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A
Introducing Family Freedom from T Mobile. We'll pay off four phones up to $3200 and give you four free phones all on America's largest 5G network. Visit t mobile.com familyfreedom up to $800 per line via virtual prepaid card typically takes 15 days. Free phone via 24 monthly bill credits with finance agreement. Example Apple iPhone 16128 gigs $829.99 Eligible trade in example iPhone 11 Pro for well qualified credits end and balance due if you pay off early or cancel Contact Us AI agents are everywhere, automating tasks and making decisions at machine speed. But agents make mistakes. Just one rogue agent can do big damage before you even notice. Rubrik Agent Cloud is the only platform that helps you monitor agents, set guardrails and rewind mistakes so you can unleash agents, not risk. Accelerate your AI transformation at rubrik.com that's R U-B-R-I-K.com foreign it's Monday, November 10, 2025. From peach fish Productions, it's the gist. I'm Mike Pesca as I reflect on the results of Election Day. Oh, by the way, Mom Donnie won. Someone wrote in and say, how dare you. You should be ashamed you didn't mention Mom Donnie won. If you guys are relying on me for this and my silence is confusing you, Mamdani won. He certainly did. Did you know he's laser focused on affordability? Laser focused? It is true. Well, he's laser focused on mentioning affordability. I don't know if talking about affordability will make things more affordable. But you know, he has that laser and that laser is focused. It's also used for focusing. We'll get into this more, but one of the stories that I was following around Election Day, I'm not going to hit you with the Seattle mayor again. People love me. Talking about the Seattle mayor race was the election monitors that the Trump White House sent to California and New Jersey. This was front page, above the fold on the right. In other words, lead story of the New York Times one day. And I guess it should have been or could have been, what was the deal with these election monitors? Or to quote a stand up comic from the 90s, what's the deal with them? And we don't know. And here's the thing. It would be easy perhaps for me to retreat to oh my God, the press was exaggerating election monitors. But that's not necessarily true. It could be that Donald Trump assigned these election monitors, including the Department of Justice political Appointee, Assistant Attorney General Michael Gates, who's a longtime Orange County Republican operative. I also hear he once claimed he heard of a dog receiving a ballot. I don't know, we've all heard of stories like that. Maybe he was the one who said it and then he heard it. So the press was monitoring the election monitors and literally nothing seems to have come of them. I did a search for, oh, what happened with the election monitors? And I found nothing. Afterwards I did find a kind of enterprising story in the New Republic. Alex Thomas. I chased Trump's election monitor across Southern California and it could have been a fun larp. It was more a Frank Sinatra has a cold type story with lines like this. Somebody who saw Gates in Riverside told me he appeared to take about half a page of notes and that with the rest of his time he and another observer made small talk about cats. Somebody told me he was wearing a fedora. Another man said his favorite color was yellow. But this doesn't. I don't say this to denigrate the coverage or alerting us about it, because it very much could have been the case that Trump, the White House election deniers, the whole apparatus of denying elections, they know not to make hay when Proposition 50 passes by large double digits. But maybe if an election is close, then the entire monitoring apparatus yield something. And by something I mean something bullshit, but something they can work with. I really don't know. I do know that what seemed like a big story was a non story, but I don't know if it was because of overhype of the story, a understandable sensitivity to the potential of the story, or really the administration, the Trump administration playing this one from their amoral, immoral perspective, strategically. And you don't know either. I do know that he talked about cats on the show today. I give you a really good spiel about math, gumballs and what is the right number of congressmen that a state should send to Congress. But first, my following guests hate cars. I mean, they hate cars. They have a podcast called the War on Cars. They have a book out called Life After Cars, Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile. They hate cars so much that they jump to a conclusion, blaming train deaths on stupid people, but blaming all car deaths on cars. Anyway, it's an extremely popular podcast. I agree with a lot of what they say. I don't have hate in my heart. Do have a Ford Bronco in the driveway. Kind of love that car. Wish I didn't have to have one, I guess. Which were an Ev. But it's not. Wish the trains were better. But then again, sometimes I have to take a dresser or bureau or just some luggage somewhere, and trains aren't great for that. We can't admit that when we're talking to the people who envision a life after cars. And those people are Sarah Goodyear and Doug Gordon. And they are up next. I've been using Cove Pure water purification, and it's great. There's no installation. It tastes good. And I'm thinking about giving it to my parents