 I don't get your third party because I read your website. And it's a bunch of mush. I'm not trying to be mean. I'm just saying it's not like specific. It doesn't even mention this. And why start a third party, which is a long shot anyway, if you're not going to be bold and what? Well, that was awkward. You just watched Bill Maher, the target demographic for Andrew Yang's centrist forward party. Tell him that he thinks the party is useless. And I have to say, I agree with Bill Maher this time to even call it a branding exercise for Andrew Yang is too charitable because I think that most people view him as less serious now than before myself included. So if it's just a branding exercise, he's failed miserably in that regard as well. But before I tell you my thoughts about this, let's hear Yang's response because he was obviously not happy about what Bill Maher had to say. Oh, I'd love to dig into this. Please don't. Yeah. So what I determined was that our current political system is not going to address poverty or climate change or polarization unless you actually fix the incentives. And it was a US senator who said this to me and everyone needs to understand this. She said we're at a point in American life where an issue is worth more to us unaddressed than addressed. Because if I lean forward to solve the problem, what happens? I get beat up by my base. My job security goes down. I get attacked. So we're in a no compromise zone. So if you wanted to, let's say, alleviate poverty in America, you have to fix our democratic system. This two party system is not designed to deliver a solution. And if we had three parties or even more parties, that's not going to change the incentive structure that plagues our entire political system. Because the incentive structure isn't created alone by the two party duopoly. It's created by capitalism, Andrew Yang. So he's trying to treat the symptoms, but not the illness itself, because, well, he's a capitalist. So I'm assuming that his cognitive dissonance doesn't let him see that electoral reform alone isn't sufficient. More parties under our current capitalist system will just result in more corrupt organizations that will inevitably represent corporate interests. But even if you wanted more than just two electorally viable political parties, which I do, and I'm sure that most people watching do, simply creating another political party isn't automatically going to end the duopoly. It's not like one party can change the entire system. We already have hundreds of different political parties in states across the country, but they're all not electorally viable because of our electoral institutions, keyword being institutions. That means that in order to end the duopoly, you have to change the institutions and end our majority and first pass the post, win or take all system. And even though Andrew Yang supports things like ranked choice voting, open primaries and independent redistricting, none of these things, even if you pass all of them, would end the duopoly. How do we get to proportional representation? Is he proposing an increase in the district magnitude? Has he thought about single transferable vote in lieu of ranked choice voting? I mean, these are all questions that seem esoteric, and that's because they are. There's an entire subfield within comparative politics dedicated to electoral engineering, and comparative politics is a subfield of political science. The fact that Andrew Yang seemingly doesn't know shit about any of this is very telling, but if he's going to speak about this as an authority, he needs to have at least an elementary understanding of electoral engineering. Has he even heard of Duverger's law? I mean, I don't mean to sound condescending, but these are things that you should be able to speak intelligently about if you're serious about changing the political system. Now, he also says that our current political system is not going to address poverty or climate change or polarization, and he's correct. But again, this isn't because there's a lack of compromise between Democrats and Republicans. It's the result of the commodification of every single element of American life due to, again, capitalism. This includes elections too, which is why most politicians are little more than useful idiots for large multinational corporations. So the fact that he doesn't address this tells me that he doesn't know what he's talking about. But Representative Alyssa Slotkin jumps in, and while her comments are probably more coherent than Yang's, she's also not addressing the elephant in the room. And I'll tell you why when we come back. I'm not 100 percent sure how a different party, I mean, you have to explain how that's going to change the whole system. But here's the thing, if you have a senator, as someone who's running for Senate, if you have a senator who's saying, if you have a senator saying, the incentives are wrong, so I can't do the right thing, that's the problem, not the fact that we need another party. It's that you have people who won't take risks, you have people who are going to put their reelection over anything else, who are worried from a primary from their left or for right, 100 percent. But if you put people who are brave in those places, if you put people who are saying like, look, if I don't win my next election, no one dies, I can go on, I'll find another job, then you actually see the incentives change because then you want to do the right thing. That is part of why our government doesn't work. It sometimes is people. So she first points out that if the incentive structure is the core critique that he's making here, then why not just change the incentive structure? Now the things that Andrew Yang thinks that by changing the two-party system, you are effectively changing the incentive structure, but that's not correct. But she's not wrong here. There are things that Yang could theoretically advocate for within the confines