a powerful mythological story—benevolent nature, tyrannical culture, the noble savage—that’s another part of it—because they had a coherent story, they had a disproportionate effect on policy and the moderate democracy.

So let me just interrupt.

Okay.

So if you look at—so AOC did the Green New Deal, pushed that through, which to me was not an adult piece of legislation. It was a Trojan horse filled with everything—zero votes in the Senate, zero votes from the Democrats. Every measure, if you look at HR1 is anti-corruption. There was prescription drug—there was the— the actual policies and body of who the Democrats are is much more moderate and pro-capitalist than it is in policy.

So what’s being parroted loudly is not in fact Democratic policy in my estimation. The flaw or the fault in the Democratic Party is their failure to stand up and keep the elements of the party in their proper places, to state who they are, to draw a line for what they’re opposed to.

And I think that that act of them being like, well, we can’t really—we’re concerned to criticize, you know, defund the police, or we’re too concerned... Part of what I would say to them was, look, if you're scared of AOC's Twitter following, Americans are not going to deem you to be worthy of carrying the nuclear football.

Like that’s just a very low checksum analysis—if you can’t just clearly say that defunding the police, whether that means other things, which it does, is a slogan that makes no sense and terrifies the vast majority of Americans rightly so, and a ton of immigrants rightly so.

Like or, you know, people of Hispanic origin, if you can't understand and state that clearly because you're afraid of the blowback, you're not going to be trusted to lead. And that’s—and so it’s a problem of degree. And I think that’s one of the biggest topics that of friction you and I have had for a long time—not negative friction, but just where we've been hammering away at that where I keep saying to you the radical left is not the kind of threat in America relative to the threat that's posed by Donald Trump as it represents in Canada.

And we can disagree about that because I think that the threats represented by the radical left represent and equally dystopian. I can tell you, like, I don’t really understand it myself to some degree. I’ve been more—and this is a surprise to me—I would say I’ve been more reactive to the threat posed by the radical leftist and I think it’s possible that it’s because I’m in academia.

And so I—I can tell you why I have a theory about why that is too.

Okay, yeah. My theory is that the right comes in the front door. They’re like, “Here we are. We want more money; we want more power; we don’t like government; we’re going to shrink.”

Yet, even the—the let’s call it racism or anything that goes down from that poll to in-group favoritism, right? Like normal in-group favoritism, there’s plenty of people who are like, look, I grew up in rural North Carolina; I’m fine with having a Black president; I’m fine with doing whatever. This is my culture. I don’t want to be asked to celebrate another culture all the time in every way or else be called racist.

That doesn’t make sense to me. Whereas the left comes in and they say, well, we like all of our stuff and we like our whole situation like the examples I was giving earlier. We’re gonna say defund the police when we’re rich enough to not be in a neighborhood that that will have an effect of—we're—we're above the pale that if everything is moved through that lens, we're successful enough that we have money and we have resources anyways.

And we’re going to wrap ourselves in sanctimony, right? We’re gonna wrap ourselves in sanctimony; want to maintain the status quo as much as you do but pretend it’s because we’re morally superior and you’re morally inferior. And that’s a—that’s shame-inducing.

That’s like a maternal scolding instinct that elicits, I think, rage. And so that’s a big difference in the two. And I think that accounts for why some people are like, hey, look, it’s just it’s complicated.

There’s this element of moral superiority, and one of the things that, you know, I did so much work with the evangelical community and they’ve been great, like making good faith arguments to reach out and talking about, you know, the values and attributes of Christ and trying to talk to voters.

And there were some voters who we were very successful in talking to. I want to say Obama got 26% evangelical vote. Hillary didn’t go after it at all; she got 13% and lost. Biden was back up at 22%-23%. We thought that was a very important community to talk to.

What people don’t realize is if you look at Trump, if you look at anybody from a Christian worldview, you can dislike every—you can dislike him legally; you can dislike the policies; you can dislike a lot of these politicians. But the deeming of somebody as morally inferior—right? Whether it’s followers of Trump, whether it’s you know, voters, no one can do that but God. You’re not allowed to do that.

