Sen. Michael Bennet talks tech in the next election

The Verge's Makena Kelly and Nilay Patel sit down with senator and presidential candidate Michael Bennet to discuss his new book "Dividing America" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

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• 1:00Nilay Patel?

  Hey, everybody. It's Neil I from the Vergecast on this week's interview episode. I'm joined by Verge Policy Reporter McKenna Kelly. We talked to Senator Michael Bennett. He's the senator from Colorado. He's also a Democrat running for president in 2020. He wrote a book called Dividing America, which is all about Russian election interference in the 2016 election. It's basically a comprehensive catalog of all the disinformation the Russian government spread using social networks during the 2016 election. It looks like a lot of photos of memes, but they were very targeted. And he explains exactly how they were used and what their goals were. It's super interesting. He has a new proposal out to strengthen our elections heading into 2020. So we talked about that. We also talked about tech policy generally, what he wants to do with social media moderation, talked about antitrust,

• 1:43Nilay Patel?

  talked about the Electoral College, and we ended very specifically talking about iPhone versus Android. It was a very end of conversation. I really enjoyed it. Check it out. This is Senator Michael Bennett on the Vergecast.

• 1:57Nilay Patel?

  Senator Michael Bennett, welcome to The Vergecast.

• 1:59Speaker 03

  Thank you for having me.

• 2:00Nilay Patel?

  Thanks for being here. I've got Makena Kelly here, a Verge policy reporter.

• 2:03Speaker 04

  Hello.

• 2:04Nilay Patel?

  So, you are running for president.

• 2:06Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:06Nilay Patel?

  And what's really interesting is you just put out a plan to secure our elections and defend democracy. You've written a book about Russian election interference, and I really want to dig into that with you. I want to talk about tech policy, that's what we do here. I think there's a lot of questions about tech policy that are at the forefront of this election cycle, actually. But first, we've got to have a good election. It seems, you know, your book says the 2016 election was interfered with by Russia. It lays it out. Actually, it's a pretty remarkable catalog of memes, fundamentally, but very provoking memes from the Russians. And then you've got a plan to maybe fix it.

• 2:44Speaker 03

  I thought it was important for the American people to actually see the content in one place. Weirdly, we did it digitally, but we also have a terrestrial version, which I brought with me today, because I was trying to get it into a medium that people would be able to react to. You know, so much of what they see on social media just goes by them in a flurry. And actually, this Russian propaganda did as well. It was a year before we knew it was Russian propaganda. It was lost in our own political vocabulary or discussion, which, that should prompt a pretty serious question to begin with, which is, what does it mean to our society that this really vile racist stuff, we couldn't recognize as Russian propaganda? We saw it as our own political discussion that was going on. And then, second,

• 3:29Speaker 03

  what does it say that the Russians saw our diversity and our pluralism as a weakness to be attacked? What you'll see if you read the book is that they take every side of every issue. They're pro-police, and then they're pro-Black Lives Matter. They're pro-African-American, anti-African-American, pro-immigrant, anti-immigrant, pro-Muslim, anti-Muslim, because they don't care about the substance of anything they're doing, they just care about fomenting disunion. And that's what they've been doing in Western Europe, that's what they did when they had their hand in Brexit. And we have a president who won't even acknowledge it. We have a president who went to Helsinki and stood next to Vladimir Putin and took Putin's word over our intelligence agency's words. He went to...

• 4:13Speaker 03

  Japan and said there, he made a joke of it. And it's not a joke. And the reason I wanted to put it out is we have to prepare ourselves for the next election.

• 4:22Nilay Patel?

  So there are some interlocking issues here. First is just saying it happened, which the intelligence agencies have said it. You're saying it. Robert Mueller said it. It happened. Then there's what are you going to do about it? And then there's just the simple fact that Facebook is a private company in the United States of America, and most of it happened on Facebook.

• 4:42Speaker 03

  And that subject, I'd be really interested in getting into with you because I'm interested in your perspective on that. Before we get to Facebook, I'd say from our, from the vantage point of our national security, the most important thing would be to have a president who not only acknowledged that this happened, but sent a very strong message to Vladimir Putin that we're never going to allow this to happen to us again. And that's partly a process of sanctioning the Russians for doing what they did. It's partly a process of making sure that we are dusting off our arsenal of tools to be able to respond to this sort of cyber attack and that they know that we will respond to this sort of cyber attack. It's not just us, as I said, it's all of Western Europe.

• 5:25Speaker 03

  You talk to any ambassador from any of those countries and they're deeply worried about the Russian support for these right wing parties in their countries and what they're doing through cyber. I actually heard the other day for the first time that in Eastern Europe, the old Eastern Europe, there now are television stations that are devoted to cleaning up the mistrues that have been spread by Russia during the course of the day. And they go through story after story saying, this is the stuff you need to deal with. So I think that's sort of, the first part is pushing back and making sure that we won't let them do it again. We have to harden our own networks. We have to harden our Secretary of State's offices all over the country.

• 6:07Speaker 03

  That's not something that, that Dade County, Florida, and that's a big place, can do on their own. I think as a nation, we have to make sure that we're protected. And then we have to decide what the responsibilities are of these private platforms to make sure that they are also. Doing what they can to keep this content off. The Congress can pass some things, and I think we should, to make sure that foreign actors and foreign governments can't buy ads, can't buy political ads on our networks. We need to require the same disclosure rules that exist on our broadcast networks for political ads on our social media, it seems to me. And those are just a few things that we could sort of start with.

