Episode 285 - Max Changes the Constitution Part III
Max and Aaron complete their discussion on Max's constitutional proposals, now focusing on the representative-ness of the house and electoral college as a counterbalance to the senate and executive council.
Related Episodes
Episode 108: Corporate Governance
Episode 74: Gerrymander USA, The End of Civilization, and Monkey Business
Episode 4: Codebreaking, Bizarro Harry Potter, and the Proper Way to Gerrymander
Transcript
Max Sklar: You're listening to The Local Maximum, Episode 285.
Narration: Time to expand your perspective. Welcome to The Local Maximum. Now here's your host, Max Sklar.
Max: Welcome, everyone. Welcome. You have reached another local maximum. Today we are going to get into the third and final part of my proposed changes to the Constitution. Since this discussion, I've cleaned a bunch of it up, so I'll mention those changes at the end of the show.
Also, I've got some wonderful feedback from some of you and from some other people. There's definitely, though, a group of people who are kind of like, what's the point here? And I think that the point here is to learn about American history and organizational design. And I've gotten in touch with some elected officials on this to gather feedback and ideas, and I've gotten some particularly good feedback around. When you create a government institution, what is the pitfall of doing that? And I think that a lot of that carries over into any kind of institution that you want to create.
So I strongly disagree with anyone who says there's no point in doing this unless you're going to push our political system into making these changes, which is obviously very difficult, pretty much impossible as of right now. But first of all, how are you ever going to make progress on anything unless you float some ideas and think outside the box? It's impossible.
Remember, hypothesis generation is an extremely important part of the scientific method, sometimes even more important than the testing itself. And so too are proposal generations.
But secondly, there is nothing wrong with coming up with a proposal, doing a little bit of research, and putting some thought into it and allowing others to pick it up and run with it later. Or maybe they read it and they're like, let's do the opposite, but in any direction they want. I think there's value to that. And so I believe that we're going to be referring to these episodes quite a bit into the future.
Now, for those of you who want to get back into tech, into software, specifically into AI, have no fear, hope is on the way. I recently recorded an episode of the podcast Data on the Rocks with Florin Tufan, and we talked about the rise of AI. And an article has come out recently, once again about AI and consciousness.
So I reiterated some of my thoughts on that show, which I'm not sure when it'll come out, but I'm going to circle back to these issues over the next few episodes. Also, we've been meaning to get into the so-called AI doomer debate. Aaron and I were actually going to try to do that the same day that we recorded this Constitution episode, but it went so long, it ended up being a three-parter. But I want to get more nuanced into that debate and try to summarize the positions there.
All right, so now we're about to get into part three of our discussion of the Constitution. Part one was identifying the problem, the administrative state, why the Founders screwed up the Senate. The second part was the proposal for the Senate and for the Executive Council. And then this part is a kind of counterbalance to that part where we make some improvements in terms of representation in order to make the system more democratic and perhaps make up for some of the changes that we made in the last one.
Enjoy. Let's bring it up like a Tea Party type is probably going, yeah, I support all this right now, but what's the progressive going to get out of this, right? And so now we come to the House of Representatives where it's like, well, if the purpose of the Senate is the voice of the states and the purpose of the Executive Council is the continuity thing, what is the purpose of the House of Representatives?
Well, it's to represent the people as best as possible
Aaron: In more smaller, more divisible chunks. Was it originally like 15,000 per representative or something?
Max: 30,000. And in fact, there's a website, thirty-thousand.org, that advocates for a humongous like 8000 House of Representatives.
Aaron: To bring it back to that original ratio.
Max: To bring it back. And they have a whole system for how it's going to work and be more effective.
Aaron: It'll be like the Galactic Senate.
Max: Exactly. Yeah, that might actually be a very good idea.
Aaron: But you're not ready to jump on that bandwagon.
Max: Well, it's just too complicated right now in what I'm talking about now. But what I think is, look, if you're going to represent the people of the United States, there's a lot of U. S. Citizens who live in US territory who don't get to vote in the House of Representatives. The people in DC, for example, the people in Puerto Rico.
Aaron: Now, do they have representatives there who are non voting? Is that the correct state of affairs?
Max: Yeah. So first of all, what we're going to do is we're going to treat all of the federal territories are going to get representatives as well, and the federal government sets that up.