You don’t know where someone is on their journey; you don’t know if he’s a sinner at the nadir of his existence and is going to turn around. And there’s a bigger weird moral frame that gets put on this.

Of course, there are aspects of that that will come in from the right, right? With homosexuality, with the more racist element. But that aspect, if I’m arguing that the right has been more infected up the power structure by the worst authoritarian excesses of the right, I think that the narrative of moral judgment has infected a wider swath of the left, if that makes sense.

Well, it’s worth thinking about anyways. I mean, it’s a real mystery to me because I suspect that if I—particularly because I’m Canadian, and so that puts me culturally to the left of the typical American, let’s say—I suspect if I read through a list of policy decisions made by the Democrats and made by the Republicans over the last 20 years and I was blind to the party who supported it, I would end up supporting more Democrat legislation than Republican legislation. But there’s still something about the radicals in—on the left that—that disturb me in a way that—look, it’s—so here’s another way to look at it, right?

We’ve all seen Cape Fear, right? In Cape Fear, guy gets out of prison; he goes after his defense attorney. Criminals who are escaped go after the defense attorney and not after the prosecutor. And the reason for that is percentage-wise—and I believe that’s true; I’ve heard that; I haven’t sourced it—but let’s pretend it’s true for the sake of this parallel.

I think a lot of what has happened is people figure the prosecutor’s doing their job. But if your defense attorney who’s supposed to be looking out for you doesn’t, there’s a different kind of anger. I think that’s what the Democrats represent.

So it’s a betrayal.

Yes, I think that that’s interesting. Here’s the uber statistic for everything for me that when I arrived at—I felt like the scales fell from my eyes over the last 40 or 50 years. 50 trillion dollars, with a T, have moved from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%. That’s not through innovation, competition, and pure free market capitalism.

It’s just not. It’s corporate giveaways; it’s lobbyists writing bills; there’s a whole structure. It’s the weird inevitability of the Pareto distribution, right? The idea—the age-old law that the rich get rich and the poor get poorer. It’s unbelievable, unbelievably difficult to keep that under control.

And it is definitely something that destabilizes societies, and that’s the thing. And it’s been done largely—that 50 trillion is—effects of globalization certainly play a role in that, but it’s not like all of a sudden everybody who’s a CEO got that much more brilliant.

So this is the largest transfer of wealth, I believe, in history, and it didn’t go a socialist way. That’s when everyone’s pulling their hair out about socialism. I just look at it and go, “50 trillion dollars.”

So if you’re a white working class and that happened under Obama, that happened under Clinton—

Yeah, well, that’s—but see, that’s the peculiar thing, is that it’s not self-evident that policy can stop that. Like one of the things I’ve been terrified about since really learning about the Pareto distribution is its implacability. You know, as you pointed out, this distribution happened even under systems of governance or ideologies of governance that hypothetically should have stopped it or at least slowed it.

It’d be interesting to find out if that transfer took place more rapidly under Republicans than Democrats or not.

Well I think that whatever it is, if you look at that one fact, that is a failing of basically the entire ruling class in America. Like that—and part of—you know, I realized that I had a moment of realization; I’m going to tell you this; it was really funny.

So, you know there was the TARP give after 9/11; there was a TARP bailout and the airlines were in trouble, and they were bailed out. My statistics might be slightly wrong, but called it a 53 billion-dollar bailout, okay? When COVID hit, they needed another—and we were—you know, us Democrats were hopeful that that would go into the workers and everyone else. It went into stock buybacks so that the stock prices rose, right? 35% of the stock market is foreign-owned; it was a straight corporate giveaway.

That’s a transfer of wealth—it didn’t go back to the workers. That pissed me off when COVID started. They asked for another bailout, and it was like the exact same number, call it $52 billion. I got all mad. I’m like, I’m going to call Marshall. We’re gonna do a commercial. And I stopped for a minute, and I said, you know what? I’m the [ __ ] who’s being served by that.

