I submitted this interview the other day:
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/02/a-long-talk-with-demo...
I think it’s also worth listening to an interview he did with David Axelrod a couple years ago, and his recent interview on Pod Save America. Here also are a couple videos I’m recommending because they cover a variety of topics in the Q&A portion that I haven’t heard him speak about elsewhere:
- https://www.necn.com/news/new-england/Indiana-Mayor-Pete-But...
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nldx3r7h3Cg
I know this comment is obviously political but I think he deserves to be heard from.
He seems anomalous as a politician: smart along every dimension, incredibly well-rounded, and able to talk intelligently about policy (and philosophy and literature!) while avoiding the trap of talking down to people.
I don't know how he'll play nationally but I'm hopeful.
He did a SXSW town hall. I watched Tulsi Gabbard (disclosure, I volunteer for her a bit) first and then tried to watch Mayor Pete, as he is called.
He basically bombed the first 20 min. The period that any viewers would try to give the candidate any chance to better understand them.
He was just a bit too nervous, he was talking fast. This was a big contrast to methodical way Tulsi was speaking just prior to him her ability to connect was in a different level.
So you thought that would be the end of it all....
Nope! I observed a beautiful spin of manufacturing narratives.
Axelrod tweeted about how great Mayor Pete's performance was [1]
Soon after there was a ton of articles talking about much lauded performance of Buttigieg. I even called out the journalist behind one of these articles on twitter and it was clear she had not watched the town hall nor had done her research [2] I just went to find that discussion on twitter and she seem to have deleted as I do not see it under my tweet and replies.
Essentially I asked her about the "much lauded performance" in her article. I asked her where she got that from. She replied with a link to a CNN article which was all based on Axelrod's tweet. This journalist based her article on that CNN article. So I pointed out, this "much lauded performance" is based on just one tweet. The journalist then replied to me, I should just google "town hall and Buttigieg". Meaning she had no done any research herself. Point is, Pete Buttigieg who started his promotion from a podcast on Axelrod. I think there is a strong chance Mayor Pete is backed by Axelrod and/or at some point he'll hire Axelrod. Mayor Pete's rise bubbling up based on the inside influence of one person.
That being said, he is intelligent and I'm sure there is probably great excitement supporting the first gay (at least openly) candidate. However, it became clear to me, how a few insiders can create hype around one candidate and manufacture "lauded performance".
[1] - https://twitter.com/davidaxelrod/status/1104922963386630144
[2] - the tweet thread I was going point to is removed now
I've listened to or watched a bunch of his interviews now, both one on ones and in front of crowds, and he didn't seem nervous in a single one of those interviews, nor unable to connect to an audience. I've posted links to two of those above, but there are many more I could post in front of different sorts of audiences.
> Mayor Pete's rise bubbling up based on the inside influence of one person
He's been twice elected mayor and Axelrod didn't have anything to do with that, nor obviously anything to do with Buttigieg's background or education.
> he is intelligent and I'm sure there is probably great excitement supporting the first gay
That’s a pretty dismissive way of characterizing him. That he is gay doesn't factor into my excitement for him, and he would rather that not be the reason people vote for him either.
I think he’s the only democratic candidate who’s not divisive, business as usual, lacking political experience, full of hot air, without something in their past to apologize for, or some combination there of.
Have you considered that because of your affinity for Gabbard, you overestimated her ability to connect? Or that you are overconfident in your ability to estimate who had the objectively superior SXSW town hall performance?
Plenty of people into politics will give a candidate more than 20 minutes to make their case, especially now that they've seen what happens when you make emotional snap judgments about who you vote for.
Axelrod may have sparked the media interest in Mayor Pete with a tweet, but Buttigieg has handled the attention and impressed people on his own.
The issue he lead with in his first 15 minutes was how he would restructure the supreme court to be 10 judges or something. Not health care, climate change, or the economy. If the host hadn't introduced him as a presidential candidate I would have thought he was some professor that they brought on the podcast.
To even begin to be successful in 2020 he's going to have to focus his message and speak with conviction. He would get destroyed going up against Warren/Harris/Bernie/Trump.