Aaron: So Puerto Rico, Guam, Virgin Islands, so on and so forth.
Max: Now all these things now, if we're going to do it the same way that we do it now, they're going to have to draw districts in these things. And so I don't know how many representatives it gets, but it could be that a chunk of DC has to vote for Puerto Rico in order to make it even.
Aaron: Yeah, I was going to say, where do we draw the line there? Because I would imagine that DC easily qualifies or pretty reasonably qualifies for at least one representative. Sure. And Puerto Rico. Probably more than one. But the US. Virgin Islands may not be enough, and so they may need to be lumped in with another group. And you probably don't want them being lumped in with Guam on opposite sides of the continent.
Okay. So there might have to be some interesting district drawing there that might combine multiple territories under a single, you know. But that's a solvable problem.
Max: I mean, one possibility is to increase the size of the House of Representatives.
Aaron: Not in scope for what you're saying here, but not prohibited by it either.
Max: Exactly. And so I think I have written down some other things.
Aaron: 438 is not a magic number, right? Well, it is right now, but it need not be.
Max: Right. And so I want to include something else, and I don't know exactly what can be done at this point, but I want to include something against gerrymandering. That's a very hard thing to do, but I feel like there should be a way to write into the Constitution that can limit what goes on today where you have these computer models now, people are like, I'm all for gerrymandering.
And the people who say that are the ones that if you don't gerrymander in your state, then everyone else is going to gerrymander. That's putting you at a disadvantage. So that's what they mean. But if we can agree that no one's going to.
Aaron: Is that a red queen's race?
Max: What's that?
Aaron: Is that a red queen's race? That phenomenon basically, if you don't run because everyone else is running at the same speed, you'll fall behind. But if you do run, then everybody stays in the same place relative to each other.
Max: Maybe. I mean, it's the same reason why the Electoral College is a winner take all in the states. You're way more powerful if you're a black voter. Yeah. If we can all agree that there are more rules on apportionment, then we kind of do that evenly. And the Supreme Court has weighed in on this.
In fact, recently they weighed in on a case in Alabama where they said that there has to be a second majority African American district because they put all African Americans in one district to kind of okay, one representative is going to take care of all them.
Aaron: Is that a variant on packing and cracking?
Max: Yeah, sort of. In some ways, it makes sense. They're like, well, this community, they have similar ideas, they belong together. On the other hand, you're also, like, depriving them of proportional representation. And I think there's sort of the issue there. Now the problem is gerrymandering takes place everywhere for all sorts of different reasons.
Aaron: It especially takes place here.
Max: In what, in Massachusetts?
Aaron: Well, we are currently sitting in Elbridge Jerry's home district.
Max: Yes. But I don't know if gerrymandering is big in Massachusetts these days.
Aaron: It is probably not particularly worse than anywhere else. We just have a long tradition. Yeah, New Hampshire is quite gerry-. There's only two districts in New Hampshire.
Max: They're funny shapes.
Aaron: Yeah, they're funny shapes. So I think the problem in the Alabama case was that it's a racial gerrymander. And the Supreme Court has decided that because there's a lot about race in the Constitution now, and because of the way things developed and because of the Voting Rights Act and because of the history of the country, the racial gerrymander has particular there's a particular reason why the court has to get involved in that one. And that's probably a good thing to do.
But I wonder if there's something that we can do that makes these things more representatives. There's some people who say, like, look, there should be like a proportional representation. Like all states should be statewide elections, and then there are no districts that could work too. So I'm not really sure what to do here.
Max: So this raises two questions for me. One is, let's assume for the moment that you can come up with some sort of formula that can be applied to test districts and determine if they are or not gerrymandered and recommend changes.
Aaron: I know it's a hard problem.
Max: One of my concerns would be how do we ensure that the legislature, presumably the House, would they be overseas? Well, let's call it the legislature, house and Senate perhaps.
Aaron: Of the state or?
Max: Of the federal government, because they're going to have some oversight on this. How do we keep them from just delegating this to a department of the administrative state so they'll appoint a civil Rights Commission or Department of Elections and they handle it. And now it's just more bureaucracy rather than the legislature actually handling it directly.
That's one of my immediate concerns that comes up, that this is just going to become another bureaucratic layer with all the problems that entails.
