 Boom, what's up everyone, welcome to Simulation. I'm your host, Alan Sakiyan. Really excited to be talking about liquid democracy. We have David Ernst, Syray joining us on the show. Hello, guys. Great to be here. Thanks so much for coming on. Really appreciate it. Thank you so much. I'm super excited for this episode. For those that don't know, David Ernst and Syray are building Liquid Democracy, which is a 21st century rethinking of democratic representation, and you can find the links in the bio below, liquid.us, as well as their YouTube channel, liquidfuture.org, as well as David's page, liquiddavid.com, the candidate's page, liquidcandidates.com, and their Twitter profile as well. Guys, let's start things off with one of our favorite questions to ask our guests. What are your thoughts on the direction of our world? Yeah, overall there's a lot to be optimistic about, and there are some things that are pretty concerning. There's amazing breakthroughs happening all the time, but at the same time there's tension happening. There's turmoil all around the world. People are losing faith in governments and leaders and representation. As long as we have open and honest conversations, I think there's a lot of hope to get things in a really positive direction, but current status quo trends leave a lot of people somewhat concerned. To add on to that, there are definitely a lot of reasons to be concerned about the future of the world, and politics, and democracy, and everything else, and I think for a lot of good reasons people often feel frustrated about the direction that our institutions are going in, but it's important to keep in mind, not just us, but lots of people around the world who are looking to explore innovative and creative solutions to solving lots of the big problems that our generation is facing, and so overall I'm optimistic about the future. And then what within your journeys led you guys to be so interested with liquid democracy? Can I go first? Yeah, sure. Actually, I've only been working on liquid democracy with Dave and on Liquid US for a few months. Before that I was actually living in South Korea, where I was a Korean government scholarship research fellow, and my area of expertise was in North Korea, and North Korea is in name a democratic country, but in practice it's the exact opposite of that. It's a totalitarian, despotic, sort of authoritarian regime. People have no freedom of movement, no human rights, no representation in their government, and so I think probably by studying a case that so starkly contrasts with the kind of system that we have in America and the kind of system that we want to improve upon and build out, sort of real democracy, made me really curious about ways that we could achieve that. Seeing a place in the world where democracy didn't exist made me realize how important it was, and so I remember one time when I was just back in America on vacation from school, I was hanging out with David and he pitched me on this idea called liquid democracy, and I found it to be really inspiring and powerful, and that's what led me to where we are today. Yeah, yeah, just to speak about North Korea, I saw a headline, I think it was yesterday, that one of Kim Jong-un's top associates was just killed by firing squad, because he, the way a diplomatic summit with Trump went, they weren't happy with it, and so they just executed him, just like yesterday. So that is a reality in one part of the world, and hopefully we can move in the obstetric stream. Yeah, to fill out my personal answer, did you want to add to that? No, go for it. To fill out my personal answer, I grew up around politics a lot, talked about it around the dinner table all the time. I was always personally really frustrated by the partisanship, by the way it was like so tribal and so team-based, and it's like our team is flawless, and the other team is evil, can never be trusted, corrupt, all these things, and both sides were saying this exact same story, so that was a little, there's some cognitive dissonance going on there. So I was always confused, and then I was doing a few projects to try to help, what I saw was helping the situation, especially in 2016, trying to get people to understand what was happening, and one thing led to another, and we were realizing what is now possible with technology, and working with friends we saw what other people were doing around the world, and that's when we were really deeply introduced to these ideas of liquid democracy, and the concept has been out there since 2000 or so, it goes back a while, but there wasn't always easy to use, reliable, free, interfit technology to actually make it a reality, and that's something that my personal background that I've done a number of times, and so I saw an opportunity to help push the ball forward, and so just talking with, I just share this idea with friends, like with Sai and with other people, and when we go into depth with it, when they'd have an open conversation, they'd be like, oh my god, that's incredible, you have to please do this, you have to work on this, that sounds amazing, so the enthusiasm was just so contagious, and this is what I've been doing for about three years now. Okay, so first is this example of dichotomy between place in the world that has absolutely no freedom, no human rights, no representation in their governance versus ones that do, and so to at least have the gratitude to realize that, wow, okay, at least we have this, and then there's still a lot to improve on, but at least we have this, and how do we help make it so that other humans in the world can have human rights. Okay, and then we also have this, the partisanship that we see today, the tribalism that we see today, the biases and dissonances that we see today need to be, we need to be amended that the nuance needs to be explored, the love and compassion towards each other needs to be explored, better to figure out how to best move forward, and then we have new technologies in place as well that are enabling things like virtual citizens, blockchain technologies taking a stance in politics as well, decentralized ledgers, also not being able to just remove people off the face of the earth for their land and their money, these types of things, so we have a lot of interesting things that are sort of brewing in this pot of like the future of democracy, which is super exciting, and you guys will be explaining to us kind of like on a liquid side of things, how to be able to, how to actually have your own representation, and yeah, so I'm really looking forward to that. I want to hit on something on the way is let's do a little lesson on history as well, so post independence, post 1776, we explored what was our constitution, and our own bill of rights, and our own way of having a three branch style of governance, and we've had that sense with amendments, we've had that sense 240 years, so to think that with the exponential technology agent, a population that's hockey stick, that we should keep things the same as ludicrous, we need to update, and so would you speak on part of the history and where we see some of the most pressing updates? Totally, and even going back before 1776, the vast majority of humans that have ever been alive, at least since the agricultural revolution for the last 10,000 years, have lived under a warlord, and some sort of absolutist system with one ruler, so even the idea of democracy, I mean you're talking about going back 200 years, it's kind of an anomaly in human history, and self-governance, when the American founders talked about the American idea, it was seen as this