I was holding the baby and I farted on the couch, and the leather of the couch was a sonic created a sonic location was like discolored or something. No, no, no, no, it was merely the fabric of it all. It took it to a sonic place that it was just like amplified. It was like screaming into a megaphone. And then I got I got yelled at from across the house. But then wow, the baby. I was, like I said in Japanese,
I'm like, well, not see you. And then like I said, farts are funny, right, and he's just maybe nice the culture alive. We're farters in this house.
You get it image that.
There being like an iridescent stain or something on the It was just like my mind.
Like a dried oil. S. Yeah, this is one strip sunfaded. So it's like remember those hologram stickers from the nineties. When I changed my viewing angle, it has like a different scene to it. Now it's green. Now, it's like a phosphorescent pink. You can see a face in it. I was eating shrimp tails.
Oh man, Hello the Internet, and welcome to Season three point fifty nine, Episode two, of Daily's.
Say production of My Heart Radio. This is a podcast where we take a deep dab into America share consciousness. And it is Tuesday, October eighth, twenty twenty four. Ten good.
Yes, it's National Parogi Day. It's national it says American Touch Tag Day, which I'm guessing that's just playing tag. But that's like when they're like, oh, they call it soft over there, it's touch tag I guess to the rest of the world, Touch Tag Day.
I don't know why it's it's it's usually all this.
These national day calendars are typically from the perspective of America.
You know, I enjoy like some of the britishisms of like the you know our words, but that one just we fixed it tag, guys, just tag it's cleaner.
Yeah, exactly. And then fluffer Nutter. It's National fluffer Nuder Day over those that love the fluffer nutter.
Sure, why not? There you go, you can have it, big fluffer nutter. My name's Jack O'Brien. Aka. Why do flies sudden lee appear every time Trump is near? He's rotting? No, couldn't be migrants, dude. That one courtesy of Halcyon Salad on the discord in honor of Trump seeing a fly during a speech and saying, Oh, it's a fly. Wonder, wonder where a came from? Like Wow, he has a conspiracy theory that the fly. We're not sure entirely couldn't be that he is decomposing like the bad guy in
Men in Black. Could not be that. Maybe it's because it's the first time he's ever been out of doors around people who aren't carrying his golf bags. But he he did seem confused by that fly. Hates the fly. I'm thrilled to be joined as always by my co host mister Miles.
Grass, Miles Gray and look in honor of a wonderful weekend for my dear Arsenal Football Club. What about some Arsenal related aka's. It's Miles Gray aka Deck trend Rice aka mchhel r Trenda aka Leean Trend Truss Art aka take Trendo, Tomiyasu uh And obviously I'm the Showgun with no Gun, the Lord of Lankersham, the Man with chronic podcast.
But Miles great, thank you so much for having me back for the season. Miles talk at Trendo. We've never done that as a trending title. Really it is something. Yeah, she'll have to remedy anyways. Miles were thrilled to be joined in our third and fourth seats by the co hosts of the wonderful podcast that you must go listen to right now, The Future of our former Democracy. They are the executive director and the director of Policy and Outreach, respectively,
for the racial justice organization More Equitable Democracy. Please welcome, George Chung and Colin Cally Welcome. Hey guys. Thanks. You know, we like welcome lights. We like to keep the light. We have invited you into just a blank white space. We record in heavy void, the hea then the white void of old Mac versus PC commercials.
Or what was the one? What isn't in willy Wonka. Where are they at when they go into that all white space? Oh they're in the TV, I think, Oh, that's in the TV. Inside the TV. Yeah, inside the TV.
Hey, Colin Cole aka Mike TV.
Hey, Oh you're Mike TV. Yeah. I've always been a little bit of uh whatever the guy is who gets sucked into the tube myself the uh yeah.
As blue Yeah something come on, nail it, come on, I'll come to you.
Germany I mix it up. My brain is glop and there it is. Shout out to super producer Victor bringing it. Yeah,
liked the group a little too much. Maybe that is a movie I recently watched with my children, and it has like thirty really good minutes and it is just coasting off of our memory of the thirty really good minutes and oh really Yeah, there's a lot of it that's just like uh huh, all right, Like after they leave the Big Candy World and go on the boat ride, it does kind of grind to a halt a little bit. There's other moments, but like they are fleeting and that's just my opinion. Shame.
I just remember always hating when he got all mad at Charlie. I was like, dude, what you're supposed to be cool with?
Yeah?
Like, and as a kid, I didn't know what to make sense of that character's experience. I'm like, dude, this guy's an asshole. Let's just turn this off. I thought you.
Turn it off. You never saw the end. Yeah, it's like, what an asshole? Turn Yeah? Yep. George Colin, thank you so much for joining us from the Great Northwest. Yes, you guys are in Seattle. Is that correct?
Ye Just keep going and take.
A past reading. Keep going, keep going, yea, keep going, keep on. Is it is it called the five up there or it's high five up here? Just five? Yeah, it's in l A. Nobody else the words highways. The importance of the five.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, but it is an important interstate, you know, we love Oh that's why the ten also deserves respect, going from sea to shining sea.
Oh right, they're all given the the I think in l A and only at l A. I've never heard of.
Wonder what the history is of our inability to just I guess because we always want to speak differently than other people.
It's a remnant of surfer culture.
Yeah right, Yeah, take on one dude over to the four oh five.
They cast the one eighteen over hit Meatip and Granada Hills.
But yeah, anyway, that's probably not as important as about than what we're about to.
Talk about today, but I still wanted to mention that. Yeah. But like I said, listeners should listen to this podcast and then also immediately go listen to the future of our former democracy. Great title, great podcast. We are going to get into a little bit of what your podcast is about it's about how our current political system is, Like, there are some things that I was taking for granted
about our current political system. You guys use the this is water metaphor at the beginning of like, yeah, this is just what we've always assumed is how it is and always will be, and that there are some things that can be better. Maybe I like it. So yeah, so we're gonna get into all of that, but first we want to get to know you both a little bit better by asking you each what is something from your search history that is revealing about who you are? George,
why don't we start with you? All right?
So I'm gonna play to my stereotypes. I'm a gay man, and I can't get enough of trying to figure out if I can get Kylie Minogue tickets that go on sale tomorrow. Okay, so for all you other people in Seattle who are also gay, man, it's on sale next week, please, so don't check you. Kylie won't be coming through to Seattle, yeah, and go ahead, go have at it. But I need my front row Kylie Minogue seats because she hasn't come to do a tour of the US for a long time.
So gotta, you know, keep up the appearance.
How long has it?
I mean, I feel like Kylie Minogue is just one of those huge artists that I'm always like, yeah, it's Kylie Minogue.
But it's been a long time since she's been in stateside. Uh.
