 Welcome to Building Tomorrow, a show about the ways tech, innovation, and entrepreneurship are making the world healthier, more peaceful, and more prosperous. I'm your host, Paul Matzko, and I'm joined by show stalwart, Aaron Ross Powell. We have a special guest in the studio today, John Aristotle Phillips. He's been called many things during his career, from the A-bomb kid to a wolf of K Street, which I thought was a particularly clever epithet, but he is one of the founders of the political prediction market, Predictit, and the CEO of Aristotle, which is a big data campaign consultancy. John, thanks for coming. Thanks for having me. Now, we have a lot of ground to cover, and I do want to get to the A-bomb kid. That's the tease at the outset, John designed an atomic bomb at an age when the rest of us were, you know, doing nothing, playing Fortnite or World of Warcraft. But let's start with Aristotle. Most of our listeners come from outside the DC Beltway, sort of not going to be quite as familiar with what campaign consultancies, big data firms do. So what is Aristotle? What does it do for political campaigns that are its customers? Sure. Well, first, again, thanks for having me on the show. So Aristotle is a 35-year-old company that my younger brother and I started when we graduated from college, and it was that created and continues to this day to be the largest provider of political technology, and I'll explain what that is, on a nonpartisan basis in the United States. So if you're running for president or dog catcher, if you are trying to get an initiative on the ballot and you're not getting any love from the political parties, you come to Aristotle. And Aristotle provides you with the top of the line software, the voter data, petition management tools, get out the vote tools, online targeting, fundraising online, that anything you need to run a modern campaign we provide. And often we will have three or four candidates seeking the same seat or office using our products. How much has, so you said it started 35 years ago? Yeah. So the technology has changed a bit in that time. Well, there was no technology. So there were no, that literally was no technology. There were no personal computers, okay? So what's the difference then between kind of what you're doing now and what you were doing 35 years ago? Oh, boy. You know, I'll tell you what's the same. What's the, we'll do that first. What's the same is we like to think of ourselves as helping voters in the, at the end of the day, voters hear points of view or hear from potential elected officials points of view they wouldn't otherwise hear if it were just up to the Democratic or the Republican Party. We see the parties as, you know, I have many friends who work at the DNC and the RNC. I ran, I myself ran as a candidate right before we started Aristotle as a candidate for U.S. Congress. I won the Democratic primary and lost the general election. So, so we are an alternative to the two-party structure and we, there are a vast number of campaigns that are not partisan in the United States. Um, and so we, we help citizens take matters into their own hands if they want to, uh, run a campaign independent of the parties, uh, but we also, we also provide technology to a lot of the party elected officials on anybody. Look, if you're running a primary challenge against an incumbent, you can, you are guaranteed of walking into a buzz saw, uh, courtesy of the incumbent protection rackets that, that, that some of the party officials are. So, so this is what we do. We, we help you run a modern political campaign and we work, we do a lot of campaigns outside the United States as well. And I'd be happy to talk about those as well. I just got back from, uh, I did the election in Kenya for the opposition, um, uh, and had sort of interesting things happen there. Yeah. We definitely want to talk about Kenya and, uh, in a second. Um, but right before we get to Kenya, uh, and some of the international elections, uh, to your point about the bipartisan nature of Aristotle, I think I saw that in 1992, you were, you know, helping the data side of things for simultaneously the Clinton campaign, the, uh, Bush campaign and the Ross prose campaign all at the same time. Right. We were doing more than just data for Ross Perot. Okay. Yes. That's correct. So Ross prose actually wasn't just the raw data. You also were, that's right. We were advising on the campaign. Okay. Now, when you went, when you said, I have great stories from the Perot campaign, you guys, I can imagine. Some would say that make the Trump campaign look normal. No, and I, and I have enormous respect for Mr. Perot. So now was, was this, uh, as you get, got involved with Aristotle in 83, I think I read that it was, was this desire to kind of disrupt the two-party system? I mean, part of the DNA of the organization from the get go. I mean, did you go into it thinking of, of, of, of breaking that monopoly? It was, it wasn't so much breaking the monopoly, but when I ran, I mentioned I, I won the Democratic primary and the party, the, the, the party in Connecticut put up a, fortunately for me, a really bad candidate, but they wanted to make sure that that really bad candidate got the nomination because, you know, my theory was they wanted to elect the Republican. So they, so the fact of the matter was we couldn't, it was as simple as this. We could not get the registered voter list for the congressional district in which I was a declared registered candidate contesting the Democratic nomination and this is Fairfield County, Connecticut. This is not some place where it's hard, the voter list should be hard to come by. We couldn't get it. And, and so we, we had to fight to just to get the basic, the seed corn of a political campaign. You're being sabotaged by your own party apparatus. Yeah. I mean, it was, it was part of the process