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July 22, 2025 19:08-19:45 - CSPAN
36:57
Discussion on Renewing American Democracy
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sam altman
openai 00:32
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Speaker Time Text
sam altman ▲ ● ▼
That could think.
Not at all, and had to give an instant response to models that can think for many seconds or many minutes.
And the robustness and reliability that's come with that means that for an industry like this, I think the technology is finally really usable.
And a lot of people have not tried the latest generation of models.
But I think if you do, you'll be like, oh, this is much smarter than most people.
And then on the government side, I think it's the same thing.
Government has got to embrace this technology and we'll be able to do everything better.
unidentified
Well, thank you, Sam, so much for joining us.
We ran a little bit over time, and I'm sure everybody's ready for lunch.
sam altman ▲ ● ▼
Thank you very much.
unidentified
On Wednesday, Acting FEMA Administrator David Richardson will testify at a hearing evaluating ways to improve the agency's effectiveness in responding to disasters and the nation's current state of disaster readiness and recovery.
The hearing comes amid repeated calls by President Trump to eliminate or phase out FEMA with the intent of shifting more responsibility to state and local governments.
Watch the House Transportation and Infrastructure Subcommittee live at 10 a.m. Eastern on C-SPAN 3.
C-SPAN now, our free mobile video app, or online at c-span.org.
Up next, a discussion on the importance of preserving and renewing American democracy.
In this 50-minute conversation, panelists talk about how Americans are perceiving and interacting with democracy through culture and media.
Hello, hello, hello.
What the mailing is getting?
I've heard great and then we'll tell you like what the things you're doing.
Hello.
Hello.
Hey, everyone.
I think we should get started so we can get to the reception on time.
The most important thing.
It's so wonderful being here.
I am so glad that we've had this day together.
I have certainly learned a great deal.
It's been wonderful to see these conversations playing out and to think deeply about the legacy of Henry Wallace.
As you will see, we are missing one panelist, the great Congressman Jamie Raskin.
There's a chance he might join us.
He's otherwise occupied.
He's on the hill doing serious things.
But if he does show up, we'll make space for him.
We'll incorporate him into the conversation and we'll proceed accordingly.
I also want to make it clear that IPS is a 501c3 organization, so at least my questions will be within those parameters.
We're nonpartisan.
We care deeply about ideas and policy, but we're not advocating for any particular candidate or another.
So just wanted to make that clear at the outset.
I'm really excited about this panel.
We're calling it Defending and Reimagining Democracy.
And I want to introduce our fantastic panelists.
To my left is Lisa Gilbert.
She is co-president of Public Citizen and co-founder of the Not Above the Law Coalition.
She leads efforts on government ethics, corporate accountability, and defending democracy from authoritarian challenges.
Thank you for joining us, Lisa.
To her left is Osita Juanevu.
He's a contributing editor at the New Republic and columnist for The Guardian.
His forthcoming debut book is called The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding.
It offers a bold vision for rebuilding democratic institutions.
Thank you so much for joining us, Osita.
Thank you.
I wanted to start with a question for both of you, and it's taken from an essay that we've spent a lot of time thinking about and reading at the Institute for Policy Studies.
It's Henry Wallace's infamous 1944 New York Times essay that's called The Dangers of American Fascism.
I want to quote a passage from that piece and then ask you to respond to it.
Wallace wrote, the American fascist would prefer not to use violence.
His method is to poison the channels of public information.
With a fascist, the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public, but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.
So my question to both of you is, in this age of disinformation, media consolidation, and assaults on democratic truth, what strategies can we use to reimagine a public sphere built on transparency, equity, and collective trust?
And I wanted to start with you, Lisa.
Well, thank you so much for having me.
And Public Citizen is also thrilled to be one of the co-hosts of today's event.
So just want to appreciate everyone else who's been here all day.
This is an important question in this moment.
I think information has become ever-channeled into silos.
People only view trusted validators as the sources where they can glean what they depend on.
