Homeroom with Sal & John Dickerson - Tuesday, October 27

Hi everyone, Sal Khan here. Welcome to the Homeroom live stream. We have a very exciting guest today. We're gonna have John Dickerson, who works for 60 Minutes, a CBS contributing analyst, contributes to The Atlantic, and also has written "The Hardest Job in the World." So, a lot to talk about, especially with the election coming up and kind of our government and the history of the United States.

If you have any questions about that, feel free to start putting them in the message boards, wherever you are watching this. Then our team members are going to surface it to myself and John. But before we jump into that very exciting conversation, I'll give my standard reminders.

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So with that, I'm excited to introduce John Dickerson, 60 Minutes correspondent, CBS contributing analyst. You contribute to The Atlantic; you do a lot of things. I mean, any one of the things I just mentioned would be more than a full-time job. But good to see you, John.

"Thanks, Sal, it’s great to be with you again."

So maybe a good place to start. I have a ton of questions, but obviously, we're days away from an election. You know, every election I think always feels special and different, but this one feels more different than normal. Obviously, it's happening in very unusual circumstances. How are you thinking about it?

"Well, I think you're right. The most basic reason it feels different is that we are holding—or trying to hold—an election in the time of a pandemic. Every vote cast and counted is under different scrutiny. Some states have had to create entirely new ways of voting. So that would just be the basic big challenge of the moment we're in. We are also in a highly contentious moment in which the president, who is usually the guardian and steward of that system—which is the bedrock of the American system, which is a form for voting that allows the peaceful transfer of power or the peaceful maintenance of power—it's basically the first block in the building block of American government.

The president has been questioning, challenging, poking, prodding at that basic brick in the structure of America by questioning whether the votes will be honest; whether the vote counting and the way it's being done is somehow going to throw the result into question. So, you have the voting pandemic and then you have basically the most popular, well-known figure in American politics calling that into question. Those are just two things. And then, of course, you have a series of major issues that are at the center of the election: the pandemic is one, the economic situation in America is the other, and then the ongoing racial debate, questions, protests about equality in America and whether that is broadly shared or broadly available—particularly to Black Americans."

And how do you think— I know predicting the future is always a hard thing to do—but let's try a little bit. How do you think it's going to play out, given everything you just talked about? You know, on election day, this isn't going to be a typical election day where by midnight or 1 a.m. people are going to say, "Oh, it looks like so-and-so's the next president."

"Right, here's what I'm looking for in terms of the way it plays out. The one thing to watch right now is the early vote that's taking place, both in person and by mail. There are some states, like Florida and Arizona, that start the counting early, and those are states that we should all kind of look to on election night. I've become particularly interested in Arizona; they start counting two weeks before. They've been voting early since 1996, so they're pretty good at doing it. About 90% of the vote will be counted before election day in Arizona, which means you're going to have a durable counting process there.

So, we have the early vote going on, and then we look at the states that are able to process those votes so that we'll get an answer on election night. Then, we've got to look at the votes that are being cast on election day. One of the splits people should look for is that a lot of Democrats are voting early. It's likely that the bulk of the Republican vote will be on election day. So, we should all be prepared for some numbers that come in that show perhaps Joe Biden winning because of the early vote, but then maybe changing once some states start to count their in-person vote during the day.

We should all be ready and prepared, if it's a close election, for the election to be determined maybe into the next day after election day, or maybe even some days down beyond that. On the other hand, early in the evening, we'll get results from some East Coast states—Florida, North Carolina, in particular Georgia—that will tell us something about the way the night is trending. It could be, even though everybody is prepared for a long election week, that we get a signal early in the night from some of those states that it's going to go one way because the turnout has just been for one candidate or another, and we could get an early result. So, everybody's preparing for a long counting process, but that doesn't mean that's the only kind of answer we might get once the votes start being counted."

And I just want to make sure I understand the logistics or how the information gets out as we approach election day. So even a place like Arizona, where they start the counting ahead of time, do they release that information as they have it? Is that where we see the precincts reporting and all that? How does that get out there?

"This is my favorite fact about Arizona at the moment: accounting is going on, and it is in a computer somewhere, the tabulation. So what they do is they open the ballot, check the information on the ballot against the voter file, check the signatures, and make sure it's an actual valid ballot. Then they tabulate it. Those tabulations are sitting in a computer and will sit in a computer until election day. It's not hooked up to the internet; it is a number inside the computer that nobody knows.