And I don’t mean this in a self-flatulating privileged way, like let me take a peek into my 401k. Guess what stocks I’m probably holding, right? A ton of airline stock, so when there’s a stock buyback, which I can get angry about, part of the thing is to have a realization to go, look, that’s not—that’s a good example because it shows—that’s a good thing. What would you say that sheds an interesting light on the implacability of the Pareto distribution? It’s like you’re part of the problem even though you object to it ideologically, and you’re part of the problem because of where you sit in the economic structure.

And right, but the thing is about this, and you talk about regulation or policies not working, which I want to return to in a minute. But part of what I realized was—that’s not because I’m a good investor, right? Because I’m smart? That’s right: free market, right? Not because you’re cruel and malevolent either.

No, it’s not, but this is not my investing genius or the free market at work, right? We don’t have a transfer of wealth of that extent going the other direction. And so part of it is like, okay, so I’m a beneficiary, so what? So what a solution for a lot of things is, you know, you give money, you scream about privilege and you self-flagellate as far as I’m concerned. That’s that’s all a self— it’s not a self-focused reaction as opposed to me saying how do we start to address that problem? And the thing is, it has to be partially policy, partially regulation. We can no longer—it is something that we fight all the time. You know, one of the things you just said shed light, I think, again for me on my irritation with the left end of the ideological spectrum is that it’s just too much to see people who benefit say like who are in a position like you are or like I am in—because we’re net beneficiaries of the Pareto distribution in a major way.

Now it seems to me too much for me to also expect to be admired as a paragon of virtue in relationship to my attitude towards the poor, let’s say, because then I’m asking for too much. I’m asking to be a beneficiary of the system the way it’s set up now and I’m asking to be admired for my objection to the very system that is enriching me. And the second one of those is too much to ask for.

And this—the solution for that and like when I had that realization, I was like huh, let me get on that. Let me look at policies; let’s have an economic summit like the one you and I did. I’m not claiming I’m gonna like go out and fix the whole problem, but if all I do is sit around and go, “Oh, I feel so guilty; let me do a couple think pieces about it and talk about white privilege.”

It’s a name; it’s just more self-focused [ __ ] for those people who think about politics four minutes a week because they can only afford to think about politics for four minutes a week. So what do we do?

And what I do is I try to advocate for, you know, policies that will work, even if some of those are conservative policies, right? I mean I have a ton of people across the aisle, across the whole spectrum who I’d reach out to. What do you think of this? Are there libertarian answers? There’s got to be some. There’s got to be some regulatory answers because it’s so out of control.

Well hopefully, because the end of the Pareto game is that far too few people have far too much of everything, and that’s not even good for them. I mean you’re not rich if you have to live in a gated community.

That’s right; that’s a gilded cage, you know? It’s not—it’s not an indication of wealth. Wealth is when you can walk around your city freely at night.

That’s exactly it. And so that’s so much of what we arrived at in the messaging when we try to talk to people across the aisle, country club Republicans, let’s say. There’s a difference for me—for people who are at the wrong end of—people are at the wrong end of this system, and it pisses me off when people get so angry about the fact that like all these people are voting in ways that hurt their own interests, right?

Yeah, I always say like, I vote in ways that hurt my own interest. I don’t just vote like, how do you know what their interests are? Their interests could be moral; their interests could be familial; their interests could be religious. It’s not just their financial interests, first of all.

Yeah, their interest could be their children’s future rather than their current—than their own current reality. I mean I learned a long time ago that that small businessmen didn’t vote for socialist policies in Canada even when they were pro-small business because they didn’t want to be small businessmen; they wanted to be big businessmen.

So they were voting their dream, not their reality, and it’s not obvious that that’s a mistake, even though—well, you could criticize it. You could point out its lacks, but it doesn’t mean it’s inadequacies, but that doesn’t mean that it’s a mistake.

So let’s get into our the canary in the coal mine discussion again. So I think like for me, it’s glaringly apparent—and I know lots of people, especially a good number of people who are your listeners will in good faith disagree with me on that—to me it’s glaringly apparent the difference in terms of what a Trump presidency, let’s say, and a Biden presidency in terms of the relative levels of corruption and undermining of the democratic norms.