Aaron: That's a good concern. I'm wondering if we can write rules into the Constitution and maybe it's not possible that could then get checked in the courts, which you might trust a little bit more and stuff that people would agree with. I don't know. Some people say, oh, just draw a grid. That doesn't really work. There are a lot of open questions there, but I'm thinking about it.
Max: My other thought, and this has kind of been simmering quietly in the background the whole time here. You mentioned citizens a couple of times in your document, right? You mentioned early on the infamous three fifths compromise. The other way that representation is skewed, perhaps, is that only citizens can vote.
But the apportionment of representatives, at least I believe under the current system, is not based on citizens. It's based on population. And so non voting persons, whether that's people who are not of the age of majority or people who are resident aliens, they count towards population for representation numbers, but they don't actually participate in the vote. So if you have a district that has a very high immigrant population, then the actual portion of the vote necessary.
There's an interesting question which I think the courts have weighed in on at various points over time to get us to the current state we're at. But I think it's a not very well answered question of should apportionment be done on the basis of voters or should be on some other basis or should there be some correction factor?
And obviously, like I said, three fifths compromise is tainted. But I think there could be a reasonable, perhaps approach of prorating non voters if they're going to count towards the apportionment of representation or something like that. You don't explicitly deal with that in the document, but yeah, I'm curious where you're thinking on.
Aaron: So first of all, I decided and you brought this up because I didn't know about this, but then I decided to read a lot more about it. So first of all, I'm not going to muck with the formulas that we have now where it's done by population just because that's historically how we've done it.
Max: I suppose the easy answer is if you don't put anything in this proposed amendment that explicitly locks that in then it's not preventing it from being quote unquote, fixed elsewhere.
Aaron: Sure. But I do share this concern where it's not just like, oh, you're counting great, you're counting immigrants, non-US citizens. What a great thing to give them a voice in our system.
That's not what's happening. It's like those states are getting more representatives and then the citizens of those states are allowed to vote for those people. So it's giving more power to you if you live around immigrants like they're giving you their votes.
Max: Yeah, I mean, in a way, it's kind of like the opposite side of the coin of the thing that people complain about with the Senate and because of the impact that the Senate has on the Electoral College for presidential elections that someone in Wyoming, their vote for president counts significantly more than someone from California just on the basis of number of people per electoral vote.
Aaron: Right. Now, notice I use the case of non US citizens because I think they have different interests than US citizens and so you're not actually voting on their behalf.
I think it's a different situation with people who are not of the age of majority yet because there's a good argument that oh, the parents are voting and that's representing the kids as well.
Max: Not to mention they will eventually reach the age of majority, at which point whereas with immigrants they may or may not become citizens. And so it's not as clear that you need to cater towards that future potential voter in the way that you do with minors.
Right, but I also think there is a strong argument that when you vote, you're voting in the interest of your children but you're not really voting.
Aaron: So you have to be cautious with that because that's the same argument that said women don't need a vote because their husband votes their interest.
Max: Exactly.
Aaron: Or the counterpart: women are just going to vote their husband's interest because how could they possibly have an opinion of their own?
Max: So that was an argument at the time. Yeah, it's true.
Aaron: It's not without merit, but it doesn't paint the whole picture.
Max: But I think the argument does apply in this case.
Aaron: Yes. It's probably more applicable in the case of guardians.
Max: How old are your kids?
Aaron: Like five and seven.
Max: Yeah. Okay. I think you could vote for them.
Aaron: So another place where that could potentially come into play is, and I'd have to check the language you use precisely in the document here, but you talk about the charge to the executive council.
You could say that the executive council, rather than represents the citizens, that they could represent the people of the United States, and that you could explicitly, even though they know the legal residents of the United States now, how does that actually trickle down or flow up into their actions?
I think a nice thought to give them that charge, but I don't know what the impact of that would be, because it still wouldn't directly impact how they are selected. It's more what they see as their mission statement.
Max: Right, yeah, it's a really interesting thing to ponder. Interestingly enough, have you ever heard of the Supreme Court case Reynolds versus Sims?
Aaron: I'm not very familiar with that one, no.
Max: So that was actually a really important one in the sixties. In the lot of state legislatures were very malapportioned and in fact, it would be based on counties and districts that haven't been redrawn in decades or like a century. And so you'd have some that are like a hundred times as big as others. And the Supreme Court said no.