Here’s a 2 minute clip of you just want the inspirational part:
His standard speech starts with explaining why you should vote for a 37 y/o mayor, followed by his “freedom, democracy, security” bit. He almost always talks about the environment very early. I imagine on that podcast he only mentioned SCOTUS because he was specifically asked about it and it’s probably likely to be one of his most controversial proposals (the idea isn’t his though, he credits it properly but I don’t recall to whom).
Without the freedom for real amounts of money to come in and exploit mispriced bets, it's practically a straw poll of PredictIt users. The PredictIt user base has some obvious demographic biases that warp the odds.
For example, if I were to sign up and bet against Yang at 5% odds, even if I won my bet, I'd make $0 profit because my entire withdrawal amount is taxed at 5%. If Yang's odds were set at less than 5%, I'd actually lose money even though I won my bet!
Given this, the market for low likelihood outcomes is extremely inefficient and it's very plausible that these odds are being gamed by candidates vying for attention.
The weaker form of your argument "Without the caps it's biased toward people who can make big bets" is the entire point of a betting market.
Edit: The one edge case where it might happen is precisely this article. Buying your way to say 5% after some organic positive press might be an effective way to buy buzz at relatively low cost. It's a small one time boost for a campaign though.
Trump: +175
Biden: +650
Beto: +900
Yang: +2200
Buttigieg: +2800
Warren: +3000
Klobuchar/Booker: +3300
Hillary: +10000
The Rock: +12500
Jeb: +15000
(payout for a $100 bet)
Also interesting to mention the crossover between Yang supporters and the crypto community: https://breakermag.com/five-reasons-crypto-fans-are-joining-...
Ambiguous markets are ... not good.
I'm vaguely sympathetic to the idea of "elect a business person so they can run government like a business", but any openness to the idea goes out the window when the candidate's business is venture capital.
There are lessons and principles that government can take from business - like treating customers well and resource efficiency. But anyone who says they are going to “run government like a business” is dumb. They require very different forms of leadership.
As a CEO you can pretty much tell people what to do. You are their boss. You are paying them. If you say we are doing something then it generally happens. The downside is no one tells you unpleasant truths.
In government most all of the time you are building consensus. You provide a vision and try to rally people around it. You build relationships. You compromise. You appeal to common goals. Things often happen more gradually. But when big things happen they can improve many lives.
[1] https://twitter.com/AndrewYang/status/1107126100163858432
This has come up with the current president's most-dimwitted son and it's so hysterical it bears repeating. US taxpayers and voters are not the customer. They're the board.
Besides, the president's only tasks should be international diplomacy, commander of the military, and doing what the Congress says. They can be "ideas gals/guys," but he/she shouldn't be independently making huge decisions outside of war scenarios. That doesn't sound like a CEO to me.
I really don't want a government that ruthlessly cuts costs that don't drive revenue and uses all mechanisms within reach to maximize lock-in and extract monopoly rents from customers.
But anyway, it's not new. That was a lot of that maybe a century ago in the US.
Like it or not, we need politicians who can work across the aisle and actually get things done.
To work with someone across the aisle you have to have someone on the other side of the aisle who wants to work with you. The republicans have made it absolutely clear over the past decade that they will not work with Democrats. Centrist Democrats need work with their colleagues to their left if they want to accomplish anything.
If the proposed action is part of / agreeable with the $opposing_party platform, I don't think I _want_ it to get done; with extraordinarily few exceptions.
I'd prefer someone who can push forward without compromising the point of the platform.
One with multiple bankruptcies too!
There's no compromise state; instead, there's at best some kind of tit-for-tat, where you'll concede something else in exchange for your most important plans.
Biz and govt are two separate things, I don't understand how one can be run like the other. Sure, there are some overlaps, but thats about it. Can someone explain?
I'm being charitable that no one actually believes that garbage at it's heart, but the other explanation might be garden-variety insanity.
I don't know what it means when politicians say it, aside from being an appeal to the above. Possibly they mean the same thing.
[EDIT] incidentally, it's almost entirely associated with the Right. Unusual to see it brought up as a point in favor of a Democrat.
[EDIT EDIT] awinder probably nailed what it means when politicians say it, and/or why it's an idea some of them have promoted.
In Canada, this is called a "crown corporation".
Canadian examples include CATSA (like the TSA), CBC (TV network), VIA Rail (like Amtrak), LCBO and Ontario Cannabis Retail Corporation (provincial monopolies on alcohol and marijuana sales, respectively).
