Discover innovative insights and highlights from the Curiosity Podcast by following us on Instagram and TikTok.
You can also listen and subscribe to Curiosity on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.
Transcription of our conversation with Miles Taylor, former Chief of Staff of the US Department of Homeland Security:
Immad Akhund: Welcome to the Curiosity Podcast, where we go deep on a wide variety of technical topics with the smartest leaders in the world. I'm Immad Akhund, and I'm the CEO and co-founder of Mercury.
Raj Suri: And I'm Raj Suri. I'm the co-founder of Lima, Presto, and Lyft. And today we have Miles Taylor, who is the former chief of staff of the Department of Homeland Security. He also runs a nonpartisan think tank in DC called The Future US, and he's here to join us today to talk about a wide variety of political and policy topics that are affecting the United States these days. I guess what's most interesting about him is he was the Chief of Staff of the DHS during the Trump administration and he had a front row seat to that administration. And he has since left the Republican Party, joined the Forward Party, I think left the Forward Party now. So he's had different views on his own party as well as, you know, new parties in the US. Miles is also somewhat famous for his op-ed in the New York Times in 2018 about, you know, his view within the Trump administration. He penned that anonymously. I think he was famously known as the anonymous figure within the Trump administration. And I think there was a lot of speculation over who he was when he wrote the op-ed. And, you know, he's since become very vocal about his view on Trump. So, excited to hear his views on US democracy, the election this year, and overall policy issues. Immad, what are you curious to talk to Miles about?
Immad Akhund: Miles is really interesting because, you know, what is, I guess right now, what is old is new again. Trump might be president again. I think his kind of look at Trump's psyche is pretty interesting and I'd love to, we'd love to dive into that. I also think, you know, it feels a little bit like American politics is broken right now. You know, we have these two very old presidents. Obviously I live in SF and we're trying to fix SF politics right now. So it's kind of interesting to hear from someone who has that inside lens and also thinks it's broken and go pretty deep into thinking about potential remedies and what could be fixed. I didn't come away necessarily thinking it's going to be done anytime soon, but I'm glad there's people kind of thinking about it deeply.
Raj Suri: Yeah, there's a lot of, it feels like there's a fork in the road ahead on US politics, on defense policy, which Miles is also an expert in, and various national security issues. So with that, let's welcome Miles.
Miles Taylor: Hey, great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Immad Akhund: You've had a really interesting kind of career in politics, would love to know, like, how did you kind of get into it? And what are you up to nowadays?
Miles Taylor: Yeah. Wow. Just straight in. I love it. I love it. Straight in. And let's just help listeners understand that today's going to be the most interesting conversation you've had yet. It's going to be wild. It's going to take turns that even we can't expect. So stay through to the whole thing. It's going to be outrageous. Politics, how did I get into politics? Honestly, the answer was the 9/11 attacks, not to bring it to a dark place, but after September 11th, I was just resolved to go into government and to do whatever I could to prevent a day like that from happening again. So I went into the national security community and worked a number of places, the Pentagon, the White House, and Capitol Hill to try to contribute to improving the US national security architecture. But that led me down a lot of different roads, working in tech policy and working on a broader array of national security issues and pro-democracy issues internationally. But it really was that day that was a catalyst for me. Probably the case for a lot of folks in our generation is a lot of people still are affected by 9/11. But we're in that window now where there's a whole generation that doesn't understand why that was a catalyst for folks to go into public service and not everyone into national security I mean a lot of people just wanted to go into public service after that moment. But that seems to have faded from the public consciousness, which is really interesting to watch.
Immad Akhund: Was there something personal about 9/11 for you? Like were you in New York at the time or did you know someone?
Miles Taylor: Actually, it's very interesting that you ask that, because I had been in the Twin Towers two weeks before the attacks. I was out there visiting a family member, and it was the first time that I had visited. There was a restaurant up there called, like, View of the World or something of the world. And we went up there, and we went to the observation deck. And then two weeks later, I remember watching the Today Show, in real time as the first tower was hit. Katie Couric cut to coverage of the first tower. Then the second tower was hit while they were talking about a plane that had accidentally run in. And then I watched the full two or three hours until all of the attacks had happened. And then the rest of the planes were grounded around the country. And it just had a very profound impact on my psyche. And in fact, you know, I'll go a step further and say at the time, months later, I was actually, I was so obsessed with following the response to the attacks and felt so connected to the event that months later, doctors diagnosed me with PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. And it's not, I wasn't in the towers, I wasn't in New York the day of, and yet it was so affecting the trigger to PTSD response. And I think that I'm not an anomaly in that regard. I think that a lot of folks felt so deeply connected to and affected by that day and that experience.
Immad Akhund: Yeah, I remember being at school watching on TV in London and it was just insane. Was there an element of the government where you were like, hey, I think we should go fix this thing? Or was it very much like, I don't know what to do, but I just want to help?
Miles Taylor: It probably started off as the latter, and then it eventually became the former. I got really lucky. I ended up getting a job as a junior aide after that time period in the House of Representatives and wound up working in the House Speaker's office, who at the time was a guy named Dennis Hastert, who is now serving in federal prison for an array of different crimes and a hush money scandal. It seems like a lot of members of Congress from that time period wound up in prison, but it was really eye-opening to be a fly on the wall and the office of the person who was third in line to the presidency. Because it's not the president, but if you're coming to see the speaker, you're probably someone pretty important. And in the course of dealing with the people who came into his office for meetings, keep in mind this was during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I ended up really dialing into foreign and defense policy issues. And that's where I felt like there was a lot of work to be done to re-architect the U.S. government national security apparatus to better understand and anticipate emerging threats. And that eventually led me to the Department of Homeland Security and wanting to craft a government bureaucracy that was more proactive than reactive. Now, I think the jury's still out on whether DHS is a proactive instead of reactive institution, but that became the area that I wanted to focus on, is how do we anticipate emerging threats rather than continuously running into the latest thing by accident and by tragedy? And that ultimately led me again to focus on emerging tech and how, you know, we could forecast some major developments and how they could be used offensively and defensively. And then as policymakers figure out, again, how to adjust those levers of government to better protect the people.