Then, once the polls close in Arizona on election day, they will release that tabulation. So, that's the tabulation of the early mail-in and in-person vote. You'll get a big kind of gurgle of results, and then slowly over time, they will add in the votes on election day. Some people will drop off their ballots on election day, which means that they've gotten an early ballot, and then it will have to be assessed. They'll compare the signatures, they'll compare it to the voter roll, and so that'll take a little bit of time.

Arizona, even though they have a time-tested, well-stressed vote-by-mail process, they've had some elections recently where the result on election night has been different than the results several days later because of that counting process. Now, that's just in Arizona; every state has a different process. It's why some of the states people are most fascinated by—Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin—those are three states that Donald Trump won in 2016, which was a part of his surprise upset victory. I call them the headache states because Pennsylvania doesn't start processing ballots until election day.

So if they're slow, that may mean we don't get a result; if those states are close, you may not get a result for a few days, and there will be lots of things to bicker over in the way that they count their ballots. So, every state does it differently, some better than others."

A lot of questions are coming in related to what you just talked about from YouTube. Mark R. Thompson says, "Why can't all states do what Arizona is doing?"

"Well, we may find that they may all start to try to do that. The principle has been local control. You know, in the United States, this is best handled by people closest to the ones doing the actual voting. The upside, also, is that when we think about hacking and disruption from foreign adversaries or anybody who would try to seize power in America from the local perspective, it's very hard to do when you have many different kinds of voting systems.

In a way, the inefficiency of having so many different systems has a slight benefit in that it's harder to disrupt because you'd have to learn how to disrupt each little county, and sometimes in some states, the rules are different by county. So there's a way in which the inefficiency actually protects us a little bit. But I should just add that we have tried as a country to reform our voting process during the Ford administration, Carter administration, Obama administration, and there are binders full of analysis on how to make voting easier and better, but it never quite happens for a variety of reasons, in part because the federal government can't tell the states what to do.

But maybe after the embarrassing delays and confusion here, there might be a new push to improve things."

I like that point; that's the first time I heard kind of our fragmentation of our voting system as a feature and not a bug, but it does make sense. It does make it harder to game because you have to literally game it, at least at a state level, probably at a local level. And that goes into another question: you alluded to the fact that Donald Trump has said a few times that he's skeptical of some of the mail-in early voting, that maybe the election might be called into question. From YouTube, Mr. Specter is asking, "Will it be a fair election? How will they make sure the votes are fair and nothing is..."

"Well, each of the individual states and the secretaries of states in the states have a process for doing that. One thing people should really keep in mind is that a lot of these states, particularly ones that have had close elections, have a time-tested and honored way of figuring out whether there's any fraud. The reason there is so little fraud is that it's really hard to do, and when they have found fraud on election day or through voting, it's been found out.

So, it might take a little while in some states because they have a kind of multi-level process to make sure that the voting that's taking place is honorable and true, but the length of time that it's taking means that they are doing their work. They are checking their math again; they're not rushing through the process. And so delay might be a little irritating in this world where we would all like everything instantaneously, but it is the sign of diligent work going forward that is actually going to protect the durability of the vote.

So, what we can rely on are the systems within the states. And the fact that everybody's been worried about what voting in a pandemic is going to be like means that there are a lot of people who are watching. While some states have had rigorous debates over the number of polling places and the number of drop-off spots for early ballots, there are a lot of people paying attention. It's a little bit harder to do a sleight of hand or some kind of fraud with so many eyes on what's taking place."

And, you know, one thing you brought up that gives me confidence in what is happening—even in your scenarios, it sounds like almost not worst case but not great—you have it maybe a few days past election day. I was hearing these scenarios; I haven't heard them as much recently, where people think it might take weeks, and it might be disputed, and it might go, you know, depending on how it's disputed, if some states don't want to say that they've had a final tally, that it could go to the state legislatures. I've been hearing all of these other kind of byzantine worst-case scenarios. Do you think any of those are happening, or is that just kind of scare-mongering of an absolute disaster scenario?

"Well, it's a good question. I could cook up some truly awful scenarios. I mean, basically, the closer it is, the trickier it might get because if it's close, it means that every tiny little vote really could matter. Remember what happened in 2000 in Florida? You had a committee of people obsessing about the tiny pieces of paper that hung from the punch ballots, the chads, as you’ll remember, which really showed how you can funnel the entire intensity of the American political system and the power that is exchanged in elections down to a tiny piece of paper that is basically barely bigger than the head of a pencil.