She had a residence in Vegues and of course I had to go do that, but she hasn't been to like around for I think maybe almost better part of a decade. Definitely pandemic, got it, got it, got it, got it.
And did your fandom go all the way back to Locomo? Yes?
Yes, And maybe it was those kind of feelings that I got to early on. I'm like, hmmm, I'm feeling a little different. Some of our videos were a little edgy. I'm like, oh right, all right, I like this for not quite sure what reason. So uh, definitely I do the locomotion as much as I can.
Really, what's up with Danny Minogue? Danny is I did say that, but you know, you know, she has.
Her own career too. And yeah, the last time I went to Sydney, they had World Pride there. She kind of made a cameo appearance with her more famous sister, So it was like, you know.
George, you're going to Australia to even see Oh no, no, this is the last time I went to Australia.
Happened.
Okay. I was just trying to gauge your minogue fandom here and I.
Oh, it's pretty hot.
We're going down er, yes, yes, yes, how about you, Colin, what's something you from your search history? Yeah?
So I'll also play a stereotype, I mean herd. And the phrase that I searched for was Warhammer word of Hermis, because I'm a big fan of the deepest lore, you know, in all my fictional franchises I participate in. And I'm going through a Warhammer book right now that made reference to a starship the word of Hermes, and I wanted to look it up on the Warhammer Wikipedia to learn more about it.
Wow, what man, I'm like the I played the.
Game a little bit and then then I realized, I'm like, oh, there's a whole other level to this that I am not engaging with.
But yeah, that's okay.
It's a weirdly big ip. It spans back like fifty years. It's a tabletop board game. There's hundreds of books, there's video games, there's like a whole like mock history to the actual setting. You know, twenty thousand years of backstory right been thought out to get there. It's pretty cool if you're into that sort of thing.
I just remember going to like in this hobby shop by my house as a kid, and I loved miniatures, and I didn't know that it was a tabletop game, but I was like, yeah, I want Like to me, they're like, these are the better version than plastic army men, right, And I was like, I want these.
And I had like a little.
Like piece of paper that was like fake AstroTurf that I put my little Warhammer figures out, and I was like, oh, you play Warhammer. I'm like what these are my little dolls that I like. I sat up and then I was like my entry point.
Like, oh, it's a game.
This makes sense why it was sold in this shop, not just like these stationary toys.
Me.
On the other hand, so I grew up, you know, playing video games, building my own computer. I played Dungeons and Dragons, and I always thought Warhammer's too nerdy even for me though, and I like avoided it. And then during pandemic, a couple of friends got into it and dragged me along. And then now here I am neckty.
Right, right, okay, but did they really drag you along?
Right?
I got into it for for social activity only. I wanted nothing to do with it.
And now I stick word of Hermes. We're going on. Tell me about the Kingdom of Dust, that's.
Right, the soul Jackal, the pyrodomon the you know, the whole thing.
Damn, I know it, all those words. I mean, uh, the So it started out as a miniature war game, that's right.
That was satirizing Margaret Thatcher and conservativism in the UK and envisioned a future world where like conservatives, like ultra conservatives became the like despot humanity of the stars, and humans are the bad guys and they're out trying to make war on the alien races. And it was a big critique of of Margaret Thatcher.
And I'm assuming it's always taken in that respect every time it's played today, correct, that's right.
They never have to put out press releases to say, hey, this is a satire. If you think that these are the good guys, you misunderstand the setting. Please don't come to our events in Nazi regalia. They never have to do that.
It's like, I'm a big fan of Warhammer and its messages. I'm also for austerity measures every time they come.
I love austerity. It's like Monopoly was originally a work of satire that was making fun of you know how America operates, and Parker Brothers took it over, and we're like, what if instead? Like what if instead that was the good guy. It's like how Rocky changed from the first one where he's like poor and then in the fourth one he's like driving a Lamborghini and like the richest man in America. They're just like, this is actually more fun, right, got to catch up. We're the best, we do good work.
What number one we are? And it turns out we are? What is something? Let's stick with you, Colin that you think is underrated? Underrated or you can start with overrated?
Can know, well, I'll stick here. I pas I think are over rated?
M Yeah, I like I like it?
But why does it have like why not have a stout sometimes? Why not have a guinness to do our our irish subject here? Why not? Uh, why not have a cider or a sour?
Like?
Why does it always have to be a you know, a triple hate hazy imperial I p a.
Yeah, bloods taste buds.
Yeah, yeah, I mean it felt like I feel like in the beginning of it, it was like the hack for dudes whose partners are like, don't drink so much at the bar, like I'm just having beers and it's like, yeah, I'm having these like nine percent I p as trying to stop me. And then like that kind of became like the reason to drink I PAS, and I was like for me, I was like, this ship is no man,
this is too happy for daddy. I can't have this, Like I'm not this is not hitting my taste buds, right, So yeah, I feel like it's it's it's coming back around. I feel like every in l A there's a lot of triple hazy I p as that people are triple hazy.
Yeah. I was one of the people who's always checking out the alcohol by volume and being like I think I'm gonna like this one that's twelve the alcohol content of a whiskey. Right. But yeah, and now I don't drink anymore as a constant wants and the like hop waters. I do enjoy the hop waters. Yeah, I just discovered. It's amazing. Yeah, the like hoppy quencher whatever cool that it's delicious. It's like the hoppy becomes tropical to a point when you drink it. That's what I love about it.
That's that's right. How about you, George, what's something that you think is underrated?
I'm gonna go with two TV shows that were cut before they were done. I gotta say, Freaks and Geeks and My so called Life, Okay, like gotta go to like the youth angst people who are just about to launch their careers in super big ways. Maybe they had to like cut because they were all offered amazing in amazing other places.
Casting was too good. It was good.
It was like, here's these amazing people who yes, of course they went on to amazing things. But the shows were so good. I identified with so many of them, especially like the ma athletes in Freaking I with that kid, so it was like, you're you strumming my life with your fingers.
Stuff like that with your song. Yeah yeah, I was like this is me.
I feel see. So I missed those that.
Whole erahead shows I got, like Firefly, Arrested Development, so many good shows that got killed before their time.
Yeah, I'm waiting for the reboots on those shows. So can you make it that happen? You all live in LA, so just like write the script and like.
I'm sorry, you know, we're kind of we have a problem with the reboots in LA right now.
It's too much.
It's at the expense of letting new things be talked about all the time.
This one's geeks and freaks. Oh, we're actually for grounding the geeks.
It's starting very sad old Jason Siegel as a burnt out high school teacher and then.
Not so busy Phillips these days are we She's so good? And uh, girls five eva. Oh, Phillips is so good and girls five eva. If people haven't seen that. Yeah, I came into this episode thinking that we were surely almost out of I P and now not just the talk of the i pas, but we've got freaking geeks reboot. The my so called life Warhammer only has one film I think, is that right?