Immad Akhund: And I guess the last government role you had was the Chief of Staff of the US Department of Homeland Security under Trump.
Miles Taylor: Is that correct? $60 billion budget. I don't want to over inflate it, 250,000 employees. And I would never do it again. But not for the reasons you'd expect. The men and women of the Department of Homeland Security, those 250,000 people are hardworking patriots. But, you know, Immad, I, of course, ended up having to spend much more time focused on one person than those 250,000 people. And that was the president, because he had, let's say, interesting designs for DHS that we didn't exactly feel like were consistent with the department's legal remit.
Immad Akhund: Mostly he wanted to reduce its mandate and cut people. Is that kind of his approach?
Miles Taylor: The very blunt answer is Trump really wanted the department to be like a personal domestic security force that he could tell what to do, that would advance his own personal interests. And then, of course, he viewed DHS almost exclusively as an agency to crack down on immigration. Now, make no mistake, immigration enforcement is one aspect of what DHS does. It also naturalizes citizens. If you become a U.S. citizen, you do that through the Department of Homeland Security. But again, it's just a fraction. So if you think of a pie chart, you know, it's one-eighth of that pie. But then the department's doing things like protecting America against cyber threats, countering terrorism, dealing with nation-state threats, emergency response, natural disasters. I mean, a whole suite of different things. To Donald Trump, though, that entire pie was just immigration. And that became very problematic, especially when we needed the president to focus on other emerging threats. And he wanted to repurpose the department just for immigration, and I think had a good deal more radical views on immigration than a lot of his own advisors and appointees. So that became an enormous challenge, to say the least, is dealing with that prioritization towards his personal interests, but also, frankly, the inability to keep the President's attention. We had a really hard time, I mean, just literally sitting in Situation Room meetings or Oval Office meetings, getting him to focus on the issue at hand. That may not matter if you're talking about something like issuing a press release or, you know, a speaking event. But when you're talking about issues of life and death, when you're talking about a Category 5 hurricane coming to the United States and the President's pushing a red button on his desk to order a Diet Coke and not paying attention to what you're saying, that becomes really, really frightening because you need him to be dialed in in that moment because there are some powers the president has that no one else in the country has to be able to respond to and to protect people. And that became a source of extraordinary tension between us at the department and the president.
Immad Akhund: I have so many follow-up questions, but let me pass it to Raj and then I'll follow up.
Raj Suri: So Miles, I'm actually curious. So you mentioned 9/11 being a catalyst for you to get into national security, and you said there's a whole generation that kind of missed that. But it feels like we've rotated back into a place of geopolitical strife with the Russian invasion and with the Israel-Palestine war, the Gaza war. I'm curious to get your take on just current events and where we are today from a national security perspective. What do you think our priority should be from a national security perspective? Are we spending enough on national security? What are the things that you worry about from a security perspective? I know in the tech world, people are thinking about how they can make a difference and build up, you know, American power again. And, you know, in light of the fact the world seems to be getting less stable, not more.
Miles Taylor: It does feel like a really existential moment, doesn't it? And not every period in politics and public policy feels like that. But right now in particular, much like in that period in the immediate wake of 9/11, I think it does feel that way. Now, after 9/11, as you note, Raj, it really was a geopolitical shock to the system. And, you know, America rapidly was involved in two wars and that really forced the public conversation to go towards geopolitics. I think something very different is happening right now, but it's causing the same sort of effect, which is if post-9/11, our attention turned to threats abroad. I think at this moment, the public attention is really turning towards internal threats. And that has, for me personally, really changed my focus in the national security realm is everything was, for me, directed outward. And with a view towards all emerging dangers to the United States emanating from abroad and primarily emanating from ungoverned spaces where terrorist groups and transnational criminal organizations could manifest their plots.
But really, in recent years, we've seen the remarkable strain being put on Western democracy and threats emerging from within. And by threats, I mean it much more broadly. We're seeing intense political polarization, political extremism that veers towards political violence, but also a lot of these other dangers just manifesting from within rather than from without. I think that really is the sea change at the moment. And then you add into that equation, what we're seeing in terms of emerging tech, and it really becomes a witch's brew of potential dangers for the future. I will say this, I am a relentless tech optimist, and yet at the same time, I can also say, the advances we're seeing towards AGI and synthetic biology and all of those things going to be supercharged by quantum computing at the back half of this decade are opening up possibilities, dangerous possibilities that we really didn't think we were going to have to deal with this soon in the national security community, but to allow individuals to be hyper empowered in dangerous ways.