So it can get really weird really fast. If it's not close, however, then there might be some sloppiness. There always is in an election; it's a massive undertaking. We might have, you know, between 150 and 160 million people in America. It is not something that ever goes off with 100% purity. Just because of human activity at that scale has bumps and messiness and an occasional untucked shirt tail.

But if it's not close, a little messiness can be accommodated by the overwhelming result for one of the two candidates. I think that I've tried not to sketch the total disaster scenarios because while people are prepared for them, and everybody should be emotionally prepared for complexity, I also think that if we get too up on tiptoe and talk too much about how awful it all could be, it sets the stage for mischief makers, some of whom are domestic, some of whom are from our adversaries, who in a highly heightened atmosphere can throw in just a little disinformation. If everybody's already so keyed up, that little bit of information will cause people to go pinballing all over the place.

So one of our jobs in the press is to try to keep the eye on the ball—what's the most important thing—and not go through a kind of doom scrolling of all the possible awful things that might happen. In fact, teach people or remind people that this is going to be a developing story on election night and to ignore rumors and to practice some restraint in handling the incoming information because it might take a slightly winding path. Don't mistake the natural wideness of the counting process for anything having gone wrong. If they do that, there will be less chaos on election day."

You're touching on actually the next question that's come through on this notion of foreign influence, mischief makers, polarization. From Facebook, John Lavelle asks, "The foreign influence that has taken place in our country has fueled the division that threatens the union and has been very successful. The two tribes are at each other's throats. The question is who has helped widen the gap?"

I'll expand that a little bit. I do sometimes wonder how successful have the foreign influence actually been? It seems like there's evidence that it's been going on, but how successful has it been? Or has it been more of our own making through polarization, through social media, or even the media itself changing and kind of polarizing?

"Well, the answer to that question is yes, which is to say certainly we had foreign adversaries who were trying through a variety of different methods—Facebook groups, phony ads, attempted voter suppression—to tinker with American politics. But I think one of the most potentially powerful things they did was in a nation where political combat is so corrosive among the highly online and the highly engaged—which is not the majority of our country, and it's not even the majority of voters—but nevertheless it does represent a lot of people on social media who can affect news coverage, who can affect the culture in which voting takes place.

That's where, when you throw disinformation into the middle of that kind of swarm where we're already bickering and short-tempered and questioning motives in our political debate, it has an explosive effect. So, it's not in some cases, it’s not even misinformation; it's just the coarsest possible information, which then causes a reaction and a counter-reaction from each side.

The partisanship in America among political obsessives has gotten much worse, both in the way they think about the parties and the way in which they think about the opposite members of the parties. You know about the polling that long ago, people who were political obsessives would be okay with one of their offspring marrying somebody of the other party. Now that number is down; it might be in the teens of political obsessives who would be all right with one of their offspring marrying a member of the other party.

Those are the political obsessives. There's also a lot of work done on voters that finds that basically about 80% of the voters are not obsessed and thinking the absolute worst of the other party. Now, they can get there pretty fast if you get into a conversation with them, and you misbehave, and you treat them as sub-human because of the party they belong to. But mostly, the people who spend a lot of time on social media and the people who represent the worst in our political dialogue are actually a relatively small percentage of the electorate and an even smaller percentage of the American people."

And you know, this polarization, where do you think it's going to lead to? Do you think it depends on the outcome of the election? Do you think we have some just structural trends because of social media? And it's not like the Russians and the Iranians and the Chinese are going to disappear overnight. I mean, is there some way that we converge back to... Is there any lessons from history that tell us that, okay, we can clearly... I mean, obviously we've had a civil war, so things have gotten bad in the past. How do we heal? What's it gonna look like in 20 years?

"Yeah, well, the civil war example is the most dangerous one, of course, which is that we only heal after we tear ourselves apart. You'd hate to have to see reform come out of that kind of hot stove moment because of the carnage that would be required to create that kind of wake-up call for the whole country. There are... I mean, I think the best case for getting out of our current fix is probably a combination of two things. One would be a considerable political defeat of one of the two parties, which would change the political incentives for the individual members in the party to not listen to the base of their party, but listen to the larger country.

The problem is, and I'm going to be general here, although, you know, at the moment, because Donald Trump is the president, the power he holds over Republicans in his party is tremendous. And, you know, as Jared Kushner says, this is Donald Trump's Republican Party. So if you're a Republican member of the House or Senate, you are judged by your president and also the partisans in your party by whether or not you support Donald Trump.