I know there’s a lot of counter-arguments; I’m happy to have all of those, but for the sake of this discussion what like, from my perspective, it’s this big slice here, like of a totem pole. The vast majority of Americans are so far down. They’re so far down below that when they’re looking up, they can’t possibly distinguish some subtle—well, you see Trump; it’s an emoluments clause and he’s doing fundraisers on the South Lawn of the White House and that’s unacceptable.

But the kind of fundraising and enrichment that like you know the Clintons did was different for this other—they can’t differentiate that. So for me, what is—and so then that gets to the question of was the vote for Trump, like my friend who went in that booth and said, “Forget it; I don’t care.”

Was that a wiser thing because that’s a higher disagreeable irritation structure before we get somebody who’s even more threatening from the right, right? That’s a good question. It’s certainly possible. Is the Trump presidency—there’s no way now that we can move forward, I think, without having much more robust and angry dialogue about that 50 trillion dollar movement from the bottom 90 to the top 1, right?

And there are some race conversations beyond the—I believe that this—the surface stuff that we distract ourselves with all the time, like cultural appropriation. There are all these issues and there’s—I’ve often thought—and I’m interrupting you partly because this is such a crucial point that distribution of wealth problem I’ve come to believe that even though the left focuses on that as the primary problem, they actually don’t focus on it enough because the attribution of the problem is wrong.

I don’t think there’s any evidence whatsoever that the Pareto distribution is a secondary consequence of the capitalist system. So what that means to me is that the left-wingers aren’t actually taking the problem of relative poverty seriously enough because they’ve got a handful of stock answers that have been applied with absolutely no success whatsoever.

And they’re more radical in their more radical guises; they’re not looking at the problem with enough seriousness, but the problem exists. And it doesn’t exist, too, because people are malevolent or greedy, although that might add to it. It's a much more complex problem. It’s much more difficult to solve.

But some of the greediness like the level of lobbying in America and with lobbyists literally submitting bills and forgetting to take the lobby firm’s heading off the paper—there’s an aspect of that. But the other way that I look at that is to go how badly did we fail as capitalists? And that’s me, right? How badly did we fail that enough people went and picked up this shiny object called socialism or democratic socialism, which is different from socialism, which is a good idea?

Yeah, that’s a well—that’s a good question. That’s—that’s the reverse of the question the Democrats should be asking themselves. So the Democrats should be asking themselves, well, how did Trump become so attractive? What did we do wrong?

And the right-wingers, the more conservative types should be asking, we haven't been—we haven’t solved the problem of wealth distribution well enough to stop socialism from being attractive as an option, even though the historical record with regards to its more radical forms is dreadful.

And we’ve also failed to embody the core values of free-market capitalism, innovation, competition, where we have—not pulled the ladder up behind us—where we have allowed and built a robust system of smart capitalism all the way down. That is a solid foundational base that we can stand on to win. It’s so god—well, it’s so goddamn difficult.

It’s so goddamn difficult, though. Look, let me give you an example. So I started a company 20 years ago, and it struggled along for a long time. And then when I got better known, it—that solved our marketing problem.

But it’s a psychological testing company. And when we first designed it, we designed—we consciously designed a company that would require no employees, that would have no overhead and that would be replicable. So it was computerized, and so it can scale without an increase in cost.

And like I’m sensitive to the problems caused by the Pareto distribution, but when I set up that company, I set it up in a way that absolutely contributed to it because we don’t pay any—no one in this company gets paid except the three people that own it. That’s it.

And that’s part of the inexorable—I can’t say that damn word—inexorability. I just did, the audio version of my book, and I had to redo all the times I said inexorable because I said it wrong.

Anyways, the end of the inexorable Pareto distribution is very difficult to escape from. It’d be lovely if we could have a discussion politically where that problem became central and everyone's attention could be focused on that; that the capitalists who we could admire, at least in some guises, could sit down and say, look, we have to figure out how to get more money to the bottom part of the population within this structure that can also generate wealth because, of course, capitalism does that extremely well.