And I'll just, I'll end my comment with this is I think 10 years ago, we saw the extraordinary empowerment of the individual by technology as a force for freedom around the world, whether it was social media networks and being able to engage with people across cultures and across borders as sort of the inertia that would lead us to the universality of freedom. In other words, all countries around the globe would democratize because of this. People who were under oppression would be able to throw off their oppressors because of technology. Now, in the decade to come, we are seeing that that extraordinary empowerment of individuals, such that each of us now feels almost self-sovereign, like we don't need a nation-state, is leading to a lot of destabilization. because folks are building new tribes and new communities, and they want to act as part of those communities rather than as part of their nation states. Now, I'm saying this, Raj, not with a view towards just the next 5 or 10 years. I think this is the big challenge over the next 50, is I actually don't know how Western democracy adapts to and actually even survives in a world in which individuals feel so hyper-empowered that they don't really understand why they should have a representative be that translation layer to some sort of effect in their government or their polity. That's going to lead to a really, really interesting period in human history, and that's largely It's not because of Donald Trump. It's not because of right-wing politics. It's because of underlying forces in our society. And I don't think we have clear answers for how politics is going to rearrange itself in that future. But we have to start talking about it, as radical as it sounds, because it's coming, whether we like it or not.
Raj Suri: So the focus is more on like the dangers of technology internally versus like, you know, how technology can help us, you know, use AI, for example, to help defend the country from external threats. So you're more focused on internal threats.
Miles Taylor: Well, really both because, you know, look, I think that we have to, I think we've got to rapidly adapt our defenses in the United States and modernize our military and modernize our approach to national security using emerging technology. That's absolutely crucial. We also, I think, have to be really clear-eyed about the type of future we're walking into and anticipate those threats. I mean, here's one example, is there's basically a meme throughout sci-fi history of the fact that somewhere in this century, you know, it'll be robots versus humans. That's a really simplistic view of what's going to happen when AGI is paired with advanced robotics. It's not going to be robots versus humans. I'll tell you what I think is very likely to happen. It will be humans versus humans because there's going to be, there's very likely to be, an emergence of a domestic extremist movement here and in other countries to basically unplug, to unplug from the internet, to destroy server farms, to say advanced robotics, AGI are the enemy. And then there's going to be a segment of humanity, perhaps the majority of it that says, no, I mean, this is making our life materially better. The conflict will be between those two cohorts. That's something that sounds really far out, but is the type of national security conversation we need to be having because we already see those battle lines being drawn. And I call it between the doomers and the boomers. I mean, there's a cohort of doomers who are like, AI is going to ruin the world. Eventually, those people, they themselves may not take up arms, but trust me, as a counterterrorism professional, they are going to inspire a group of folks to take up arms and say, let's go blow it up. Let's blow up those transcontinental connections. Let's blow up high-speed internet. Let's take down satellites. Let's turn this off, because they're fearful. And then those who are on the side of advanced technology will say, we can't let that happen. That's what the robot wars are actually going to look like. And that's a real conversation that needs to be had in the US national security communities. How do you even prepare for that? I mean, the government's not even designed to prepare for that future. So anyway, I promised you guys I would throw some far-out shit into the conversation. So here we are.
Immad Akhund: That is a bit far out. Maybe let's pull it back a little bit, and then we can come back to this far-out stuff.
Miles Taylor: I don't know, man. Robot Wars. We really went there. We should dial it back.
Immad Akhund: I'd like to do the crazy future stuff a little later. I guess, like, why don't you think that, like, the kind of geopolitics around China and Taiwan or, like, Russia and Ukraine are are important or like things that we should be like paying a lot of attention to right now, it seems like you're very focused on kind of further in the future things. Yeah, I guess like, what's your thinking around that? And like, I'm also really interested in like, you know, how you think, if Trump did win his second term, how he would react to the current Russia-Ukraine and China situations?
Miles Taylor: A second term of Donald Trump has enormous implications for US foreign policy and we'll get to that in a second. I do think that the geopolitical conflicts that we're dealing with at the moment are, they are very existential. There's a broader war happening between autocratic regimes and Western liberal democracy. And we're seeing that conflict largely play out at the moment in proxy wars, but I think it speaks to some of these deeper forces at play in our society at the moment. And it will be one of the biggest challenges of the 21st century is figuring out, enabled by tech, are autocratic regimes more powerful? Will they going to continue to thrive? And where does Western democracy sit in that equation?
I mean, if you know, you jump back to think about the early 1990s at the end of the Cold War, he gets a lot of crap for this. But, you know, Francis Fukuyama wrote that famous essay and book, The End of History. Now, he called it The End of History, not because the world was going to end, but because in his view, it was inevitable that the world would democratize everyone would live in free countries and therefore history would end because history is all about wars and conflict and there wouldn't be in a world of universal democratic states. Fukuyama has been very much proven wrong by the past few decades because we've seen extraordinary democratic backsliding. It actually just came from a lunch with the head of a think tank in DC called Freedom House. It's been around for 100 years, an organization very focused on human freedom around the world. And they release an annual report called Freedom in the World. And for the past 20 years or so, it showed democratic backsliding. This sounds very abstract and academic as I say it, but it is a different world for people.
If it's a world that's governed by China being the preeminent power, versus the United States being the preeminent power. I mean, we're talking about a regime in Beijing with the Chinese Communist Party that is very focused on censoring its people and speech and controlling the population. Very, you know, your classic authoritarian regime. That will translate into how it interacts in the world. If we know one thing from the history of international relations, it is that A country's foreign policy tends to be a reflection of their internal politics. So Western democracies want to be friends with Western democracies. Autocracies want to spread autocracy. That is of concern for your average American and citizen around the world. If China rises and is projecting power around the world, that does have an implication on freedom of travel and prosperity and trade and all of the things that drive innovation and technology and a more open society.