because they're always drinking bottled water, which can be fine, but it's inconvenient and not good for the environment. And you've got to, of course, recycle it. Not with COVID Pure. You just fill it up right from the tap and you put it into the unit. And what you can get is purer than, say, boiling water. And you could get hot, hot water. You could get cold water. I like the cold water. But you know, my mom, she enjoys a cup of tea. And my dad, he enjoys a decaf coffee. And they have a tea kettle that. And this is more about the tea kettle than CO Pure. It's metallic on the top, so when you try to open the latch on the tea kettle, you're engaging with a piece of metal that was just on a stove and burns in Sue. Not with COVID Pure. Cove Pure also has this. My dad's gonna like this because he's very empirically driven. Has the number right there on the front. So TDS is the total dissolved solids. And there's, I don't know, 500 in the water that we have. And after going through Cove Pure, it's down to nine, sometimes five. This is what makes the water of COVID Pure taste so good, so pure. But it's not just the taste. You know, what's in your water could be here in New York, we have pretty good drinking water, but I've been to places where you just don't, don't drink the water. And cove pure removes 99.9% of contaminants. We're talking PFAS and pharmaceuticals. Fluoride, lead, arsenic. It is the purest water you could get. So if you're looking for a gift that's good for your loved ones and one that they will actually use, I highly recommend Cove Pure. And because I partner with them, they're giving you a special $250 holiday discount with my link covpure.com thegist that's C O V E P U R e to get $250 off covepure.com/the gist. Hurry before the sale ends. True Work. I'm wearing it right now. Fall weather changes fast, so I'm dressed in layers. I've got this hoodie that's a lovely shade of green, but on top of that, I've got a true work zip up jacket. And if I wanted to, I. I could pivot to a truer coat. A true, true work coat. They're made by trade professionals who are tired of wet, heavy gear weighing them down. And every piece is tested on job sites with trade pros. The trade could be podcaster or it could be, you know, actual construction worker or logger. I wear True Work. I don't know, maybe a little too much given how often I'm clear brush, which is not much, but it's just a testament to the fact that this stuff really and truly does work. And it also looks damn good. Upgrade your day with workwear built like it matters. And get 15 off your first order@truework.com with the code the Gist. That's spelling's important on this one. T R U E W E R K dot com and. And use the code the Gist. I'm going to bring you the hosts of a podcast I listen to regularly and they're out with a book. And they've. They've kind of tried to become more palatable because the podcast is called the War on Cars. Ooh. I don't know if I'm signing up for service, but the book is so much more hopeful. It's called Life After Cars. I guess they've won the war, freeing ourselves from the tyranny of the automobile. They are Doug Gordon and Sarah Goodyear. Doug and Sarah, welcome to gist.
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B
Thanks for having us on.
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C
Yeah, thank you.
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A
So I do want to talk about the rhetorical tactics and the arguments, but before we even get to that, what are some of the best. I'm very statistically minded. What are some of the best statistics about not a nirvana, but just, I don't know, Amsterdam. How much better could it be if we had a less car centric culture?
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B
Well, I mean, I think the biggest one would be in terms of deaths and fatalities. You know, the Netherlands has a traffic fatality rate that is 60% lower than the United States. And even if you account for things like miles driven per capita. Miles driven, it's just the United States is kind of off the charts in terms of developed nations. So I think that's really the biggest one. Of course, the other Ones are things like pollution levels, nitrous oxide. In the book we talk about Ghent and how they more or less eliminated cars in the center of their city and how nitrous oxide levels went down by something like 40% just in the span of mere weeks of doing that.
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A
Yes. So my problem, not my problem. I've looked up these levels. I checked out your facts. And by the way, most people in your position would say something like the death levels are twice as much, but you don't cherry pick the statistics. You're right. It's something like five deaths per billion miles driven in in the Netherlands and seven in America. And those 2018 statistics before things got crazy with distracted driving in the pandemic, it is better. But how much is that chalked up to the nature of the Dutch people and, or similar countries and Ghent, which is full of old masters, but really what I mean is a pluralistic communal society where they really think about the, the welfare of their fellow citizen versus the United States, where we don't. And even after, even after you had a bunch of municipal or governmental changes, you'd still have Americans driving cars and were more aggressive and care less than other people in the world. That's true, isn't it?