Henry Cavill's working on it. Actually he's trying to make it a whole thank.
God, So fuck. I was hoping we could option that first person.
With that idea, I just go to bookstores, and I just try and get the rights to everything I see on the shelf.
That's kind of how studios do. Kid, what are you reading there? You know who has the rights to that? All right, Calvin and hold George with something you think is overrated?
Oh, people are gonna come at me. I'm gonna have to say pickleball?
Well, hold on, how old do you think our audience is?
Now?
Yeah?
Yeah, I mean I know the grandparents out there might be getting mad at it. I feel like younger people who like pickleball aren't as militant.
But yeah, is it take? Is it? Like? Is it everywhere in Seattle too?
I mean it's encroaching on my tennis courts and we have to have some words, so like a surist, so you know, off my lawn slash tennis court.
Yeah? Yeah.
Is there a lot of a lot of tension between the tennis players and then the encroaching pickleballers who are like.
I'm going to use a third of this, can you go?
I mean they are my moral enemies.
I mean yeah, okay to say so right, okay, good to know, good to know.
Just if you're not athletic enough to play tennis, they have doubles, which is like you can play doubles without moving around very much. Yeah, exactly like doubles.
I could teach you, but i'd have.
To charge that. What I have to say, thank you? How about you calm? What's something you think is underrated?
I don't know if this is true in California, where you all are from, but around most of the country, I feel like winter is underrated.
Mmmm.
People don't like being cold.
I get it.
Driving in like ice and slush kind of sucks.
I get it.
But also, you get to you get to wear cool jackets. I'm a sucker for a cool jacket. You get to have a sweater, you you, You just get to have more variety. Know, I was wearing a T shirt and shorts every day. I like being able to switch it up. I think fires are really cool. They're too hot in the summer. There's nothing like sit out on the porch on a cold day with a hot drink, like some winter experiences are unparalleled.
And you are now singing miles of lift with you.
Oh my god, yeah right now, I have tears coming down my face.
And what's the coolest jacket you on?
Myles? Oh? In here now? I don't have it. I'm I have a look.
I grew up in the San Fernando Valley, which the average temperature throughout the year is basically like eighty five degrees, you know, like essentially, and I since I was a kid, I always yearned for seasons. So whenever I have the chance to go somewhere, like I mean, we might have to go this place at this time here it's pretty cold, I'm like, yes, yes, yes, I want to wear a jacket.
I want to know cold.
Yeah, I don't have one, Like I'm really proud of to be honest, I'm like, I want to get a nice winter coat, but that's just there's no need for that in La so I you know, I'll just get yelled at for buying another jacket I'm not going to use. But I'm I love a jacket, I love a scarf. I love outside in the cold. It's all very yeah,
I'm a huge fan. And it like it to your point, when the weather, you know, like just like when it's hot, there are activities you have to do because it's so hot, and you socialize differently when the weather's super hot, and I think in the cold, it's very similar too, and I yeah, I love that.
I love that.
I love winter. It's properly rated. But yes, I feel like we should embrace it even further.
Hell yeah, hell two coolest jackets. I got an orange bomber jacket like brown accents and some like reflectors on it, okay, and then a Alaska Airlines blue trench coat raincoat hooded.
I think a parka kind of thing.
It's it's more like a business, like a like a not quite parka okay, but like you can work with the soup, do you could work?
Yeah? Yeah? Oh wow, aren't we doing well?
My my my grandfather flew for a Asca Alaska Airlines, uh and so I had some connections and got one of their surplus like uniform jackets.
Was that like really a thing where you're like, hey, can I get that jacket? Or you just like came up on you like they're not going to miss this might it was?
It was the first one. So for a long time I've wanted like a nice raincoat. I have like ones that you can wear with a T shirt or whatever, but we wearing like a big poofy rain jacket with like a button down shirt and a tie, like you kind of feel like a fool. And I wanted to the nice and they're all like two thousand bucks, and it was or they didn't look very nice, like they weren't rain jackets, they weren't waterproof, they didn't have a hood.
And I've been complaining to this about about this, to George actually for like months.
And no, no years years.
At one they were getting on in Alaska Airlines flight together and I'm like, that jacket, That's what I want. And then and then I was like, how do I get one of those jackets? And George said, I don't know. I want you to email the CEO or something. And then I thought, wait a minute, Yeah, my grandpa used to fly. Maybe I just do email the CEO. And I said, hey, my grandpa used to fly for you, blah blah blah. Can you guys help me out?
And they do hear, mister Airlines, really, I write to you today.
And I was just saying that to like get him to stop talking about it.
So, yeah, it's just email the ceo. CEO. Yeah, by George, you do have quite an idea. All right, let's let's uh take a quick break and we're going to come back and we're going to talk about the future of our former democracy and uh, you know how we could maybe change a couple of things. We'll be right back and we're back. So George Colin, like I said, the
podcast is really good. You kind of start out talking about this idea that we are super accustomed to this one feature of our political process that doesn't need to be this way. And in fact, when other countries have changed this feature, they've been and much happier, not one a plus is across the board, as that will never be the case with politics, but much happier and more functional. But I did just want to like start out by asking why now everything seems to be going so well
with our current political system. No, I mean when when our conversation was starting out, you know, we don't want to spend all our time talking about how things bad, because I think most of our listeners know that, But we did start out in the place of we're facing an election where the stakes are kind of more of the same or burn it all down in fascism, and you know, you guys even pointed out that, like our current situation is terrifying to people in other countries, like
the assassination attempts, the multiple yes, yeah, you know, the politicizing of those assassination attempts and just you know, the rhetoric is all pretty scary. But are you what are you hearing from people who are kind of keeping one eye on our current electoral politics.
I think everyone understands that there are some huge challenges, and yet we don't really have the imagination to think about how to solve these problems. Like we feel stuck and all we can talk about is like, get this one person elected and somehow that'll save our democracy. No one believes that, but we're kind of grasping for straws in terms of what do we actually do to get
out of this this vicious cycle that we're in. Maybe one quick aside in terms of the origin story, like we're really talking about our electoral system, how we cast our ballots and how those ballots are translated into seats. This all started in terms of our American electoral system well before we were even a country, Like we have to go way back to twelve fifteen. Ah, yes, yes, twelve fifteen is a signing of the Magna Cardo where King John of England see just a little bit of
control to this new parliament. Essentially the English aristocracy, Like you know, he relied on them for tax dollars to fight these foreign wars, and they kind of got fed up with having all their money taken away to fight a war that they didn't necessarily believe in, and so they demanded some power. Magna carta get signed no more
absolute monarchy. They started elections in twelve sixty five using essentially what we now know as a winner take all system where you select one top one wins, and we largely have not changed that system since that time. We as us, as we were a former British colony, we essentially inherited all of those British English systems, like the legal system, it's a British British common law system. The electoral system is the same, and so we've never really had.