We're really in a fight between open and closed societies. And so I think it's critically important. And if Donald Trump, to your question, wins a second term, my concern, having worked with the man firsthand, is that you will see retrenchment in the United States. In other words, you will see the US pull back from world affairs. And what happens on the international stage, when there's a vacuum, people go fill that vacuum. And that vacuum will be filled by autocratic regimes. And Donald Trump has spelled it out. This isn't conspiracy theory. It's not the sky is falling. It's quite clear in what he has said. He wants to pull US forces back from all the places they're positioned out in the world, from Japan to Germany. He wants to consider pulling back from NATO if NATO doesn't live up to its defense obligations, which it may not. And he largely wants the United States to reach detente and to be able to work more closely with adversarial regimes like Vladimir Putin in Russia, like Xi Jinping in China, like Kim Jong-un in North Korea. I mean, we have to remind ourselves, this was a man who literally said he was writing love letters to the head of the brutal North Korean regime. That was pretty alarming at the time. It will be really alarming if he gets a second term. So you can imagine, if he wins, a dramatic sea change in US foreign policy. And if you're Xi Jinping right now, that would be a dream come true, because it would allow China the opportunity to really assert itself. Now, Donald Trump will add an asterisk to that. He'll say, no one's been tougher on China than me, and I'm going to get a really, really great deal with them. Make no mistake, Trump does want a big trade deal with China. That's to him the white whale. That's the Moby Dick of politics is getting an awesome global trade deal with China. But after that, I don't think he really cares if China invades Taiwan, if China bullies its neighbors. And that does have implications for people who want to live in a free and open society. and not to paint such a grim view of it, but that's, I mean, he's painted that view, I think, quite clearly in public speeches.
Immad Akhund: So you'd say, probably pull back support on Ukraine, probably, you know, give enough tacit signs that he wouldn't, you know, help protect Taiwan that like maybe China makes a move. I mean, he did kick off the, at least the tariffs and like trade war with China. And I think, yeah, it was his presidency that really pushed that narrative.
Miles Taylor: But you think he really cares about trade, he doesn't care as much about that as power and like protecting… Donald Trump has been on a lifelong quest to find leverage that helps make him look like an amazing deal maker, and that at the end of the day will enrich him. That's, you know, also very, very widely supported by the man's whole history. In fact, he used to tell us anecdotes in the Oval Office about what he'd learned in business was you have to find leverage as fast as humanly possible so that you can use it to force someone into a deal. So for Donald Trump, what's the biggest deal he could cut on the face of the globe? He could cut some massive economic deal between the world's two biggest powers, and also what would that do for him? If he cut a huge deal with China on trade barriers and tariffs, then he leaves office, I don't know, if you're in the Chinese Communist Party, you're a pretty big fan of Donald Trump for having cut that deal, probably benefits him on the back end. So he wasn't anti-China. He was just trying to ramp up pressure on China so he could cut a deal like that.
Now, in general, put Trump out of it. That doesn't sound like the worst thing in the world is that an American president wants to find a way to cut a great deal with another major power when it comes to trade. The problem with Donald Trump is that is at the expense of everything else. because human rights, national security, democracy versus authoritarianism, he doesn't really care about those things. He's willing to trade those things for what he would consider a good trade deal. That's what worries me. And if I had to make a simplistic speculation here on the question, I don't think it's unreasonable to forecast that if Trump wins a second term, that he would back channel to Beijing. As long as you guys cut us a big trade deal, we won't do anything on Taiwan. And I could see him making that trade. That's not going to be something I don't think he would broadcast, although you never know with Donald Trump. The thing that's supposed to be the most secret conversation you have with him on a national security issue, he then goes out and tells the cameras a minute later. But I wouldn't be surprised if he's thinking in those terms. He knows China wants Taiwan more than anything. And so he knows he has huge leverage to cut some sort of deal. And I've got to tell you, there was no meeting we were in with him that wasn't about trying to find the leverage on something. So, I strongly suspect that's his view on engagement with China right now.
Immad Akhund: What do you think ended us up in this situation where we have two, like, almost, well, one almost 80 and one older than 80-year-old kind of running for president? Like, is this… Honestly, it's the worst, isn't it? I think that makes it really true. From my perspective, I'm from the UK and Raj is from Canada. It just feels very dysfunctional. Is this just the future that old people kind of collect power and then they live a little longer and we're just going to have old presidents? Or is this kind of a freak event in your thinking?
Miles Taylor: Well, I really would love Raj's perspective on this, because I'm sure Raj, you remember that incredibly funny tweet. I still think about it all the time from a few years ago. We were like a little ways into the Trump presidency and someone tweeted out, man, I feel like our neighbors in Canada must feel like those people who live in an apartment building above a meth lab. You know, like, what is going on down there in the United States? And I always feel that way about our Canadian neighbors. It's like, eh, politics is relatively stable up there compared to what's going on down here.
But yeah, I mean, look, what you're seeing in the U.S. political system I think is general dissatisfaction. Of course, I've ragged on my own side of the aisle and on conservatives because I think we've let the right wing of American politics be completely taken over by this carnival barker Donald Trump. And it's really poisoned the national discourse. But you see folks that are equally as frustrated on the political left about the direction things are going. And you don't have to take my word for it. If you look at the polls, 50% of Americans now say they are political independents. They are not a Democrat or a Republican. That is the highest that number has ever been in the history of polling on the question. And we have the lowest watermark of people who say they are Democrats or Republicans. It's about between 23% and 25% respectively say they're Democrats or Republicans. That is not necessarily a testament to those brands being particularly bad, although their brands are very bad. If you were just doing a brand assessment on the Democratic and Republican parties, you would say like, this is catastrophic. Like that C-suite needs to really think about resetting their brand. It is a statement on people feeling very frustrated that the system itself is not representing their viewpoints. And this is another statistic that buttresses that point, that always blows me away. And I'm going to ask you, Immad and Raj, to first answer this question. What percentage of Americans would you two say approve of the job that Congress is doing?