That means different things to different people.
To young people, that may mean they get their information from TikTok.
To those who still tune into cable news, it's MSNBC, it's Fox, it's these very different perspectives.
And I think it's almost impossible to break through those silos.
And there isn't really a current silver bullet to do so.
But I completely agree with the premise that these silos are exploited by authoritarianism, by fascism, by those that want to put forth a particular perspective.
They know they can get it into one of the silos and then have it permeate till it feels like it's the truth.
So a couple of things we can do, which are all unfortunately fairly long-term, but one way to think about tackling this problem is making sure that tech platforms are actually held accountable for what they put forth.
Miss and disinformation is currently just allowed on the platforms that I mentioned.
There's no accountability from Meta or the other entities that allow it to percolate.
We can't trust companies to self-police on this.
And so the requirement is legislation to put guardrails into place and regulations that follow.
So just putting that out there is one solution.
I think the other one I want to proffer is putting truth up, propping truth up, and giving it more air.
I think there are still other trusted validators.
There are local businesses, there are educators, there are mayors, there are people that in local communities are trusted.
So figuring out Ways to ensure that those voices are also loud.
I think one way to counter mistruth is to pull the truth up and make sure more people hear it.
So that's the other thing I'll put forward as a solution that we should grapple with today.
Yeah, on my end, as far as specific and concrete strategies are concerned, I've always been a fan of public media, going back to when I was learning my ABCs with Sesame Street.
And, you know, I think that there is something really, really important and valuable, and you see this in Europe especially, about having a journalistic infrastructure that is at least partially non-commercial, non-partisan, not designed to sell you something, not designed to push your buttons, but to get you the information that you need.
And we really need to invest in that more seriously in this country.
We never have.
I mean, we're in this point where obviously the public media is under attack in a new way, but we've never invested as much as we should have in public radio and PBS and these kinds of things.
We should do more.
And we should do more specifically, I think, to revive state and local journalism in particular.
I think one of the things that people have come to understand or to believe is that we have ourselves in this kind of nationalized political environment, partially because people used to have the means to understand what was going on in their state house, what was going on when it came to funding a particular school or road.
This was the kind of political information people were taking in back in the day.
And in the absence of the newspapers that used to provide that information, people now get their political news and information from nationalized sources that play into or feed into nationalized narratives.
That's how they understand their entire world.
And I'm not saying that there's something intrinsically wrong necessarily with national narratives.
And I'm not saying that you can't be a demagogue about potholes.
You can be a demagogue about anything.
And obviously local issues can be very contentious.
But I think we're all understanding that there's something fundamentally out of whack with our politics.
And that's partially because people don't have the means to see materially, concretely, what are people doing in politics that affects me directly in a concrete way in my community.
Instead of that material, they're reaching for extraneous things.
They're talking about Jeffrey Epstein.
They're talking about the Green Minim.
They're talking about all this nonsense.
And I think that that's not healthy.
And I think one of the ways we can fight back against that is rebuilding a real journalistic infrastructure, particularly when it comes to covering state and local politics in particular.
That's really appropriate, especially considering what's happening now.
I mean, like, on the Hill, there is a pushback against PBS and public media, so your words are incredibly important.
Osita, I wanted to stick with you.
I'm among many who's been reading your work for quite some time, and so I join a bunch of people who are really excited about your new book that's coming out.
Again, I'll mention the title.
It's called The Right of the People, Democracy and the Case for a New Founding, which is being described as a bold case for reimagining the American Project and making American democracy real.
We have spent a lot of time today talking about democracy and what it means and who it applies to and how to reconstruct and reimagine democracy.
I had another question for you, but I hope you don't mind if I ask you a slightly different question.
What do we mean by new American founding?
Why is that part of the title of your book?
Well, I mean, it's a call to, I think, really fulfill the promise of American democracy.
One of the provocations of the book is that I don't really think we have a very democratic system.
And we should see democracy in America as not something that they did 230-something years ago that we have to dust off and protect.