So that problem has to be brought to the forefront. The thing is, the further I got into this, Jordan, the more that I realized that everything foundationally is moral. That’s it. You said once to me, and I think shortly after college you said there are only moral decisions. That’s it. I was like, that’s so weird, though, because sometimes there’s pragmatics; sometimes there’s something.

And the more you look at that, the more it’s borne out that, in fact, like any shortcut you pay for. Any shortcut pushes. I mean, look, we don’t have to get all into Jungian synchronicity, but you know that drill. And so one of the things that I think about a lot is we can argue as if we’re sitting around in college, right, drinking, and there’s a libertarian and there’s a conservative; there’s a liberal, and we—we know what we’re going to say already.

Nothing that is cure ideologically will ever work or function, and the only answer to it—like for me part of what I realized was I realized I’m going to be arrogant enough to try to go on an adventure that tries to tell stories—not re-message the Democrats that I’m lying and repackaging and putting pig on a lipstick—that I can make an argument for Chris.

I think you met lipstick on a pig.

What did I say? You said pig on a lipstick, which gives the ratio of pig to lipstick seriously wrong. [Laughter] That should appeal to the Trump viewers of this broadcast.

That’s horrible; that’s—that’s horrible.

But it’s not about—it can’t be about deception, right? It has to be about making actual arguments for why the core liberal values that I believe are most imperfectly but approximately embodied by the Democrats can have appeal to conservatives, right? And we’ve talked all that big.

Hopefully, you also tilt the Democrats in that direction, like by producing that message, right? It gives them—right; it gives them a center around which to align.

Okay, absolutely. A necessary thing; you need that center. But here’s the complexity that I realize is we didn’t make any money at all. We said everything is pro bono, and we didn’t have any credit, and we wouldn't have done any of this.

Like the no permission part is like here we went off and did it, but when there’s a ton of money to be made in advertising—I mean we have—I sent you that article, right? There’s an estimate that we created, you know, and it could very well be off or overblown, but there’s an estimate that the ad structures that we put in place created a billion dollars of advertising.

We aimed it at the swing states; we aimed it evangelicals; we aimed it at Hispanic communities and in the places that really mattered a lot. That’s a lot of value, even if it’s off by 50%. And the thing is, part of how we got there was people—when they do an ad buy with a commercial, they make money on the ad buy, right?

And so part of it was we’d go off, we’d make some commercial, we’d test it, we’d make sure that it was honest; it would be saying something that’s slightly different. But the cost of having our message conveyed in a way that might hope to be transformational was for us to give it to them and say, “Here, say that you did it.”

And if there’s any sales or anything to do with it, you go make a bunch of money off it and just say it was you. And so that’s the price of it because if we said, well we want to be cut in on the revenue streams, then they’d have a bunch of reasons to choose their own creative over our creative.

Right, so what you did by taking yourself out of the fee structure, you enabled your voice.

That’s right, and we allowed for other people; it’s like you don’t get to have all these things, right? We get to have all the credit and make a ton of money and also be adored by the Democratic establishment and then also be transformative.

And so I’m not saying that like it’s any great shakes morally, but that was the part of me that was like the solution isn’t in doing; the solution is in—when I realized the airline buyout thing that I was an inadvertent recipient of that in a way, it’s kind of a rigged—that’s kind of a rigged game.

When there’s a buyout and there’s a stock buyout, and I just make more money despite them being in failure is to do stuff, and to try and do stuff properly. And so I think that a lot of it is we have such a failure of moral leadership right now in corporations.

I mean, I was thinking back to like would it be amazing if we looked up to you know more leaders of industry and more for the—it’s just we’re so removed from our paragons, from our avatars of meaning, I guess is what I mean to say, like the fact that a politician's supposed to be there to help you and to do good for the community is almost laughable now. The fact that a college or university represents the production of a renaissance man or woman in pure form—I mean the lie of that I think was laid bare by that college admissions scandal.