Immad Akhund: Maybe 30%?
Miles Taylor: Raj, what about you?
Raj Suri: I would say about 15 to 20%. I actually read these numbers, so I'm kind of…
Miles Taylor: All right, Raj nailed it. He reads these numbers. It is generally about 15 to 20% approved. So the vast majority, 85%, do not approve of the job that Congress is doing. What do you think the re-election rate is for an incumbent member of Congress? If you're in Congress and you decide to run for re-election, on average, what do you think your odds are of being re-elected? ninety percent at least maybe ninety five ninety ross what about you probably eighty percent yeah it's ninety five percent so in what marketplace in the world to the majority of consumers say we hate these products and yet those are the only products on the shelf, so yes.
Raj Suri: Well to be fair though, the Congress is different from your own representative right? Congress is hundreds of other members.
Miles Taylor: But when you then drill down into those numbers, you also find in those districts that people end up being very dissatisfied with their own member of Congress. And that's because really 10% of the population is making a lot of the voting decisions for the other 90% of the population. Because the majority of those decisions about who wins happen during the primaries. And in the primaries, we only know a tiny fraction of people are animated to go vote, and it tends to be the most ideological on the political right or the political left. And it's what people in this space call the primary problem, is you end up having very ideological voters making most of the decisions. So by the time the electorate gets to the ballot box in November, it's a lot of choices they don't really like, and it's choosing between the lesser of two evils.
This systematically, when you look at the data, has gotten worse and worse and worse in the past 30 or so years. You see competitive districts going down and the odds of being reelected going up. And at the same time, people increasingly saying they're independent. So they're really frustrated. They don't feel like the process is answering to them. And part of that reason is because primaries are closed around the country. So in most states, you can't go vote in the primary unless it's your party's primary. And again, that means means the most ideological extremes are choosing those candidates. Some states do have open primaries where anyone can come in and choose who ends up on the final ballot, and I think they tend to have better outcomes. We don't have to go too far down that road, but there are systematic issues that call for democracy reform. There's Republicans and Democrats and folks in the center who, especially in recent years, have started to talk about the need to make some major reforms to the democratic process, to break up gerrymandering around the country, to make politics more competitive again. Because when it's competitive, you tend to have people who are more representative of your views.
Immad Akhund: What's that? Is any of that new? Like this kind of primary process has existed? I don't know since when it's existed, but it's existed way more than 30 years, right?
Miles Taylor: It absolutely has. But the problem has gotten worse in recent years in terms of races getting less and less competitive. In fact, if you compare U.S. House races today to 50 years ago, they're dramatically less competitive than they were, going back to that statistic of almost a 95% chance of getting reelected. And voters will self-report in those polls that they don't feel like their member of Congress represents their views anymore. It's a pretty straightforward equation. You compare it to, for instance, parliamentary systems. In a parliamentary system, even the most extreme voices tend to feel represented. Why? because they end up being able to have a proportion of representatives.
So take Israel, for instance. You know, there's far right and very far left factions in the Israeli government, but those factions aren't big enough most of the time to take over the full government. You have to do coalition campaigning, team up with various coalitions to cobble together a majority, and that requires different parties trading on their views. And the U.S. system, with first-past-the-post elections, meaning winner-takes-all, it's very, very difficult for the different views on the ideological spectrum to feel like they are represented in government. The result is you have people who stop believing that the system works. They become more disaffected, and they start justifying going around the system. I mean, this is why we saw the January 6th insurrection happen is because folks stopped believing that the democratic process was working. They spread a narrative that elections were being stolen. So what's the answer? Well, not to try to win through the electoral process, but to go attack the process itself, storm the Capitol, upend the U.S. political system. That is worrying to see that trend. We're only going to be able to defuse that polarization in the long term if we make politics more competitive again. And I think that means things like third parties and democracy reforms and really injecting that choice and competition back into the process.
Immad Akhund: If you had a magic wand, would there be one thing you would change? Like, would you change it to a proportional representation parliament? Like, what's the one thing you would do with your wand?
Miles Taylor: There is a very serious conversation happening in Washington among different think tanks and groups around proportional representation. It's actually possible. It doesn't require a constitutional amendment to start changing congressional districts to proportional representation. So there's an organization called Fix Our House that has pulled together a lot of former top Democrats and Republicans around this conversation. It would take a majority vote in Congress and a number of other changes to move to. Now, in the near term, is that plausible? No. It is sort of political fantasy. I mean, we're talking about something that would take a long time to build the political support for, but I do think that would be my magic wand solution is you would go to PR, proportional representation, because data analysis shows it tends to have a depolarizing effect where it exists around the world.
But this goes back to this is something the founders knew. I mean, James Madison, when he was writing in the Federalist Papers about how democracy would survive, was talking about the fact that you can't do anything about people being factional. We are tribal by nature. We are going to create factions and we're going to fight each other. And Madison's thesis was the only way you can control that is you've got to pit factions against factions. You've got to make sure people can organize in their factions and use them to check each other. And if politics becomes too centralized, then you don't have enough different factions checking each other and you have the possibility of majority rule in a very dangerous way that suppresses minority rights. And I think that's what tends to happen in systems that don't have competitive multi-party elections. And so, you know, we are seeing some of the effects of that. And it was, again, one of the biggest fears of our founders. And I think it is manifesting itself.