That is an ongoing project of creation that we need to invest ourselves in.
We should see ourselves as founders.
There wasn't just one generation two centuries ago that founded democracy for all time.
We, on the basis of, I think, more egalitarian principles than they had, knowing more about governance than they do, knowing more political science than they did, have as much of a right, if not more, to see ourselves as part of the project of fundamentally reworking, renewing, actually, from my perspective, creating American democracy for the first time.
And that's a bold thing to say, but I think that that's where you land when you think from first principles about what democracy actually means.
It's a word we've come to take for granted.
We use it all the time casually.
But democracy is extremely complicated.
It's a thicket of vexing ideas.
And we're in a place now, obviously, too, where many Americans don't take it for granted as much as we might in this room that democracy is a good system, that it has values and virtues that are worth preserving.
I think that Donald Trump succeeded in politics partially on that basis.
There are people who didn't really think that he was either a threat to democracy or to the extent that he was, they thought that there are more important things that they should vote on.
And that's dangerous.
We need to be making an affirmative, robust case for democracy.
What we tried out this past, I'm saying we, what the Democratic Party tried out in November clearly did not resonate with the kinds of people that it needed to resonate with.
And so we're in a position now of having to articulate a robust defense of democracy.
And I think we're going to be in a bad position to do that if we're not defining it really kind of coherently and tightly.
So in all that I read and all that I worked through in writing this book, I really could not find a more succinct and coherent definition of democracy than the one that Abraham Lincoln functionally gave in the Gettysburg Address.
Democracy is governed by the people, of the people, by the people, and for the people.
And another way of putting that is democracy is a system in which the governed themselves govern.
They are not entrusting governance to some higher superior authority.
They are not...
Anti-democratic forces are...
Are at work here, always.
We have to remain vigilant at all times.
You know, they're not entrusting governance to some other higher authority that's better than them.
they themselves are taking upon the responsibility of governing themselves, right?
And that sounds, jeez Louise, that sounds...
That sounds all well and good, but I think to really get a kind of granular sense of what democracy means, you have to think about the principles at work within a democratic system.
I think there are three that you really have to emphasize.
One is equality.
Everybody who is party to a democratic decision has to be in equal standing.
If that's not the case, you leave the door open to some superior class of people being the ones that actually get to make the decisions that matter.
A democratic system is responsive to the governed.
When the governed speak, they speak with authority, and the system is obligated to respond in some way to what they've asserted.
And the last thing is majority rule or majoritarianism.
There are a lot of different ways a group might make a decision collectively, but majority rule is the only one consistent within the principle of equality.
When three people want something and two people want some other thing, there is no way that the two people win out unless there's some kind of inequality at work, right?
These seem like very basic, commonsensical principles.
I think that people kind of accept them when you say them that way.
And yet, we live in a political system that flouts all of these things in basic ways.
We are sitting right now in a city, Washington, D.C., of 700,000 people who do not have a full and equal voice in the federal government.
They're among the 4 million Americans for whom that is true.
The one delegate that D.C. has in the House, El Norholmes, does not have a vote on the final passage for legislation in the House and in Congress.
That is democratically untenable.
DC is, in fact, governed more intimately than other parts of the country in the municipal government because it is a constitutionally created city.
It has become the plaything of Republican members of Congress in other parts of the country.
But there are 4 million Americans for whom this is true, mostly in Puerto Rico.
And I don't think there's an honest definition of democracy that allows us to say that those people are living in democracy today.
They're not.
Even those of us who do have some kind of a say do not have an equal say, obviously so.
California, its population of about 40 million people, if we're its own country, it'd be one of the 40 largest in the world, one of the largest economies in the world, has the very same number of seats in the Senate as Wyoming, a city with, I think, under 600,000 people.
It's smaller, in fact, than Washington, D.C.
And so, on a mathematical basis, when you divide representation by the population of each state, that residents of Wyoming has about 67 times representation in the Senate as a resident of California.