experiment in self-governance, and it was moving away from the monarchy of the British system, and of course the British system was a constitutional monarchy, so they did have their parliament with the House of Lords and House of Commons, but really democracy is a relatively new idea, and most of the countries, I think by number, less than half their countries in the world, even today, claim to be democracies, can't remember the exact number there. I think it's been about 20 years since we hit the 50% mark, but that's still not very, we have a long waste way to go, and it's questionable how many of those are real democracies, where people feel like they're actually being representative, and how many of those are just kind of nominal. So then exactly what you're talking about, the world has changed in so many ways, I mean to imagine that we had used the transportation technology of 1776, that's a horse, and the actual communication infrastructure at the time was you ride a letter with a quill, you give it to a person on a horse, and they ride for a week to get your message from New York City to Philadelphia, I mean that's one direction, versus today we can send a text message instantly, we can stream a video all around the world nearly instantly. So so much of our world has changed, and we see that in just about every industry, except the way that we collectively address the problems that we face as a country, as states, as regions, as cities, for the most part it's really still based on these ideas from the 18th century, which exactly like you say is something to be grateful for, and without a doubt it's got us a long way, it's built the roads, police, firefighters, there's a lot to be proud of there, but at the same time there's so many signs and so many measurable things that you can point to where people are not satisfied and not happy, and there's a certain trend where it sort of seems like someone used the phrase, a friend said it seems like democracy is bursting at the seams right now, and so it's concerning just because there are, this has happened before, we've seen cases, their IMF has done lots of studies of what happens in places where people no longer have faith in democracy, and it very quickly turns into hell on earth, I mean it's just society's collapse, and it just gets really ugly, and so I'm of the opinion, and I think a lot of people are of the opinion that we ought to be able to do a lot better given what our modern tools are available to us and so many other things. Any thoughts for you Simon? Yeah I mean just really quickly, you know as David said there's a lot of things to like about the way our founding fathers you know set things up in the 18th century, separation of powers I think is really really important, I like the fact that the administrative judicial judiciary and legislative branches can place checks on each other and make sure none of them are you know abusing their power or stepping out of line. At the same time there are a lot of things, there are a lot of ways in which the world has changed that I think our founding fathers you know definitely couldn't have anticipated, and so in order to tackle some of these modern challenges we have to be innovating and thinking about creative solutions ways to do that. You know traditionally the government is not known as being the like this really quickly evolving very adaptable rapidly sort of advancing institution, it's very slow and bureaucratic and that's challenging and the really cool thing about liquid democracy and maybe we'll get to this a little bit later is that it really helps solve a lot of the biggest problems that our political you know environment is facing today, corruption, gerrymandering, lobbying, you know this sort of crisis of underrepresentation. Liquid offers really really useful solutions to those problems and so that's why you know we're working on what we're working on. I'm so excited to unpack them. Let's do some of the slides, the images that we have. The very first one is a congressional job approval ratings from 2002 to 2019. Do you approve of the way Congress is handling its job? Yeah, yeah so this is a very simple metric that you can point to that just suggests that people are not happy with our government right now and it's just this is based on Gallup polling every year, multiple times a year they just ask a random sample of citizens, yay-nay do you approve of the job Congress is doing. So it's actually at a high point just after September 11th and it's just been on a downward trend for nearly 20 years now it's hovered really around like the 20% mark if not at some points down as low as 10% so like 9 out of 10 people for large amounts of time have said we don't approve of Congress of our representation in the government yeah and that's definitely worth being aware of I mean it's it's a concerning trend and then the next way for a long time I mean this isn't one year two years this goes back decades yeah yeah and to be hovering around like a 20% mark is yeah it's egregious there's updates have to get deployed yes yes okay and then the next one Ronnie this one you found this one and this one surprised me because it's it's really stark this is just gets into specific criticisms that people make of politicians and so it's a percentage of Americans who say most elected officials lose touch with people quickly don't care what people like me think put their own interests before the country's interests are corrupt or just simply can't be trusted and every single one of these metrics is over three quarters this can't be trusted one it's almost nine out of ten so I mean that's not to not to indict the individual people the way I read this more than anything else is the system itself is creating these really perverse incentives yes where we're just left with with leadership that we don't believe in and that's I mean who wants to live in that and one of the aspects of this that I think is now bursting at the seams as you said earlier is that the amount of our family values from the kin tribes that we used to live in just did not scale and so then all of the self dealing I'm now telling you a story to sell you shit that you don't need instead of telling you a story for your fitness inclusive fitness levels yeah and so that's why we have the politicians are self-dealing rather than actually representing on like an inclusive stakeholder methodology and I really do think that some technologies like blockchain could really help with things like that well it's it's interesting you bring that up that's just that's a really fascinating lens to look at it through so there's one we don't have a graph up on here but one way to think about this is just the number of representatives and the number of people that they're representing and just think of that as a ratio of how many constituents per representative and so right now there's 500 members of congress that we're looking nationally and there's 300 million americans and so it's about a million to one give or take it's 700 something a thousand to one yeah and that number is it's absurd when you think about it one person is supposed to represent the the interests and the political beliefs of 700,000 people and what was it when we first started exactly that's exactly the point is it wasn't designed to be like this this was actually so to your the shorter answer to your question is 30,000 it was 30,000 yeah first started it was 30,000 to one and this was actually meant to be the very first amendment to the constitution before freedom of speech and freedom of religion and freedom of assembly and freedom of