and, and, and, and ironically, I mean, candidates will tell you irrespective of their party affiliation. There's nothing better than winning a primary if you want to test your team and, and your message and the rest of it. But, but often that just, you know, a lot of people don't win their primaries. I was, we, we got into this discussion here because we talked about, we were talking about, you know, the, the parties are, are loathed to provide assistance to primary challengers to their own incumbents. They're, they're in the incumbent protection business. And so when you have, whether it can be Bernie Sanders or it can be, you know, somebody running for, for state legislature, if you're challenging somebody who is a Democratic incumbent, it's, it's, it's expected that the party is going to try to make it very, very difficult for you. And you have to think about, do you really want to be using the software and the lists and the other information that the party can turn off a week before the election? You know, you don't. And you also don't want to be, you know, data is, is, is extremely important, your names, your, the people that have said they're going to support you, the people who as a result of your door-to-door efforts have entrusted you as a candidate or as a volunteer for a candidate that they're supporting, you know, grandma has given her personal cell phone number to the, to your campaign. They, they don't, they're not doing this with the intention that it's going to get hoovered up by some institution in Washington, inside the Beltway, and then sold to a publisher's clearinghouse or provided to an advocacy group, which grandma doesn't even agree with. So that's, so having control of your own data is very important. So if I'm, say, I'm a candidate, I'm going to primary my Congress person. And so I decide to come to you. What kind of data can you give me? Where, where are you, or Aristotle, getting that data? And then how is the data you provide me in the way that you get it different from the hoovering up lots of data about people and selling it? Because you got it from somewhere. Right, right. So the analogy, the, the example I was using is where somebody provides non-public data to a campaign and trusts that data to somebody who's gone door to door for the campaign. And the presumption there to use grandma's example is that that information, that non-public information is being entrusted to this entity and not to a national political party or an advocacy group to which the national political party is selling or giving or providing that data. Okay. There's a difference between that non-public data and the registered voter list, that list that my campaign was unable to get when I ran for U.S. Congress. The, the, it is essential. I'll jump ahead to where this line of question may be going. It is essential in my opinion that if you are contesting an election or have a legitimate use for the registered voter list, that under the Equal Protection Clause, you, you must be able to get the same data as the Democratic or the Republican nominee for the party. My company, one of the things I'm proud of is that we have where necessary challenged refusals to provide data to Aristotle. This is again, the basic registered voter list to provide that information for, to Aristotle for us in turn to provide it to those who are authorized to get it, candidates. So going back to 2000, you know, the McCain campaign was being denied and the presidential campaign was being denied access to the registered voter data in a nearby state. They came to us. We had to challenge the, the denial and we prevailed and we prevailed because the secretary of state went to the elections commission, the attorney general went to the elections commission and said, are you crazy? You can't pick and choose who's going to get access to the registered voter list. It's available to anybody. If you got it, sure, you got to be a declared candidate. You got it. You can, you cannot use it for commercial purposes. Yada, yada, yada. All that being said, access to, and it's not just the, the data anymore. It's also the, the, the tools, the software, the online fundraising, the ability to take credit cards, all those things, a modern campaign requires those sorts of things. And if, you know, if, if you're denied access to Facebook because you've got a point of view that's out of sync with the mainstream or because you're a libertarian or for whatever reason, you know, I think, I think that's a real problem for the democratic process and you need to have access to those tools to communicate. So there, a lot of this data is coming from, you know, public databases that are sensibly supposed to be available to, you know, to those who request them, like, you know, voter registration lists and the like. I spent a little time tooling around on the Aristotle website and it looked like there's information about potential voters that goes beyond anything that would be on the list. There is. So where does that data come from? So, so we collect the, it starts as the base file is the registered voter list. And on top of the registered voter list, if there are listed telephone numbers or if there are people on a do not call registry, we match that data. If there are other types of information that have, so for instance, there are public record databases that we purchase access to and the public record databases will include things like if they are, well, an example would be if they're a donor to a political cause or to an advocacy group or they have their veterans, for instance, we do append that information to the registered voter list. Which I guess when you donate to a political campaign, there's an expectation that that information is now public information in those states. Well, it's a require, it's a, it's a legal requirement that it be made public information. So you