That's not purely academic fact that matters.
That disparity speaks to the reasons why we can't pass the gun control policies most people in this country won't.
We can't pass the immigration laws, immigration reform most people in this country wide.
We can't do the environmental work most people in this country want.
And I think it speaks also to why the President of the United States can send troops into Los Angeles without having to worry very much about what the people of Los Angeles think or that that's going to have some kind of political backlash against him because it might not.
California is, again, not represented adequately in the Senate, not an important state when it comes to winning the Electoral College.
This matters.
And I think we're in a position where we can no longer pretend that it doesn't matter.
It does.
It shapes policymaking.
The Senate shapes the judiciary.
It shapes the executive branch.
And these disparities are only getting worse and worse with time.
And I think we're at a point where if we want to really solve the problems we face in this country, we have to deal with these basic inequities or we're not going to.
And we're going to find ourselves pulled more deeply and more rapidly towards authoritarianism.
Beautifully said.
Thank you so much for that.
Lisa, one of the reasons I'm so glad that you're here is because you've been thinking about the question of tech and policy and politics.
And a few times we've mentioned here on this platform this rise of AI and its ubiquity.
It's everywhere.
Everyone's using it.
In my other life, I teach at Georgetown and my students are using it.
Everyone's using it all the time.
And I don't think we've fully grappled with a few things.
One, just how profoundly it will unsettle society.
It'll change our relationships with each other and with power.
And secondly, the sheer amount of money that's flooding in to these companies, a sheer amount of insane money, which means power that's flowing to these companies that are putting out these chatbots and whatever successor technologies take their place.
I wanted to ask you, what are the key threats posed by tech money in politics right now?
And how should progressives respond to that?
Well, it's a very provocative question, so thank you.
You know, I think that tech money, corporate money in general, but tech money in particular, has become one of the most pervasive forces in democracy over the last two years.
You know, they become one of the most dominant players in our elections.
And, you know, it's the traditional big four tech companies like Meta and Apple, but it is also these new entities.
It's AI, it's crypto.
Crypto in particular was one of the biggest players in 2024.
44% of all of the corporate money that came in came from crypto backers.
It's a massive amount.
And an even wilder set is that that money is 15% of all of the corporate money that has been spent since Citizens United 15 years ago.
It's an insane volume.
It's hard to even quantify.
And even crazier when you think about the fact that crypto has only been around for a couple of election cycles.
92% of the money they've ever spent was in 2024.
So it's hard to get our arms around this, but the volume is massive.
And what that brings is immediate dividends to policymakers.
You know, they poured most of this money through a pack they called Fair Shake.
It was not partisan.
It went to Democrats and Republicans with the idea that they should prop up those that are supportive of crypto and take down those that are skeptics.
And we're already seeing the consequences.
Even before this new Congress came in, before Trump got here, one of the SEC commissioners, the minority commissioner, she went through unanimously in the last Congress.
She was painted as a crypto opponent, and she couldn't even get a hearing in the banking committee because people were so nervous about crossing crypto.
And we're seeing it now.
We're seeing it actually today.
There are votes on pieces of legislation, stablecoin bills that will make it easier for crypto to permeate.
We've seen the idea of a reserve, a Bitcoin reserve for the nation.
And even worse, the absurdist profit off the presidency action of Trump having his own meme coin.
I'm sure you all saw he advertised, we think, illegally, his meme coin by offering people a private dinner at his golf course, offering people tours of the White House with him there, so they would buy more of his meme coin while he is in the Oval Office.
So the levels of corruption surrounding crypto and AI, focusing on crypto because of the sheer amounts of money, but AI money is also flowing, it's really intense.
And I think it's definitely changing in real time how politicians are voting and what is happening in Washington.
So what should progressives do?
What should everybody do?
I mean, the remedies are actually not new.
You know, corporate money has been a problem since Citizens United and before, but exacerbated by that decision 15 years ago.