• 6:48Speaker 04

  What the senator is talking about right now is Amy Klobuchar, Mark Warner, and Lindsey Graham's Bipartisan Honest Ads Act. And that's something that's been sitting around since, I think, 2017, something that already passed through HR 1, I believe, in the House and is waiting to be taken up in the Senate. Why don't you think Mitch McConnell is taking something as sensible as that up?

• 7:08Speaker 03

  I think that, I can tell you that it's not, at least not until recently, it's not because he's passing background checks for guns. He's not been occupied with that task either. I think the president doesn't want this stuff on the floor of the Senate. He seems to have some concern that if we take this seriously, it's a reflection that he didn't win the election. I don't take that position. He won the election. But I do believe that the Russian, I don't just believe, I know, the intelligence community has told us the Russians interfered in a very material way. It would seem to me that the Majority Leader of the United States has an obligation to put this kind of legislation on the floor. As you mentioned, it's bipartisan, and it's already passed the House of Representatives. There's nothing controversial about it.

• 7:52Speaker 03

  I think the president just has probably told Mitch McConnell not to, not to put it there. It's another reason why I put this book out, because it gives people the opportunity to go to russia hacked our democracy dot com, and for a small amount of money, you can send one of these books to Mitch McConnell and tell him that he should put this legislation on the floor.

• 8:13Speaker 04

  Right, and you mentioned that it's not a controversial bill. Even Facebook, Twitter, Google, the major platforms are already implementing their own ads database, which the bill would require.

• 8:21Speaker 03

  Right.

• 8:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, when Mark Zuckerberg is like that honest ads act seems pretty good. Actually, my instinct is like, maybe it's not good enough.

• 8:28Speaker 03

  Same with me. That he's like closing the barn door before it all gets out. That's one of the things that drove me crazy about this, too, is for a long time, Facebook seemed not to know that they were running Russian ads. Facebook seemed to not, it didn't occur to anybody there that it was odd that they were getting paid in rubles for these racist ads. And Zuckerberg, at the beginning of all this, said, no, I really don't think that happened on Facebook. And only later did he admit that it happened on Facebook. And now the question is, what are you going to do about it? And it's not just these ads. It's also the corrosive nature of the discussion on social media. I was, I had a Facebook person say to me once, you don't want Mark Zuckerberg deciding whether this tax bill has created

• 9:09Speaker 03

  a deficit or hasn't created a deficit. And I said, I'm not so sure. I don't know. I don't know what the answer is, but I do know that if I was having this level of effect on the nation's democracy, I'd want to know that I was using my powers for good and not for evil. And unfortunately, in our political system, it's basically been used for evil.

• 9:31Nilay Patel?

  So I want to kind of delineate between a couple of different categories of things you've discussed. There is the election process in Miami-Dade County, right? And I think your proposal is we need some paper ballots.

• 9:44Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 9:45Nilay Patel?

  We need to, we need to actually secure the mechanism of voting and the election. And I think when people say hacktour democracy, hacktour election, the first thing they think of is, okay, there's a bunch of non-air-gapped voting machines out there that are on the open internet. That was a report that just came out. And Russian cyber criminals are changing the vote counts. I think that's most people's instinctive understanding of hacktour election. But the real problem is a bunch of memes on Facebook.

• 10:13Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 10:14Nilay Patel?

  And those seem like radically different concepts, radically different kinds of problems to solve. Do you think they should be solved at the same time?

• 10:21Speaker 03

  First of all, I agree with you that they're radically different. I also think the fact that they didn't spend a lot of, let me see, how do I say this? The Russians are Probing and the fact that they haven't yet tried to take over these systems doesn't mean they can't and it doesn't mean we don't want to be protected against that. So that's that is one set of issues. The other set of issues is the social media component and I think it is we should be addressing them at the same time because they're both corrosive and they both create a lack of trust in our in each other and in our democracy. Look, we're living in an era which is profoundly unlike the the the America that I grew up in in many ways and other people grew up in, which was a heritage of disagreement and

• 11:06Speaker 03

  those disagreements were used to fashion in the end durable and imaginative results. That was, I think, the idea of our founding was, look, which was not a very democratic founding, but over time became more democratic. The idea was, we're gonna have a lot of disagreements because we live in a free country. We should expect to have disagreements. And the question is, can we take those disagreements and make them into a much more emphatic and interesting policy outcome than any king or tyrant could come up with on their own? That was the idea. And when we're at our best, that's what we're doing. We completely lost the ability to do that at our national level of government. And because of the way these and you know this stuff much better than I do, but because of the way these social media sites are set

• 11:49Speaker 03

  up to perpetuate conflict and to to to keep your eyeballs on there because you're looking at, you know, the car accident that you can't take your eyes away from, that's creating more, I think that's creating a lot more anger and polarity in our political discourse. And that's a real danger for a democracy. And I don't know whether you guys have the solution to that, but I think the last 10 or 15 years of this is showing us that if we do this for another 10 or 15 years, we could smash the whole thing into smithereens.

• 12:18Nilay Patel?

  So it's interesting.

• 12:19Speaker 03

  That's a technical term.

• 12:20Nilay Patel?

  It's the Michael Bennett plan to not smash democracy into smithereens.

• 12:25Speaker 03

  Right.

• 12:26Nilay Patel?

  He should change that title. He can take that. The world's free.

• 12:28Speaker 03

  I'll take it.

• 12:29Nilay Patel?

  What you're describing to me is something we cover a lot. We talk about a lot. It's fundamentally a content moderation issue. What's gonna be on Facebook? Who's allowed to post?

• 12:40Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 12:41Nilay Patel?