Every legislature senate, whether it's state senate or state house or assembly, whatever it's called, or even in cities, they all have to be equal by population. And no mind that the federal government has a Senate that doesn't follow this. The states are unitary things and so they have to follow. So there's a lot of interesting things that could be said about that. But before I go on with that, I feel like I also want to mention they also took up another case, I think it was in Hawaii.
And I could be getting this a little bit wrong, so someone who's a constitutional scholar could correct me, but I believe someone was like, well, Hawaii over here was doing it by citizens and they were know, people in the military are far away to vote and they weren't allowing these people to vote. And the Supreme Court was like, oh no, they could pick and choose what their formula is for equal.
These two formulas are reasonable, how they're going to count, but it has to be approximately equal. And then of course, they don't even fill in what approximately is. I think 100 to 1 is probably not approximate. And that's what killed the New York City Board of Estimate. It used to be that the Borough President of Staten Island had the same vote as the Borough President of Brooklyn, despite the fact that Staten Island had such a small population.
Now, of course, those years before 1989, we were known in New York City as being under the iron thumb of Staten Island. No, I don't think that was the case. I think that people didn't like the Board of Estimate, which is a good cautionary tale for designing the Executive Council, because the Board of Estimate was made up of all these random government officials who were elected for some other purpose, and they would be like approving people's permits. And it got to be very corrupt in that sense. And so people hated them.
Aaron: It did always confuse me why — and for a little bit of background, we both grew up, or at least I grew up, and you spent a significant chunk of your childhood in Connecticut. County government is not really a thing in Connecticut. So we were in Fairfield County.
Max: New England. I don't think anywhere in New England.
Aaron: Yeah, it's much bigger deal in mid-Atlantic states. I want to say Maryland, where there is negligible town level government, that much of it is handled at the county level.
Max: In New York, except for the city, we have county legislatures.
Aaron: It would make sense in my mind that why wouldn't the senators not be at the county? I've also wondered, if a state has two senators, why not split the state in half and one senator represents one half and the other senator represents the other half? Now, that doesn't really serve the goals of the U.S. Senate that you laid out,
Max: When you redistrict and it's like between the terms-
Aaron: That's the other thing is because I believe it's designed so that while every state has two senators, that those two senators are in different election cycles.
Max: Like before Reynolds versus Sims. I think there were situations where counties did elect, like a state Senate. I think you could still do that under Reynolds versus Sims, but you would have to apportion it correctly. And I don't know at what point it becomes right.
Aaron: It seems silly to redraw your counties, particularly if the county actually has a meaningful function on a ten year basis.
Max: Yeah, but I'm saying is you could still have the county governments pick the senators. You would just give them more senators based on their population. I see. Yeah. That would be totally consistent with what the Supreme Court is saying.
But yeah, I mean, look, those cases might develop in an interesting way over the course of the next century because apportionment is a very messy thing, and they certainly haven't answered all the questions that could be raised, and certainly even the questions that they settled before could be reopened. We'll see.
So I didn't want to get into that, but okay. House of Representatives gets a lot more representation. The new Representatives comes from places where, let's be honest, democrats think they can win, particularly DC.
Aaron: DC. Puerto Rico.
Max: Yeah, they think they can win in Puerto Rico. We all know they can win in DC, puerto Rico and some of the other outflung ones, I'm not so sure because remember when Alaska and Hawaii were admitted, it was considered well, Hawaii is going to be Republican and Alaska is going to be Democrat. Turned out to be completely opposite.
Aaron: I did not realize. Yeah. Interesting. Why did they think Hawaii would be Republican? Was it the large military presence?
Max: I don't know that. I assume it's the large military presence and probably the business interests there.
Aaron: I guess that could make sense through a certain lens.
Max: Yeah. So what was I getting at there? Okay, so that gives them an edge. And plus, I think it plays to the sense of fairness that we all feel.
Aaron: I think you buried the lead here because not only are we increasing representation of non-state entities in the House of Representatives, but you're proposing a change to how the Presidential Electoral College works.
Max: Now, the Electoral College is going to be based so today the Electoral College is based on the state gets the number of so each state gets to appoint a certain number of electors who elect the President. The electors are equal to the number of Representatives plus the number of Senators.