What we need to do first and foremost is overturn the Citizens United decision.
Short of that, on our way to that, we also need more disclosure of how the money is flowing so we can better understand how these decisions are being made.
We need shareholders to have more checks on the corporate money that's flowing.
You know, there's a reputational risk associated with corporations playing in politics, publicly traded ones.
So we need to provide checks through shareholder democracy.
And then we need public financing, which is something I know we'll talk about more later in the panel.
But we need to give regular people a louder voice in the meantime so we can combat and level the playing field from what these corporations are doing.
Yes, thank you.
And thank you for that focus on crypto as well.
That's also incredibly important.
Osita, part of the reason why we're holding this conversation, we're having all these conversations today is because we want to focus on vision and what it means to have vision, especially at this moment, at this juncture in American history.
The difficulty of coming up with a vision that empowers people and encompasses our ambitions, but that is also enables us to kind of work consistently towards a goal and to achieve it.
I was going back to read some of your work, and I came across this quote in an essay that you wrote for the New Republic in 2020.
I'll read it now and then ask you to respond to it.
So this was a few years ago, but I think it still applies in so many ways.
You wrote, a substantial portion of the American electorate and many of our political elites value technocratic and administrative competence or the appearance of either over political vision.
Another enemy of progress is a political culture that dissuades us from pursuing grand schemes no matter how much we might want them.
What does it look like to build a political culture that encourages political vision and makes it achievable?
Well, I mean, I think that part of that is supporting and fostering people, candidates, leaders who offer that vision.
When a candidate like Zorhan Mamdani, for instance, comes around, you don't harangue that person with a bunch of nonsense, even if you disagree with them on certain things.
You try to work with them and establish a dialogue with them.
And funnily enough, that piece was in part about Andrew Cuomo, who in this period was kind of an American hero, was being framed as one by the press.
And I couldn't really figure out for the life of me why.
He was doing things that were very similar to what other governors were doing, but he was also doing these press conferences where he told people to cover their mouths when they were coughing.
And this made him a great statesman or something.
And I wrote part of this piece about my puzzling at why that was.
And I think what I came down to is that Andrew Cuomo is somebody who projected competence, projected a particular kind of leadership and ability.
He doesn't have grand political visions and schemes and so on, but he knows how to get things done, and that's what really counts.
I think that's the basis upon which I think a lot of the people in the press lionized him at the time, and the people in the Democratic Party did, even though, and this is before we knew about the nursing home scandal, even though people were making critiques of his administration.
And frankly, I think that's the basis upon which in this last election people rallied behind him.
It was about this kind of image of competency and control and that kind of vision of what leadership is about, even though he left office in as much disgrace as a politician can.
And it was a real, I don't know, it was striking to see people in the Democratic Party in New York City rally behind them in spite of that.
So I think part of it is having a different sense of the kinds of politicians and candidates and leaders we even want and desire and are willing to put our faith and support in.
I think that Mamdani is one of those people, and there's a lot we can learn, I think, about the fact that he's been treated the way that he has.
We're in this conversation now, too, I should say, about policy bottlenecks and difficulties that we have in building and achieving great things, the abundance agenda, and the extent to which we are shooting ourselves in the foot with certain policy mechanisms that we ought to change.
I think that there are reasonable and important debates to be had in that realm.
We don't have to get into in this particular point in time.
But I think that one of the other obstacles is, look, if you think that we should be changing certain things about policymaking in order to achieve big things, you have to be telling people that we want to achieve big things.
You have to have a vision that animates the desire to improve, to reform, to remake those bottlenecks in the first place.
And I think we have a lot of people making technocratic complaints about technocratic issues without the kind of larger vision.
What is the actual thing that you think we're going to do when we fix this stuff?
What is the actual large-scale vision you have for reforming American health care, reforming housing in this country, reforming the environment?
What is the large-scale grand plan that you have?
Because that, for I think, a lot of people is the stuff of politics, especially at a point now where our problems are so large and getting larger.