have to, you have to, if you're a campaign, part of what our software does is it discloses who gave money, who gave money to you as a candidate and complies with the laws regarding that. Now, there's certain limits on how you can use the information and their limits in terms of the threshold amount, but by and large, the, if you make a contribution to a political candidate or a cause or sometimes to a, to certain types of nonprofits, those lists are available and you should, people should not be under the assumption that they're, they're not. So I think I'm trying to suss out the distinction between, I mean, we, we, Aaron proposed kind of a scenario where, or actually you proposed the scenario where, where there are unsavory organizations hoovering up data that grandma, you know, the grandma wouldn't want her phone number to be used for a publisher's clearinghouse list. She would find that an annoying breach for privacy versus what is publicly accessible, what people are essentially voluntarily disclosing, you know, trying to maintain that distinction. I mean, is that something, how does Airstyle avoid dipping a toe into the. Sure. That's a great question. So, so, and the line is moving. Right. In terms of what people, what the assumption is with respect to use of personal information. I use the Facebook example. I would not want to be in their shoes in terms of trying to figure out where that line is that you're going to cross at some point if you're licensing to a, you know, certain, for certain applications, what might have been acceptable or not really considered five years ago, that's changed since then. And it's going to continue to change. If you look at GDPR in the, in the EU, for instance, which is a privacy legislation that, that any company is not just restricted to companies in the EU, it's companies all over the world that may have information on you, on EU citizens, you have to comply with it. There, we've touched on two different areas, but they're connected as you point out. One has to do with legally mandated and accessible information like a registered voter list, or I would go further, I would say it's also includes contribute, contribution lists. Okay. It's not optional to report whether or not somebody gave you a contribution of $200 aggregate year to date. If you're a federal candidate, it's not an option, you have to report that. And there's, there are reasons to do with campaign transparency, et cetera, et cetera. Certain, certain signatory, if you sign a petition in certain jurisdictions, that prediction has got to be public. And if the petition is public, then it, you know, in, in most jurisdictions, it, it is subject to disclosure and to use for various purposes. So that's one type of information. Another type of information is personal information that you may entrust. I may give you right my personal cell phone number on the back of a card and slip it to you after this interview today. I don't expect you to go out and sell that to somebody else. You use the word. Docs you on Twitter or something. Well, you use the word unsavory. I didn't, I don't think I said unsavory organizations. I said there, there are, there's a whole ecosystem within 30 miles of where we sit today, which is built upon sort of the, the attempts to get power and then to retain power. And that's what politics is, right? It's how we decide to adjudicate a lot of that stuff. My, my sense is that the balance has shifted. The parties for some time, the parties are always trying to figure out what their, if they're still relevant. They were trying to figure out if they were still relevant 35 years ago when we started Aristotle. Our intention at the time was to make it easier for people to make the very best case they can, no matter how weird or bizarre or mainstream their point of view is, and we include a lot of incumbent politicians use our products and we're delighted to have them as customers. But the fact of the matter is if you're, if you do not want to rely on a political party, either your local party or the national committee or anybody, if you want to be able to be your own person, stand up when you want to stand up and sit down when you want to sit down, take your own points of view on issues which are almost catechism here in terms of you can't do, oh, you can't do that, you're a Democrat, you can't support that, or you're a Republican, don't you dare, you know, touch that issue or criticize this politician. If you don't want to live your political career taking orders from other people, then you need to control it and controlling it means controlling your message means controlling your campaign, and controlling your campaign means you got to control your data. You have to be able to be able to access it without somebody looking over your shoulder and you'll be able to use it or withhold it. If you want to, if you're a candidate and you want to cut a deal with it, with a trade association or an advocacy group with whom you feel it's either a matter of principle that you align yourself with them or you feel that it's politically expedient, I don't really care about that. I mean, that's fine. Then you share your data with others, but if you want to keep it to yourself and you don't want your own data sometimes being used to undermine your own campaign, then you should look at a company like Aristotle. Has being in this industry changed how you personally give out information online, how you personally, are you more conscious of your own online privacy because of what you do? Not that Aristotle itself is hoovering up the information, but I mean has it made you more conscious as an individual consumer? You know, as an individual consumer, yeah, I think it has, I think it has, but I think, you know, again, how you choose to present yourself, your online self is up to you. I have a daughter who's now in medical school