So, like, whatever your reps are, plus two. Now, the weird thing about that is that the balance in the Electoral College is totally based on how big they make the House of Representatives, which that decision has been set in stone for 100 years, but they make that decision without thought to the Electoral College balance.
So it's a really weird way of doing it. I think it was kind of like, well, we have the Senate one way, we have the House of Representatives another way. We don't want to go through this whole debate again with the Presidents. Let's just add it together and call it a day.
That's kind of what I think the Constitutional Convention did. But now that we have this Executive Council that's chosen the Senate way we'll say, no, the President is going to be chosen the House of Representatives way it's going to be the election for the President is going to have electors based on the population of the state. So apportioned in the way that the House of Representatives is now it already has DC.
So DC will keep their Representatives, although DC will be represented less because nowadays DC gets three votes because it's as if they had two Senators. But you might get some more from Puerto Rico or whatever, but I think it's going to be more based on population. And the President will now be not the only office elected with a national election, but it'll be the only office with a national election that's weighted by population. And so that would carry a bit of weight.
Aaron: So Nate Silver will have to change the name of his website. It will no longer be 538. It won't be 438 either because we'll be adding additional representatives to the House.
And as a result, the presidential election, it will not strictly adhere to the popular vote, but it will be much more closely aligned to it than it is currently with the weight of the Senate influencing the distribution of electoral votes.
Max: Right. So one argument against the Electoral College that I hear, which it's arguable that this is valid. Well, a voter in California has much less weight than a voter in Wyoming because the voter in Wyoming is the least populated state and they have three electors in the Electoral College. Well, now Wyoming is going to have one, so it's going to be reduced by a third. California is not even going to notice there are two that's missing.
Aaron: Now, one of the goals of perhaps changing how the Electoral College is structured would be to get candidates to campaign in places where perhaps they don't. It seems like this would not necessarily do that because it would make it even less likely that somebody is going to spend time campaigning in Wyoming.
Max: Right. So it's a question of do we want to allow winner take all still? I haven't filled that in yet. That's one place where I want to get more feedback.
Aaron: Is that currently determined at the state level or is that determined by the state level? Because there are two states which are exceptions.
Max: Yeah, but it's really in your interest to do winner take all. Those states are just they don't care about that stuff. They're also very oddball states, Nebraska and Maine.
Aaron: And they're not at the absolute bottom of the influence level there, but they have relatively small number of delegates to begin with. It's not like a New York or a California who's got a significant power in their bloc weakening that. These are people who we've got, what has Maine got like five electoral votes? Or maybe not even that.
Max: Maybe four.
Aaron: Yeah, I know it's more than three. Yeah. So saying that, well, rather than having all four go one way, we're going to have two go with a majority and then one per district. That doesn't really dilute their influence that much.
I can't imagine a scenario where it's not going to result in either a three one split or a four for all. They're potentially giving up one electoral vote from their blockiness, much less impact than if a similar approach was taken in New York.
Max: Both Nebraska and Maine also award their two Senate electors based on those two.
Aaron: It's winner take two and then the rest by district.
Max: Exactly which kind of makes sense. So I don't know what to do with this. This is where I'd like some feedback on, but I feel like this is going to be very appealing to people on, let's say, like, the left side of the aisle, who would be very suspicious of indirect election of senators.
Is it too imbalanced for one side or the other? I don't know. That's where I want to kind of get some feedback and try to figure it out.
Aaron: One other question I want to throw out there, and maybe we don't have an answer for it now, but food for thought. So this gives much better representation to territories. Yeah. So the advantage of going from becoming a territory to a state, which is really consideration primarily for Puerto Rico right now, I don't think there's anyone else who's really on the cusp.
By cusp I mean, they're not actually actively pushing for it, but they've talked about it. It's something that's been considered.
Max: DC as well.
Aaron: So the advantage of making that jump to statehood would be that in addition, you now get senatorial representation and a vote in the appointment of the Executive council. So DC and Puerto Rico under this system would have no say in the executive Council because you need a senator to.
Max: That's not true. So your state is selecting the senator. Right. But who is your state if you're a territory? It's actually the federal government itself because you're directly under the federal government. The federal government does have representation in the Senate. The vice president is in the Senate. So you do in that way. And not only that, now that there's only one senator, one vote.
Aaron: That seems like representation laundering, but it's something, not nothing.
Max: It's something, not nothing. Well, the question is for the Electoral College, for counselors, do we include an equivalent of the Vice President in that? I'm not really sure.