To be fair. We did get rid of the whigs, that's true. The barristers don't do that anyway.
But I mean there's some things we should have kept because that was cool.
I feel like, yeah, the lawyers wouldn't be total jackasses.
If you're like dude, I gotta sorry, sorry, I'm not going to be.
That would definitely make it more fun for sure, and so you know, I think what we have to do is start to allow ourselves to imagine other options. There are other countries, as you said, that have become democracies since we had you know, since we've expanded the franchise and thought about these challenges of how do we do other than just elect a delegate to tell the king
how we don't like a SAX policy. Now we're trying to think about Okay, now that the franchise has expanded, well beyond just men with lots of property to lots of different people, and so you can't have a one
size fits all approach to representation. All these other countries have picked something else that allows for that representation, for minority groups across the board to have real representation, and so being able to give ourselves permission to get beyond our American exceptionalism and say we have things to learn from other places, other people, other societies. Why don't we understand what choices they had and what decisions they made.
Yeah, it's very American to do the winner take all. Like American's most comfortable in a casino. You know, we love a casino. We love a story that makes it a line I put people putting it all on the line one in a million, and we just follow the one person out of a million who actually wins to tell ourselves that. But yeah, we love high stakes stories, right and yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt Colin.
Oh well good, Well, so so zooming in on like some of the problems. So we all know the electoral college sucks. We're not going to talk about that so much unless we want to. But talking about it.
On that idea already.
Yeah, yeah, we're ready for some alternatives, man, right, But when.
We talk about electing people of the Congress or your state legislature or your city council, I think most folks, most folks know jerry mandering is bad. Maybe you don't know like the details of how it works, but you know it's manipulating the lines, manipulating the systems to get the outcomes that you want. People are concerned about that, and folks are concerned about this idea of polarization that are two sides are getting further apart and they're starting to
hate each other. But there's not really many thoughtful ways about how to grapple these problems. We just say, oh, we should elect more moderates, Like we just need to find a pace to compromise more at the middle. We need to draw the lines better. But all of these ideas are like kind of abstract, they're maybe not actually good. Maybe electing more moderates actually doesn't lead to more people feeling like your voices are heard. And you know, gerrymandering
is kind of a reality. Like democrats and progressives tend to live in cities, People of color tend to live in cities. More conservative white folks, working class folks often live in rural areas. Like, you can only manipulate the lines so much. And so if those are the problems that you want to solve, you can't just do the current thing that we're doing better. The current thing that we're doing is the problem that leads to all of those outcomes, Like we have to come up with something different.
And that's kind of what we're trying to explore in the podcast, is if we wanted to explore from a totally different starting point how to conduct elections and how to build our government, how can we make some of those problems obsolete?
Right?
Like, you know, I'm always struck when I was listening to the podcast, and when we were talking on our yesterday's episode, just sort of given what our options are in the United States and how a lot of people don't fit under you know, the these gigantic umbrellas of just either of these parties, right, and the discourse or the rhetoric we hear so much is like, you know, you have this sacred right to vote, you know, and you can vote, and you're able to vote, and that's sacred.
But you know, as listening to your show, the other part of this that I feel like we don't talk about is what about do we have a right to be represented? Because it's one thing to say, here's the fucking menu, which one do you want? And you're like, well, actually, according to my diet restrictions, I've none of these. Actually is there something else, like no, sorry, so you can have, you know, some kind of terrible reaction to what's on offer, or just not not engage into the in the process
at all. What I mean is that something like we should really be thinking about is that it's not just about our ability that we can cast a vote, but that we also need to have some We should have the right to have our own beliefs or values, represented in the people that we do ultimately send to Washington to legislate.
Absolutely, George, Yeah, yeah, I was gonna say that, just to build off of that. The challenge of a winner, take all system as it relates to folks of color
is that our options are very limited. We have this Voting Rights Act, landmark piece of legislation that obviously people died to get past, and it's been interpreted that the only way that folks of color in particular, or other minority groups that can have representation under this or take all system is when we have when we can draw majority minority districts, And that kind of makes sense at some level, like Okay, you put a lot of like minded folks together into a district and they are more
than fifty percent, they get representation. But ironically that requires segregation, and do we want segregation as a means to an end in order to achieve better political representation? So I think it's really challenging to have that, as you mentioned, the right to vote, when that doesn't necessarily translate into real representation.
Now it depends on how intricately you draw those lines when you're jerrymandering. We can really right, I'm really good at tracing, very fine.
There's also like two different dimensions of representation that we lack. I mean there's a lot that we lack. Well, there's two big ones. So one is just if you want to buy like that we live in a two party system. We don't like we want to envision something else, but like that's the world we live in today. And you know, there's millions of Republicans in California who effectively have no representation. Their vote for president doesn't count because we know a
Democrat's gonna win. Their vote for governor largely doesn't count for the most part. The members of Congress and state legislature like it doesn't matter, like we already know in advance a Democrat's gonna win those seats, And the exact same thing is true for Democrats in Texas and Alabama, in Mississippi and Missouri. There's so many folks who just know five years in advance, I'm not going to elect someone who I care about at any level of government.
So of course people are like tuning out and not participating. But you actually have the same problem sort of within the parties. So like I live in Washington State, I know ahead of time, a Democrat's gonna win governor and Congress, everything that was just saying. But as a result, that means the November election, even if you're a Democrat in Washington doesn't really matter because you know the Democrats going
to win. The election that really matters is the primary, you know, a few months earlier, that picks which Democrat is going to win. And primary elections are mostly older, wealthier, wider folks, so you end up having a teeny tiny subset of the population pick the one option everyone else has to choose from in November. And so like in Washington,
we have seven Democratic members of Congress. Six of them I would say, come from sort of the moderate Hakeem Jeffreys, Nancy Pelosi wing of the party, and one of them comes from sort of the AOC Bernie Sanders wing, even though consistently the Bernie Sanders wing of the party is about half of all the Democrats in Washington state, so those people aren't represented either.
Yeah, So the critiques I've heard from like a more representative system, well one of them is like, yeah, it might work for those like small homogeneous European nations, but America, like, you know, America has racism, so how could that work here?
Which is a terrible argument, But it's especially interesting that you are drawing on Northern Ireland being the example, because Yeah, I think it would just be instructive for people to hear about sort of the context of civil rights in Northern Ireland.