  What are they allowed to post? So some of these memes, and I really, the book is, on the website, people should go look at it. It's an exhaustive collection of these images. A lot of them look like things people would post. And they are designed to sow division. And you actually call out some, some dark patterns in there, the calls to action, the push this button, make sure you engage.

• 13:00Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 13:01Nilay Patel?

  That's just stuff a, I don't know, branded content agency would do. So what, where is the line? What do you, should it just be people from Russia shouldn't be allowed to post on Facebook? Should it be that they shouldn't be allowed to pay to promote their stuff to people in the United States?

• 13:15Speaker 03

  I think those things are clearly, clearly should be true. Why should, why should Russia be able to use our social media platforms to attack the United States of America through subterfuge? I mean, you would not, look, it's hard to think of what the terrestrial equivalent of this is, but I suppose it would be allowing the local editorial page to be taken over by the Russians. Or allowing the local TV station to be taken over by, for an hour or two during the week by the Russians. We would never have allowed that. And we shouldn't allow that here. So I think banning that is really important. But I, I think it's beyond that. I mean, you see this sort of racist stuff that's being posted. And they argue that it's just a platform and that, then therefore it's okay to have racist stuff.

• 13:59Speaker 03

  Or seeing people getting their heads cut off on television, or on the internet. I mean, as a parent and as, as a citizen of this country, I don't think that's good enough. And I don't know where the line is, but you know what they say about civilization? It consists of drawing lines. So we got to figure out someplace where we can draw the line. And, and, and a mechanism so that over time, we can balance the need to have full and free expression in the country, protect ourselves as a nation, and also, I think in the end, find a way for some of these platforms to actually serve the needs of the democracy rather than compromise them. In other words, it's not obvious to me, I don't know this stuff as well, again, as you guys do,

• 14:41Speaker 03

  but it's not obvious to me that social media shouldn't be a constructive democratizer of our society. So far, it really hasn't been that. And so far, it really has sort of propped up tyrants in the Middle East more than it's propped up. You know, revolutionaries in the Middle East, but that doesn't mean it will always be that way.

• 15:01Nilay Patel?

  So, what's really interesting to me with that, you said, they say they're just a platform. That walks you right into a raging debate about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. You know, Senator Hawley wants to effectively hand enforcement of it to the FTC and FCC. It kind of looks like a licensing regime to run a social media platform and you have to prove you're not biased. The president suggested that the FTC and FCC should be the speech police effectively. Do you have a position on 230?

• 15:30Speaker 03

  Well, I think even Wyden, the guy that wrote the bill to begin with, says that it's being used in ways it was never intended to be used and that it wasn't, it wasn't supposed to create immunity for massive internet companies. So, I think we need, we need to look at that and figure out what to do about it and what, where the guardrails really are. That, it was about, it was at a moment in our time when these companies were just getting off the ground and they were trying to give them, in an uncertain future, some protection, I think, from lawsuits about the content that was, were on those websites. Those days are obviously long gone. I mean, right now, the only people that really can police Facebook right now, I think, is Facebook.

• 16:14Speaker 03

  Because they are the only ones that have the resources that are required to really do it. That doesn't mean that the federal government shouldn't be telling them what they should be doing, but they're the ones who have the cash flow to be able to protect us from content that we need to be protected from. It's a challenge, I mean, I'm not saying it's not without its challenges, but I, I'm always, my, my antenna go up when I hear them talk about themselves as a platform, when I hear them trudge themselves in the First Amendment. They're not a government agency. They are a, which means the federal government, the First Amendment doesn't apply in the way that they claim that it does. Which is not to say that those values aren't still important, that free expression isn't still important. But we ought to make it work better for the American people than it is.

• 16:59Speaker 03

  And I think they've got a, whether they believe they have it or not, I think they've got a fiduciary responsibility to the democracy. That's how I would feel about it if I were in their shoes.

• 17:09Speaker 04

  To be the devil's advocate, though, to pretend I'm Mark Zuckerberg, to pretend I'm Jack Dorsey, I would say that maybe the line has already been pushed too far. Because we already have politicians, the president over the weekend was tweeting about Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy theories.

• 17:23Speaker 03

  Right.

• 17:24Speaker 04

  We had, he was retweeting an account that ended up being what looked like a Russian bot. So when you have people in power who are already using their platforms to spread this speech, it's difficult, as a platform, I assume, to knock down that speech, to remove it, to get it off the platform, because maybe, as voting citizens, we need to know whether or not our leaders-

• 17:49Speaker 03

  Is the president good at Twitter?

• 17:50Speaker 04

  Is the president good at Twitter? Is he, is he trying to push this propaganda? And I think that's something that Twitter and Facebook have been struggling with as well.

• 17:57Speaker 03

  Well, I think this book is full of examples that were pushed around by the, by people close to the Trump campaign during the course of their campaign to try to improve their chances against Hillary Clinton. And it was used to, to magnify attacks that were made on Hillary Clinton. And if you're asking whether that's okay with me and this democracy, it's not okay with me. I don't think, it's also not okay with me that the president of the United States spends all his time on Twitter, but that's, I think, another topic. We need somebody who's actually doing the job. You know, Twitter doesn't run itself by tweet. It doesn't. It's an enterprise that has a governing board, that has fiduciary responsibilities and obligations to its shareholders and to, and we can't run our politics this way.

• 18:42Speaker 03

  Now, that's not something you can regulate. That's something that, I think, elections determine, is whether we're going to have somebody who spends all his time watching cable TV and tweeting foreign policy, or whether we're going to have a president who takes that stuff seriously.

• 18:56Nilay Patel?