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C
Well, I mean, that's a little bit harder to prove statistically, but certainly the American doctrine of rugged individualism maps onto the car pretty exactly right. And so the mindset that one develops in a car of it's, you know, everybody else is in my way, I should be the lord of the road and roll down here in my mobile living room and have everything exactly the way that I want it to be. That is a very American attitude. But I would argue that we're in a feedback loop with that because if you look at people who live in places where they have a more, a less autocentric environment, they have a better sense of community. And so I would argue that in some ways the automobile is responsible for our callousness and our disregard for the lives of others to a great degree. And it's reinforcing it and it's exacerbating it.
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A
Yeah, I generally disagree with you, but there's a more decent case than with other things because car, car culture is so embedded in our culture. Culture. But in general, I think the causal relationship probably goes the other way. And we are a certain type of people and this shows up in the size of our Chevy Suburbans rather than the size of our Chevy Subur carbons, dictating the kind of people we are. Especially because the SUVs have gotten, you know, twice as big in the last 20 years. And it's not like the culture of America has gotten, whatever the version of that, twice as, twice as aggressive.
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C
Okay, I'm going to argue back when.
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A
We'Ve retained our aggression.
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C
I'm going to argue back one more time. And first and good call on the SUV size. That's another reason that our fatality rates are going back up again is the size of our vehicles. But if you look at some of the research that we cite in the book, Donald Appleyard, who wrote a book called Livable Streets and did a seminal study in 1969 in San Francisco where he looked at social life on three different types of streets. Light traffic street, a medium traffic street and a heavy traffic street. And what he found was that people on light traffic street had three times as many friends and acquaintances as those on the heavy traffic street and on streets that were changing, people were actively losing social relations and told him that anecdotally. And it was also reflected in the data. And these studies have been recreated in other countries and other cities since. So I would say that actually being surrounded by automobiles does degrade the quality of your social relations and your regard for your friend, friends for your neighbors.
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B
I'd also say that we live in a sort of experiment every day, which is New York City, which is flooded with suburban drivers on a daily basis, people who live in really car centric places. And yet when they come here, New York City has some of the safest streets in the United States and has bucked a lot of the trends that you're seeing of rising pedestrian fatality rates across the country. So they don't magically turn into non Americans when they cross the bridges or tunnels when they come here. I do think there is something to the, like Sarah was saying, rugged individualism. I think our sense of collective good is different than in other countries and it sometimes makes solving the problem a lot harder. But in 1971, we had a traffic fatality rate that was 20% lower than the Netherlands. And we just diverged for a lot of different reasons. The oil crisis and what they chose to do versus what we chose to do. Some political choices as well. I don't think you can totally discount culture, but I think it sometimes gets in the way of talking about the solutions because the solutions are the same and we've seen those solutions work in US Cities.
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A
Yes, New York City has fairly safe streets. Is it. What's the Jersey, what's the Jersey City? That is zero fatalities.
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B
Jersey City And Hoboken have both gone a number of years with zero fatalities on the city run roads.
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A
Yeah, right. So this tells me that since essentially the same kind of suburbanite is driving in Jersey City and Hoboken is it as is New York, New York recently had excellent statistics with their driver fatalities going down, but for years they didn't. Again, this is a minor point, but I do think that car culture hasn't made Americans so much more aggressive. Could have contributed a little bit to it. I think the aggression of Americans are there. And there are some studies in the book which I think I more totally reject, like petro masculinity, fossil fuels and authoritarian desire, which is how oil and automobiles have fostered a toxic masculinity that it is, that is expressed few through vehicular domination. Maybe, I mean, maybe I can't disprove that. I just don't think it's as compelling as some of the Netherlands Dutch statistics. I want to talk about.
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C
You've never been. You've never been coal rolled then you've never been.
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A
So maybe specific rolling, which is you. You belch your diesel gas at bikers and this one guy you talk about literally started mowing over some bicyclists. Yeah, that's not good, right?