the press they the original congress the very first congress in 1789 passed what's called the congressional apportionment amendment it's like this little story that most people have never heard where they want to write into the constitution will add a new member of congress every time it gets above originally 30,000 and then once they got past 200 it was going to raise to 40,000 per representative and once it got 300 it was going to raise to 50,000 per representative so what it would mean is that today we'd have like 8,000 members of congress and you just have a much closer relationship with your representative you just know them a lot better know them a lot better and then there's less self-dealing so if we would have scaled congress to 8,000 members maybe it would be harder to potentially pass some of the legislature like yeah that we want but at the same time there would be less self-dealing more inclusive fitness yeah yeah and just to add on to that I mean the 1 to 30,000 ratio to me it is better than what we have now but it still doesn't sound very good I mean like you said I mean I would love I mean so one of the things we do a lot when we talk to people about this idea of look at democracy is we just ask them a simple question which is do you know who your you know local state and national representatives are and so just a few days ago we did this event this really cool political kind of bar cafe space called Manny's and David was a panelist you know running an event about the future of democracy and he asked people in the audience this question of do you know who is representing you in government and very politically engaged people right so what percentage would you say of the audience knew the answer to that question maybe one in five right so this is a problem um from my perspective um let's talk about that who who in San Francisco is representing us right now so on the city level there's a board of supervisors there's 11 supervisors each one represents a different district so where we are right now I think we're in district six and on Soma so that's Jane Kim Jane Kim okay yeah and then London map if you want yeah yeah yeah and then Gavin Newsom of the entire state yep okay and then we have senators and representatives also of the state yeah two senators 50 representatives uh is it that high I don't know for the whole state Pelosi is the one for all of San Francisco Pelosi is for a million people 711,000 right just one person yeah I mean the senators are even more because there's 25 million registered Californians so that's 12 million yeah for one senator yeah yeah Kamala Harris and Feinstein and so and so but there's an argument to be made that they represent the state not the individual people that's I mean that's officially what it is because every state they get to no matter the number of people in the state wow yeah it's it's a crazy job and so imagine being that person and trying to hear from all your constituents every day no it's impossible it's impossible you won't have time to breathe raise a family be a nature none of that stuff yeah yeah so there doesn't need to be a better way yeah okay I mean I was just gonna add on to that um I love this idea of kind of the family or the tribal unit and I think our politicians in a perfect world ought to be you know we ought to trust them as much as we can trust our parents or siblings or our best friends yeah right now it feels like we're so disconnected from them it's like you know first of all how can one person ever represent a million people it's just logically impossible and it's just weird that I'm represented by this person that I don't really know I've never met I don't know that much about them and they don't know that much about me yes um and so choose them yeah exactly so even if you don't vote for them they're still you're still stuck with them things have to change and and just another thing that I was thinking about as you guys were chatting is um I remember hearing the statistic that that people members of congress spend something like 70% of their time lobbying you know donors trying to get money for the for their campaigns to re-election and if they're spending that much time hanging you know hanging out with rich people trying to get money how much time are they really spending engaging with the population as a whole or thinking about the best ways to vote on legislation or actually doing their job so yeah we have a lot of problems damn yeah we also didn't plan for that to happen where 70% of the time of the people that represent us has spent like campaign financing yeah it's such a corrupt system well but you have to do it I mean if you don't fundraise then you lose yeah it's very simple and so it's not again it's it's not even that these people are devils it's that the system itself has created these rules that yes you can't compete any other way as as as is now like to be said our founding fathers are rolling in the grave wondering why we haven't deployed updates to well there's that quote from jefferson like we should renew the constitution every generation every generation yeah yeah that's a great quote yeah yeah yeah and yeah and they're deploy the right updates yeah it just makes sense yeah it's a very interesting idea I'm not sure if I would want to go that far because I think there are a lot of really important and meaningful valuable ideas in the constitution like freedom of speech totally and so that's but I think a lot of the issues that we're facing really have to do specifically with our legislature and underrepresented in this democratic process and so you know I still want a constitution I still want a you know a president and a judiciary but I'm just really trying to tackle a lot of the problems surrounding for example congress or yes yes yes okay so let's go to the third asset Ron okay so three versions of democracy walk us through this okay so direct democracy a lot of when a lot of people think about what we have now they refer to as representative democracy I think that's a misnomer I would call it electoral democracy because it's based on elections so that's what we see right now we pick these members of congress or city council members there are representatives there are elected representatives and they vote on issues for us and ancient Athens direct democracy 1.0 was us voting directly on the issues ourselves exactly so when people talk about the birth of democracy they want to point to the Athenian forum going back 2,000 years ago and that's 500 people gathering in a space together voting directly on should we do this with our shared treasury should we go to war here should we make this law and it's there's no representatives it's your voting directly and you still see that today with referendums ballot initiatives we do sometimes still take direct votes but a lot of people think of our governance options as these this balancing act between representative through these elected leaders and direct where you're voting on citizen initiatives and ballot initiatives and that's those are two extremes and now we can do better and that's what what liquid democracy is all about and so it combines exactly it gives you all of the options and so just to speak to that very quickly so there are a lot of people there's the polling on is something like 50 of the population or something say they want to see more direct democracy in the US it's very high number surprisingly high number and Elon Musk has said a bunch of times when he has his million person calling on mars he thinks it ought to be governed by all people having an app where they can vote directly