People were so furious about it because the answer to that should be no kid could cheat to get a university, they’d wash out in the first month if they didn’t deserve to be there in a way. So we’re removing ourselves—like the money-making mechanism of business, like great businesses and business people should be building a whole pyramid and structure of success under them—that’s how you win.

Well part of part of that again is it’s a—that’s a time frame problem, you know, is that the more fundamental, the more morally fundamental a decision is the longer the time frame over which it operates.

And so you might expect people who are benefiting from the capitalist system to set up their structures so that capitalism itself would be supported across a long span of time, and that would mean cutting in the people that in the bottom of the hierarchy.

But short-term considerations arise to make doing such things very, very difficult.

Right, and if you keep doing it, if you keep making it difficult, another eight, ten, twelve years, then AOC is the president and the whole system’s gonna change, let’s say, right?

Well, that’s the risk. If the system fails enough people, then there are enough people who are willing to especially young men who are willing to take their chances in the revolution; you know, at least it’s exciting.

So here’s the hardest thing that I had to figure out, which was this: I had an okay time. I think part of this is my—I’ve always had a very diverse background of friends because I write thrillers; I have a lot of friends in the military community, a lot of kind of hardcore conservatives.

The hardest thing for me was to try to apply the same self-awareness of my blind spots. And I don’t say empathy, but sort of seek to really understand the further elements of the left that was the hardest thing for me—instead of just saying you’re idiots and you’re squawking and you’re doing all this stuff to really slow down and listen and understand that a lot of these younger, especially the younger kids, younger who are coming up, who are very attracted to democratic socialism who are way more radical in a lot of their views than are appealing to me.

When I stopped and looked at the world through their perspective, and could get over my inherent like—you're always more angry at your own side in some ways—but man, if I was—I have, you know, my wife’s a college professor, as you know, and she teaches at CSUN, which is a lot of the kids, Cal State Northridge, a lot of kids from tough backgrounds like they don’t have time to be political. Those are the kids she has; they’re working two jobs; they’re helping support their family; they’re raising their younger siblings.

Like these are working kids; so many of those kids come out of, and they made the right choices. Not drugs, not—you know, didn’t wind up in prison; they went and did this; they’re holding their family together; they have like a hundred and thirty thousand dollars in debt coming out, and they’re making thirty-three dollars an hour.

Oh you know, okay. So that’s—that means the price to buy into the system at a point where you have a chance of thriving can’t get too high.

So student loan debt would certainly contribute to that, as would the entry price of real estate.

That’s right. Okay, so so that’s a real danger.

But I think that people are—why would you look at other means and other systems? And why wouldn’t you just criticize the system? And for us to come along, me to come along and say, well, that’s ridiculous. And democratic socialism—and do you fund the—like all these things you’re talking about, the system are so full.

I think I think you could look—the other thing that you can credit, especially young people who are attracted to the farther left ideals is that there is genuine concern about the unfairness of the economic distribution. It’s like—right? And you know, so there are a lot of poor people who are at zero, which is a hell of a place to be because you get to the point where you can’t get out because you need—what? I don’t know how to say it exactly. You can’t afford a bank account; you can’t afford an address; like you can’t get the basic necessities that would allow you to play in the system.

You can’t afford twenty dollars a month—the fee to keep your bank account open if you’re under a thousand dollars.

Right, exactly. Exactly that. And so that’s the cost of being stuck at zero, and young people look at that and they think, well that’s a terrible waste of human resources, which it is, and it’s dreadfully unfair, which it is.

Now, the problem is, is that the solutions that are conjured up on the radical left don’t seem to work, but I think not well anyways.

So I think it’s reasonable to say you can be sympathetic to the motivations that drive the attraction to those theories, and it would be lovely if they worked. But so many of them when put into practice don’t produce the result that’s intended.

Like I don’t see any evidence—I’ve looked, and it’s tough to parse through it—but it isn’t the evidence that left-wing governments have been better at controlling the Pareto distribution problem than right-wing governments is very sparse.