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C
Or the guy driving in a Dodge Charger down your street in Brooklyn with the retrofitted exhaust that, you know, makes sounds like bullets firing. I mean, you know, I'm just saying. But we can agree to disagree on that too.
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A
Yeah, yeah. Then again, I got a guy on a bike in my neighborhood who like blasts a. A boom box. That's not necessarily. And, and the songs are a little aggressive, but you hear that in cars more. I do want to ask about trains. So trains are a big part of life after cars. And I love trains. Trains also in Europe, when you go there, you're like, wow, if only. But we do have trains in America and they're not nearly as wonderful. Cheap, efficient. So why is that again, life after cars, I'm going to still be in America, make the case that the post car American train experience will be better than the train experience that's occurring now. And we could talk about some of the not so great successes with trains going on right now and over the last couple of decades.
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B
Well, I mean, you can look at Florida right now and the Bright line which runs from Miami to Orlando, and it's not without its problems, but it's the death train. Well, I mean, that's just that, right? That's a, that's a big Issue in terms of like Floridians not understanding what happens when the gates go down.
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A
You're a Florida man. You are Florida man.
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B
Well, I mean, you know, there's some design issues at play there as well.
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A
But certainly they're, they're. So just to make the audience clear.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Those trains are at grade, from what I understand, which is a real killer. But in the article they even talk about Florida. Man, are Floridians so dumb. And if they were, they'd be killed by other trains at a high level. They seem to be killed by the bright line. Not seem, they are killed by the bright line at, you know, exponentially. Yeah.
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B
Drivers crossing. Exactly.
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A
Greater levels.
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B
But okay, so that's a big put aside. Right. But ridership levels on that have exceeded expectations. You know, Amtrak, I forget the exact line, but they opened a new line in the Midwest that exceeded ridership expectations.
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C
Oh, yeah, that's the, that's the Chicago to Minneapolis.
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B
Yes. So, you know, everywhere we put trains, people tend to want to ride them. Streetcars, things like that tend to be pretty popular. And a lot of the reasons we don't have trains is just political choices that were made in the early 20th century, mid 20th century, as cars grew. I think, you know, again, this is sort of like a sliding doors diverging sort of thing where Europe went in one direction, especially with the oil crisis of the 1970s, and we went in a very different direction and underfunded and divested from a lot of our public transit and trains.
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C
Yeah. So you have to ask yourself about the forces behind that. Right. And their political forces. But there are political forces that are motivated by political donors. And the fossil fuel industry has been a big factor in trying to promote fossil fuel using infrastructure. I mean, that's just, you know, that's pretty clear. So the fossil fuel lobby is very, very powerful here in the United States. We're an oil producing nation.
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B
And our plane. I was going to say the aviation industry because if you look at a place like San Antonio, Houston and Austin, which are essentially merging into becoming one giant megapolis, that's a really great candidate for trains. But Southwest Airlines kind of has a lockdown on transportation between those cities.
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A
Yeah, but is it the fossil fuel. Also conceded good points. But is it the fossil fuel industry that makes the California high speed rail cost $200 million per mile or the Second Avenue subway? You know, phase one, two and a half billion dollars per mile. Next phase, $5 billion per mile. That's not, that's not Mobile Exxon, is it?
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B
Oh, no, not at all. I mean, I think, you know, we have a lot of issues in this country with procurement and labor issues and contracting, environmental review, other things that just take a very long time and raise the price. And yes, there is a, if you look at a direct comparison between like the Paris Metro or London building the Elizabeth line in record time and opening it. And you know what, it's taken many decades to even continue just a little bit of the Second Avenue subway. So, yeah, you know, you can't discount those other kind of dysfunctional forces at play and you can't just slice off one reason and say that's it. But in terms of like, are Americans uniquely opposed to trains? Right. Like, I don't think that that's true.
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A
No. No, I don't think so. People love trains.
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B
They love, love, love trains.
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C
I mean, we just got off a train from D.C. this morning and the.
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B
Only way to fly.
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C
Yeah, it's always packed and it was packed today and people were very happily sitting on the train and going where they needed to go.
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A
Was it the Acela?
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B
It was.
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C
We treated ourselves to the Acela today. Yes.