Raj Suri: Don't you think another major problem is that things that are popular, the majority of the country supports, are still not getting done in Congress? It seems like that's more of a rules of Congress type of thing, where you can't put a bill on the floor. For example, I think the Ukraine thing right now, it would pass if it was put on the floor, but the majority is not putting it on the floor. High-skilled immigration, which I work on, It would pass if it got on the floor, but it's not getting passed. Gun control would probably get passed. There's a bunch of things that would get passed if it was on the floor. Is that more of something like, not really a proportional representation, but more like Congress rules or something like that? Or people can't vote freely based on the rules of the party or something?
Miles Taylor: Raj, in highlighting that, I would say in the public policy Olympics, you just stuck the landing and got a 10 out of 10, because I think it's the best symptom of the problem is to show that in poll after poll, Americans actually do have a majority review, sorry, a majority view on some of the most contentious issues in our politics. Pick the most contentious issues, like you just did. Guns, abortion, climate change. When you poll Americans, they actually tend to have a majority view on those issues. Now, is it 90%? No, but abortion, for instance, it's like 79% of Americans want abortions to be safe, legal, and rare. On guns, the vast majority of Americans believe in the Second Amendment, but that there should be red flag laws and a whole range of specific checks.
There really is a pathway on the most contentious issues. And yet, the reason why you don't see that pathway taken is the people who are in office are not dependent on the majority to get reelected. Going back to that number, they are dependent on the 10% of most ideological voters in their districts. The 10% who say, I don't have a shared opinion on guns. It's guns or nothing. Or the 10% who say, climate change is a total hoax. And I saw this while working in the House of Representatives for years is members of Congress were not influenced by the majority view on these issues. They were influenced by the most ideological wing of their caucus because that wing determined whether they got reelected or whether they got booted from public office. And so I do think that goes back to proportional representation because if you were running in your congressional district. And you knew, instead of just running against Democrat versus Republican, you were running against five other people, and some were a little bit to the right of you and some were a little bit to the left. You would have to cobble together a coalition that was bigger than just the most ideological people in your district. You'd have to appeal to the center. You would have to appeal to your point, Raj, to people who shared the majority view. And there's a lot of data to back that up.
And I'll point to one interesting experiment. Of all places in this country, it's actually in Alaska, a place that people think of as a deep red bastion. Alaska has passed something called Ranked Choice Voting. In the past couple election cycles, what Ranked Choice Voting does is rather than you saying it's just A or B, you actually get to rank candidates in order. And when you rank them, as people fall off the list because they didn't hit 50 percent, Whoever you put as second or third, those votes get reallocated. The result of ranked choice voting is it forces candidates to appeal to a wider swath of the electorate. What's happened in Alaska, we've seen a lot more moderate figures in the Republican and Democratic parties winning elections from Alaska because they're forced to appeal to more of their actual population. It's a really interesting petri dish for how you could expand those reforms into other parts of the country and address political polarization.
Raj Suri: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, that's why you have someone like Lisa Murkowski, right, who is pretty moderate, I believe. And she's says she's independent officially right now. I thought she was a Republican.
Miles Taylor: She's a Republican with an independent streak. But, you know, Lisa Murkowski is the quintessential example. She could not statistically have won her last Senate race if it wasn't for ranked choice voting. It would have been likely a more extreme figure. We, of course, saw Sarah Palin running in a House race in Alaska. She's definitely made herself into a MAGA firebrand. You would have seen, you know, folks like that leading in those races if they only had to appeal to the Republican primary voters. But they've got to appeal to the whole Alaskan electorate. And And that's why you saw Sarah Palin lose her House race is because she had a tough time appealing to more than just MAGA voters. So again, and I don't wanna just focus on the right, it does the same thing with progressives. People who are very far left, we've got people in Congress right now that literally call themselves socialists, which I think is insane. They would have a hard time winning their elections if they didn't have to appeal to only the most far, far left people in their districts. So ranked choice voting can really have a moderating effect across our political spectrum.
Raj Suri: And what does it take to pass, like, rank choice voting or proportional representation? Is it state by state? Is it like a referendum that needs to happen, for example, in California? Because, you know, Immad and I can just start one. We can get some signatures.
Miles Taylor: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's go. In most states, it is a referendum. And so there's a number of referendums this coming cycle in different states. You've actually seen it expand to other places. You know, you had Nevada pass ranked choice voting. You've got some other states that have put it on the ballot. I would compare this to what you saw 20 or 30 years ago with other big sort of sea change movements like gay marriage, like marijuana legalization. When those movements started, you know they were seen as fringe uh which which is very unusual to hear today you know but LGBTQ rights was seen as a fringe coastal elite thing that middle america was never going to pass. Well, you know, gay marriage is the law of the land, and before the Supreme Court made that the case there was a tipping point in state legislatures approving gay marriage. We saw the same thing with marijuana legalization that it started off with folks saying that's just a fringe thing it's going to be a couple of states there's no way middle america is going to pass this well now i think it's it's it's close to the majority of U.S. states have legalized marijuana in some way, shape or form, that tipping point has already happened.
We're at the early stages of those types of democracy reforms like Alaska and Nevada and others are looking at going mainstream. I think it's more on the 10 to 15-year time horizon that you really see it approach the tipping point, but there is quite a movement around the country because folks are just getting really pissed off about politics. I mean, you know, who among us on this call enjoys American politics right now? I certainly don't. And so I think that dissatisfaction is going to create that momentum. It's not going to happen anytime soon, but I think it's similar in its trajectory to those major movements that we saw.