In theory, at least some of this makes sense. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like businesspeople who have "made enough money" tend to show any desire to rest on their laurels and decide enough is enough. And a businessperson who runs for office is just as likely as anyone else to be running to get power and notoriety.
And of course, businesses do well by leveraging debt. And they have handouts and nepotism and corruption.
At least, if you're talking about Venture for America, it's more of a YC or TechStars. It's a non-profit designed to help entrepreneurs start companies.
Prior to that, I think he was the CEO of Manhattan Prep before it getting acquired by Kaplan.
Operational experience is not my concern.
> applying an investment mindset to them
This is my concern. I don't trust people in the VC industry to have a healthy concept of an investment mindset.
Or being the activist investor that breaks up the business and sells what's profitable.
I mean, didn't we try that already, and quite recently for that matter? It doesn't seem to be working very well. What makes you think that Yang can do better than that?
This is a terrible idea for a society. Typical businesses are internally dictatorships that are single-minded, intolerant of dissent, very controlling (my employer reads my E-mails and lately they are setting up a ton of cameras) and are designed to funnel rewards to only few people. That's not a good mindset to run a whole country. We can't just lay off people to cut costs.
I think that's why Trump seems to get better along with dictators like Erdogan, Putin or Kim Jong Un than with democratic leaders. their leadership is much closer to what he is used from his business.
Running government more efficiently would be nice but I don't see the ex-business people who got elected into government do better than other politicians.
But I wouldn't say we shouldn't trust online phenomenon. Online phenomenon is why Obama and Trump got elected. Trump has effectively bypassed the traditional media's stranglehold on the american mind via his use of twitter and social media. And online phenomenon is why we have occasio-cortez.
As the internet gains more mind share, we have to start taking the online space more seriously.
There’s no reason to believe any internet content amplifying the message of any candidate (or president) is genuine. In fact given the findings of the past several years it’s better to assume online content is in fact generated rather than genuine.
Is there an age that is too old to be a CEO/President/Senator/leading figure? Are they necessarily out of touch, lacking in resiliency, not forward-looking, or any of the factors we look for in our leaders?
- President is unlike CEO/Senator/leading figure in that it has a fixed 4 year cycle (even Senator's can be democratically replaced in a few months with a by election).
- President is unlike the others in that it has a built in redundancy, the vice president. You should probably weight your opinion of the vice president candidate stronger when considering a president who is likely to become ill.
- Extremely old people seem to be as likely to be forward looking to me as middle aged people, perhaps more so. Many still care about their legacy, they probably have less concerns about personal wealth.
- Every presidential candidate is necessarily out of touch, you don't get to be in that position if you lead an even remotely normal life.
Lincoln wasn't wealthy until he married into money. Carter and Truman were upper middle class. Eisenhower and Grant were on boring career paths that usually end with one retiring as a Lt. Colonel or thereabouts before history got in their way.
Younger candidates simply don't have to contend with that reckoning. But they have a lot less experience. You could make the case that experience should be good for a candidate, but that it doesn't always work out that way.
Specific cutoff age? I'd say not. But I would think that we should require of candidates a full independent medical workup from an independent practice, such as [1]. The kind of nonsense reports we get from the doctor selected by the person currently occupying the PResident's chair are clearly farcical.
(Of course, also beyond the bare constitutional requirements and the independent med workup, should be added: 2) minimal prior service as an elected official, 3) pass a standard HS Science & Technology test, 4) pass the INS Citizenship exam, 5) release a decade of tax returns, and perhaps a few other requirements that inform the citizenry of who is seeking the job... but what do I know, I'm just one of 300MM on the hiring committee)
[1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/departments-centers/mayo-clinic-e...
Reagan was beloved but probably starting to exhibit senility by the end of his 2nd term (he was 70 when first elected) if not even earlier. I'd worry about Bernie/Biden in that regard too.
Not really.
> Are they necessarily out of touch, lacking in resiliency, not forward-looking, or any of the factors we look for in our leaders?
No; The statistical probability may be higher with age, but we don't elect an age and get a random person of that age as a leader, so that's not important. Filtering for that is what election campaigns, executive search processes, etc., are for.
His fundamental point is one that our society needs to contend with - "high tech" is the oil of the 21st century. Do we want that wealth to be concentrated into a few world-historical fortunes? Or do we want to use it to improve the lives of everyone?