Yeah, I'd be happy to start. I first started thinking about Northern Ireland. Actually not well. I guess when I was a kid growing up during the time of the troubles in Northern Ireland. I just watched TV and I just thought, Wow, white folks hating on white folks, Like, I don't get it, Like, what did they do that
makes them so angry? Fast forward? I remember reading this kind of mostly born report that a colleague organization of ours came up with that was making the case for pro poorsh representation, and they basically it was like two lines that said, when communities don't have any recourse to have any voice whatsoever in policy, their only option in
most times is political violence. And that's what happened in Northern Ireland, and that was resolved largely through power sharing that included a change to the electoral system as part of the nineteen ninety eight agreement, and I thought, oh, what I remember a big to do about Senator George Mitchell and President Clinton at the time leaning in and getting folks to put down their arms and to come
to an agreement. But it was kind of like a revelation, like, actually, there's so much to learn from and as we started to kind of dig deeper, and in the end we ended up bringing a bunch of our colleagues to Ireland and Northern Ireland to observe the elections earlier this year. The parallels between our societies are so astounding that we essentially are both the creations of English settler colonialism. At some point, the English beat the socks off of the
Irish elite, they fled, and basically they started. The English started sending tens of thousands of people to Northern Ireland, to this region called Ulster, who essentially populated and control it because they needed to have this buffer the back door, to prevent France and Spain from attacking from the backside
and so setling colonialism. They had all this manipulation, using gerrymandering and limiting the franchise to essentially create one party rule for fifty years, and then the result was a civil rights movement in the late sixties early seventies that really started to make the case of we need housing, we need jobs, and we need one person, one vote.
And so going there and being able to see mural after mural and statues of Frederick Douglass, famous anti slavery activists who actually traveled to Ireland during the time of what we know as the potato famine, they call it the Great Hunger, Great starvation, and talked about the parallels between the treatment of African Americans in American slavery and the treatment of Irish Catholics in Northern Ireland. And so I just thought, wow, there are so many things that
are just like parallel track that we should see. Did how did they actually resolve their deep, deep polarization.
And their civil rights movement didn't just result in Oh, they got granted rights because they marched in the streets, like just like in ours riot, police were marshaled against them. You had militia groups formed to you know, throw rocks, fire hoses were spread. It just it wasn't It was
not a peaceful process. And what we saw in the late nineteen sixties early nineteen seventies is very similar what we're seeing in the US today, which is this increasing rate of political violence, of folks feeling like they're not heard of, folks marching in protest and counter protests to each other, not just exchanging ideas, but exchanging bullets, getting into fights, there being this ramp up of political violence.
And it's really familiar the parallels in which the sort of political dynamics mirror what we're feeling a lot of today.
And that preceded what's known as the Troubles, right or that was the Troubles, and then it kind of turned to open warfare in the seventies and into the eighties, right, Yeah, And so the system that you're describing came together in the aftermath of this horrible kind of civil war that happened in the streets of Northern Ireland. And so I want I want to just kind of get into how that system could be transferred to the US. Next. Let's take a let's take a quick break, and we'll be
right back, and we're back. We're back, and so yeah, I just wanted to hear kind of from you guys what your vision is for how that system that is currently a representation, a representative democracy like how that could take hold in the United States.
Just let me throw one quick historical footnote, then I'll turn over to Colin. Actually, their implementation of what Colin will refer to shortly actually started in nineteen twenty one Northern Ireland, and as they were partitioning Northern Ireland away from the South, which then became the Irish Free State.
Basically the British said, okay, well, why don't we agree as part of this end of this war with the Irish, that both sides will have some form of power sharing built into their systems because both sides have minorities that they wanted to protect. Northern Ireland gets rid of it as soon as they can, because they see the writing on the wall. They're like, one party control, let's do it. Ireland actually keeps it for a full hundred years, and
that's still the system that they use today. So actually, in nineteen ninety eight when they actually re implemented it, something that they actually had for about roughly ten years beginning in the nineteen twenties. So I'll kick it or column.
Well, and we'll come back to the sort of forgotten history question in a moment too. So the system that they use in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland is a system of proportional representation, so called because each segment of the population has the power to win their
fair share their proportion in government. So if Irish Republicans, who are different from US Republicans, they want to join the Republic of Ireland, Irish Republicans or Irish Nationalists win thirty three percent of the vote, they're going to win about one in three seats in Parliament. And what you might have it happen is you might have say, forty percent of the vote go to Irish Unionists, folks who
like being part of Great Britain. Maybe forty percent of the vote goes to Irish nationalists, and then another twenty percent of the vote goes to people who say, oh, we don't really care about that, we care about jobs, or we care about housing, and then that ends up being the makeup of your parliament. And in terms of what they could look like in the US, it's interesting. So there are there's a path to get it here.
There's an act that's been introduced into Congress every year since twenty seventeen, the Fair Representation Act, that would just move the US congressional seat system to that system. So instead of electing, you know, instead of Massachusetts electing ten Democrats, they would probably elect six or seven Democrats and three
or four Republicans. And instead of you know, Alabama electing all Republicans, they would elect you know, two Republicans and a Democrat or whatever whatever the population might be, and
you could have these smaller chunks breakthrough. But what's really interesting is that the specific version that they use that is proposed for this bill, that they use in Northern Ireland, it's a form of ranked choice voting, and I say a form of rank choice voting, because a lot of folks might have heard of our CV rank voice voting. But there's a bunch of different ways to do it.
The way they do it in Minneapolis is different than the way to do it in Maine, which is different than the way to do it in New York, which is different than the way that they do it in Ireland. But back in the nineteen tens, twenties, thirties, forties, cities in the US actually use this Irish version of proportional
ranks choice voting. Cities like New York City, Cincinnati, and Cleveland Sacramento in California, and you saw again back in the forties at the height of Jim Crow, well before the Civil Rights movement, you saw black communists from Manhattan get elected to the New York City Council. And that's just sort of it's hard to imagine today, let alone during the Red Scare.
Yeah, and it is. We always talk about the way that these facts that aren't part of the system as currently constructed get just memory hold from history and kind of erased from history. So that's super interesting.
And you said that, someone told be like, what is that from a marvel like reality or black this is like Manhattan is a city councils.
Yeah, like that's real. That's real in the context of racial justice and equity like in the US. Like when listening to your show, I was thinking about we had a lot of energy behind that cause in twenty twenty, but we it feels like we no longer have the attention of the mainstream Democratic party right now, and you know, having a party that is focused on that cause and is always there even if you know they're not the
majority in power, but they're always being represented. Could it like that that's just a thing that I had taken for granted as like impossible, and that that would just be amazing to have that, like you know, there would always be people doing work for racial justice and equity in the US, like in government, right does not see it's wild that is such a basic idea, but like it's.