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A
So there's another, I'm not going to say boondoggle, I guess I'm glad it exists as an option. Right. But it can achieve its top speed and the cost per mile. You know, obviously Amtrak runs at a deficit, which is an ipso facto an argument that it doesn't work. But my general pushback on this, which is I'd love a future that looks like Europe, I don't think as America we're going to get it. And I see a lot of evidence when we talk about life after cars. If I'm investing, envisioning this great glorious future, it would be good if some of the examples in the present, like your go to example, wasn't the death train. And by the way, I understand that article just came out like a week ago, so.
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C
Yeah, when you wrote about it in.
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A
Your book, you didn't know it'd be called the death train. But the, the go to examples are not glorious achievements. And it would be better for your case, right, if they were.
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B
Yeah. I mean, look, the New York City subway. More people ride the New York City subway on a daily basis than fly domestically in the US So where we have trains and if you plopped a car loving Texan into the middle of Manhattan, they would take the subway because it was the most efficient way to get around. And look, if you plop me in the middle of Texas, I would drive because it is the Only way to get around. So I think it's more. What I'm saying is that, like, are you. Are Americans uniquely disposed to oppose. To oppose these things or to reflexively say, you know, no, I'll just get in my car. It's really just a function of the built environment. I think, you know, the politics, the procurement, the dysfunctional in terms of. Of paying for these things, those are obviously very important issues, and you can't discount them. But I think I push back at the cultural explanation for why we don't have these things. Yeah.
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C
And I would argue. I would argue, Mike, that. That actually we talk with a. With a researcher, Dr. Ian Walker, in the book, who looks a lot at what he calls moto normativity, which is this mindset that cars are normal and that everything they do is acceptable. And he talks about something the is ought fallacy. And that is the fallacy that because something is, that is the way it ought to be. And that is something that a lot, you know, it's. It's a famous logical fallacy. It's. It's well known in behavioral psychology. And what I'm arguing is that we need to push back against that. You know, we can't just be doomers and just say, oh, well, you know, the United States is just going to hell in a Chevy Suburban and we're just going to go along for the ride. If we want a better society, if we want a better environment, if we want. Want something better, we should build something better. And we should have the conviction that that can be done and that the world can change, because the world was very different 125 years ago when automobiles came into the picture. And this is not a law of physics that automobiles are the only way for Americans to get around. It hasn't always been that way. It doesn't always have to be that way. And we have to believe that things can be better or we should just lie down and die.
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B
Yeah.
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A
So you're saying they're not automobiles, they're isomobiles. That's right.
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B
There you go.
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C
All right, I'll do that.
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A
Yeah, that one's free. What do you guys think of the fairly rapid adoption of EVs, those kind of cars? What I'm getting at with this question is, are you guys essentially abolitionists or reformers?
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B
We're more reformers, I think. I am a conditional abolitionist. I think in places where people have options, we should focus on improving those options. Transit, biking, walking, things like that. Our kind of party line for the podcast is we Obviously need to electrify everything as quickly as we possibly can. Climate change is a real threat. And in places where people do not have alternatives to driving those cars that they use, they should be electric. As soon as they need a new one, we should make it easy for them to get one, maintain one, charge one. But everywhere else, yeah, we should be looking at places that have good bones and a lot of American cities have excellent bones that could be changed just a little bit to enable not 100% rideshare mode share for cycling, but certainly 25%. Even if you got to a city that had 13% mode share for cycling, you'd be a long way towards solving a lot of cities problems. So that's sort of our party line. We're not abolitionists of like ban all cars everywhere right now. We also very much understand that in 99% of the country that is just not going to be a realistic thing for people. And even in cities like New York that have excellent transit, there are people with mobility issues. There are services and other things that need cars and trucks for them to work. Those cars and trucks in cities should be electrified. Ambulances, school buses, delivery vehicles, et cetera.
- [27:28]
C
Yeah, and ev, the V stands for vehicle, it doesn't stand for car. So there are lots of electric vehicles that are not cars that could be very helpful in this transition. And I'm talking about everything from E bikes to golf cart type vehicles which you now see on the streets. And for instance, Milan, you see fashionable businessmen rolling around on cute little sort of ATV type things.