Well, that is not really the way the founders intended it to operate. They wanted a system in which lawmakers used their reason to evaluate the questions of the day, and political affiliation and maintaining political power was what they feared. But the system is where it is. So what you need is this is something to happen that breaks the link between individual members of a party and the group interest of that party. That basically says to people, 'Gee, just supporting my team has caused this enormous electoral loss; I should probably go back to what the people want me to care about,' which is whatever it happens to be.

So you sever the extreme adhesion between individual candidates and their parties. One of the ways you do that is... and that has to probably happen through an event. In other words, a massive electoral loss would then potentially open the door to some reforms. And what the reforms would do is they would break down the structural impediments to bipartisanship (which I won't go into, but which I go into in some length in my book) but which the death of split-ticket voting, the fact that we all live near each other and therefore, if you're a Republican, you tend to live on a block full of Republicans now in a way that you didn't in the 70s, gerrymandering, and all kinds of other structural parts of the system that accentuate partisanship.

You would need something to basically have some reforms that would break apart those structural sorting techniques that have created—or I shouldn't say they have both created and locked in—the partisanship we have now."

Yeah, no, I mean, it's a fascinating thing of how it could evolve, but that makes a ton of sense. You know, going to your book, "The Hardest Job in the World," when you're referring to the presidency, I can think of other hard jobs too, but that one does seem hard. From YouTube, Nish786 says, "You make the case in 'The Hardest Job in the World' that the demands of the American presidency have grown impossible for any one person to fulfill. What problems does that pose?" And I'll add to Nish's question, "What—how do you fix that? I mean, it sounds like a pretty hard thing to fix."

"Well, and thank you for the question and thanks for reading the book. So, we were talking about just some of the problems with the modern presidency, which is partisanship, which has locked up Congress, which means that the president no longer has a willing partner or no longer has the willing partner of a kind that the founders wanted in Congress.

Something that operates independently to address the big challenges of the day in a way that accommodates the diversity of the country. What we have now is, as Congress is less able to do its job effectively, a lot of the decision-making gets thrown over onto the president's plate. Then the president has to use the weak tools of the office, which are not universally applicable to all the problems of the day, to through executive orders and other ways to try to address some of the issues that Americans care about.

Well, executive orders and executive action and work through the administrative agencies is a weak way to do it. Basically, it doesn't get the job done. When presidents act in ways that are seen as unilateral by the opposite political party, it encourages the opposite political party to be very angry. If you can work things through Congress, the opposite political party at least has a voice and a structure.

Now, some people would argue about that with respect to the recent Supreme Court fights that have gone on, but nevertheless, when Congress is working as it's intended, it’s basically a structure for having arguments and for seeing who wins that argument and then at least making the losers feel like the system was fair enough so that they can live to fight another day. What you don't want in any system is where people feel like they were maneuvered by the structure of the system to a bad result, and they really couldn't change anything.

So some of the structural changes in Congress we've been talking about, we need to change. The president has accumulated power ever since, basically, the—you can put a finger down anywhere in the timeline, but let's say basically the New Deal and the Second World War. So, that's hard power to give back, and they don't want to do that. But as Americans, we can stop looking to the president every time we want a political solution, and we can stop rewarding presidents who promise that they alone can do it.

As Donald Trump promised. You need to elevate presidents who operate in the American system as it should work, not as an American system in which they are the lone superpower—sorry, the lone superhero—who can, through force of their will and skill, solve all of America's problems. It's not the way the government is supposed to work, and we should stop thinking that's the way it's supposed to work because it just leads to frustration."

Yeah, although I wonder about that. I mean, even in corporate America, we tend to have, you know, the CEO. We, you know, Elon Musk is sending rockets to space. Well, no, it's Elon Musk plus a lot of other people are doing it. You know, and stuff like that, right? Steve Jobs—credit, well, Steve Jobs and a lot of other people.

"Well, and but in the corporate world, at least there's the chance that that's more likely to happen because the CEO can have absolute power if they've designed the organization that way. Even if a president wanted absolute power, they don't have it. And they've got... And then, so it's sort of the worst of both worlds, because if we think of them as an all-powerful CEO but then don't give them the tools to do the job, then they both make claims like they're going to be the Elon Musk of the government but then don't have the ability to actually do it.

