In 1992, I was a very active volunteer. I organized an event – “organized” is the wrong word. I was the lead person for a big event he had when he visited Cleveland; I was involved in an event he had in Toledo; I did some liaison work with the people in Columbus. Interestingly, this was all happening as a high school senior, which was cool, right? I’m driving around the state and doing all this stuff, because Jerry Brown is grassroots, and a high school senior can get involved at that level.

After Jerry Brown lost, after Bill Clinton won the democratic nomination, I wanted to still stay involved, because politics was something that I really wanted to be core to my life, and to what I did. I didn’t want to back Bill Clinton; I actually was interested in getting behind the older Bush in 1992, contacted the Republican party in the city, and said, “Hey, what can I do, are there any jobs?” They had seen me and kind of knew about me, because I was really active with Jerry Brown. They’re like, “Yeah, we could definitely find something for you.”

They had this immediate job that would’ve been really cool; but after I talked to him, he called me back a few days later. He said, “We talked to National, and they said there’s no fucking way we can have a Jerry Brown guy working on our campaign.” That moment so disillusioned me on politics, because here I am, this young, innocent upstart, who really just wants to do good, who believes in things and wants to put their time behind it, and help make things happen; and I’m being told that because of a previous association with a legitimate candidate that pulled 20% of the vote in their party, that I was going to be discounted. At that point, I basically pivoted and decided I was going to do something other than politics with my life, and life went on.

In more recent years, I, like many Americans, have been troubled by the partisan nature of politics. It is most evident in Congress. Congress, at this point, has an approval rating of less than 10%. For the American public, in our evaluation of our satisfaction with the people who represent us in the Legislature at the national level, less than 10% of us are happy with that. To me, that screams “situation in need of a redesign.” Because I’m disgruntled, and see that the vast majority of other people are, I said, “This is really the time when a design approach needs to be brought to bear.”

Without further ado, let’s get a little bit into the different elements that make up your solution, Dirk.

Looking at all that kind of data, looking at, as well, testing assumptions. When our current model was put together, one of the things that was really important was balancing the power of the federal government versus the state government. That was a really big deal, and it’s why we have this somewhat strange system with the Senate and the House, and the compositions in the House, in particular, it’s very funky how that is all figured out; but it’s done to balance population and influence between the two sides.

However, what I learned as I looked at that with a more critical eye is that the politicians who are representing these states, and who are nominally being forwarded as beholden to those geographic areas, they’re actually receiving their funding from outside the state. For example, the current Speaker of the House, more than 80% of the funding he gets for reelection in his little congressional district in the state of Ohio, it’s more than 80% of the funding that comes from outside the state; so it’s national interests, it’s special interests, that are funding these people. The whole ideal of, “Oh, these are representatives of this small group of people” is just nonsense. It’s not the reality of how the dynamic works. Really dug in to understand stuff like that, about how it’s really operating today.

The other thing I did, because I tend to come at problems from a very big-picture, blue sky, I throw out all assumptions, I’m really interested in innovating; so I went back and looked at, first of all, democracy historically. Began in ancient Greece, in Athens, and studied it from that point through to when it was established here in the United States in 1789, and then forward again to the present day.

I also was interested in looking at other democratic forms – or, excuse me, other forms of government. We’ve fallen on democracy, and democracy seems right, but I wanted to test that assumption. I put a great deal of time into researching other forms – forms that have been tried and abandoned, forms that haven’t been tried at all; and was looking for another way. Coming out of this process, then, of studying how it’s working in America today, studying the history of democracy, studying these other forms, I think for this moment in time, if we take all the assumptions of equality and civil rights and the foundations upon which the United States is built on, absent from – or, not necessarily democracy, but as manifest in democracy – given all of those assumptions, the democracy is probably the right way to go.

Started there, and from there identified how to fix it, and what the way to fix it is, which were the next steps.

On the judicial side, it’s also working pretty well. We could go through the different aspects that make it up, whether it be appointing by the President, confirmation by the Congress, whether it be the lifetime appointment; there’s certainly ways we could pick it apart and redesign it, but it’s not the big blistering sore. It’s really the Legislature that’s the problem. It’s the Legislature that is fueling the partisan politics, it’s the Legislature that we almost unanimously agree is not doing a good job. That was really the place to focus.