of capitalism that would still make substantial changes, but not to capitalism itself. He could support campaign finance reform, get money out of politics or place restrictions on corporate lobbying, but his main solution is a centrist third party, which again only makes sense if you think that all of Americans' political problems stem from a lack of compromise. Having said that though, Alyssa Slotkin also doesn't adequately address the actual problems, and she doesn't identify the incentives that actually make lawmakers behold into corporations. She suggests that fears about not getting re-elected is the driving factor behind their behavior, but that's not true either. It's the corporate money. Now why won't she point this out? Well, I don't know, maybe it's because venture capitalists and hedge funds were some of her biggest donors in the last election cycle. And I'm assuming as a direct result of who funds her, the priority page on her website is almost as empty as Yang's. So we have two people that know that something's wrong, right? Their instinct there is correct, but they don't know the first thing that you should do to address this problem. They have no idea they're clueless. Now I want to show you one last clip where Yang responds to Slotkin, and it ends with Bill Maher essentially bodying Andrew Yang. And to say that Bill Maher bodied anyone almost makes me feel physical pain, but unfortunately I have to give Bill Maher credit here. This was really embarrassing for Andrew Yang. I love what you're saying, but there was a guy in Michigan who bravely voted to impeach Donald Trump at great personal risk, Peter Meyer, and he lost his seat in part because Democrats boosted his extremist challenger because that challenger is going to be easier to beat in the general. We have an incentive system right now. If you step up like Peter did or Adam Kinzing or Liz Cheney, you're out of there. And so there are people that see this and say, okay, I get it. But the way out is to do what they did in Alaska, which is why Lisa Murkowski is the only Republican Senator who voted to impeach Donald Trump, who made it back and was up for reelection in 22. You know why? Because they got rid of the party primaries in Alaska. That's why Sarah Palin lost to Mary Peltola. That's why Lisa Murkowski beat Kelly Shabaka, the Trump endorsed Looney, who would have beaten her in a Republican primary. You get rid of the primaries, you fix the incentives, and that's what the forward party is designed to do. I would just say that I think it's one thing to have that conversation at a state level, and I'm not against having that kind of primary. There's not a different party there. There's not a third party that they're part of. It's a different primary system. But when you're talking about a third party, I like math. And I want to make sure that if we have a third party, that if we have a third party, that it's not going to be handing the country over to people who are extreme, who have fascist leanings. I want to make sure that I'm not the last person to say that the Democratic Party is perfect, trust me. But I'm just concerned that a third party means we're handing the country over to people who do not have good intentions for democracy. And what about the issue though? I mean, if you're going to start the third party, don't you at least have to have one major issue? And I thought you had one. The UBI thing, universal basic income, everybody gets free money, whether you believe it or not, it's an idea. I don't usually say this, but Bill Maher is right. He's right. The forward party doesn't have any policies, not even UBI, which was Yang's signature issue. And that's because when you create this weird mishmash of centrists from both parties who don't stand for anything except their own self-aggrandizement, even vague policy commitments can facilitate the breakdown of this already tenuous alliance. But from his standpoint, where he thinks that hyperpolarization is the main issue in American politics, it does make sense to think that Democrats backing more extreme politicians in Republican primaries in particular exacerbates the issue because it does. But the example that he uses to demonstrate the value of ranked-choice voting with respect to Alaska, it inadvertently demonstrates the limitations of ranked-choice voting. If your best sales pitch for ranked-choice voting is that we'll get more Lisa Murkowski's, you're doing a terrible job at selling ranked-choice voting, Andrew Yang. Lisa Murkowski might be more moderate when it comes to rhetoric, but she still votes for Republicans the majority of the time. She's a more polite partisan, but she's still a partisan nonetheless. But then, Alissa Slotkin claims that third parties could lead to vote splitting, essentially. And let me respond to that by saying, first of all, to the extent that that's true, the Libertarian Party takes away more Republican votes than the Green Party takes away Democratic Party votes. But second of all, if you worry that Yang's forward party might take away more Democratic Party votes, that right there is a really good reason to support nationwide ranked-choice voting. But Alissa Slotkin does not support that, and Yang didn't bring this up in response to her. Instead, he touted how ranked-choice voting saved fucking Lisa Murkowski. These two are insufferable, I swear to God. So the problem with this conversation is you have two people identifying real problems with our political system. They know something's wrong, but they're talking around the solution, which leads to political commentary as hollow as Yang's forward party's platform. And if right-leaning centrist Bill Marvall people doesn't see the appeal of Yang's forward party, then the question is, who is this even supposed to appeal to? Because when your target demographic is saying that this idea is really stupid, then I just don't see how this is an already a miserable failure.