#1214 - Lawrence Lessig

Joe Rogan (0:04)

Three, two, one, and we're live. How are you, sir?

Lawrence Lessig (0:09)

Hey, I'm great.

Joe Rogan (0:09)

Thanks for being here, man. I really appreciate it.

Lawrence Lessig (0:11)

It is the coolest thing I've done.

Joe Rogan (0:12)

Really? Ever?

Lawrence Lessig (0:13)

Well, you know, I can't remember that far back, but it's pretty cool.

Joe Rogan (0:17)

I watched a Ted Talk on, what was the word that you used? Lesterland?

Lawrence Lessig (0:22)

Lesterland.

Joe Rogan (0:23)

Yeah. And it felt hopeless.

For people who don't know what I'm talking about, could you just give like a brief synopsis of the way you were describing how completely rigged our election system is, and what it actually takes to be elected, and how much of the time they spend is involved in raising money, and why?

Lawrence Lessig (0:50)

Yeah. So we've got a system where we have a money primary, and then we have a regular election. In the money primary, to compete, you got to raise tons of money to be able to fund your campaign.

When you raise that money, you raise it from a tiny, tiny fraction of the 1 percent. So in the TED talk about Lesterland, I said, imagine a place called Lesterland, where basically it's the Lesters who rule, and by the Lesters, I mean the same proportion of people named Lester as in the United States right now. So there's about 150,000 Americans named Lester. I'm one of them, but here we are, the Lesters. So imagine a world ruled by Lesterland, because that's essentially the world we have because of the way we fund our campaigns, because there's about 150,000 men who give even just the maximum contribution to one political candidate.

If you ask who, the number of people who give the maximum contribution over the course of a campaign, meaning in the primary and the general election, it's about 22,000 Americans in 2014 who gave the maximum contribution to one political campaign. So what that means is it's a tiny, tiny fraction who are the most important funders of political campaigns. And candidates for Congress and members of Congress spent 30 to 70% of their time sucking up to this tiny, tiny fraction. And so is it any surprise that you see Congress bending over backwards to keep those guys happy? Because they know without those people, they don't have a shot at getting back into Congress.

Joe Rogan (2:33)

And the way you were describing it, when you were saying it as Lesterland, it was like, imagine if we were this screwed up. That was essentially what you were saying.

But we're more screwed up than Lesterland.

Lawrence Lessig (2:44)

Yeah, we're more screwed up.

Joe Rogan (2:45)

That was a disturbing video. Because I was realizing it was emerging as you were speaking, I was like, wait a minute.

Is it that bad?

Lawrence Lessig (2:55)

You know, I actually, since that video, have come to think it's even worse.

Joe Rogan (3:00)

So like Clarence land?

Lawrence Lessig (3:04)

Well, it could be worse because it's even a smaller number. And if you look at the number of super PAC donors, you know, the really critical super PAC donors, there's about 100 people who gave more than half of the super PAC money in the last presidential election.

Joe Rogan (3:18)

100

Lawrence Lessig (3:18)

100 You know, so this is a really tiny, tiny number.

But what this tiny number represents in the way we fund campaigns is the extraordinary inequality on that dimension, right?

But since I was focused on the money, I've, you know, more recently started thinking about the other screwed up dimension. So think about gerrymandering.

You know, we gerrymander districts in America so that about 85% of the House seats in the United States Congress are safe seats, which means if you're a Republican in a safe seat Democratic district, your views just never matter to the Congress person because that vote of a Republican will never determine who's in Congress or a Democrat in a safe seat Republican district. That's the same. Okay, but that doesn't mean those Congress people are not afraid about reelection. Of course, they are afraid about whether they'll be reelected, but they're afraid not of a Democrat running against a Republican. They're afraid of an even more extreme Republican running against the incumbent Republican. So what those incumbents in those safe seat districts do is they obsess about what the extremist in their own party cares about. So the extremists on the left and the right have this ability to leverage extraordinary influence inside of the House of Representatives simply because we've decided to gerrymander these districts to create these safe seats. So those extremists are a kind of Leicesters too. There are more of them.