and I used to cringe when I would see all the stuff she would do online because, you know, she's a teenager and she had lots of friends. You know, it's stuff that we wouldn't even dream about. I said earlier that technology wasn't even used in campaigns when we started Aristotle. The first software program for a political campaign ever was written by my younger brother, my partner to this day. And it was written on an Apple II computer, right? And we scrounged and saved and got an Apple II computer, which was not technically the first personal computer ever, but it was certainly, this was one of the first of that batch. And, you know, that was the first time, up until that point, you kept the names of your supporters in a shoebox. And this was the idea was, you know, hey, this new fangled thing called a computer, can you be used to organize your lists and then you can print mailing labels or, you know, door walking sheets. So anyway, point being, none of that occurred before, you know, when we started the company. And there were milestones in terms of in unexpected ways. I mean, we were the first to offer online fundraising. So online fundraising, which is ubiquitous today, was not possible, first of all, before there was online, but also the Federal Elections Commission had a rule against making a contribution with a credit card. And the theory at the time was, well, credit cards can be very dangerous because you might make it, it might be a corporate credit card and then you make a contribution with a corporate credit card and then you have a corporation corrupting the election. Well, you know, you can get cash, right, which is a lot easier if your objective is to corrupt an election. So, but it effectively prevented online contributions that you could not put a contribution on a credit card. We challenged that rule along with another company, you know, in this space of another pioneer. And, you know, we said, look, there's no reason that corporate, that credit cards can't be used. You got the same disclosure issues, you got disclosed and made the contribution, and if it was a company that did it, you got to disclose that. So anyway, long story short, we've, we've, there have been a lot of changes and many of them things you wouldn't conceive of. We, as we move further and further into an era where campaigns are relying on data and, you know, and the bigger the campaign, the more data and the more they want access to, do, do we run into situations where almost the campaigns kind of are drowning in data, where the data, there's like diminishing returns. I'm, I'm mentioning, so years ago at Kato, we had, when there were the fusion centers that were set up after September 11th, so that law enforcement intelligence groups could talk to each other. We had a panel discussion here and I remember much the discussion was, and you saw this with like then the NSA surveillance stuff, was if you're, if all you're doing, if you're just trying to get your hands on data, at some point, like the data becomes almost counterproductive because you just, you have like so much of it that you can't figure out what it means and so you have to go back to, you know, like just ordinary detective work to find the terrorists or whatever. Do we, do we run that risk in campaigning? Like do sometimes campaigns just like, well I just, if I just get more data, I'll win, but there's like, what do you do with it? Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, look, if you don't have a, I, I, it's one of the reasons I, I do, do foreign campaigns and, and find them so enlightening and, and rewarding in a way is because you get back to the message, right? So you get back to how important what, you know, what the ballot question is. What is a voter in Uganda? What's on her mind when she walks up and checks the box and, and stands in the sun all this time and then finally gets to the front of the line, checks the box, casts her ballot. Sometimes at great risk to their personal safety or the family's security. The, the data is, the data and the software and the online funding, everything we've talked about. It is, yes, if you run a, often in a political campaign, you have no control over three of the four things that make, that decide what it's going to be, among them being, you know, the state of the economy. You have no control over the state of the economy. You know, the, the, who your opponent's going to be. You have no control over that. Did somebody else pick the, your opponent? But, but you do have control over, oh, then surprises, right? External factors. War, peace, all this other stuff goes on. But you do have control over the quality of the campaign you run. And that's where the data does come in. And yes, there's too much data. People are, you know, I've seen it happen before where, where campaigns have very sophisticated systems and they pull the wrong voters to the polls on election day. I think that's what happened in large part in, in 2016. Oh, interesting. All right. So, I mean, you don't need to pull the wrong voters, too many of the wrong voters when elections are decided by a couple thousand votes in certain, in certain areas. And so if you get, it's not just the wrong data, but it's misinterpreting how to use the data. And then on top of that, and more important than all that is, what's your message? And have you, you know, how credible you are? And are you a good, are you a good carrier of that message? And do people, do people like you? You know, it's a, it's a big part of it, too. So, that's tantalizing, where I mean, I think our listeners are going to perk up when they hear 2016, wrong voters pulled out of the polls. Flesh that out, out a little bit for us. Well, I think, I think in, you know, in, certain turnout models, if you are, you know, I'll, I'll oversimplify it. You, you rate, you know, you're, you're polling and your