Well yeah, because you think of how like platforms change every year, like the Democrats platform looks completely different now than it in twenty twenty. Like, well, you know, I think we use too much like political capital to be
talking about used to form this go round. So let's put that on the back burner and become fully pro cop this year, because you know, we kind of were a little in our policies can be nebulous at times, And I think that's like it really gets to what really affects voters and makes people so that you just
get to this point where you're totally disaffected. You become ambivalent to the process because you feel like, well, what about all these other real problems And the only way to enter the conversation is this very rigid system where unless you're reading from the same hymnal, your chances of
getting elected aren't really possible. And I think that's really a great way for I think that would help a lot of people also become much more involved, because what we're talking about is something that does give people a fair shake where it's like, no, if you have the numbers, like you can get a seat at the table. That's
just it is what it is. And then guess what, people will have to have coalition governments where they are going to have to work with you to get the kinds of majorities you need to achieve certain things.
And I think that's.
Super I think underrated and underrated thing about it, because I think most people will just go to the factor like, oh, so what you want more Republicans And it's like, well, no, that's really not the case. You just want something, you want it to actually be representative of what's there. And I feel like it sounds like too and just listening to the show, like we had a moment when we were writing the Constitution where they're like, what if Congress
looked like everything we see out there in America? And it's like, and that's like one of those forks in the roads where our destinies like, and we decided it's not that new of a concept, like these are things we've been grappling with since the beginning of this country.
Absolutely, there's a few other things that are kind of
mind blowing. When we talked about Ireland, particularly Northern Ireland, one story that keeps coming up is that whenever we've talked to folks on the ground there, they kept saying, you might have some concerns in the US about getting far right parties elected and taking seats, and that might freak some people out, but in many ways that's important because in the Northern Ireland experience, they saw that there were people who were shut out of the political system
that they had no alternative but to be violent. And so when you have people win seats their fair share, maybe they win one or two in a city council, and they have to grapple with balancing the budget, closing a hospital, dealing with pensions, then it's harder to be completely anti government when you actually have some power and you have to grapple with some collective decisions that you
just can't just throw rocks at at the house. One other interesting thing that we learned about that kind of blew my mind is how power sharing was taken to the logical extreme in both Ireland and to more so in Northern Ireland. So our winner take all system we understand it, particularly in our electoral system in terms of there can only be one winner when you have one
member per district. But when you think about the winner take all system in terms of legislative governance, we understand like, if you're the majority party, you get to pick all the committee chairs. It's like to the winner go the spoils. That seems obvious to us, right right, That's not how neither Ireland nor Northern Ireland does it. If you win forty percent of seats in the Parliament, you win forty percent of committee chairs. They have this process it's called
the Dahunt method, whereby it's like the NFL draft. Your party as like the team gets to pick in a particular order which committee chairs you want. So if you're the first pick, you'll probably get to pick like the Taxation ways and means committee because it's likely the most powerful justice as usually second, something like that, and so you just kind of go down the list in terms
of who deserves the next pick. Added to that logical extreme in terms of Northern Ireland, if once again, if your party is forty percent of the seats, in parliament, you get forty percent of the cabinet seats in government itself as a way to make sure that everyone has a fair share. There are critiques in terms of sometimes it grinds to a halt because those parties almost never agree on lots of big things, and so sometimes it
shuts the government down, which is its own problem. But the idea that they are committed to power sharing in order for everyone to feel like they have a stake in governance, that's a really key idea that's really missing in our debates here in the.
US, and it's something that Northern Ireland folks we talked to kept emphasizing that, like, oh, like there's a lot of critiques about power sharing this specific model we have through these how many seats, but the elections being proportional, like that's a no brainer, Like no one, no one debates that at all, Like that's obvious.
Yeah, right, yeah, I mean in Project twenty twenty five, the thing that's scary about it to people is that they're planning to like clear house and just make all the cabinet entirely one thing. So that that's interesting. I feel like maybe after this next presidential administration, there might be more appetent. It could be the last one, folks, but it could be the last election, not for the
reasons he's saying. But oh yeah, well yeah, go ahead, Sorry Miles, I interrupted, Oh no, no, no, I was just saying.
And also like the visibility right, because I think, especially in the United States, we have this version of like the amount of extremists there are in the United States, you would think, depending on where you're watching news, like they're outnumbered.
There's seven billion of these people.
And it's always interesting to see like when people like are like in in Europe when they're having their elections, you're like, oh, they're far right parties only got like a fraction of what people thought they were going to do.
And I think that's also helps too for people to understand like, Okay, there is this group of people that exist, but they aren't nearly as large or influential they would want you to think, which I think also helps people have a little bit of a clear understanding of like truly like what we're dealing with in the country in terms of like who who's sort of like where everyone's
ideologies sort of lie. Because yeah, I think it's very easy to sort of obscure that with our media in this country and have people kind of thinking like, oh my god, like what's all happening, Like what are we up against? And yeah, knowing that I think putting being able to quantify that, I think is a big benefit.
And that's part of the risk of a winner take all system is you can have a fringe element, right that wins it all. People forget that. Back in twenty sixteen, if you looked at Poles, most Republicans didn't actually like Donald Trump, but they were split between Chris Christy and Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio and John Kasich and Mitt Romney. And Romney wasn't running in twenty sixteen, was he? No, No, he was not running.
The spirit anyway, yeah, right, spirit of.
John Huntsman point is like they were the winner take all system. Let's a fringe element if they win more than others in a primary process or whatever, win everything. Like a portional system caps your ceiling at your actual support, so you never have a fringe party take over every chamber of government.
I do want to just go back to this idea that you know, it doesn't say anything about two parties or parties of any sort in the in the Constitution, and yet and like George Washington was like kind of against parties in general. He was just a downer, didn't didn't like to party, but he like America just kind of snapped to a two party system and like kind of keeps going back to a two party system and
like staying in this two party system. And so for me, that's one of my big questions is like, is there just something about America and our at the central lie at the heart of America where it's like we're we are a representative democracy and also the system is completely designed to keep the dispossessed without power, Like that's been the deal kind of from day one, Like when you look at the wording of the Constitution and then like
what who those words actually applied to. I'm just I guess that's the big question for me is like how you know, in the experience of granted, a winner take all primary system, but like the primary system of a progressive and widely popular Bernie Sanders, you know, getting a lot of attention and enthusiasm, and then it just kind of felt like you were always up against this entrenched machine.
I'm just curious how you guys, think about the existing kind of inertia and money and power of the system as it currently exists, and how you could potentially see this idea overcoming that overtime.
George, can you mind meld with me real quick? I want to say something.
I'm gonna I'm gonna go back to French class.
The name is due Verge. Yes, and I of course know what that means. But the listeners, George, and no further questions? All right?
Do Verge was a French philosopher that basically came up with this theorem or this law that basically said, any winner take all system is going to end up with only two major parties that can contest for power because when there is like another faction, another party that tries to buy and play within the confines of a winner
take all system, they almost never win. And if you try us several times, you'll have to give up, because how do you tell people to vote for us if you can never turn their votes into actual seats that is actual political power.