on policy instead of having elected representatives direct democracy for all million people it only makes sense that something gets drafted in the legislature and that rather than having somebody we got to be educated on the like what do we actually have the the capacity to read and understand what the actual law that we're voting on is or if we don't then can we do the the representative I cast it to you because I trust that you know that you are going to read it and make a decision that on behalf of me exactly yeah the idea of of everyone weighing in on the policy makes a lot of sense when everyone's in the same room together it's it's the most authentic option you could have it totally plays in this idea of consent of the governed if we're going to make a law that this is illegal or we're going to spend our shared taxpayer dollars on this it makes a lot of sense that we all would consent to it but it just takes a lot of time I mean it would be crazy to imagine every single one of us was going to look through the 10,000 bills that were introduced in congress last year I mean they took hundreds and hundreds of of roll call votes 10,000 just in one year yeah just last year there were 10,000 bills introduced and a few hundred about 500 of them got brought to a roll call vote among all the members of congress and so we all live busy lives I mean we all have jobs we all have families we all have school and other responsibilities and so it would be moving backward the people that think that direct democracy we just need more direct democracy are missing the fact that that takes an enormous amount of time and this stuff is really complicated and you want to get it right when you think about you know Obamacare one of the big pieces major pieces of legislation arguably the large piece of legislation passed in the last decade it was a thousand pages and so expecting every last person to read a thousand page bill it's just informed no way no of course not and when you had back when you had so much time in the ancient Athenian times that could be more easy to have direct democracy well those people were extremely wealthy the people voting were all retired aristocrats so this was their full-time job I mean this was all they did you know it was also just not yeah selling eight hours of their day every day for money also just because then you could spend those eight hours engaging with your communities figuring out what you wanted to do for the future kids etc during those eight hours yeah so that's that's what the situation has always looked like now what we can talk about the future solution what liquid democracy offers sometimes it's also referred to as delegative democracy because it's based on this idea of personal delegations instead of electing one representative for a million people you get to actually pick your own representative and the mechanism very simply is that each and every person can vote up yay or nay on any item any legislative item and if you don't vote on it then your personally chosen representative gets to vote on your behalf for you so you get the best of both worlds you can always weigh in yourself when you want okay and when you're not weighing in yourself you still have your representative as a backup for you okay so there's something that I have to a timeline to place my vote on and if I place my vote okay great it's locked in if I haven't and then the final then the person that I let's say that Dave is the one that's casting that's my delegate that I want to cast a vote that if I haven't cast it by that time and Dave has my vote gets added to the one that Dave would be casting yeah yeah if you want to pull up the demo this is perfect yeah let's do it show let's do that so nice so this is what the current system looks like with the electoral we'll just skip right through this but basically the current system is we have this two classes we have regular citizens around the outside here and then we have a few politicians who are so have so much more influence than everybody else and it's just it's this two class system so now we're going to switch to and the and it was the um the all of us on the outside and the person that's elected to represent us so that's like the the 100,000 500,000 all on the outside and one person on the inside yeah which you still only be 30,000 yeah exactly we're just still a crazy number yeah yeah so this is what a liquid democratic system uh can look like so this is an example of people being able to weigh in on a single issue so right now just a few days ago congress is voting on should we give funding to areas that have been experiencing these disasters like hurricanes this is big bill being fought in congress right now so assume that that's the example we're working with right now so any one person like lia here can say yes i'm in favor of that or they can say no i'm against that and you can see the tally here changing people in favor people against and someone else can vote exact same thing but see now we also have these arrows what is this cluster that's happening yeah it was already just preset up this is just a sample but the point is that exact so these arrows show that delegation so if this person here says i'm in favor of it all these people who have said ahead of time hey i trust daisy they're gonna inherit they're gonna adopt and copy that exact same vote yeah okay so this lets you see what a liquid democratic system actually uh looks like in practice same thing this the reason they're in the center is because a lot of people trust that position they're they're elevating them they're empowering them as a leader for our community but then can julian pass um the vote from julian like if five one two three four five people have passed their vote to julian for yay but then colton says no yeah exactly so so let's say colton here they're very influential they're against the thing but ashley is like wait i actually am in favor of the thing they can just override and take it back in real time at any time you always represent yourself you can always weigh in yourself you're always in control so if ashley's passing uh the vote to colton that and colton votes no but everyone with ashley was voting okay okay exactly oh it's delegating to ashley okay yeah there's a i i gave a little bit of a misleading description i i always say that it's if you're not voting your vote is getting passed to the person but a simpler way to think or a more accurate way to think about it is actually that quinn here didn't vote and so when ashley voted quinn says look up how ashley voted and just copy the same position yeah okay okay so it's the vote never actually left from quinn it just copies the position yeah i already said i like that person i trust that person for the most part i agree with that person however they did it i want to copy the same that's great so it's not like ashley's getting 40 000 votes it's uh yeah to play with it's more that um quinn's copying ashley's one vote uh and if 30 000 people believe in at the way that ashley's voting then the vote will be copied okay so you always stay in control you can always speak yourself you can always and if you and if you pick someone and you realize basically and i actually don't trust this person they made all these promises and then they didn't keep them or you know this happens all the time of course you can just change it in real time change your time and then can uh can ashley if i'm dedicating my vote to ashley can ashley then uh pass the vote along to colton yeah yeah so um only if ashley is public is saying i publicly believe in colton okay so there's