  So, just to step back from 2:30, because it's a raging debate and it's very weedsy and it's a lot of lawyers. The choices are, can we make the platforms moderate more, which carries a huge cost, right? Platform moderate, we cover this all the time. There are, Facebook has armies of contractors sitting-

• 19:13Speaker 03

  That's right, yeah, yeah.

• 19:14Nilay Patel?

  And, you know, they're making minimum wage in, in Phoenix and in Florida. They don't live great lives. But if we moderate more, we have to impose more of that cost. Or we can moderate less. Because it doesn't seem like anybody's happy with the amount of moderation that exists right now. So where do you think?

• 19:30Speaker 03

  What do you get by moderating less, do you think? Obviously, you have fewer people in those jobs that you described that don't sound that good.

• 19:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I would say that the conservative, I'm putting conservative in quotes, but the conservative approach is, hey, we're being deplatformed, hey, there's a bias against our speech.

• 19:49Speaker 03

  Right.

• 19:50Nilay Patel?

  We need to have the government step in and make sure you're neutral, which effectively means moderate hate speech less. Like, that's my read of it. But that's less, right? And that the amount that they're being moderated now is the amount that is causing them to scream that there's bias against them. So that side is not happy with, they would like it to be less. I would like it to be moderated more, and I know that it carries this cost. I'm asking, you think the answer is more?

• 20:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think the answer is more, and I think every day, when we feel like we're losing more and more control of our destiny and of our future, it begs the question, what responsibility does this platform is going to have for themselves, or be driven to have by the government? It'd be better if they would make more attempts to self-regulate. I think that would be better from their vantage point. I think that would be better from our vantage point, because, you know, I think the government is usually quite a terrible regulator, or often is a terrible regulator, and creates unintended consequences because of what we try to do. But I think we have to do it. It's not okay to live in a society where these guys, you know, spend months and months and months and months and months getting indoctrinated into the idea that they're going

• 20:56Speaker 03

  to get an assault weapon, buy a 100-round clip, and go blow up a school somewhere or something else. We can't just accept that as a current state. We wouldn't accept it if people were being indoctrinated on Facebook to become ISIS fighters here. And so we have to figure out how we're going to do it and protect ourselves.

• 21:17Nilay Patel?

  So that's the full range of things we need to moderate. Specifically, when it comes to Russian interference going into 2020.

• 21:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:24Nilay Patel?

  Are there specific?

• 21:25Speaker 03

  I think the most important thing that we need to do is harden our infrastructure so that we don't have stuff running on Windows 2.0 that any, like, high school kid could hack in the Secretary of State's offices around this country. I think we need to get the American people to understand what happened to them, because they don't understand it. I was in a, it was amazing, I was in a Nursing home in Manchester, New Hampshire, and I'd finished, we had a good conversation about all kinds of stuff. I walked out, there's a guy in his 90s who said to me, "Hey, just make sure Obama," and this was just recently, I mean Obama doesn't really have a role to play anymore, "but just make sure Obama stops giving away veterans' money to refugees."

• 22:09Speaker 03

  This is what he said to me. That is straight out of the Russian propaganda that's in this book, and that the Russians ran, and is a good illustration of the fact that most Americans have no idea. If they looked at this stuff, they would think, "Oh, this is just some white supremacist website, or this is some pro-gun website." They wouldn't know this is the Russians that are doing it. And so that's another important piece. And then a third piece is, we gotta push back on the Russians. We gotta sanction them for what they've done, and we've gotta make sure they know that we've got ways of reciprocating.

• 22:41Nilay Patel?

  So, Facebook, other platforms, they've put their executives or CEOs in front of Congress recently. Have you been impressed with their performances, or have you been reassured by what they're saying?

• 22:50Speaker 03

  I don't, I haven't been. It always feels to me like it's sort of grudging, and it always feels to me like they don't feel like they owe this country something. I mean, I'm, I'm, I am a capitalist, and you didn't used to have to say that, but you have to say that these days. And I realize that our capitalistic system is not working well in many dimensions, so let me give you two examples. One example is that 90% of the American people have not had a pay raise for 40 years, and that we've got the worst income inequality that we've had since 1928. Another example is that our education system, instead of liberating people from that inequality, is reinforcing that inequality. Another example is the geographic dislocation that has happened as a result of the concentration

• 23:33Speaker 03

  of venture capital and the concentration of tech companies geographically in this country versus where everybody in America lives. Those are all examples of dislocation. On the other side of that, I didn't bring the slide with me today, if you look at a slide... That shows the rate of return on invested capital by publicly traded companies in America. Over time, and the slide that I have has four lines on it which represent the most profitable firms going to the least profitable firm. Over decades, what you see is a band that's just horizontal that goes across the page. And the reason for that is that if anybody starts getting an outsized profit, someone else comes in and competes that down, takes it away from them.

• 24:18Speaker 03

  Since about 1995 or so, the most profitable companies in the world, which are the fangs basically and the pharma companies, their profit line has gone straight up like this, straight up like this. There's nothing, there is no competition for what they're doing. And you guys would know better than I, I don't know, is that big data, is that the head start that they've got? Is it the fact that they have to invest so little of their money to generate the kind of outsized returns that they get? But it is a huge distortion in our capitalist landscape that I think we need to look at. And that's why I'm glad the federal government is starting to look at it.

• 24:56Speaker 04

  Right, and I think Elizabeth Warren came out with a plan to break up these big tech companies. And we've seen a lot of talk about, well, there needs to be more competition, maybe the FTC should unwind acquisitions Facebook has made with Instagram and WhatsApp. And I guess maybe where do you stand on that?