And that actually is unbelievably disheartening, but I think we’re down—I think we’re getting too academic-abstract with it in a way, and I think the part of it is to say when they say that we go here’s a bunch of facts and to me that’s the same thing with a MAGA voter, let’s say, of me coming in and going, here’s a bunch of facts about Donald Trump’s corruption, rather than joining and saying, “Look, you’re 22; you’re not supposed to have a world economic view and an understanding of the whole breadth of history, especially from our academic systems that are failing you as you're under crippling debt and you're addicted to screens because companies have hired teams of addiction specialists to throw shrapnel in your nervous system and the biomed companies are all over you; they’re being devoured from every angle.

And we’re coming in with PowerPoint presentations about why it’s dumb rather than going, god you’re right; there’s a lot of problems here. And you’re on your—maybe some of the language and reasons and reasoning that you’re that you’re moving towards aren’t the ones that will get you where you want to be, but boy are you right about a lot. Let’s start from there then.

Like you can’t change somebody’s opinion without seeking to understand them first, your motivations.

Absolutely and you shouldn’t just assume that all the positive motivations are on your side.

Okay, I want to ask you some other questions here. So you produce 200 commercials. We’re going to show some of those interspersed in this in this video. Now, how were they distributed? How many people watched them? That’s the first question.

We did a ton of online digital—excuse me, they—and they ranged; some of them we ran during NFL games in Swing States on television. Some of them, like the Reagan City on a Hill one, one of the benefits was some of the ones we did were really innovative in ways that are kind of fun that we could talk about in different ways.

And so we got secondary, like ours, Reagan City on a Hill one; Brian Williams asked James Carville about that on the show. So there was also a secondary sort of conversational aspect of crossover into mainstream media in different ways because people would then write—I did a whole series of ASMR commercials.

This is a fun—what’s ASMR?

Oh, it’s the whisper. Do you remember those videos where people would like whisper and make sounds on the microphone that were super trendy?

No, I must have been out of function. I must be malfunctioning during that period.

But so basically, you know, we realized that the commercials that a lot of the Democratic agencies were putting were these like, you know, Trump is beholden to China, and it would have the dark shadowy Trump and all the stuff, and so a lot of—you know, they got tons of people are mashing the like button and sharing it.

But what we found in some of the testing—there’s a brilliant woman we worked with, with the testing—is it moved undecided voters 10 points towards Trump. And the reason for that is if your nervous system is put into fight or flight by the ominous score and the facts, then you move more towards—you’re more inclined or receptive to conservative messaging. That’s right—jingoism, xenophobia, strongman leadership.

Yes, yes. So I did this commercial series where we hired a wonderful actress to whisper. It’s sort of seductive whispering of the mic because I thought we need to talk to voters’ nervous systems. That’s another part of storytelling, right?

You’re not talking just to their prefrontal cortex. You want to talk to the decision-making mechanisms. We need to lower the guard because there’s so much screaming about politics.

And so that was what we did. She said, “There’s so much screaming; you know, I want to tell you this is the only way we can cut through the noise.”

And it’s a sort of whispered soft messaging.

“Hi there, it’s just you and me. So after loading everything else, Donald J. Trump is loading our election. He hired his rich donor buddy to slash the postal service so our votes can’t be counted. Voter biggest crap; vote early, still some shell.”

So that was effective, and then that got written up in a bunch of places.

Secondarily, so how many people are typically viewing these ads?

Most of the ones that we did with big launches were in the millions.

And how would that compare to it—well, I could say a typical political ad, but this is atypical because in some sense because the technological infrastructure for doing this is so new, I don’t know what you’d compare it to because—I mean, an ad used to be an evanescent thing, right? You’d throw it up on a TV show, and I mean, it could run in sequential TV shows, but the ad would run and then people wouldn’t have access to it. Now, of course, they have access to everything all the time. So I don’t know.

And it’s different. I mean, it would be Instagram; it would be Facebook; then it’s on Twitter; then it’s shared widely; then some of them we cut down and we ran on television stations. I mean—but we got—I think I could confidently say we got over 100 million views of stuff, if not more.