analysis and your strategy, their design, every voter gets assigned in simplistic terms a one to a five, right? Five meaning I got her, she's going to vote for me. And one means, you know, nah, I hope she stays home on election day. All right. And so you pull your fives first and then you pull your fours. And then you have to think really hard about whether you want to pull your threes, right? It depends on where you are and, and, and how confident you are. And you think the wins, a lot of factors that are scientific and a lot of factors that are not scientific. That assumes you're able to pull your voters at all. Assumes you have, you know, you have a campaign structure set up and some money and, and etc. was, you know, if you overshoot the mark and there's no, it's like a, you know, a kid in a go-kart without a governor on the engine, you just keep going faster and faster and you plow through your fives and your fours and you have this well-oiled machine that starts turning out threes and maybe God forbid twos. Or the ground has shifted underneath you in a particular area and those three, people that were threes or actually should be two and a halfs or twos, you know, you can be, find yourself in a situation where you're pulling the wrong kinds of voters. I think this happens often in political campaigns, where they have the execution down. They've got tons of volunteers and they're, they're, they're loaded for bear and they snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Sometimes, yeah, the turnout numbers in this last election in 2018 are phenomenal. I mean, it's, it is historically high turnout by almost, you know, a third more than in an off-year election. So everybody was turning out. I mean, everybody was turning out their voters this last election. Did somebody, did some of the wrong voters get turned out by the, by the, you know, the opposition? Probably. Yeah. When your margins of few tens of thousands of votes across the couple of states on the national election or it's a few hundred or a few thousand votes in some of these close, well, now going to recount elections, that makes a big difference. Look, if you campaign, if you decide you're not going to campaign in Wisconsin and you're going to instead get a campaign in Arizona as a presidential candidate on the Democratic side, your turnout, you're operating on faulty information. Okay. And the faulty information doesn't just, isn't just how we're doing in Arizona. Right. But it's also, you're so confident that you're doing really well in places where you're not doing so well that you end up losing Pennsylvania. So turning from domestic elections to overseas, you mentioned Kenya sooner. And so you were in Kenya to help, if I understand it correctly, the opposition party was running a candidate against the kind of ruling government in Nairobi. And there had been some really disturbing questions about fraud in the previous election cycle. There had been violence. So set up for us, what were you exactly trying to do for the opposition party there? So in Kenya, Aristotle was hired by Rila Odinga. And Odinga is a Kenyan political leader. He was well known for, in terms of what he stood for. He is a gifted politician, in my view. He was running against Kenyatta, who is the incumbent. And Kenyatta also had some things to be said for him. But obviously, I thought that Odinga was really, had a great message, great background and make a great president of Kenya. As you point out, the election against the backdrop, Kenya is supposed to be the cradle of democracy in Africa. It's supposed to be the shining star. It's how the rest of the continent, and you don't need to look very far to see examples of places where it's just a shambles. And the elections are a sham. But Kenya is supposed to be above that. And there are many, many millions of Kenyans who desperately want that to be the case. We were hired to help with the strategy and the transparency, the election day operations and transparency. And had been operating in the country for some time, working with the with Odinga's campaign and the party. About two weeks before the election, the technical head of the elections commission was abducted and murdered, dismembered and his body was dumped in the jungle. Despite the offers from Scotland Yard, from the FBI to help investigate the murder, the Kenyan government declined to take advantage of that at the time. So that was two weeks before the election. And the election was marred with regularities. Before election day, so this is the weekend before the election, on the election, what happened was my colleague, one of the people that works for Aristotle, was abducted. And I was abducted. Guys came in with the hoodies, broke through the door, handcuffed me, and tossed me in the trunk of a car. And off we went. So you know in your mind that this was after the abduction murder? After the murder of Masada. Okay, wow. That's running through your mind, okay. Yeah, I mean, I've been involved in political campaigns in a lot of, you know, rough places. I was involved in the campaign Afghanistan for the first, the man who's currently the president of Afghanistan. And, you know, Tunisia was the first real election after Arab Spring. So I've, you know, I'm accustomed to a certain amount of risk, but so we were abducted. And for about 24 hours we were held, you know, unable to communicate. At one point, it's sort of, I don't know if we have time to talk about this, but it's sort of, you know, in terms of sort of what happened during the 24 hours, it was, I'll put it this way, it was undemocratic. And, you know, the bigger tragedy was that the elections really were quite flawed. We had turned the corner, I say we, I really mean Odinga had turned the corner with the help of his supporters and the many millions of Kenyans that wanted to change in Kenya. The polling indicated