You have to have a kind of background vision.
And again, I think that part of having that is fostering, supporting, backing candidates who speak in those terms about politics.
Thank you.
I also want to note that in about 10 minutes I'll be asking for questions.
So if you have any questions in mind, we'll use the same system we've been using.
You'll get a note card and a pen if you need it.
You can write the question, and then I'll take the question up here.
Kind of saying in this realm, Lisa, about like sort of, I guess, the influence of money in politics and how some candidates are pushing against that.
Public citizen is champion expanding public financing of elections.
How might small dollar donor systems and public financing reshape not just campaign funding, but who runs for office and ultimately who democracy serves?
So we are longtime champions of public financing.
As you know, I've already mentioned it as one of the remedies we think is incredibly important.
You know, right now, our political system favors those who have a Rolodex and can reach out to major donors, and it makes it incredibly unempowering for everyone else.
The idea that what you need to run for office are connections and big dollars, and if you don't have that, you cannot step up to the plate is incredibly discouraging and really hinders the diversity of those who can run.
So public financing, first and foremost, allows more people to take the stage, to step up to the plate, whatever metaphor you want, and run.
In addition, it grapples with one of the systemic problems in our system, which is that people do not trust that politicians are there for anything but their big dollar donors.
The whole example I ran through around crypto, I mean, it's illustrative of the realities of our political system right now.
If you run for office, you are absolutely going to take into account those who give you the money that made it possible and their K-Street lobbyists.
So taking that out of the equation by leveling the playing field, by allowing regular people to also have a voice and to contribute in an equal way, just changes the dynamic incredibly.
And hopefully, if we ever have it implemented at the federal level, it will help to begin to rebuild trust in government, which is sorely lacking right now.
There are a number of different types of systems.
There is a system wherein you give a contribution and then it is matched at a five-to-one rate or a six- or nine-to-one rate.
So elevating your contribution.
There are systems in some states where vouchers are provided where you can use that to contribute to politics.
Systems where there are tax breaks or incentives for contributing a small dollar amount.
Whatever system is put into place, the point is to make sure that regular people, that all of our voices are equal to that of the corporate and special interest dollar donors who right now have the power.
Thank you for that.
And really well stated.
I think anyone who knows me knows that I'm obsessed with the intersection between culture and politics and policy and the fact that we need to be attuned to what's happening and speak to a culture in all kinds of ways.
And that needs to be a relationship that goes in both directions.
And Osita, you've written about this as well.
I particularly loved reading an essay that you wrote for The New Republic.
I think it was last year, if I'm not mistaken, about Tom Wolfe.
It's a piece about Tom Wolfe and how pop culture became central to serious criticism.
And you're right, being articulate about the inarticulable for Wolf demanded the adoption of a now standard critical posture, taking popular culture seriously and viewing its products and developments as worthy of close study, if not respect.
How can progressive movements harness pop culture, not just high art or critical literature, but the everyday cultural narratives and spectacles that shape public life to articulate a richer democratic imagination and help reweave a shared public culture?
So I have a lot of thoughts about this.
I mean, I guess I have a lot of thoughts about everything.
But it's something I've been thinking about a lot, especially as I've kind of finished this book and looked at the next things I'm working on.
One of the things I've always been interested in politics is the fact that conservatives have a cultural agenda and progressives don't really to the same extent.
Conservatives really, really care about cultural power and cultural influence.
If you talk to people on the right during the first Trump administration, you'd hear them say things all the time like, you know, progressives have all the power in this country.
The left rules this country.
And you say to them, what are you talking about?
You have the presidency.
You have the Senate.
You have or had the House.
You've just locked in a majority on the Supreme Court for God knows how long.
You control state governments totally across this country.
What are you talking about?
And they'll say something like, well, you know, I saw a transgender person on Good Morning America, and that's what really counts.
Conservatives care about culture because I think that they have a particular vision of what they want from American society and the role culture plays there.
