A few podcasts that I think are worth your time. Somve very smart people here talking about the state of our country in fairly non-partison way.

Ezra Klein show with Francis Fukuyama

This one, more than anything I’ve ever heard or read, coherently describes many problems in government today. Some excerpts:

“I coined a phrase in the book — “vetocracy,” meaning “rule by veto.” And the broader argument is that the American political system has always made it very hard for the government to actually do things because it gives a lot of parts of the political system veto rights over what the system does.”

If you think about the problem in terms of identity, we have these people who used to be in the dominant culture in the country. And all of a sudden, all these other identity groups appear, and they’re getting affirmative action and seem to be getting government policy. And [they] say, “What about us?” Because being working class has put us at these huge disadvantages, objectively. I think that is the anxiety behind it, and you can’t just say, “It’s racism and bigotry.”

Ezra Klein show with Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell has written some amazing books about how humans work. If you haven’t read any you should - Outliers is a good place to start.

I think the internet, as it is presently configured, in 25 years or 50 years from now will seem like a very bizarre experiment gone awry. That the idea of building a system fundamentally for every human interaction that is incapable of defending itself is insane. I mean, insane …. Two years ago, the State Department server had to be shut down because there was Russian malware on it that they couldn’t get rid of. Snowden makes off with all of the diplomatic cables, and then OPM [Office of Personnel Management] gets hacked — every single file of every American who has ever applied for a national security clearance is in the hands of the Chinese. The federal government — the entire cyber apparatus of the federal government — is Swiss cheese. And we’re still having an argument about it being on her BlackBerry. If it was on her Blackberry, it’d be 100 times safer than on the State Department server. …. How long can this go on? At a certain point, we’re going to say: We need a new internet. The internet is a fuck-up! I don’t understand how no one sees this.

I had never thought about this before. Maybe we should start over, build the internet over from the ground up.

This American Life - 601 - Master of Her Domain…Name

As Americans we should not be upset about the fact that Hillary Clinton had a private server. However, we should be very mad that she, and many of her predecessors, needed a server because of how bad our government handles Tech.

“The way Hillary and her top aides dealt with her e-mails is indeed scandalous. It’s just a totally different scandal than people thought.” - Sean Cole “I think a lot of us thought that this was done out of sophistication. That it was done out of this very advanced Machiavellian understanding of federal records laws and advanced knowledge of computer technology. But by the time the FBI got done with all of these interviews, it becomes really clear it was actually done out of technological ignorance.” - Garret Graff

I hope you enjoy.

-M