a separate so there's a separate question to be asked here about um is your vote public or private okay and so the way we've designed it with liquid us and other people have different opinions about this but the way we've designed is you always can choose do you want to be public or private okay whenever you make a private vote it doesn't get passed down to anybody so you're just voting for yourself as one person okay whenever you make a public vote then it gets passed down to everybody and so that's your question because you have multiple degrees multiple levels as long as it's public because everyone needs to be able to see what you know where the vote is coming from who's being trusted here yeah versus if it's private then that's one corruption exactly of all sorts it's just it's hard to imagine that you could trust something if you don't know where it's coming from exactly okay so and then i can choose to have this be on like a decentralized distributed ledger of public voting yeah we're already yeah we're already doing that it's kind of beta testing right now but we publish a ledger of all the votes and it can be mirrored very easily excellent excellent yeah and you can see the complete history and so just to just to yeah we'll get back to this again the point is that in what i believe to be a healthier democracy for the 21st century you actually know your representative these aren't these like far away ideas of these like politicians you heard about from the tv or from like a 30 second ad or you know you have this very limited they're almost like pitch to us like products it's very limited exposure to them yeah it's a pretty bad thing that they're pitched to us is like a product yeah well it's it's the best they can do because they have to convince a million people it's the only way to get elected yeah they have such a limited amount of time in the future though instead of picking between candidate and candidate b you'll actually be able to pick your friend or your family member or your professor or someone you really admire and you chose yourself you don't need anyone else's permission you get to be represented by the people you trust great great and then on a on a uh on a final like counts level like how do we ensure that that that that the final says from in this liquid democracy style of voting are being uh non-corrupted towards the final decisions on legislature what what sort of corruption do you have specifically maybe like um just making sure that when we're trying to say that uh like ashley who already has like a good amount of people that trust her that that the way that she's uh voting in is not being corrupted like what is our not bribed yeah and what is our security that that like how does how is ashley submitting that last mile to the yeah that that's not being manipulated like you know is this happening computationally how is this occurring yeah um so so we built a system called proof of vote and so this gets into the the ledger that we're talking about the public ledger and so basically anytime a vote gets entered so we so we built the interface to take all the votes and it's open source and people can build other interfaces we want these to be like democracy browsers sort of but when you cast the vote it gets entered into this official ledger of all the votes where you have the proof of all the votes and so if it's public you can just see your name in there and if it's private then um we want to provide basically a vote id so it's a unique code like 68325 ad and you get a you get a receipt when you cast your vote and so you can look up and see there's my vote and anyone can tabulate all of us so it's a it's a transparent this is technical terms this is referred to as um end to end vote tabulation vote verification end to end vote verification yeah because you you know I cast my vote and I can see my vote in the final count in the final count yeah okay cool yeah okay and um there are ways that it can be even stronger in the future with like cryptographically signed messages or a little ways away from that yes in general our attitude is make something easy for people to start using and um always be open and transparent about the ways in which we want to strengthen things technologically so we right now we don't have cryptographically signed votes but we'd like to get to that in the future yes and then you'd be able to say um you could be able to verify that your vote got entered correctly and sign that message and we'd be able to say okay 90 percent of people have verified and all that could happen automated as well so yeah that's a that's a fascinating subject yeah that's that's heading us into the future as well um let's hit on um there were some of the some of the things that you guys actually passed as well um so uh ab 1505 and uh for local control and senate bill 126 for conflict of interest um should we show the the page where it showed kind of like how you guys put that together that that was pretty interesting for me when you showed me that yeah so this is all at charter law reform dot com so charter law reform dot com yeah great so what we've been talking about to date to up till now is the long term vision for what 21st century democracy can look like thinking about you know 30 years from now what sort of democracy would be better for us to live in and it's a fascinating conversation for people that are interested in this the tricky part is okay that's that's the long term vision how do we get from where we are today yeah to there so what we've been doing is we've been working with advocacy organizations on the ground right now who want to pass a specific piece of legislation and so that's what this is an example of so this is working with these group of retired teachers educators here in california try to change the california state law around what are called charter schools charter schools are privately run schools that receive public funding usually nonprofits some people confuse that but they're almost always nonprofits and there are some cases where they work really well but there are other cases where they don't work really well and there's we're talking about a huge amount of taxpayer money you're in my money that goes to them and sometimes they can end up harming a lot of other students kids kids so the group of teachers they understood the current law it's called the 1992 california charter law charter act charter school act down here yep and understand the current law they had very specific ideas about the ways we want to tweak the existing law to help solve this problem that the state is facing the current educational system is facing so they had these five legip particular legislative policy ideas and one of them has already been passed signed into law signed by the governor that was known as sp126 senate bill 126 and that provides legal restrictions around conflicts of interest so apply to charter school board members the same prohibition of conflict of interest as applied to public school boards exactly so the charter schools are typically nonprofits but they're receiving huge amount of taxpayer money here in my public funding i'm hundreds of billions of dollars if i'm on the charter school board and i also own the company that sells desks exactly yeah i can't just buy exactly the desks are my very simple company yeah yeah things like that non-controversial so not controversial that's why i got passed so quickly not exactly it just needed to be that code update how do you get it as fast as possible well if you go to charter charter law reform dot com then you can easily endorse um parts of this