• 25:13Speaker 03

  I think we should, I think we need an investigation of all of them and look at each one. As you know, they're not the same companies. What Google does and what Facebook does are two different things. And what Amazon does, but we need to look at it. You know, I think like when I hear Scott Galloway talking about the effect on other industries, if Amazon's never required to make a profit, they go in and buy Whole Foods, which is the eighth largest grocery store chain in America, and everyone else's market cap drops by 20%, it's at least begging the question, is something going on here that's a distortion that isn't right and isn't fair? I think we're going to have to think differently about what our definitions of antitrust look like, you know?

• 25:58Speaker 03

  And this may not be a world anymore where we ask only, is it good for the consumer? You know, we may have to start asking, is it good for our society? Is it good for? Capitalism, is it good for workers in America?

• 26:10Nilay Patel?

  I don't think you're ready for how deeply nerdy that we are on the show. So you are talking-

• 26:13Speaker 03

  I'm definitely not ready for that.

• 26:15Nilay Patel?

  You are talking about the consumer welfare standard. We talk about competition and antitrust on the show all the time.

• 26:20Speaker 03

  That is nerdy.

• 26:21Nilay Patel?

  I mean, so the problem, our listeners know, but I'll just say it if you're new. The problem is that most murders are measured on whether prices go up and all of these products are free. Right?

• 26:31Speaker 03

  Right.

• 26:31Nilay Patel?

  Google is free.

• 26:32Speaker 03

  Free.

• 26:32Nilay Patel?

  So you would change that standard. You would instruct your justice department-

• 26:35Speaker 03

  I would, no, I think we do need to broaden the standard. I'm not an antitrust lawyer, so I don't know exactly what it should be. But I don't think just asking and answering the question on consumers in this context gives you a full picture of the distortion that's being created for the reason that you just said, which is stuff is free. Except when it's not really free. When you've made kind of a trade with Waze, you know? That's a little bit of a kind of a- Waze is my favorite app. It has made a profound difference in my life.

• 27:05Nilay Patel?

  That's the headline.

• 27:05Speaker 03

  It's pitiful. It's pitiful. It's pitiful that that's true, but it is true. I cannot stand sitting in traffic and the fact that I can now put a device in my car that has an app on it that I believe in. In other words, like, it would be very stressful if I didn't believe that Waze knew what it was doing, but I have confidence that it knows what it's doing. And that has relieved me of the burden of worrying about traffic, which in my life is a profoundly helpful thing. On the other hand, I actually have not made a trade with them to tell them, "Google, where I am every second of the day." That's the reality of the situation. But I think that we've kind of backed into all of this as a society

• 27:48Speaker 03

  without coming to grips with the privacy issues that are involved, without coming to grips with the data ownership issues that are involved. These are all things to be negotiated and litigated and for politicians that are representing their constituents with fidelity to raise as issues. And they're all issues for the social media companies, I think, to raise as fiduciaries of their shareholders and of their companies. But we have not had that negotiation as a society. I think that's coming, and it's going to be fascinating. What side we land on, when I have this conversation with people my daughter's age, they're 19, 18, and 14, their view of these issues is totally different than my view.

• 28:29Speaker 03

  It will be interesting to see as a business practice what we end up deciding to do because I have more attachment to my privacy than they have to their privacy. I have more attachment to my data than they have to theirs, even though my data probably is worthless to everybody. More worthless than theirs.

• 28:46Nilay Patel?

  I would take the data of a sitting US senator over a 14-year-old at this point.

• 28:50Speaker 03

  Not my 14-year-old.

• 28:52Nilay Patel?

  Well, so you raised an interesting question. So I think we run product reviews. I think about all the time that no consumer is choosing to buy Bose headphones instead of Sony headphones because the Bose headphones have a better privacy policy, even though they both have privacy policy, which is a remarkable outcome for headphones. Like that, I just don't think headphones should have privacy policies, but they do, and one of them is actually better than the other. But it's weird for us to say you should spend $200 on these headphones instead of those. They might sound worse, but their privacy is better. We're going to start trying because I think it's a market signal we can put in the world. That's the argument that I have in my head for a GDPR-like solution, right? The market isn't going to get, isn't going to push companies to respect your privacy. They don't really have an incentive to do it.

• 29:37Speaker 03

  Should they have an incentive to do it, though?

• 29:39Nilay Patel?

  I mean, morally, yeah, but like is...

• 29:42Speaker 03

  I mean, it seems to me that most people would want to understand in making a trade that monetizes their data, that there's an acknowledgement that it's their data of some kind, or that, that the folks that are using their data have some sort of fiduciary responsibility to them. Now, as I said, I don't think everybody in America agrees with what I just said. I think there are people who are content to give up their rights to their data and give up to their rights... To privacy for the benefits of living in a world where they're where they're served by technology that makes their life easier like so I'm not sure I think this is a place where we need to have a political debate.

• 30:23Nilay Patel?

  So you you don't think that right away we should move towards a GDPR like solution at the federal level there's already sort of one in California.

• 30:29Speaker 03

  Well, I actually I think we're going to be headed I I don't know if GDPR is the right solution or not and I think there is some evidence that it's creating unintended consequences that are benefiting incumbents and I so I haven't studied it but I do think that we should head towards some sort of regime that acknowledges that individuals have a right to decide what's going to be used what their data is going to be used for I wouldn't want that regime to inadvertently incumbent you know benefit the incumbents but but I'd like us to think about how to do it.

• 31:01Nilay Patel?

  Have you looked at the California bill at all?

• 31:03Speaker 03

  No.

• 31:03Nilay Patel?