So, are they just very leading indicators? It got me thinking that it's a relatively cheap campaign strategy since people like to refer to those as some sort of "market based odds" thing. Is it legal and/or ethical for campaigns to buy themselves on the betting markets to drive up the appearance of demand?
We'll see come the Apr 1 FEC reporting deadline if it translates to campaign donations, which are on of the real signals of the seriousness of campaigns.
AFAIK, there is no evidence that early standing in prediction markets is any better a predictor than early polling; prediction markets tend to converge to the ultimate result close to the election, but so do polling numbers.
There is a huge betting market selection bias in that the only people using these betting platforms are young and tech-savvy (i.e. the type of people who are in these candidates' base). Additionally, you can place nominally small bets, meaning there is no real skin in the game. Increase the minimum bet size to $10,000 or so and I think the odds will become much more realistic.
Running for, and even attaining, office is a stepping stone to or enhancing move for an entertainment career, and vice-versa, in a way and to a degree I'm pretty sure it didn't used to be in the fairly recent past. And an entertainment career is even more of a feedback-loop into any other business ventures one might have than it used to be, and it already very much was. I mean, being a celebrity used to help with running for office for obvious reasons, but now running for office is a pretty good action to take if you want to become a celebrity.
"Enhance your personal brand today—run for office! Just remember, your number one goal isn't winning, it's raising your profile. If you happen to win that's great, but it's beside the point. Feel free to be crazy and weird. Worst case, run as an R and as long as your activities and personality are notorious enough you're guaranteed a steady income for the occasional appearance on Fox News as an expert in... well, doesn't matter really! Maybe they'll even give you your own show! Have a book ghostwritten—it's like free money!"
I did find the weekly campaign updates, which are okay as far as they go.
https://www.amazon.com/War-Normal-People-Disappearing-Univer...
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/heres-how-were-defining...
If prediction markets had more depth, I’m sure we would see politics hedge funds emerge.
But knowing little of his background (e.g. career, wealth, any other attempts at politics), I think it's cool as hell he acted on what must have been a wild "what if" idea to join the race. I'd like to think that the more normal, non-political-machine-produced humans who go through this process, the more accessible and interesting that process will be to the average person.
It seems Yang afigured out how to "hack" the Democratic primary process to get on the national debate stage. I call it a "hack" because someone like me thinks the possibility of a no-namer like Yang on stage with Sanders and Warren is too absurd a reality to imagine. But Yang did his research and found he could target the minimum requirement of having 65,000 donors [0] -- a number that seems laughably low, because of how easy it is today for anyone with a phone/computer to make small donations, coupled with Internet platforms like Reddit that let Yang find voters/donors who aren't willing to provide the traditional value (e.g. large donations), but can make all the difference when the metric is number of people, not cash on hand.
Yang likely has no chance in the primary, so I won't have to wonder if my vote for/against him would have been even slightly biased by subconscious feelings about solidarity with other Asian-Americans. However, I like that I can just marvel at the sight of an Asian-American strolling on this rarefied political stage, like it's a normal thing. And yet, it isn't -- It's something I don't think I ever thought I'd see in my life. Not because I think there's a hard barrier of racial/social injustice. It's just something I had apparently had no reason to imagine or contemplate. Just like I don't ever normally contemplate the idea of 2 cats trying to steer a Tesla. There's nothing that logically blocks that concept in real life. But seeing it in real still feels like a small, happy surprise.
0: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/candidates-reach-for...
Unless the Democrats suddenly decide to stop playing identity politics they're going to choose someone based on gender/race (female/not white).
His Universal Basic Income proposal is the most interesting thing in politics in a long time. It is actually feasible and will get us on the track to post-capitalism.
You are an American? You are a citizen? You get a thousand bucks a month. Funded by 10% VAT.
The freedom dividend: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTkhrosH8xw
" there is “no indication” O’Rourke actually ever broke into computers or even possessed the skills to do so. Instead, O’Rourke’s membership is linked to his participation in online discussion forums ran by the group. Beto himself operated one such forum known as “TacoLand” to discuss mostly punk rock."
https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/beto-orourke-infamous-hacker...
Who wouldn't want to get $1000 a month? Would you? of course you do...