yourself um and give people the representatives um moving in the direction that you want exactly so 2100 people have done that so all across california people have been weighing in and saying yes we need this and they're even adding in personal comments and personal stories and so on and so forth and every time someone adds in we automatically send their message along to their particular state reps and we can verify are these actual registered voters because on the internet there's a lot of fraud going on so we've done a lot of work making it as easy as possible and also making it as trustworthy as possible so we want to confirm that these are real people and get their messages to their specific legislators and then um let's this is this is what we call a liquid initiative this is a liquid initiative yeah it's an initiative that started on the liquid us platform and so there have been you know dozen different initiatives that we've been starting and we always want to work with uh existing group that that knows um here's the problem here's what the legislative solution looks like yeah and we can help set that up and we're doing in all different states in all different cities all across the country yeah like you said just more and more of these liquid initiatives all different states yeah across the country that's fantastic and then having people actually like you said every single time they endorse make a comment um send that off make the pushes happen so right so right now what what people say is um you call your call your representative call your member of congress call your your state representative your state senator and um is what people think is the best way to make an impact on policy and it's comes from a good place the problem that I personally always have when I do it is that I call in I usually hit a voicemail or something or you know maybe I get an answer and it's like then what happens it kind of goes in this black hole nobody ever hears anything from it so what we are doing that's really distinct is that this um these citizen positions are totally public and people when when you call in other people recognize and can see x number of people are in favor of this and whiner people are against it and so what we're building towards is to actually create scorecards for every representative so in the same way right now politicians will get these grades from representatives like they'll get an a grade or an f grade from the nra we're working towards being able to offer liquid scorecards for every elected representative that very simply instead of saying does your voting record match what the nra board wants it's does your voting record match what your verified constituents how they want you to vote and so that's called liquid scorecards and that's one of the benefits of weighing in this way on top of just being easier and more verified as we're trying to create more accountability yeah great way to create more accountability and so you could actually look up and say okay for this representative how good of a job are they doing actually listing their constituents on education issues versus science issues versus foreign policy issues versus so on and so forth yeah even broken down by category as well let's um the some of the next assets that we have um let's go to the next one um okay so this is um the selecting uh proxy by issue area so let's hit that one yeah we want to hit the next asset all right there it is you want to explain this one yeah sure so I think you know one of the things that really appeals to me about the idea of liquid democracy is that it's very humble I think in a perfect world all of our representatives would be experts on everything they would know everything about science and economics and foreign policy but that's just not the reality of how the world works we all specialize in different things um Albert Einstein was great at physics I don't know how much he knew about healthcare Nancy Pelosi has been working in government for decades and decades and she knows a good amount about each issue but it's hard to call her you know a leading expert on all of them you know there's no perfect person out there and so this you know we have within a liquid democratic system this idea of proxying where if you don't have the time or the expertise to weigh in on a particular issue you can delegate your vote to someone else someone else but uh another thing that can be layered on top of that is not just choosing one proxy for everything but having an issue you know different proxies for different issues oh yeah and so you could choose you know Neil deGrasse Tyson as your science delegate meaning anytime a bill comes up in front of congress uh that has to do with you know a scientific topic like NASA for example uh you could vote it on it yourself and if you don't Neil deGrasse Tyson votes in it for you and the same thing can be true you know on an issue by issue basis and so I think this is a really really powerful idea because you know not only do we want our representatives to be the people that we trust the most we need them to be pretty smart because this stuff is really complicated we want them to be experts we want them to be really knowledgeable in their field um you know the affordable at care act was something like 2 000 pages I don't have time to read it and even if I did I don't know how well I would understand all the details of it because I don't have a background in healthcare law my mom's a healthcare lawyer she really knows that stuff and not only that but she has like dozens of friends who are you know who are even greater experts in that area than she is and so I think this is the the issue by issue proxing feature is one of the things that really attracted me to liquid democracy because it feels like we'll get such better such more such you know so much more informed outcomes than we're getting yeah wow by even proxy by issue area so if I'm already well versed in this specific issue area I can continuously be voting my in my own stake there but for ones that I don't understand I'll just proxy off to the specific leaders in those fields absolutely and it allows you to focus as well you know you're going to be really knowledgeable about some topics but not about other ones you can do a better job on the ones that you are interested in because you know that the other ones are being taken care of by people you trust just like in our private in our private economy you know different people specialize as tailors as carpenters making furniture as engineers making electronics it'd be crazy to imagine every last person has to do every last thing themselves and so government is the tool we solve collective problems different people are going to have different areas of interest and areas of expertise to how we deal with different collective problems we face you know we'll set it and then on the on the future we have the next asset yeah that's so this gets into a different idea of the of how we make liquid democracy reality so we talked a second ago about the liquid scorecards there's this other idea and this is this is really the thing that captured my imagination early on was okay so we're talking about delegative democracy what better democracy could look like the the intuitive response is good you know you're going to pass a constitutional amendment good luck you know no chance for obvious reasons that that's right but the difference is the idea is running these new people for office and working with existing people in office who say i want to test this out just for this one single seat just for this one single elected