  I think that's it's a very interesting test case it's coming online it might just set the tone as California sometimes does just.

• 31:10Speaker 03

  Good I mean yeah it's a big place.

• 31:13Nilay Patel?

  How do you think about speaking of California and this is a total left turn as you think about our election our democracy one of your proposals is let's get rid of the electoral college do is that reasonable is that.

• 31:24Speaker 03

  Well, I've I've proposed that and I agree with that but I think we will all be dead before that actually happens there are hard things that I think we should have to do we are living in a gilded age I mean it's not just like the last gilded age but in terms of lack of economic mobility for most people compression of wages the accumulation of wealth at the very top of the society not even the top 20% but the top 10 top five top one top point one getting worse and worse the higher you go and in the in the last gilded age Americans took control of their democracy again they amended the constitution of the United States so women could have the right to vote well they also

• 32:06Speaker 03

  amended it for prohibition so it wasn't all perfect and there were racist elements of the progressive movement they busted up the trust they passed an amendment to have direct election of senators and not have them appointed anymore you know senators were buying their seats by bribing state legislatures then they got into the senate it was believe it or not it was an even worse moment than the one we're in right now then they got into senate and gave themselves railroad rights of way that's what was going on back then that all got busted up by Teddy Roosevelt and by the American people. We're gonna have to do that again. We're in a gilded age. We, this needs to be the end of that gilded age. And we need a progressive era that involves profound reform of our

• 32:48Speaker 03

  government. So I believe if I were picking constitutional amendments to go after, the one I would go after is overturning Citizens United. Ninety-five percent of the American people believe there's too much money in our politics. Let's organize every state in this country to put that on a ballot to overturn it. We should end political gerrymandering in this country and in the Congress. And if I could pass one piece of legislation there, it would be to ban members of Congress from ever becoming lobbyists, because over half the people that leave the Congress and don't retire become lobbyists in Washington DC, which sends a terrible message about what it is we're trying to do here. And that all may sound like it's too big to accomplish. I would argue that if we don't start getting

• 33:32Speaker 03

  some of this stuff done, we're gonna find ourselves living in a society where the democracy is really fraying in very fundamental ways. I mean, I think the election of Donald Trump demonstrates that we're already there.

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• 34:48Nilay Patel?

  So, we talked about Russia. That's one side of the tech policy equation, right? They're using our social networks to hacking our democracy. The other side of the tech policy equation is China. AirPod prices are gonna go up 10%. You have teenage daughters, I'm sure they're gonna feel that. That's just a fact. I'm guessing they have AirPods. How should we handle China right now?

• 35:07Speaker 03

  They have AirPods, by the way, because my mother gave them to me. And in 54 years on this planet, it's the finest present I've ever been given. So, let me say something good about Apple.

• 35:18Nilay Patel?

  So, the last question's always iPhone or Android. But you've clearly answered it.

• 35:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's it. iPhone. Look, I believe Donald Trump, who I think has done virtually everything wrong as president, virtually everything in the way he's approached the job, as well as the policy choices that he's made, as well as the fact that he spends all his time watching cable television and tweeting. I think he was right to call the question on China. I don't think he did it in the way that would be most effective. When you think about the entire world, virtually, everybody has the same equities with respect to China and the growth of China. The Europeans have the same equities we have. The Asian countries really have the same equities we have. They obviously don't wanna live in a unipolar world dominated by us, but that's not gonna happen.

• 36:07Speaker 03

  They don't wanna be dominated by China. They're much happier living in a bipolar world. And so, an American president who wanted to push back on China's mercantilist interests, I think, would have the entire globe help them do that, with the possible exception of North Korea and Russia, two markets that we don't need to worry about that much. So, I hope what comes out of the Trump-China stuff is the opportunity to mobilize the rest of the world and say to China, "Look, obviously, you're gonna grow. We see a huge potential market for us in China, but you're going to have to subscribe to a set of rules of the road." That the rest of us have to live with. And we'll see whether we can succeed at that or not.

• 36:50Speaker 03

  You know, China, they're relentless, relentless government that thinks in 50-year increments when we can't even make it through one cable television show at night on MSNBC or Fox. And that raises very profound questions for our democracy and the future of our democracy. I wrote a book recently called The Land of Flickering Lights about my worries about where our democracy is, and in the process of that, fell completely in love with our democracy again, this exercise in self-government and the importance to humanity for us to succeed. I really believe in that.

• 37:29Speaker 03

  I believe that we offer the alternative to what China represents, which is an authoritarian surveillance state. And I don't believe humans are at their best when they're living in an authoritarian surveillance state that's using big data to do what China is trying to do. That's why this all matters so much. And that's why we have to get our act together, because it's really about what we do as voters and as citizens in the democracy that's going to determine how we head. And with respect to China, we have to have a much longer attention span than the one that we historically have brought to our political system, which is why I think in the end, the Chinese are going to do all right with respect to Trump and this particular

• 38:12Speaker 03

  trade thing, because there is no one on the planet who has a shorter attention span than Donald Trump.

• 38:17Nilay Patel?

  Do you think the, the long-running trend of manufacturing in China, of Google saying, we're not going to be in China, but now maybe we are going to be in China, of, I think Mark Zuckerberg offered to let the premier of China name his child if he would let Facebook go on it. Like, there's a lot of interest from the big tech companies in China. Apple turned over its iCloud servers to a Chinese corporation that probably aspires the government. Do you think that stuff needs to get walked back? Do you think we just need to say to Google, "Look, you're not going to do this"?