And they're thinking about this and talking about this all the time.
We, on our hand, I mean, there are certain policy issues where musicians and actors and so on come to Congress to talk about rights and this kind of thing.
Obviously, we support things like arts, education.
You know, beyond politics, we push for more representation in Hollywood.
We push for changing certain narratives.
All those things are important.
But we don't have kind of high aspirations and expectations for culture, I think, in the same way the conservatives do on the basis of their values.
But culture matters for politics, and obviously so, for a few different reasons.
One, it's one of the sources of our political ideas.
Two, it is a meaningfully important sector of the economy.
It's about five million workers, about a trillion dollars of GDP, before you talk about the second order effects.
But the third thing, and I think the most important thing, is that culture is a basic need.
It's not the same kind of need as food or health care or housing.
But we do need stories and art and music and have from the beginning of time.
And I think because it's a basic need, we also have a kind of obligation to make sure that we are offering, providing quality, and providing innovation.
We're not just rehashing the same things over and over and over again.
We're always giving people new ideas, new ways to see themselves and their lives and the world around them.
And those are expectations we should have of culture, partially because when we do that, we actually grow the economy, when we innovate culturally.
We produce new things that creates jobs, you know, in a very basic way.
But also, you know, this existential question I think is important.
I think this all has a lot to do with democracy.
And people in the 19th century took it for granted that there's a connection here.
So if you read Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville, as was common for his time, makes the argument that aristocratic societies, European societies, those are the kinds of societies where you're going to see the highest and best in culture.
That there was something about democratic society and the equality that would lower standards.
And we produce things that would be okay in America, but nothing as great as the Europeans did.
And the funny thing about it was that around this time we started proving them wrong with Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson and Mark Twain and Walt Whitman.
And it was Whitman specifically in his book Democratic Vistas, which every American should read, he makes the direct democratic counterargument, which is that when you actually take the intrinsic worth and value and dignity of every single human being as a first principle and you create a system and you create a society in which they are empowered and given agency,
you're actually going to have creative flourishing, people coming up with new ideas and new things that the world has never seen before.
And for a very, very long time in this country, we proved Whitman right.
The explosion of creativity in America from the 1850s, I want to say, through 2000, is unlike anything in the history of civilization.
On every front, whether you're talking about visual arts, music, jazz, rock and roll, hip-hop, theater, the film industry, we were creating in ways that we can't even fathom now, the amount of creative energy we had in this country.
If you look at the Highest Gross movies of 1975, or 1972, 50 years ago, you'd see a lot of dumb garbage.
Sure, yeah, it was always the case.
We always see like The Godfather and Dog Day Afternoon and these kinds of things.
Now we've got Ant-Man 17 or the cap and crunch cinematic universe or something.
We're doing Superman again.
I've heard that it's fine.
I might see it, I might not.
But if I don't see it, I know I can catch it the next time we do it in 2030.
But I think it's important to understand about Superman is that there was a time when Superman was a new thing in the world, a new idea, derived from certain sources, yes, but the product of the imaginations of people from Jewish immigrant families in this country.
And it's the case for a lot of the superheroes.
We provided that as a new way, a new kind of story to tell, and we gave that to the world.
And if the people 100 years ago, in the 1930s rather, who came up with the first superheroes had said to themselves, actually, we're just going to do what we did 30 years ago, 40 years ago, 50 years ago, and keep reading back, we never would have had them.
This really matters to me.
As somebody who, you know, journalism was my third choice.
I wanted to be a filmmaker.
And I decided to take the more lucrative and stable path of print journalism.
But I think it really matters in a concrete policy sense.
We were talking just a few minutes ago about AI.
And I won't say all the things that I have to say about AI here because we'd be here all evening.
But artificial intelligence and the LLM models that we have now are models that are based upon the regurgitation of what has come before.
And materials that are used to do this are materials that have been stolen.
I wish the Congressman Rascal were here because I cannot, I don't understand why nobody in Congress seems to care about this at all.
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