position and so rather than trying to pursue a constitutional amendment i'm just going to run for this office and you can vote a liquid representative system in just for this one position and so that's what this liquid candidate is so this is a mock-up a little two-frame comic of the speaker of the house kind of looks like Nancy Pelosi asking different representatives how do you vote and this representative is the liquid candidate so they pull out their phone and right on their phone this is intentionally provocative they push an announced vote button and they hold their phone up to the microphone and their phone says the people of district five vote yes so all they are is this button pusher they got elected simply to actually represent the will of their constituents the person is superfluous yeah and that's this is an extreme this is a caricature and real life they're going to be in the room they have a huge role to play and in debate in communicating what's happening okay and so on so forth but the final vote is yes tallied electronically by the people and then yeah yeah yeah so this is a liquid candidate no i was just going to say so so david could talk more about this because he he actually ran for office but each liquid candidate can have their own sort of policy about how they're going to use feedback on the app to make decisions and so some people can say i'm always going to vote exactly in accordance with what the app tells me 100% of the time and then other people could say you know i'll use the app as a really useful feedback mechanism but at the end of the day i'm going to use my own judgment kind of to make the final decision and then other people can say you know if a certain threshold a certain percentage my constituency votes then i'll make the decision like three percent or five percent or whatever then i'll make the decision according with the app but you know it's a it's a flexible concept for sure yeah but it's really powerful because it gives us a way to implement liquid democracy in america today without having to change any laws or pass it without even to ask the current people in power hey will you volunteer to give up your power instead we just run for office yeah yeah as a liquid candidates and all the nuance that you just broke down so yeah yeah and so it's also much safer because there's you know this is a powerful idea but it's a relatively new idea and there's a lot of details that still need to be ironed out and things that need to evolve and so the benefit of doing it on this uh seat by seat approach is that the issues that we will face are isolated just to that seat at a time rather than trying to say okay yesterday the whole system was one way tomorrow we're gonna change it all overnight yeah i mean that's that's incredibly disruptive that's not wise or smart or anything like that and the next asset actually shows the the digital democracy candidates yeah yeah so there have been nearly a dozen people who have run in past elections so this goes back to 2014 um yeah here i am uh who have run for a legislative position somewhere in the u.s some at the national level some at the local level some at the state level um of all different parties so that's an interesting question are they running in the major parties are they running a third party are they running as an independent and then what the specifics of their pledge was uh control basically means they they're promising that they will do every vote in a hundred percent accordance whereas engaged or you use the word empowered means um they'll use it as advisory but they're not necessarily committing a hundred percent okay so liquid controlled is the nuance where all of the liquid democracy that's voted uh the constituency you vote in that exact direction uh engaged means that you'll consider what that is okay yeah the requirement that we that we really like people direct controlled is when they directly control it no so the direct versus liquid part means are you accepting proxy votes is it just direct democracy so the number of people especially early on have said i'm going to run for office i'm going to give everyone an app that tells me how to vote and and it's just one person one vote there's no proxying involved okay got it yeah so it's just direct democracy and liquid includes the liquid includes the product includes representation i think that's really important otherwise it's really difficult for people totally the thing is that it's it's hard to imagine someone that says they'll be direct um usually someone that's into direct would also like to support liquid they just don't have the technology to make it possible so that's part of our what we see our role is making it free and easy and trustworthy and so um that ought to be more common but we but when we publish uh the proof of votes you can see on every vote whether it's a direct vote or a proxy vote so again like so i was saying every candidate and every elected official has their the right to say i'm only going to accept direct votes if they want or proxy votes and that's sort of a good thing because it allows us to kind of a v test a lot of different approaches to what do what do people respond to best so a lot of people thought it was really important when i was running that i have like a break glass in case of emergency clause where if i would i'd be controlled by everything but if for some reason you know the imagine the worst possible vote you could think of i would be able to um go against it okay but then i'd have to stand immediately up for a recall vote sure sure so if i took the the break glass if i took the emergency vote my own way then every one of my district would then be asked hey do you agree with david's explanation for why i did this or would you like him to resign and this is a lot of code like you know if you do this emergency break glass uh function then then they get to vote immediately on if they want to keep you or not like that's good stuff that this is how to use computer science for democracy yeah and now specific to me other people might not want that yeah then so you can make your own clauses see which clauses are popular exactly people can pick them up add them yeah this is great stuff so right now there have been you know 12 odd people or whatever this number yeah it's been like i think 14 since or well now there's agatha right so these are just the people that made it onto the ballot there's a whole another slide of there's a lot of people that have announced their intention to do it but didn't make it onto the ballot it's a certain number that's the last slide i think right um this is about article people talking about liquid democracy all around the world so there have been paper academic papers this is a phd thesis that really ironed out the original uh mechanisms there have been essays there have been things that went on the front page of reddit with 40 000 upvotes um other academic papers and all different newspapers around the world so it's a it's a growing as a growing area of interest yeah my favorite one is the google votes uh they used actually at google's campus they used a liquid democratic voting structure internally to make a lot of interesting decisions you know from trivial things like how should what meal should we have in the cafeteria so you could vote on what meals you wanted or you could proxy to someone someone else yeah cases yeah to things like how should we spend the charity budget oh which is very very it was very cool text test case and actually there's someone named uh sarge pitterman my cousin who's working there right right now who is