• 38:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that we, unless the terms are ones in which we feel like we're protected. I mean, for decades, our manufacturing guys gave up all kinds of stuff to the Chinese, including majority ownership in their firms. There was a lot of IP stolen, but there was also a lot of IP transfers as a result of this. And I think if people looked back and had a do-over, they'd want to have a do-over, in part because conditions change. I mean, energy prices are now so low in the United States. The cost of labor has risen a little bit in China. The benefits of being able to re-engineer if people are manufacturing here versus in

• 39:31Speaker 03

  China, and the lack of transportation costs if you manufactured here, not in China. I mean, all those things can kind of add up to a place where I think you could almost see a competitive manufacturing sector here if we hadn't given away the supply chains to China. And so, we should not, in my view, we should not repeat that mistake with respect to tech or any other industry.

• 39:54Speaker 04

  I have questions on election interference. I've been following this for a long time. I think yesterday Donald Trump made the kind of compromise, I think he was trying to say, of putting, "If we wanted election security legislation, well, you're going to have to give me voter ID." I'm curious if you think your colleagues would budge on that at all?

• 40:13Speaker 03

  I don't think so, because voter ID has nothing to do with the issues we're talking about. We were hacked by Russia. Russia attacked this democracy. The intelligence agencies all say they did. The Intelligence Committee, on which I serve in the Senate, is a bipartisan committee, has put out an extensive report. I don't see why we need to trade over this. What we need is leadership from the administration and from McConnell to get this stuff on the floor and protect the American people. He put together, at the very beginning of his administration, you might remember, he put together this Commission on Voter Fraud. Do you remember that? And as a result of that, a couple thousand people in Colorado, my state, withdrew their

• 40:57Speaker 03

  names from the voter rolls because they didn't want Washington having their data. And we objected, I objected to that, and in the end, Trump had to relent. He gave up because it was so clearly that enterprise had no legitimate mission. Very rare for him to give up, but he gave up on that one. I remember sitting in the White House once, I'm not bragging, I've only been there twice since Donald Trump was elected. I remember sitting there, having him tell a group of senators that he would have won New Hampshire, except that thousands of illegal voters had been sent from what he called certain parts of Massachusetts to vote in the New Hampshire election. So, there is no evidence to support any voter fraud in this country, much less widespread

• 41:42Speaker 03

  voter fraud, and I am deeply skeptical of any regulation that's going to make it harder for people to vote.

• 41:48Speaker 04

  Right, and this is such a pressing issue. I was saying some quotes-

• 41:52Speaker 03

  The Russia issue.

• 41:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, the Russia interference issue, and especially just the idea of securing our elections. There are a number of bills that would at least funnel money to states for them to secure their own elections. I think there was one that Blumenthal, Senator Blumenthal and Chuck Schumer tried to vote on a couple of weeks ago, where the whole term Moscow Mitch came from, from blocking those two measures, right? So, there are a number of measures that are out there, and a lot of bipartisan ones, too. But, a lot of people are starting to get kind of scared that we don't have enough time now to even get those measures through Congress before 2020 comes around.

• 42:24Speaker 03

  Well, we, this is another reason why I wrote this book, you know? And if people go to the website, they're going to have the opportunity to send a book to Mitch McConnell, saying, "You should put this legislation on the floor." RussiaHackedOurDemocracy.com is the website. We gotta push, you know? People say, "What is it going to take to move McConnell on election security? What's it going to take to move McConnell on guns? What's it going to take to move ...?" He won't move unless he's forced to move. And on election security, we've just got to keep pushing. Think about it this way. Imagine a world where all he did was put it on the floor. I'm not asking anybody to vote for it, but can you imagine a senator, a United States

• 43:05Speaker 03

  senator, voting against the election security bills that you've looked at? How could you go home and explain to your constituents that you voted against it? Now, we are living in a world where temporarily, we're temporarily, we've been made insane by Fox News and other things. To believe that the Russians are more of our friends than our than Democrats are. And that Vladimir Putin somehow has our interests at heart in a way that our intelligence community doesn't. But I suspect that is temporary insanity and not the permanent state of the nation's Republican Party. I hope that's true.

• 43:41Speaker 04

  Right. So even if we had a measure that say, I mean, because what we talked about there are two. There's the hardware and the software side of this. There's securing the booths, backing up with paper ballots, something that Senator Wyden has been fighting for for a very long time. But then there's also the software angle. And I think the hardware with the paper ballots, Senator Linkford a couple of weeks ago said, we just don't have time. There just is no time to back up with paper ballots before 2020.

• 44:06Speaker 03

  Well, that's not an excuse for not having a vote. And maybe the people that do have time to do it can do it. You know, the Washington timeline, it's funny, you mentioned you'd said, oh, that piece of legislation's been around since 2017.

• 44:18Speaker 04

  Seventeen.

• 44:19Speaker 03

  And for Washington, I mean, there there are pieces of legislation that have been around since probably 1917. It should have been passed and never have been passed. We can't accept this glacial pace. And when I go back to the discussion we were having a few minutes ago about the need to reform the system, this is why we have to reform the system. We got to find a way to get money out of politics, not, it will never go completely, but we got to find a way to de-emphasize the role of money in politics and re-emphasize the role of people in politics, which is why I think as we are protecting our elections from the Russians, we also have to make sure that we're making it easier, not harder for people to vote. I come from a state that has mail ballots and the result of that, it mail in ballots.