Okay, okay, what kind of—here’s a nasty question, I suppose. What good did you do and what harm did you do or what harm might have you done? Let’s start with good. What good do you think you did within the Democratic Party, let’s say.

We have advocated and elevated the purest place for me in the Democratic Party are the first-time House candidates. That’s the love for me, to work with because it’s so hard as people move up in the structure and make all the compromises that they have to make, it gets more and more sticky.

And the fiefdoms and Baileywicks, and so the House candidates are wonderful. We supported them. I mean I think we had a big—I would say it’s so hard to say and it’s so hard to want to take credit.

Yeah, I wouldn’t want to remove our efforts from the midterm or from the presidential. I wouldn’t be comfortable removing them and thinking that the outcome is the same. Now, whether that’s a slice that we laid on top of, you know, tons of people who did other work and laid other slices down, community organizers, the politicians, you know, and yes, the democratic institutions with fundraising, the D-Trip-C, there is some credit that is there too.

But we put and targeted all of our messaging; our theory of the case was right. We put it straight into the swing stage; we put it straight into persuasion messaging for moderate voters; we went after a lot of Hispanic commercials. Like our theory of the case was right. We went after evangelicals; we did—

So what do you mean by theory of the case?

We didn’t do anything that was politically correct; it was ambitious; it was unifying; we had diversity in our ads. We did several sort of Black Lives Matter, you know, we had the Lincoln Project, I got one to them, but they were very clean on the parameters of what we were representing as a unified positive vision of America.

And our criticism I think some of the commercials with Trump here or there—we did get, I probably failed in getting snarky in ways that might not have been as fair or persuasive.

So you did get snarky in a way that was—so was was not as persuasive?

Here or there, some of those 200 ads—if I look back on, I’d go, yeah, but I had an instinct, and I’d send them to testing, and I’d get the answer back. I was like, I think I can try this way in of this kind of attack route.

Okay, and we got back that was like, nope, it’s turning people off again, and I was wrong.

So I was wrong plenty. I mean I rushed into being wrong everywhere again and again and again. We didn’t understand the permission structures; we didn’t understand the etiquette, and at a certain point, it was funny; I joke with Billy; he’d send an email out to like a bunch of senators and heads of different committees, and I’d get like a worried call from one of our political people, like you can’t—you can’t see all these people; there’s all this internal, you know, stuff going on.

And so the first reaction is kind of chagrin or embarrassment of like, oh, we stumbled into, you know, this without knowing anything. But then we were like, wait a minute, that’s idiotic; we’re trying to win a race. If everything that you’re saying you believe that Trump is that damaging and threatening, we don’t have time for any of this internecine [ __ ] so knock it off.

We’re gonna see all of you; we don’t have time to break that up, and everyone kind of went, okay. Like we were so clueless in some ways that it almost benefited us because we were breaking a lot of established norms in little ways that if people came up with it with an issue about whether it was some subtlety of language policing or hierarchical stuff or bureaucracy, we just said we’re not doing any of that.

We’re here to win. If you don’t want to be involved, we’ll take you right off, but we’re not gonna navigate any of those things. And since no one had given us permission and no one was paying us, no one could fire us, and so it just worked.

It was really weird.

Well, it is really weird that it was even possible. But it’s less weird when you—the weird thing is that you did this without any payment, that you just decided to do it. And the second weird thing is that you actually went ahead and did it. And as a project it worked, even though the outcome of it might be very difficult to measure.

Um, you illegal harm?

I did, you asked about the harm.

Well, I also—I wanted to go more into the good first, though. You talked about the newly elected people. You didn’t tie that exactly to the good that you’ve done, but there obviously is a link there, so I’m just going to ask you to make that more explicit.

That’s the—they're the best home. You know, we have amazing candidates. If you looked up Alyssa Slotkin, if you looked up Dean Phillips, if you looked up Haley Stevens, if you looked up Lucy McBath, some people we lost this round because of the bad messaging—really bad party messaging and inability to draw a line against socialism in the from the police.

But