that we were doing much better. And we, Odinga really had changed the entire tone and likely outcome of the election in a debate performance that Kenyana did not bother to show up for. So there was a certain contempt for the democratic process. But also, you know, it's hardball and there's a lot at stake. The, you know, there is now, there's been a power sharing agreement that's been entered into, you know, how that evolves we'll see. Odinga is, as I say, is a gifted leader. There are other very gifted Kenyan politicians that strive for democracy who will, you know, that will hear about in the future. It's by far and away not the worst place I've run an election campaign. And I love Kenya and I love the Kenyans. I'd love to go back, but I can't go back right now. Especially not at your risk of being abducted again. So I think some set of our listeners are going to hear that story and think about American political campaign consultant going overseas to help run a, you know, campaign in a, you know, in countries with sometimes questionable adherence to democratic norms. Though Kenya is not, I mean, has a more stable democratic foundation than, then say, Afghanistan or Tunisia did when you were there. And they're going to think about maybe someone who has more headlines in a similar situation. They're going to think maybe Paul Manafort, right? Someone else an American political campaign consultant known for running campaigns in unstable countries, going through political turmoil. So, you know, how is what you're doing different than, say, what Paul Manafort was doing? And I think I remember reading you ran a campaign in Ukraine. I don't know if it was at the same time Paul Manafort was also in Ukraine. I mean, what's that, not whether you have a personal relationship with Paul Manafort, but like that, that idea of Americans exporting political campaign consultancy to countries around the world. How do you, you know, how does that play when something like Paul Manafort happens? Is that, is that hard for Aristotle? Because people aren't thinking, oh, he backed this sympathetic dissident in Kenya. They're thinking, oh, another American getting involved in intervening in foreign politics. Right. So, it's a great question. And it's not a question that we don't ask ourselves in terms of what's our role going to be. I mean, we get, I'd like to think because of our reputation, track record, we, you know, we get asked to consider working in, in many countries and occasionally we, we turn it down. What we do is, and I'm making this, I'm not connecting this to Manafort at all, what, what we do is bring modern western style campaign techniques and technology and even strategy to campaigns where, and to places where that can make a difference. We are, often find ourselves on the opposite side, sometimes on the same side as other western, and by that I mean British, French, Italian, Spanish, Greek, German campaign teams that we've either been on the opposite side of in places where we've run elections or on the same side. So, these, the, the demand for campaign, for competent campaign management, especially, especially when it comes to election day tabulation and transparency. You know, a lot of these elections are disputed and they're disputed. I mean, we have recounts going on here right now. But a lot of these campaigns are, a lot of these election results are disputed because there is, and there's often widespread evidence of cheating, right? Being able to spotting the signs and being able to do the kind of forensics to say, look, had it not been for the destruction of all these ballot boxes over here, or these, you know, 125% of the registered voters here in this part of Ukraine could not have voted for all for the, you know, the Moscow back candidate. Those kinds of, it is, the West has a stake in the outcome of these elections. I was always struck by just how many American government employees are employed in Kenya. It's, it's a very large number. They're doing security, they're doing, you know, wildlife, all kinds of things that, that, so the US has a stake there as well. So I, you know, we're quite proud of the work that we do. The, the, the, the campaigns and the environments in which we find ourselves are, are, it's not Democracy 101, but we think we can make a difference and we're, we're quite open about it. Anybody goes and does this and thinks it's going to be a secret that they're walking around a place like Kenya, especially if you look like me. I mean, it's not, you know, you're not fooling anybody. And, you know, to the level, to the extent, as we said before, to the extent that the quality of the campaign, the communication, especially where there's going to be election cheating, that you can communicate that quickly, you can spot it, you can deter it, or worst case, you can, you can quantify it after the case. That's important. It's important whether the US government recognizes, you know, regimes that are elected with flawed democratic process. If we want to say that we're supporting a democratically backed government in a particular country, then the democratic process should be allowed to work its way through the, through the election. We ran long in our interview with John tonight, so we decided to cut the episode into two parts. Tune in next week as we change topics to discuss the political prediction market that calls elections more accurately than any pollster. We'll also talk about John's well-earned reputation back in the day as the A-bomb kid who designed a nuke in his college dorm room. You heard that right. Until then, be well. Building Tomorrow is produced by Test Terrible. If you enjoy our show, please rate, review, and subscribe to us on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. To learn about Building Tomorrow or to discover other great podcasts, visit us on the web at Libertarianism.org.