Aaron: Yeah. I guess what I'm getting is I'm not sure if particularly if we want to encourage territories to make the jump to become states. There's an interesting discussion to be had on the advantages and disadvantages of being a territory versus being a state.
I'm also not sure if there's a size threshold at which we're like, well, Puerto Rico is big enough that they really should be a state, not a territory, whereas Guam, you're so small, we're not going to make you a state even if you wanted to be. I haven't given it that much thought, but it's something that pops to mind. Because we're changing the nature of state versus non-state influence here and rights and privileges that go with that.
Max: Right. Well, now you have less of a incentive. I think you have less of incentive to be a state. Is that what you're saying?
Aaron: Potentially. If we're talking about amending the Constitution, then it doesn't have constitutional implications. So the House has the power of the purse, correct? Puerto Rico doesn't pay federal taxes.
So should they be allowed to vote on how federal funds are allocated and distributed if they are not contributing to that.
Max: Yeah. Well, remember, let's say we answer the question, yes. But remember now, the executive council can.
Aaron: They've got what you refer to as line item veto.
Max: Yeah. So they can say, like, look, this is just kind of pork that has been put in by people who don't pay taxes. We can't afford all this.
Aaron: Yeah, it's not a symmetrical saying, but I don't know if they still do. But DC for a long time had license plates that said no taxation without representation. But should it be no representation without taxation? I don't know how I feel about that.
Max: Yeah, no representation without taxation.
Aaron: You got to have skin in the game.
Max: Just cross it off. No taxation. You were half right. Yeah.
Aaron: This is a well thought out and kind of very interesting structure, but I think we've established that there's certainly some edges that can be rounded off or maybe some gaps that need to be filled here still.
Max: Right. And if you're on the Locals, I'm going to send this out to the Locals first. I'm going to put a link to the Google Doc so you could go in and read it yourself and comment it on yourself and see in real time as I make some updates. So definitely go to Locals, maximum.locals.com. And also you have to be a supporting member in order to get access to this document. So I think it's a lot of fun.
And as you notice, it's not just like my love of history and politics, but a lot of the other things that we've talked about play into this. There's also a bit of engineering that comes into this, a lot of mathematics, some of the social choice theory, and a lot of like we even had an episode, and I'm trying to think of which one it is, but it was one on the board of directors and how those work and what their fiduciary responsibilities should be.
So basically, corporate governance, which is always an interesting topic because it's something that affects our lives more than the government governance or it's just as much, but we don't talk about it, so it kind of brings all that together. And so I really enjoy doing this and I hope at some point I don't know how to publish these or put it somewhere, because I don't want to be like someone going around being like, this is my thing, I want to make this happen.
This is something that someone could pick up decades in the future. If there's an Article Five convention, it's like, oh, we better be prepared. Okay. Right.
Aaron: It's the type of thing that you could conceivably publish a position paper or white paper on, but you're not on staff at the Heritage Foundation or Cato or whatever. And so there's not an obvious venue for that, necessarily.
Max: Yeah, exactly.
Aaron: Now, if people run into you at Pork Fest, will you have paper copies of this available, or they just have to give you the secret handshake and you can send them a link?
Max: That's a good question. I don't know. What should I do?
Aaron: Put Max on the spot. If you see him at Pork Fest, ask him. You say, “I want to see the great compromise document. What can you do for me? I'm ready to compromise.
Max: All right, great. It sounds good. Maybe I will bring paper documents.
Aaron: I offer you a link, and in exchange, I receive your unfiltered feedback.
Max: There's a lot of people at Pork Fest who are very anti Constitution.
Aaron: We were talking earlier about some of the events on the schedule, one of which I think is why the Constitution is terrible or failed or something along those lines.
Max: There was a debate about it. Like, the US. Constitution sucks.
Aaron: That's right.
Max: But we'll see what the terms of the debates are also argued by the same person I debated against earlier, so we'll see what's going on there.
Aaron: 'm beginning to be concerned by not only well, I guess it's aligned with his previous position that if monarchy is superior, then you would be opposed to the Constitution.
Max: Yeah, but it's also weird because who wants to secede from the United States, but then it's like, okay, I want to secede, but I also want a monarch. That's like that's kind of weird.