Immad Akhund: I wanted to bring it back to your, I guess, time working on immigration. I feel often unsure about immigration right now. You know, you see these kind of numbers about like 3 million immigrants walking across the border and claiming refugee status or whatever. Is it a big deal from your perspective? Like, do we need a wall? Or is it kind of trumpeted by the media and it's not actually like that different?
Miles Taylor: Well, look, I would say this, and this is my personal opinion. I think it's immensely important for any nation to control their borders just as a basic matter of security. You know, if you have laws about naturalization and who gets to become a citizen and who doesn't, you should be able to enforce those laws. And it's a basic function of government to be able to protect its territory.
Now, and it is true, we've seen a remarkable surge in illegal immigration in the past few years. Literally, it means that more people are coming in the back door of the United States than the front door. When you look at the numbers, more people are coming in illegally than are legally being granted citizenship. That's really remarkable. And you can't describe it as anything other than a failed government. But it's a huge mistake and a misunderstanding of the problem to say, well, it's Joe Biden's fault. Why? Because I know firsthand from two Republican administrations that the authorities of the executive branch to crack down on immigration are really severely limited. This is not Joe Biden's fault or Donald Trump's fault. This is Congress's fault. Only Congress can pass the laws to reform the American immigration system, to slow down and stop illegal immigration at the border, and to make it easier for people who want to join the American experiment to join the American experiment.
So Raj mentioned earlier, you know, immigration to supercharge our economy, basically. The only Congress can do that. No president can do that. And I dealt with this when Donald Trump was president, when he would explode in the Oval Office with frustration that we couldn't stop everyone at the border. Well, Mr. President, if you want that to happen, you have to cut a deal with Congress. Only Congress can do that. We can't break the law and just turn everyone away.
Immad Akhund: Because there were two years where Republicans had the majority, right? Like, why didn't Congress do something?
Miles Taylor: Great question. I think because there wasn't a focus on cutting the deal. And what this all comes down to is really asylum law. So under U.S. law, it doesn't matter if you have a border wall that's 100 feet high and it covers the whole border. It doesn't matter. Why? Because under U.S. law, as long as you come up to and touch that wall or scale that wall somehow or dig under that wall and you say, I'm fleeing violence and persecution, you can claim asylum in the United States.
Now, that's not just magic words that automatically get you to stay here forever. The problem is our justice system is so broken, we send that person to the courts and we say, well, a judge is going to decide whether you can claim asylum. Well, guess what? Our system doesn't give you an answer to your request. for 7 to 10 years on average. And so you say, okay, well, while I'm waiting, what am I going to do? I'm going to start a life. I need a job. I'm going to work here. And then very cruelly, the majority of people on the back end of that process find out a decade into it, Oh, by the way, we've determined, no, you're not here legally. Now you have to go home. That is a broken, absurd system. People should be able to know the moment they get here whether they have approval to or not. And if they don't get approval and if they are deemed to not validly be seeking asylum and persecution, they have to know what's the way to come in the front door.
We should be, in my opinion, flattered that millions of people want to still be a part of the American experiment. That is remarkable. We should be so proud that so many people are trying to get into our country and make that easier to do lawfully and also really intensify security at the border because in my view it's deeply unfair to people who are fleeing war-torn countries, places like Syria and Afghanistan and Sub-Saharan Africa who are waiting in line to come to America. when people are able to get in because they're closer in the hemisphere to our borders. That's unfair to them, too. We've got to make a system where you get that answer quickly and you can secure the border.
That's the bipartisan deal that needs to be struck in Congress. And the reason Donald Trump didn't get it done, and I think this is one of the biggest mistakes of his presidency, is because he didn't want to work with Congress. He wanted to do it all himself, and he found out too late the president doesn't have the power to do that. And same thing with Joe Biden. If you're a Republican, and you want to blame Joe Biden, I am here to tell you, I served in those jobs. Joe Biden cannot fully stop the illegal immigration flow. He doesn't have control over it. Congress has to pass reform, and they've missed those opportunities time and again because politics dominates. And the last thing I'll say on that is most recently, Immad, we, of course, saw a deal presented in Congress for bipartisan immigration reform, and it wasn't the Democrats who shut it down. It was my party. It was the Republicans who shut it down, not because they thought it was a bad deal, In fact, it was the deal they'd spent years saying they wanted. It's because they didn't want to give Joe Biden a political win in the 2024 election. And they said that. Donald Trump said that. He said, don't vote for this bill. It's going to help the Democrats win. And so the deal died. That just speaks to how broken our politics are. So there should be an answer to this question. And hopefully we'll get a president at some point who can cut that deal.
Immad Akhund: Well thanks Miles, I think we're out of time. It's a shame we didn't end on a more optimistic note than “we just have to fix Congress.” I think we'll get there.
Miles Taylor: And I think listeners are really glad we didn't go back to Robot Wars because they're like, well, let's just leave it at immigration's a mess. I don't want to know. Next time, folks, we'll talk about the T-1000 Terminator, where it's in production and how you can get one.
Immad Akhund: All right. Well, we're probably going to be building it here in Silicon Valley. So, you know, we'll get it first. But yeah, Miles, this was an amazing conversation. Thanks for taking the time. Great stuff, Immad and Raj. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Raj Suri: Take care, Miles. Good meeting you.
Immad Akhund: Wow. What a conversation. We touched on so many subjects. Raj, what do you think you learned about the most?