One of the interesting things that I learned in my research is that over 70% of the people who serve in the Legislature are attorneys, are career politicians, are business people, or people who already work in the government. That’s over 70%. There’s less than 1% of the people who are scientists. There’s less than 1% of the people who are engineers. Now, we live in a period of history where the world, and the things in the world, are massively complex, massively dangerous, really hard; yet we have a homogeneous collection of people who are making the laws, who are having the conversations, who are expected to do the research and provide the insight that manifests in the way that our government works and functions, and that’s crazy. That is just absolutely crazy.

So first of all, that’s nuts, and that has to change. One. Two, who is that? The reason for it is those are the people who are able to be elected. They’re the people who are interested in being elected, given the realities of what being someone in the Legislature means; but then, of the people who raise their hand, they’re the ones who are able to be elected, and so it’s no surprise that business people, who generally are ambitious, aggressive, pragmatic, can makes things happen, that they’re going to be in the mix. That career politicians are going to be in the mix. That lawyers, who are good at arguing, manipulating, cynically, that they’re going to be in the mix.

At the same time, all these very bright people, all these thoughtful people, who have a different perspective, who have a fresh way of looking at the world and the situations they might be faced with, are kept out. To me, that was really, really core; so a big part of what I’m proposing is essentially rebooting the Legislature, and moving to a model where — and this will get to some of the technology stuff we’ll talk in a bit — combining with a new way of looking at voting and using technology, combining that with some type of presidential appointment that is similar in some ways to how the Supreme Court is chosen, that we change our approach, and we bring the best people in.

Some of the examples I used in the article are, what would it be like if Clara Barton were helping to make good decisions for us? What would it be like if humanitarians were part of the mix? It’s not just people who have one way of looking at the world, it’s not just people who have a certain set of skills and backgrounds, but a much broader set of thinkers and doers and people to represent us. That’s a big part of what I’m proposing.

We’re in this new context now, where the constraints, the communication and information constraints upon which the process of having a legislature, of having the democratic representation of the citizens manifest in how the laws are made and executed, those don’t exist anymore. So what I focused on is the fact that the smartphone, first of all, has all of the features necessary for someone to be directly active in the voting process. We could be sent a bill on our phone that we could read in its entirety. We could be sent with the bill, in real time, opinions on it from analysts who represent the things that we’re interested in; so if we’re interested in civil rights, or gun control, or reducing spending, or whatever the things that we think are important, we could get recommendations from analysts in real time as to how a bill would impact those things.

Then, of course, the phone also gives us the power to vote. In the smartphone, we have all of the technology necessary to be fully informed actors in a direct democratic process. Also crucial to this is the fact that smartphones are becoming slowly ubiquitous. When I started this research in Q3 of 2013, 53% of American adults had a smartphone. In January, that number had increased to 58%, in January of 2014, and it’s a number that will keep increasing. We already have a lot of people with these devices.

The current, outdated voting infrastructure is terribly expensive, so if we’re redirecting costs … I don’t have numbers here, and this is where this is a thought piece as opposed to a specific implementation plan; but money could be redirected, and we could provide purpose-driven voting devices that are maybe much similar than smartphones, but could be freely released to citizens to participate in this process. You now have this model where we can be the people who are confirming Supreme Court justices, who voting on laws and bills.

That ties back, then, to the idea of this new enlightened Legislature. Their charter can be more limited. Their job is to research and discuss and write wonderful legislation, things that will move us farther ahead, things that are thinking more holistically. Things that are ultimately in our better interests, and then we, the people, will be the ones who vote on it. It’s us voting on the Legislature that these very intelligent people have collaborated and come together to make.

Then in the appointment process, getting to your original question, the President can recommend person A or person B or person C, and it’s up to us to appoint them, to approve or reject those appointments, and they can serve for a period of time. At the end of the day, there’s a lot of ideas behind, and parts to, the system; but at the end of the day, it boils down to have an enlightened Legislature that’s very broad and represents our best and brightest, not just the people who are most electable. Second, shift the voting aspect of their responsibilities to the citizenry. Democracy is intended to be direct representation. The fact that it’s not is a product of the ratio of citizens to what can be done, and particularly the communication limitations of times long now in the past.