Aaron: Well, it would be difficult to do that without seceding, unless you're creating a monarch at the top of the federal government.
Max: I don't think he really proposes, like, the Kingdom of New Hampshire or anything like that, but I guess maybe we'll find out. Okay. Another topic I want to talk about real quick is that I have contracted with a group that is going to get me another podcast.
Aaron: You have a booking agent.
Max: Yeah, and I'm a little concerned. I just did, like, kind of a taste of it. I'm going to do it once a month for a few months. And I'm a little concerned because a lot of people, they come to me and they ask to be on the show, and oftentimes I want this show to be a forum for people who are interested in the show to voice their opinion.
So, for example, if you're a listener, you want to be on the show. Sometimes I do calls. I haven't done it in a while. But if you just want to talk about a particular issue, either send me an email. I read the emails, all of that I've done recently. But also I'm willing to do like, a quick zoom call with you, five minutes, ask you what's on your mind, and then play it on the show as well.
And so I'm happy to do that. And if somebody wants to be on the show or is looking to be on podcasts, they email the show at localmaxradio@gmail.com. And sometimes I find some great guests that way. But I also get a lot of pitches that are like trying to sell enterprise software, high performance teams or coaching of business and stuff. I'm like, I don't want to talk about work on this podcast. I mean, I know we talk about the philosophy like software engineering and what you could build in technology and stuff, but workety-work? No.
A lot of people sound very boring. And so I'm like, how do I make a pitch that doesn't sound boring? That sounds a lot more interesting than what people usually do. So that's what I'm going to try to figure out.
Aaron: It's always hard to sell yourself.
Max: Yeah, well, hopefully I think part of the thing is going to be not to sound like everyone else, but I feel like me, that I have so many different interests that it's going to be too much of a long, long list. So I don't know what to do about that. I'm looking forward to hearing some crossover episodes.
Aaron: All right, great. Well, there's an outside chance I could get you a booking, Aaron. We'll see if that's all possible. All right, I think we're good for today. We have covered quite a bit. Any last thoughts on this constitution or we're going to wait till we get the feedback coming?
Max: Yeah, I mean, I am looking forward to seeing some of the latest revisions because I think I'm looking at a 24 hour old copy that I was working off of. But we've had some fun discussions on this this week leading up to this episode. And there's some more ironing to come.
All right, a few changes that I've made after the fact. I decided not to apportion representatives between the territories. Just have them send a delegation once they reach a certain size and a non voting delegation otherwise, like they do now. Guam has a non voting delegation. Guam is the size of Stamford, Connecticut, where I am.
You know, maybe giving them a rep will be too much. It doesn't make sense to have these very different places kind of share one rep. I don't think someone, a representative could do that if they're just going to be flying around all the different territories or something. So future work would have to be for a better house plan.
I definitely want to read some of these mega house plans. Maybe perhaps come up with my own. All right, now for related episodes, usually I don't read off the related episodes, but I think it's important this time.
We have an episode on corporate governance that I did in episode 108 on What is Probability. And that specifically covers like an organization with a clear purpose, runs better as an organization. So that is episode 108. It came out honestly. I remember doing the research for it on the way up to Aaron's the last time I went skiing, just before COVID, so that was like February of 2020.
Then episode 74, we talked about Gerrymandering and way back in the early episodes. I think it was episode four, if I'm not mistaken. Let me try to double check that. Yes, episode 4, The Proper Way to Gerrymander. That was how you can use techniques in machine learning to gerrymander your state and perhaps subvert democracy, but get all your preferences passed.
So if you want to learn how to do that, episode 4. My sound wasn't so good in those episodes back then, but give it a shot. You should be able to hear it. I am going to post this proposal on GitHub very soon and on my website over the next week or so, hopefully.
And once again, I'd like your feedback for those who haven't given it to me the first time. I've gotten a bunch already. I'm actually kind of curious if there's anyone in my non-American audience, of which I know there are quite a few of you who have a perspective on this that I am not hearing. I do mention in the paper at least one international example of a governing board that seems like it works, and that would be Switzerland.
But maybe there are others, maybe there are some that don't work. I'd love to hear about it. So that's for my non-American audience. For my American audience, have a wonderful Independence Day, a wonderful Fourth of July and enjoy the fireworks this week. See you all next week. Have a great week everyone
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Narration: Feel the power.