• 45:03Speaker 03

  The result of that is that we have the second highest voting percentage in America. It's 62%. It's not as high as I would like it to be, but at least it better reflects the society at large. We give people three weeks to vote and we have no fraud. There is no voter fraud at all. So for me, what this comes down to is are you for the democracy or are you not for the democracy? If you're for the democracy, you're for pushing back on the Russians and making sure they don't destroy democracy by doing what they're doing. And you figure out ways of making it easier, not harder for people to vote.

• 45:35Nilay Patel?

  All right. We've only got a few minutes left of you. I was gonna ask you iPhone or Android, but you already answered. Windows or Mac?

• 45:40Speaker 03

  Uh, Mac. For my whole life, it's been Windows until the last couple of years.

• 45:45Nilay Patel?

  Well, why'd you switch?

• 45:46Speaker 03

  I had a, I bought a computer from my old campaign and it was a Mac and I've really liked it. It's really good. Mostly what I use is an iPad. That's what I use for all my writing going back and forth to DC.

• 45:59Nilay Patel?

  Are you like fully in the ecosystem? You're like iCloud it all around?

• 46:02Speaker 03

  I actually have not, I'm not using the iCloud. You're probably not supposed to say that or say that, but I'm, I'm still, every time I go to the-

• 46:10Nilay Patel?

  If you're not using it, it's not a risk.

• 46:12Speaker 03

  Every time I go to the Apple Store to, to get a new phone, they're like, "Oh, this is no problem. We'll download everything from the iCloud." I say, "No, we won't. I gotta take it in and plug it into my computer at work." It's pathetic, but that's, that, that is where I am on that stuff. And I, I think the iPad is just an extraordinary thing. And actually, the iPhone is an extraordinary thing. And I'm so torn about it, because on the one hand, I think that when I, when I see people, as I did today, walking around your, not in your offices, but outside your offices, with everybody's face down in their iPhone, with nobody talking to each other. And when I think about the fact that we are best when we are face to face, like we are today, having a real conversation. Because I don't believe

• 46:56Speaker 03

  I have a monopoly on wisdom. I think the worst decisions that I make are the ones that I make on my own. Were the ones where I don't have an interchange or give and take with somebody who's got a different point of view. Those are always better decisions, and that's how our democracy is supposed to work. And I think it's working much less well, in part because of these devices, in part because of social media. On the other hand, if you had walked up to me on my college campus in 1985 or 86 with a device in your hand and said, "Here, Michael, look at what this will do." And it translated every single language that I would ever want to know. It had every piece of human knowledge that

• 47:37Speaker 03

  anybody had ever acquired, basically, available to you. It could tell you the weather anywhere you wanted. You could call up your mom and, or, you know, your friend and around the world and, and FaceTime them. I would have said, that's the most unbelievable thing that I've ever seen. That must be worth $5 million. And so, there's so much good to it, too. But it is just a way of saying that we've got to update our fiduciary rules within companies, and we've got to update our regulatory approaches from the federal government's perspective, I think, as well.

• 48:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think we've all been on the, I mean, The Verge has been here for the ride of the smartphone.

• 48:19Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 48:19Nilay Patel?

  That's where we started, now we're here, and I think it's very clear to everyone, it was a great ride. Yeah, but Apple's sales are like, they're flat. Like, the ride is very clearly over, and now it's, oh crap, everybody has a phone. And we have to figure out what to do with what we distribute to it, who's in charge of it.

• 48:34Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 48:34Nilay Patel?

  How accountable they are.

• 48:35Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 48:36Nilay Patel?

  It seems like, to me, one of the central issues, how powerful they are. Are they too big? It seems like one of the central issues in this election. It hasn't yet risen to that level. I don't think there's been a great tech policy moment in any of these debates.

• 48:50Speaker 04

  A lot of people say, "Amazon. Amazon this, Amazon no taxes," all of that.

• 48:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 48:55Speaker 04

  But that's about it.

• 48:56Nilay Patel?

  It's so easy to be mad at Amazon.

• 48:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 48:58Nilay Patel?

  But I haven't seen that moment yet. You think that moment's coming?

• 49:00Speaker 03

  I think it will become part of the discussion about the economic dislocation that we're having in this country. And the fact that the economic growth is so mal-distributed, both geographically and in terms of, you know, income levels of people. And you can't have a conversation about any of that that doesn't involve technology of one kind or another, meaning specifically the issue of big tech, but also, obviously, the implications that technology has as we move toward a world of quantum computing and artificial intelligence, and what all the implications of that are. I mean, we still haven't caught up. I was in Detroit the other day for the debate, and, you know, that city, the downtown,

• 49:42Speaker 03

  it's amazing what's happening there, but the rest of the city has basically been left behind by what technology has done to the world, and we haven't even caught up to that revolution, much less than one that's coming down the pike. So, there'll be a lot more reason to have The Verge, I think, in the next 10 years even than in the last.

• 50:02Nilay Patel?

  That's true. We depend on chaos.

• 50:04Speaker 03

  Chaos is your friend.

• 50:05Nilay Patel?

  We can drive through it. Well, Senator Bennett, thank you so much for joining us.

• 50:09Speaker 03

  Thank you. I really appreciate it.

• 50:10Nilay Patel?

  Tell the people where they can find you.

• 50:12Speaker 03

  They can find me at MichaelBennett.com, two N's and one T. Thank you.

• 50:16Nilay Patel?

  Thanks so much. All right, that was Senator Michael Bennett. My thanks to him for joining us. Thanks also to McKenna for asking some good questions in there. We're back on Friday with a chat show. We're back on Tuesday with the interview show. I'd love to hear from you, who you want me to talk to, what you want me to cover. I'm at Reckless, just tweet at me. I love hearing from you. We'll talk to you soon.

• 50:43Speaker 07

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