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B
And you don't even have to go to the, to Italy, you can go to the Villages in Florida, you can go to Peachtree City in Georgia where they drive golf carts.
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A
Yeah, it's very right coded in the United States it can be.
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B
Yes.
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C
Well, but like here in New York, you've probably seen them, the Amazon delivery bikes. They're bikes, but they have like a little cargo.
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A
Yeah.
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C
Thing and like a little.
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A
I feel so sorry for those guys.
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B
They're like, they.
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C
I've talked to them occasionally. They seem perfectly happy. I don't know that they would be happier sitting in traffic, you know, so what, what I'm saying is cars, more cars will not solve the problem of cars. But there are a lot of different things that we could do with electric vehicles and we should be looking at that very aggressively.
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A
So we have an interstate highway system. It was a glorious achievement and led to prosperity. But it is also true, as you document on the podcast in the book, that adding more lanes to Highways, you might think it would alleviate traffic. Seems almost never to do that. Just encourages more cars. Sort of like widening your arteries actually won't help your cholesterol. But is there a use case or is there an example that we could point to that answers the question, okay, what do we do with this giant and wide highway system if we achieve a life after cars?
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C
It seems like a lot of.
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A
Well, okay, but it seems like infrastructure.
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C
No, no, no, no. I mean, I'm kidding. First of all, I want to push back against the idea that the Interstate highway system brought an unmitigated prosperity.
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A
I don't know, mitigated, but it's certainly not okay.
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C
Well, it was heavily mitigated. It was heavily mitigated. If you look at a city like Hartford, Connecticut, which used to be a thriving city, and then they blasted all those highways through it and turned it all into surface parking for suburban commuters, and the white flight went out on the highways and they came back in as suburban commuters who come and extract value from the city and don't pay their taxes there. I mean, every highway in America has gone through a neighborhood and destroyed a neighborhood. And there are many, many cities in this country, Syracuse, Buffalo, Cleveland, et cetera, et cetera, that have been decimated. We were just in Washington, D.C. there's neighborhoods in Washington that were destroyed. So it's not an unmitigated prosperity that comes from.
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A
Not unmitigated, but on net. Of course, the Interstate highway system, though imperfectly, or perhaps the motivations of the urban planners, were the exact opposite what we would want today. So it wasn't implemented perfectly, but of course it led to a giant increase in prosperity. I mean, I don't know any economist would say that that wasn't the case.
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B
It depends how you define prosperity. Right? Like, yeah, it built the suburbs per capita. Right? Absolutely. There are. You can point to lots of statistics that say that it built. It built the middle class, it built all these suburbs, but, like, certainly didn't cause prosperity for the people whose homes were destroyed, for the children who are left behind who are breathing in the fumes and have extremely high asthma rates. You know, it's certainly in terms of climate change, there's going to be a point where the net prosperity starts to go down because of all of the greenhouse gases that highways enable. So, you know, it's. Yes, in the short term, sure, in a. But in the long term, I would disagree.
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C
And as for what to do with that infrastructure, certainly some of it will continue to carry cars and cargo and you know, probably autonomous trucks and all of those things that will build the kind of prosperity that you're talking about. But if we tear down some of them, like the Embarcadero in San Francisco was torn down, I don't think anybody would say that was a net loss for San Francisco in terms of its prosperity. It's a thriving tourist area. It's a thriving business area. Now, where a highway used to be. There are many, many places in the United States of America that the waterfront in Seattle is another example.
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B
The west side highway in New York.
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C
The West side highway in New York. These are places where there used to be highways and now there's thriving commerce, tourism, all the things that these cities want. And it's also healthy and not carrying all these hidden costs because the air pollution from cars causes cardiovascular disease, which is the leading cause of death for people in the United States. And car pollution is an enormous contributor to that. That's just one of the many, many what I think are hidden costs to the society, not just to the individual, but our health care costs would go down dramatically. And we cite a study from Japan where there was a natural experiment where they added a transit stop, and immediately that town which had previously only been accessible by car, the health care costs went down by a measurable amount. I think that there are all sorts of things that we don't understand. And right now, we have not even learned the lessons of the past. In Texas, they are widening freeways right now, knowing what we know, that induced demand means that those freeways are going to fill up right away. And we're destroying the same kinds of neighborhoods and equity that people have built with their homes and their businesses that we did before. We haven't learned the lessons of Robert Moses even.