You actually increase the odds that your opponents win, Like if Bernie Sanders runs a viable candidacy, that increases odds Republicans win, so like it just turned. The logical conclusion is only have two candidates.
Yeah, it seems like a bad system almost.
And so you see this playing out in basically the UK and the other former British colonies that have kept this system. In Canada, there's essentially only like the Conservative and the Liberal slash Moderate party that can win ever any election. They only have multiple parties because they have kind of regional politics of like Quebecqua Separatists that has its own political party. But for the most part, nationally they are a two party system because they have the
exact same system that we have. The UK is pretty much the same. You have Labor and then you have the Tories or concernvatives. Sometimes the Liberal Democrats play that kind of in between role, spoiler role, but for the most part, du Verget's law plays out very clearly in all of these systems. And so being able to start with, you know, what is the electoral system that we want
for our for our society. Is it something that is very simple and that forces a majority even though it doesn't reflect the majority interest or do you want to make sure that you have a minority representation built in to our electorate? And so by picking a proportional system whichever flavor because there's definitely variations on a theme. The fact that you will get you know, three, four or
five parties means that there are coalitions. There is kind of like a shifting depending on which issue that different parties can call us and get legislation passed. So there is nothing structural or cultural about the US that pushes us towards a two point. It is the system that pushes us awkwardly into these two camps that don't fit us.
And actually there's some really interesting political science. I'll give the very high level. We can put a link in the show notes if you all want, but there's some political science that's been done that shows that effectively, in the US right now there are six political parties. There's six ideologically consistent and distinct ways of being basically that most people subscribe to, and it's just that they're jammed
into the two parties. Like Alexander Cocosio Ortez said a couple of years ago, in any other country on Earth, Joe Biden and I would not be in the same political party.
But in the US we have to be.
And so when you think about, like, you know, you're Mitt Romney, Barry Goldwater, John McCain type folks, and your evangelical Christians and your like Mago wing of American Nazis, Like they don't actually have anything in common politically. And
it's the same parallels on the left. And so whether or not these six parties emerge or they become distinct factions within the two parties as we have them, there's those are probably the coalitions that we would see emerge if we moved to a proportional multi party system.
I think the other part about this too is like I think at this point, we see that there is a way to do it.
It is being done.
We've that we've dabbled in it in the United States before, but right now, in its current form, it seems like intractable, like this is it's stuck. And I know when we were speaking a little bit earlier before we even recorded, I remember Jack and I were like, well, how do we it? Is it possible? And I felt like you
brought up a few good points. Was to think about a lot of like the major changes we've had in the in the United States across you know, the storied history of this place, the years preceding those changes, it felt like this is going to be how it is forever, and then boom, we have rights. We have universal suffrage, we have civil rights, et cetera. We have marriage equality
and those those kinds of things. And I think for a lot of the times too, we're also like the I feel like the de facto way we speak about it in very early kinds of political conversations when you're younger and getting into it is like it feels everything has to happen from the top down, and when you look at the current system, like there's no way these freaks are going to be like, yes, I would like to dilute my power, but it seems like this is
the kind of thing where we can create upward pressure from a more local level, and that is happening in the United States.
We like to make things about personality and like individualism in the US, and so often the answer is actually structural, and we don't like to admit that a lot of the times because it doesn't allow for us to be the heroes of our own narrative.
But yeah, so can you sort of just point to some examples of like how this is not just like you know, Cincinnati decades ago, which where things like that were happening. But like even in the year of twenty twenty four, there are there are movements being made that are approaching something like this that could potentially help you drive the conversation on a national level.
Yeah, I'll start and I'll kick it over to Colin. I think the most exciting thing for folks to watch in the twenty twenty four elections, besides the presidential is what happens in Portland, Oregon. It's on the five. If you'd go north on the five, you get for the Yeah, what was really exciting. And this goes to some of the work that we do as an organization More Equitable Democracy.
We support people of color led groups on transforming our electoral system in order to advance racial justice, and so our colleagues there were doing a lot of advocacy work in community of color, trying to bring more resources to their communities, and they always hit like this huge buzz saw their city commission. It was a commission whereby there was no separate executive branch from the legislative branch. They
were one and the same. They were all elected at large, so you essentially had to win like a congressional race in order to win a city council seat at that always favored big moneyed interests, usually of folks who had
relationships with developers, and so they understood. We did a lot of research to kind of back this up, that breaking up that system was important, but that going to the most obvious solution in the American kind of context is to go from all at large to single member districts, just like cut up the city into five equal districts. Maybe we'll be able to get two seats out of
the five that are responsive to our community's needs. Those communities of color about twenty five percent of the population in Portland because of a really long anti black history, there is no one particular area that is heavily people of color. There isn't the same type of segregation that there is in other cities, and so just drawing those single member districts was not going to solve any of those problems.
Into any configurational highlight. Like we said, what if we move from five to seven to nine to twelve to fifteen city councilors? You just could not do it.
Not possible. And so that's why we introduced the Irish model to them, and they started to think, okay, well, if we had a larger district where we elected three, maybe we can win one or two of those that are in neighborhoods that we do a lot of organizing. And so what was really exciting was that. And this sounds when I say exciting, this will sound boring for just a second. There was a charter review process. Please don't fall asleep. This is not exactlytant.
Yeah crps baby, that's me all day. We got an air horn in there.
When shorter review process ah awesome, and so baked into their charter their constitution was this mandatory about once every decade Ish process whereby folks from the community were invited in to kick the tires of their system, their structures of government, and asked to come up with ideas to change it. For ninety nine percent of the time when local governments do this, it's just window dressing. They don't
really mean to invite people to change things. But to their credit, everyone understood in Portland, this antiquate system that had been designed about more than one hundred years ago wasn't working. So everyone understood something needed to change, and so the ability for our partners to organize around a process where people were supposed to be invited in to come up with ideas and to really flesh them out.
That's what allowed for that deep conversation about what does it mean to have an election and have everyone represented? How do we integrate or prioritize racial equity within these structures? Can a winner take all system ever be equitable? It's kind of like at odds with one another. And so that's how they came up with this design of essentially the Irish system. They ran a campaign to support the recommendation that came from that city charter review process, and
they won fifty seven forty three. This is the first city that has adopted this for the first major city that has adopted this electoral system since New York City did in the nineteen thirty So it's been one hundred years of that kind of hidden history that it's been kind of outside of our imagination. Colin, do you want to say any words about like how things are going at this point?
Yeah?
Well, Also a lot of folks might be like, well, yeah, okay, Portland did it, but like I've seen Portland, ya, it's crunchy liberal hibbies who developed.
Damn, Kyle McLoughlin is a good mayor. That's right.