working on sort of building out that system further at google and so this kind of technology has a lot of interesting applications not just for government but also in private organizations or unions or political parties as well so it's pretty versatile it's great yeah yeah because these are some of these companies of a hundred thousand yeah they're like as big as government so we're bigger yeah so that's great so yeah liquid democracy apply to all you know corporations yeah countries yeah i mean it's really just thinking what what does healthier democracy look like for the 20 century for the information age what we have right now is industrial age democracy what is information age democracy what is the information age democracy yeah the exponential technology eight billion humans on the planet democracy yeah yeah yeah exactly yeah this has been very interesting and i feel as though we're you know we're totally headed in this direction um it's just like getting the short term that you guys are building to get you to get us to the long term where we see it happening it's just a it's the critical stepping stones that have to happen to get us there and even just the conversation about liquid democracy you know having others share it with their friends their families co-workers people online it's so critical like whoa liquid democracy totally democracy 3.0 look at the history where we're at now this type of stuff yeah yeah so most people are not aware of this i mean if you especially if you walk down the street nobody will have heard of the term when you ask people out on the room you know you'll you'll typically get like 1% or something like that but it is growing i mean i've had a firsthand exposure to it just over the last few years more and more people are reaching out people are doing this all over the world so just yesterday i had people starting a similar group in romania reach out there's groups in canada and france and germany and india and australia and all over the world constantly reaching out for liquid democracy in their areas that's great wow and the thing is the thing is that there's a certain inevitability to it though there's a mathematical inevitability to it because if you think the the person that gets elected they get elected by the majority unless what they're their voting record on every single issue already matches what the majority of people want then no matter what the liquid candidate must be making more people happier on more issues it's just it's just mathematically how could one person out of a million do a better job than the combined efforts of all those people yeah yeah the challenge of course is is um awareness is do all the people know about and see as an option and how simple how frictionless is it exactly and so that is really plays into the need for the liquid candidates so every time a person runs for office the press loves to write about that so i got a bunch of press about me other people have written so one of my friends ran for for a senate seat he estimated that hundreds of thousands of new people learned about liquid democracy just because he ran even though he didn't he didn't win he didn't make it on the ballot and so the point is that and this was Nathan all yeah Nathan i was gonna say yeah and i should mention he's um where's what state is in indiana yeah and so a lot of people have this assumption that oh this is kind of like a san francisco silicon valley tech thing no one in india would want to use this but he had a lot of really positive feedback from people out there and so liquid democracy is a nonpartisan idea it's something that appeals to people both on the left or the right of the spectrum or people who don't know where they might fall on this sort of simple dichotomy yeah yeah it's just democracy that's healthier for everyone and picked up by india australia germany france all these other countries yeah that's great yeah huge um couple couple quick questions on the way out that we like to ask our guests um because it's just it's super it's just such a good episode um let's hit on uh what do you guys think where do you guys think we come from pre birth and where do you guys think we go post death you want to take this one was not expecting that you caught me by surprise wow where do we come from pre birth uh you go first no good try yeah you go we come from the earth come from our parents yeah where do you think we go post death uh hopefully people remember us and share stories about us i'll let you know when i get there if i can't i don't have any special insight into that do you guys think we're alone in the cosmos probably not it's too big are humans the only what is there other life on other planets besides earth is that the question take it where you'd like um i mean i don't think we're alone on earth sir as a starting place there's lots and lots of life forms on earth and growing numbers sometimes you look at it i don't know i hope so i hope there's more life out there i haven't i don't know do you guys think we're in a simulation i gave mine to seddie what was the seddie the search for extra intelligence but the one where you would donate unused computing power yeah the set yeah the set at home project yeah that was fun yeah do you guys think we're in a simulation uh i think it's an unfalsifiable question i don't know how you what's the how do you measure how do you deny it whether we are or aren't if okay let's say we're in a simulation then what created the simulation is there is a simulation in the simulation i don't find it i don't know where to go with the answer whether we are we aren't if we can get if we can escape out of it that would be really interesting but i don't spend a ton of time thinking about it sorry i love video games i would love to see technology progress to the point where we could create trillions and trillions of world that are worlds that are as a more complex than the world that we currently exist in we haven't got there and so until we get to that point i remain skeptical about the idea that we live in a simulation but uh it's a powerful argument it's definitely something i think about from time to time as a gamer you get it yeah yeah absolutely totally all right and then last question what do you guys think some most beautiful thing in the world the ocean stole my answer i spent a lot sunset over ocean beach can i combine both of them yeah there you go i grew up in half moon bay for most of my life so just near san francisco which is a beach town that's so i spent a lot of a lot of time out on the bluff just enjoying the beautiful scenery holy cow what a great episode on liquid democracy this has been you guys thank you so much for coming on yeah dave thank you so much guys yeah that was so enriching there's your work your work is you know it's already available for people to dive deep into which is great already being cleared from around the world and implemented into systems around the world it's very exciting thank you everyone for tuning in we greatly appreciate we'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below on the episode check out the links also liquid.us the youtube profile david's profile the canada's profile twitter as well check out those links share more conversations with your friends your co-workers people online your family about liquid democracy and about the future of the rethinking 21st century democratic representation huge shout out to ron vagus for producing and directing thank you ronnie and go and build the future everyone manifest your dreams into the world thank you so much for tuning in we will see you soon peace