Raj Suri: I was most interested about this ranked choice voting. I didn't realize that… He believes that it's going to take over the nation. It's going to help make candidates more moderate. And that was the most promising thing I heard, is like, hey, this could actually… I can see why it makes candidates more moderate. you know, because, um, you know, it doesn't force, as you said, forces candidates to appeal to a broader.
Immad Akhund: So actually they do rank choice voting in San Francisco. Oh, do they? Yeah. And one of the funny aspects of it, and I don't want to say this for sure, because I'm not a hundred percent sure, but you know, there was that DA that won, uh, yeah. Yeah. He actually won because of rank choice voting. Cause he was the, this is from memory, so I feel like I should go research this, but basically everyone's second choice can sometimes win, right? If the first choices get knocked out, which is like a weird element of it. And like, actually you would think it would lead to moderates if like all the first choices are like the extremists, but like potentially someone could sneak in as a second choice. But like, logically speaking, ranked choice voting makes a ton of sense. And I actually kind of mostly agree with this thesis that I think for maybe bigger elections, it ends up leading to more moderates.
Raj Suri: It will be good to know what the edge cases are, right? What are the ways it doesn't work? But I guess it's promising that it's in two states already and has a chance to pass in other states. So if that happens, that would definitely be promising for Congress, which I think he rightly identifies as the root of the problem. I mean, Congress didn't really, it doesn't explain why we have such bad candidates for president, but, you know, you talked about the primary system and that's clearly one of the reasons why, you know, we have bad choices. It would be good, it would be fun to also talk about multi-party systems and why don't we have, you know, a strong third party. I mean, he was part of the forward party as well. So, but yeah, that was the part I felt was most interesting to me. How about you?
Immad Akhund: You know, I thought it was really interesting to hear from someone in the Trump administration about like, you know, what he will do if he comes into power. You know, the polls suggest and I have a I have a feeling that Trump is the one who's going to win. I think there's a reasonable amount of frustration with Biden just because I think he's old and people feel like they want someone younger and not that Trump is that much younger. But yeah, so if Trump comes in, you know, the world will change a lot. And I think hearing about how Trump, you know, is much more focused on trade deals and is not interested in wars and how that affects, you know, what is Russia going to do in Ukraine? What is China going to do in Taiwan? Like, I think Israel and Gaza won't be actually that affected by that. But, you know, potentially, I think that's like a probably the thing that like, you know, I'm kind of thinking about a lot is like, how does the world look like next year? And it was interesting to hear his kind of insider takes on it.
Raj Suri: The part of Trump secretly wanting this trade deal with China, it was interesting to me. I don't know if it's true. It kind of goes against everything that I've heard about Trump. I mean, I think Trump likes to use China as a stalking horse or like someone to have as an enemy. I don't see him necessarily doing a big trade deal, but he is very economically motivated. There's no doubt about that.
Immad Akhund: And he is a populist you know, uh, what's it called when, uh, like people want America to turn inward? No, like he wants America to turn inward. Nationalist? Nationalist and like Isolationist. I think that's the word I was looking for. Like he's not interested in, in like having America all over the world. I think that's like probably a fair characterization. Uh, But on the other side, he's unpredictable. And I think that would actually probably like, you know, under a normal president, like America is not going to send in like airplanes into Ukraine, but like under Trump, you know, who knows? He can definitely do things that are like outside the normal overton window of politics. And that makes him like, probably like someone that like, you know, maybe Russia and China would have a harder time dealing with, but who knows?
Raj Suri: Yeah, so that part was interesting, you know, I would have liked to dive in more on the, you know, like, given the national security experience, like how technology can play a role there. And like, you know, in more concrete way. But yeah, those those two topics were interesting.
Immad Akhund: I know you hold immigration kind of dear to your heart now that you're working on a startup that's focused on immigration. Do you feel after that conversation a little bit optimistic about immigration? Like it feels like a very solvable thing or do you think it's like being stuck in this morass for like decades and you don't expect any change?
Raj Suri: I would say the conventional view on immigration has swung dramatically over a decade. It's swung from like, yeah, this is obviously broken, Congress is definitely going to fix it, to like, I've heard this from people actually in a similar role to Miles in the administration today. They're like, Congress is never going to fix immigration, and so we have to find another path to solve it. And when you see what happened this year with the immigration bill, you kind of understand the pessimism. This was a bipartisan bill that got killed due to election politics.
Immad Akhund: I think it's just too interesting to both parties to have it live as an issue. Both parties want to just keep it live and fight over it, which seems very dysfunctional.
Raj Suri: Yeah, because otherwise, what do you have as an issue? The economy is doing well. So you can't fight over the economy anymore. It becomes all about the marginal difference on taxes. We used to have a lot of elections around. It was just like, should the tax go up a little bit? And then we're funding more programs, or should it go down a little bit? And we put more into it. That's what the 90s were about, I feel like, the elections were. Now it's the southern border thing. I mean, for sure, it's in Republicans' interest to fight over that. Yeah, so I don't feel more optimistic about immigration. I do feel optimistic in the long term in that this is just so broken that it has to get fixed at some point. But in the course of our country's history, we're 250 years old. That could be another 50 years. We have done stupid things for long periods of time. And so you just never know when it's going to get fixed.
Immad Akhund: Yeah, well, maybe if there was a more important topic to talk about, we could have this topic be solved and not be the focus. But yeah, who knows? But yeah, fun chat. Anything else you want to add, Raj?
Raj Suri: No, I think this was a great chat. And yeah, thank you, everyone, for listening. And feel free to follow or subscribe on all your favorite podcast networks. And we'll see you next time on the Curiosity Podcast. See you soon.
Share this post