And you know, there's not really a feedback mechanism that there is in the corporate world. Basically, with the presidency, there's one feedback mechanism: reelection. Most of them take intermediate feedback mechanisms if they lose a midterm or if their polls go down. But if a president has a strong enough pain threshold—or a high enough pain threshold, I should say—then they can, you know, power through and face no real feedback other than the election after four years. Because Congress is no longer a feedback mechanism, everything is so connected now.

If you're a senator, basically, as a Republican senator, if you're running, your voters want to know, 'Are you for the president or against him?' The rest is secondary."

And I could talk to you for hours, especially given the world that we're in right now. But just in the last question, you know, as a member of the media, and the type of journalism I've followed you many years, even before we first met, and we've had many conversations like this, I have deep respect. You know, you're kind of like the journalists that I always imagined are like the people there trying to be the truth seekers, and they're reading the history books and they're writing the history books.

What advice would you have for kids out there who might be watching, or people of any age, who are like, "Well, you know, we're past Walter Cronkite somehow, and the fourth estate of journalism, and social media has somehow ruined everything." And you know, there's everyone's version of the truth now. So what advice would you have to someone who wants to become a journalist, and why should they be excited about that?

"Well, I think that my advice would be—and it goes back to Khan Academy—what is one of the great things about what you've created? It is to allow people who are curious to learn and to follow that curiosity. In the process of following that curiosity, develop the skills for understanding their world.

So, critical thinking and curiosity are necessary to live a meaningful life. I think it turns out also that they're what should fuel you as a journalist. One of the things I think, whether you're interested in journalism or not, is seeking out your own answers. Following your own curiosity, not just what happened but why it happened for yourself—not because you're skeptical and you think everybody's trying to lie to you—but because you know that when you investigate the why of things, when you go look it up on your own, when you follow your own path of your curiosity, it's rewarding.

You gain, in a democratic system, control over the world around you by understanding what's happening. Events don't come plopping on you; you understand what's happening, and so you feel some control in a frantic world where things can seem out of control.

So, what I would say is anybody who is curious and a critical thinker can then go get a job where you have a license to be curious and hopefully use those critical thinking skills to follow your curiosity. The final thing I would say is for anybody who wants to become a journalist or anyone who wants to engage in journalism, just like if they're learning through Khan Academy or any other learning process, experimentation and understanding is not a straight line.

There are things that we once believed about the movement of the planets in the heavens that we've now changed our thinking about. Einstein was a genius who saw ahead of entire generations of thinkers, but he also got a lot wrong. When he found out he had gotten something wrong, he didn't feel glum about it; he was delighted because it meant that he now knew the right answer. He now could pursue a whole new set of curiosities.

I think, as consumers of journalism and of any information, we need to understand that being wrong is not always the product of somebody who has ill intent or somebody who is acting in bad faith. There are plenty of those people to be sure, but if we understand that the pursuit of knowledge is sometimes a crooked path, then we won't get all undone every time we learn something that we thought might not be true the day before. The accumulation of knowledge is a kind of crooked path, and we need to know that. We need to know that about our journalism. In its best form, it's self-correcting. The more you learn, the more you learn, and the better informed you are.

But we should make sure we think of it in that way and don't always think, 'Oh, well, you know, they said it was going to be this way, and it turned out to be that way, and therefore everything they always say is without merit.' That's not true in life, and we shouldn't think about it when it's not true in the way we receive our information. A little more understanding of the way we receive our information will help us to be better informed."

No, I love that. And that seems applicable to journalism, the media, and life—to just be constantly truth-seeking and not tying your identity or ego to a certain set current fact base and always being open to new ideas.

John, thank you so much. This was a real treat, especially given the timing. Hopefully, we can debrief and see how correct your prognostications were in a couple weeks or months.

"I would love to do it, and it's always a pleasure to be with you. So, thanks for giving me the opportunity."

Thank you, John. See you soon.

So thanks everyone for joining. Always a fun conversation. You know, John really is one of those journalists. You know I've had the pleasure of getting to have kind of just random conversations with him that go a lot like the conversation we just had. But he definitely gives you a spark of curiosity around, you know, the messiness but also the beauty of what makes a society a society; what makes a government a government.

And I really do think he's, you know, that that form of journalism that we need a lot more of now more than ever. But just as a reminder for tomorrow—another really great guest. We're going to have Vivek Murthy, former surgeon general, and we're going to talk about, you imagine, a lot of things—healthcare, what's going on with COVID, and probably a little bit of, you know, what the surgeon general does and the role of government in all of this as well.

So I look forward to having that conversation. Please join us tomorrow on the Homeroom, same time. Talk to y'all later!