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B
I mean, even Los Angeles. Very not too long ago, they spent 1.1 billion to widen the 405 because traffic was so bad. And Mike, you were saying, you know, it never works. Like, you can't say that it was an economic benefit if you spend $1.1 billion to widen a few miles of highway, and then by the time you finish, traffic is just as bad, if not worse, as before.
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The name of the book is Life After Cars Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile. It is written by the hosts of the War on Cars podcast, Sarah Goodyear and Doug Gordon. Thank you, Sarah and Doug.
- [34:22]
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Thank you, M.
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Up to 800.
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Per line via virtual prepaid card typically takes 15 days. Free phone via 24 monthly bill credits with finance agreement example Apple iPhone 16128 gigs $829.99 Eligible trade in example iPhone 11 Pro for well qualified credits and imbalance due if you pay off early or cancel Contact us and now the spiel among the big winners on Tuesday was democracy. No, wait. The Democrats in California voters approved Proposition 50, irrational response to Texas's aggressive redistricting. If you're going to draw lines to favor your side, we'll draw line to favor ours. The result is a kind of arms race, and Republicans currently hold more arms since they control more states where maps can be redrawn. Missouri, for instance, could soon erase one of its two congressional districts out of the 10 congressmen it has. This leads to the perennial argument over what a fair map should yield. The prevailing but misguided consensus, and I'm here to guide you, holds that a state's congressional delegation should mirror its presidential vote. If 38% voted for the Democrat, roughly 38% of its representatives should be Democrats. Maybe some more sophisticated people will say, all right, candidate quality matters. Let's look at party registration. Let's look at overall vote for other Senate races, various proxies that put a number on what percentage in statewide races vote Democrat. Therefore, that should be the percentage of people to the House of Representatives that state sends. Both parties, by the way, embrace this logic, not because they're lying, but because it flatters their interests. And also, I think they actually, in this case, have an honest misunderstanding of how these elections should work. I will now explain why the reasoning is wrong. To illustrate, let us start with a conservative who buys into this fallacy. Here's Victor Davis Hansen, very sharp observer, who nonetheless repeats it on his podcast while discussing redistricting and what Gavin Newsom doesn't want you to know Here in California, when you only have nine Republicans and you're the state is voting 40% Republican and you have, you know, nine districts, you have about 20, 18% or something, 17%, you should have 40%. And that's what Gavin Newsom never tells anybody. I mean, Gavin Newsom probably doesn't want you to know. I don't know what he doesn't want you to know. He's pretty open guy, maybe that he's wearing a toupee. I think he's fine with you knowing anything about gerrymandering. He loves that as an issue. He went to Texas to take a victory lap on his gerrymandering success in California. Thank you for inspiring a nation Texas. Thank you for inspiring the state of California. Thank you for Proposition 50. Gerrymandering is fire, and Newsom is right. I do believe that you have to fight fire with fire. But let us still not be ignorant, let us not be deceived as to what constitutes the ideal. The right number of representatives were gerrymandering not to have scorched the process. I draw you to a headline in the New York Times. Gerrymandering War spreading across us is a crisis, experts say Now I am constitutionally lowercase c ill disposed to calling everything a crisis, but the gerrymandering development is a bit troubling. It's not apocalyptic true constitutional crises. I just want to take this tangent to once again clearly explain what a constitutional crisis is and what it isn't. A constitutional crisis is when branches of government or agencies or figures within the government collide with no remedy offered in the Constitution when it comes to, say, Trump and the Supreme Court. I have always said we're not in a constitutional crisis because I have that definition of constitutional crisis. I don't know what a gerrymandering crisis would be, but I also think that we're not there yet. All right, back to representation. The Times in this article notes that Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee could soon send no Democrats to Congress, despite 34 to 38% of their voters choosing Kamala Harris in 2024. That is the go to proof of injustice. Look at how many or the percentage of people who voted for the Democrat who are Democrat and yet there's no Democratic representation in Congress. You could make this case, and should make this case with Massachusetts too, where 36% voted for Donald Trump and they send zero Republicans to Washington. Is this a crisis? No, it's a proud implementation of the principled land of Eldridge Gary. That's how he