But if you talk to some of the activists and colleagues of ours in Portland, what they would tell you, and I think what like looking at the elections also tell you is that Portland is like most major cities in the US, and that that has not been the people winning elections. The city council has largely been the candidate's most preferred by developers and big business. Like George mentioned, they are all folks from downtown or west of the river,
which is where all the really rich people live. Like the established political I mean the political establishment that's entrenched in Portland is the same as it kind of as anywhere. And you know, one in four Portlanders is a person of color. So like, yes, it's pretty white, but it's not just like a white utopia like people might think it's it is. It is a multiracial community. And if Portland can do it, I actually think anywhere can do
it that at least on the city level. Like the four of the five city councilors came out against the reform when it was being considered. The former mayor came out against it. You know, the Chamber of Commerce came out against it, like they were fighting every single established interest that existed, and they still managed to win.
Wow.
And yeah, now they're doing it for the first time that they just like made sample ballots public a few days ago. And there are some other smaller cities in America that are using proportional systems Albany, California, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Minneapolis, Minnesota for their Parks and Recreation Board. And there was one Detroit suburb that used it for a few years.
Because this is a weird story, but basically, the Obama Department of Justice brought a lawsuit that the Trump Department of Justice settled, and so under the Obama case, like they adopted a proportional system to resolve a Voting Rights Act complaint. But the Trump DOOJ said, you only have to use this system twice and then you can go back to the old system that violates the Foot and
Rights Act. So they don't use it anymore. But it's not too at bats if they can't get it right and make it permanent after to it, that's that's right.
You know, I don't know what we're doing here. Well, guys, Honestly, I feel like we could talk to you for days about this, and I can't wait to listen to the next episode of your podcasts that drops here. How many two episodes.
In two of the third drops tomorrow.
Third drops tomorrow. So there we go. Everybody should go check it out. Wonderful having you and we'll have to have you back. Where can people find you, guys and hear more about all of this?
So you can go to our website, which is Equitable Democracy Org. We have a link to the podcast there as well as it's on Apple Podcasts and Spotify words you listen. You can also find our organization on Twitter. That's at Equitable Demo Demo on Twitter and at Equitable Democracy on Instagram. I'm on Twitter at Colin J.
Cole.
That's c O L I N calling like Colin Farrell, not like Colon Powell.
There you go, and you have much more Calin Farrell vibes than we saying before. Yeah we got on.
Yeah he's Irish, so it's on brand.
Yeah exactly.
How about you George on X George K Chung C H E U N G. And definitely check out our podcast The Future of Our Former Democracy on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
And we will link off to that in the footnotes. Is there a work of media that you guys have been enjoying.
I'll start it's this fairly new couple that is on X and TikTok called the It's the Peacocks. It's this couple. Why I think that they're so interesting is that it's the guy is from northern in Ireland and the women's Chinese New Zealander, and they're all about teaching their kids Cantonese, which is my parents' language. And the fact that there's a white dude that speaks better Cantonese than I do. I feel a little bit of shame because you know,
Chinese people, East Asian people in shame. We do shame really well.
Number one.
Number one is shame baby.
But there's only been in my life two times that I've met a white person that has spoken better Cantonese than I do. And for better for worse. They're always Mormon missionaries, so God to love them.
They they're putting, they're put in that work.
They put in the work, so good job.
That's like when I mean, yeah, like people like white people speak Japanese really well, and like they live here. I'm like, what's going on? Like, oh my my parents are missionaries in Japan and that's why I speak Japanese.
I'm like, wow, yes, they do the work.
Yeah, what about you calling?
So I'm not gonna I'm not gonna stick with the Warhammer thing. We already talked about the Warhammer books. H But so I watch a lot of long form like video essays. Sure, And there's a good one that's sort of the the a good confluence of a couple of my things. It's called People Make Games, and they, you know, do longer form explorations of you know, video game industry,
board game industry. But they have a video recently called the Games behind Your Government's Next War, and they dive into how governments around the world are using war games and building custom board games basically to test out foreign policy and wars and oh, well, if if we were to mobilize our fleet over here, knowing that we have this economic relationship here, you know, Miles Jack, I'm gonna have you go ahead and play China and let's just
let's just play a game and simulate what comes out. Yeah, And it's this whole massive like government board game industrial complex. It's fascinating.
Oh wow, yeah, I'm going to check that out. I'm looking at the thumbnail of that right now. I'm definitely gonna look at that.
Yeah wow. Okay, okay, right Miles, where can people find you? Is there a work of media that you've been enjoying? Oh?
Yes, find me on Twitter and Instagram at Miles of Gray. If you like basketball, you can hear Jack and I talk endlessly about the NBA on Miles and Jack got mad boosties. And if you like ninety Day Fiance, like I do to blow some steam off of the you know, horror that is being on earth at this time, I talk about ninety Day Fiance and the other podcast for
twenty Day Fiance. A tweet I like, is you know the thing I love about like TikTok and stuff is like, there's so much good recipe sharing, but alongside that you get some people who begin to say, like their authorities on the kinds of cuisines that might be a little bit culturally specific. And this video, I just let me
make sure I have the creator's name right. It's from Nathan underscore Ng and it's just a good sort of side by side video and I'm just gonna play it because it just kind of sums up like sort of the tone on TikTok, but just how sometimes.
We see these videos. This was also my work of media.
Really, if you're white to the Naked eye, but I actually have Asian taste buds, I'm not.
Sure what that makes me. It makes you a white person that likes Asian food.
Helps I know it may be white, but actually Asian taste. What does that say about me? Like ship? All right? Tweet I've been enjoying Strange at Strange Harbors, Jeff Saying tweeted is Todd Phillips punk? Is MasterCard a queer? Ally? Is this TV show? My friend? I thought that was good, Just summation of my internal monologue. Bullseye. You can find me on Twitter at Jack Underscore. O'Brien, you can find us on Twitter at Daily Zeitgeist. We're at the Daily
Zeitgeist on Instagram. We have a Facebook fan page and a website Daily zey guys dot com, where we post our episodes and our footnotes where we went off to the information that we talked about in today's episode, as well as a song that we think you might enjoy miles. What song do you think people might enjoy it? Uh, there's a there's an artist on TD Doci d O E C H I I. And she's a dope MC and artist.
And you know, top Dog Entertainment always likes to find some of the city's best and Doci is no different. This track is called Nissan Ultima. She's just like a great lyricist, has a total sense of humor about like her in her lyrics. But is all just because she's a great MC. Like you're just like, oh that was a bar and funny and just overall.
Really talented artists. So check this track out by Doci. It's Nissan Ultima. Yeah, shout out to Brian ed editor, Yeah, get it right right? That all right? Well, The Daily Guys is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio ap Apple podcast or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. That is going to do it for us this morning. We're back this afternoon to tell you what is trending, and we'll talk to you all then. Bye bye,