I believe if this could be put into place, that we would see a transformation in the effectiveness of our government, as well as, I would propose, the productivity of the citizenry. If we feel that we own this process more, if it’s not the fat cats on Capitol Hill deciding our fate, I think that it will make people more confident, it will make people more bought into this country that we share, and have all of these positive unintended consequences for the good of us as individuals and collectively.

On both that small scale, which is the Town Meeting, and then the larger city or municipality, these sorts of experiments are happening. Granted, we’re talking about a much larger population, but as you pointed out, the context has shifted so dramatically from the initial conditions in which our democracy was seeded that now we have this opportunity to iterate and improve, and do what America does so well, which is innovate.

The Founding Fathers had these Enlightenment philosophy ideas that influenced their initial cut at democracy. As a nation, if we are the natural inheritors of our Founding Fathers, we should have it within us to overcome the inertia of the current system, which is clearly broken, and be able to build on those same philosophical underpinnings, but marry it with these wonderful technologies, many of which have their origins in this country to begin with, and create something greater for the next 250-plus years.

Then, of course, voting. What’s voting like, how could that look? How could that be done in a way that would be accessible and effective? Putting together a prototype of that is just part of, from our perspective of tackling this as a design firm, saying, “Here’s a total solution. Not just some ideas, but really a vision of how it could manifest as well,” which is what we love to do.

I do believe in my heart, and I designed this from the standpoint, that this is a solution that would work. It solves a lot of problems, and it would be way better than what we have now. I don’t think it would be perfect, I think there would be some unintended issues that would have to be worked through; but hey, let’s get started, at least. Let’s get something out there and going, because we know what we have now is wrong.

The ultimate solution is going to be one that takes a lot of voices, it’s going to be one that takes a lot of compromise, that takes a lot of balancing disparate forces, some of which I don’t care about. There’s a lot of money and a lot of business interests that are really incentivized to keep the current system in place, and I don’t care about them. I’ve come up with this basically saying, “To hell with them.” However, getting to a true solution, they’re going to be part of the process. Maybe a dysfunctional part, but a part nonetheless.

This is intended to get people to say, “Wow, we really don’t have to just tolerate this like sheep anymore.” There’s radically better ways that we have the technology in place, or with just some extra investments in infrastructure, to make happen and make real. Here’s one idea, but hey, I have an even better idea, that was sparked there but is taking it farther.

At the end of the day, in a perfect world, the government is radically redesigned in ways that may look nothing like what I’m proposing, but this piece very humbly attempts to be a fire starter, and be something that waves the flags out there and says, “Hey, this is really broken and bad, and we have the power and the wisdom and the insight, we do, all of us, to make it better.”

This is the time, this is the mid-term elections, which are contentious and are going to be sucking all the air out of the news cycle. You’re going to put on your cable news channel of choice, and 24/7 they are going to be analyzing and giving commentary on the moves that our political parties make, all within the current framework, which is depleted and kind of sad. Rather than focus entirely on that during this election cycle, we challenge you to think beyond the current system, and maybe take a look at Dirk’s piece here, and start a larger conversation.

This is not a moment for incremental change. What we have is totally, totally wrong, and so we need to step back, and really go big, and say, “How do we clear out this 70-plus percent of suits and bureaucrats, and how do we replace them with the sort of people we admire and look up to, and who really would be good representatives for us? How do we take the technology that is making so much money, that is so important in our lives in largely superficial ways, and leverage that to be a catalyst to change?”

If we allow ourselves to think big, and not hold ourselves back with the concerns that are very relevant to people doing good work that is incremental work, that’s how we can really make a difference. Indulge yourself a little bit, and maybe the world will be better for it.

If you want to follow us outside of the show, or have a conversation with us on Twitter, you can follow me at jonfollett, that’s J-O-N-F-O-L-L-E-T-T, and of course the whole show is brought to you by Involution Studios, which you can check out at goinvo.com; that’s G-O-I-N-V-O.com. Dirk?