pronounces name when it comes to Massachusetts. Nine representatives, by the way, the largest state with an entire delegation, all of one party. But we should say there is no racial disenfranchisement in play in Massachusetts. Section 2 of the Voting Rights act wouldn't apply because that targets former Confederate states or states with history of suppressing black voters. Nor would the Calais case now before the Supreme Court. Caveat, caveat, caveat. All true. My point isn't that one situation is fair and the other isn't. It's to define what is fair because it's so ill defined and it's not. I'm telling you, it's not for three Massachusetts seats to go to Republicans and not only because, well, other states do it. It's just in and of itself not ideal, fair or representative of the voters of Massachusetts to necessarily have at least three of those nine seats going to Republicans. Just like in Missouri. It's not ideal, the platonic ideal for four seats to go to Democrats because 40% of that state which sends 10 representatives to the House of Representatives, voted for Kamala Harris or is Democrat. The common argument that fairness means seats proportional to votes doesn't survive the test of probability. So let me just say, I've said this before. If you take any of these states that are 60, 40, if you drew every congressional district in accordance or reflecting the overall political makeup of the state, you'd of course have zero representatives from the minority party. This is true in every state that's, I don't know, 53 to 47, where every congressional district to be drawn proportionally, then every congressional district would have a six point lien in exactly reflective of the state. But I'm not even talking about that. And that's not how congressional districts are drawn. The question is how should they be drawn? And no matter how you get to an ideal of how they should be drawn, you don't get to congressional districts in line with the overall state registration or vote in the presidential election. Because I give you hypergeometric distribution. Here we go to gumballs. Imagine the state is a gumball machine. 99 gumballs in total, 59 are red and 40 are blue. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna make nine piles of 11 gumballs each. Get it? Those piles are each a congressional district and they're drawn at random. This is a great reflection of the should part of the representation in Congress. Nine piles of 11 gumballs each. So if you do the math, how many piles do you get of majority blue gumballs? The answer is, on average, only about two. Only about two out of the nine piles wind up majority blue. The math makes clear that even under pure random conditions, minority parties do not win a proportional number of seats. So when pundits say that 38% of voters should yield 38% of seats, they're confusing idealism or politics with probability. And of course, real world elections, districts, turnout, candidates, quality. They deviate far more than random chance would predict. Any unfairness isn't proof of conspiracy necessarily. It's more a structure of math and maps. But then there is conspiracy, and then there is times where you do get under the math what the real math says. Like if Missouri really only sends 1 out of the 10 representatives to Washington who's a Democrat, that's quite unlikely. Not shockingly so. If you're picking nine piles of 11 gumballs, you do get one or fewer majority blue 30% of the time. And they're just a, I guess a fun fact if you're a math geek. If it's 11 piles of nine gumballs, not nine piles of 11 gumballs, that happens. About one, one pile being blue, that's only 16% of the time. So, summary, this is not a crisis. This is definitely far from a golden age. And I would watch out not necessarily for what experts say, like in that New York Times headline, but I would watch out for headlines that say what the experts say. And I will tell you this, the experts, the real experts, say that if you're eating gumballs, make them sugar. Experts. Four out of five experts say that, the last being gerrymandered out of dental school. And that's it for today's show. Cory War produces the gist. Jeff Craig is our social media video does a lot of other stuff too. It's really good. Astra Green is back, plugging away at the website. Kathleen Sykes, she helps me with the Gist list. It's a good one today. It's really good. You, you don't know it. You don't know it all because most of it's behind the paywall. But it's funny. There's an elephant story in there where there's a Democratic story, but there's also a story about a woman who taught an elephant how to roller skate and then had to sue to get custody of the elephant. And there is a story about the Cleveland Guardians, relievers who throw pitches into the turret. It's a shame you won't know it because it's all behind the paywall. But if you want to text Mike to 33777, you can subscribe to the Gist list. And lastly, let us not forget Michelle Pesca. I never do. She oversees this whole pile of gum. Do Peru. And thanks for listening. Hey guys, have you heard of Gold Belly? It's this amazing site where they ship the most iconic famous foods from restaurants across the country anywhere nationwide. I've never found a more perfect gift than food.
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