It's the maiden voyage in the bet MGM studio here at Ascension St. Thomas Sports Park with Rand Carthon I'm Mike Keith and it's time for us to get down to the business of the 2023 Tennessee Titans schedule. You had to hold it. You had to look at it. You had to wait with it Was it hard? Very Because you don't take I mean obviously it's the schedule. It's who we're gonna play It's our opponents and things that we could start getting ready for but on the personal side It's okay. Where where's this game? Oh, I got family I can get have to get X amount of tickets for this or the London game now you can plan for you know family travel so Excited to actually have this out public and I'm sure as soon as I take my phone off do not disturb I'll have a bunch of rolling again Let's take a good look at the schedule to begin Preseason is where we start and it's Chicago and at Minnesota both on the road and then home for the New England Patriots So two preseason games on the road New England at home The regular season opens on September the 10th at New Orleans It's a noon kickoff and you're gonna see a theme with the noon kickoffs the home opener in week two the LA Chargers back on the road to Cleveland to round out September October begins with a visit from the Cincinnati Bengals Then it's at Indianapolis for the first AFC South game on to London To take on the Baltimore Ravens on October 15th The buy is in week seven on October the 22nd Post buy Atlanta at home followed by Thursday night football at Pittsburgh Then two more road games at Tampa Bay at Jacksonville The home schedule comes in to focus down the stretch Thanksgiving weekend Carolina followed by Indianapolis Monday night football in Miami on December 11th Then home for Houston home for Seattle at Houston and then the regular season ends once again With Jacksonville ran Carthon as general manager of the Titans any immediate takeaways I think this is going to be a competitive schedule. I mean you look at the teams that we're playing They're either teams that you know our division opponents obviously are what they are in the AFC South is going to be you know a tough Climb for us this year But you look at the other teams, you know their teams are you on the upswing or teams that have become established So it'll be a good test for us to see where we are New Orleans as the opener there It'll obviously be loud in the Caesar's Superdome, but Derek Carr being there Troubling a little bit that they're gonna have a new quarterback and maybe Maybe be a little bit of a mystery coming in. No, I mean, that's what you have preseason for okay And that's why our scouts, you know downstairs They'll be working on you know having to have the opportunity to see Derek Carr see how he you know Functions with any offense and so I trust you know our guys to get us ready But that's a great test to come out on the road in such a hostile environment and loud environment And give us something to really look forward to this preseason selfishly. I'm glad the cold weather games are early And we got some warm weather games down the stretch, but that lasting with Jackson It'll probably be cold in Nashville the first weekend in January That's that's what you want against the defending division champs, right? Take any advantage you can get, you know And for me selfishly I See that we got three games in my home state of Florida There you go I'm a pretty excited to be there and have this team that I'm a part of you know get to show the people in my home State where we're made of. Rand Karthon, let's wrap up with this This and you said and Coach Varebel always says and everybody says it's the schedule You knew who the opponents were gonna be now You just know the dates but for the fan base This is sort of like a Christmas day type thing Because you start to be able to make your plans and as you know being a gator in this part of the country Football weekends mean so much to really everybody. Yeah, absolutely because you have to plan your your Saturday And then plan your Sunday and sometimes your Thursday and sometimes your Monday So it's now everybody not only here in this building But across the state across this region now we can plan our lives for the rest of the year There we go. Now the world can start for 2023 the run towards Las Vegas and potentially Super Bowl 58 begins for 32 teams Rand Karthon. Thanks for being with us anytime man Thank you. All right. We're gonna yes, sir Now another more complete run through of the schedule again the preseason at Chicago at Minnesota and against New England Again that season opener at New Orleans September the 10th team's first trip to the Big Easy Since 2015 when the Titans won an overtime in Mike Malarkey's first game as interim coach September 17th the LA Chargers come to town first Nashville trip for Justin Herbert September 24th at Cleveland last time the Titans were in Cleveland, Tennessee won 43 to 13 Cincinnati on October 1st Titans and Bengals meeting for the 4th straight season at Indianapolis on October the 8th the first AFC South game London Baltimore the opponent 8 30 a.m. Central time Titans second-ever trip to London second one under Mike Vrabel actually week seven by Week seven by is actually kind of interesting in Titans history It's the first time the ballclub has had a week seven by since 2009 It's the fifth time overall the Titans have had a week seven by October 29th Atlanta at noon Arthur Smith brings the Falcons to Nissan Stadium for the first time since 2015 at Pittsburgh Thursday night football on November the 2nd Titans were one and one on Thursday nights last season at Tampa Bay at noon on November the 12th Titans have won three in a row over the Bucks and Then the first meeting with Jacksonville on November the 19th as the team starts to crank up action in the division The next weekend Carolina at noon at Nissan Stadium only the seventh all-time meeting between the Titans and the Panthers Good chance. We'll see Bryce young in that one to December We move and it's time to finish up with Indianapolis at home then to Miami for Monday night football It'll be the Titans 45th all-time Monday night football game. The team has won 25 of those Houston comes to town on December 17th, and then on December 24th It's Seattle if Geno Smith is the starting quarterback for the Seahawks He'll make his third career start at Nissan Stadium, but amazingly his first since 2014 And then at Houston also played the Texans twice in three weeks in December 2019 if that looks familiar week 15 and then at Houston week 17 And then winding it up with Jacksonville Titans radios coach Dave McGinnis joins me. Hello coach Mac You know, I was wondering if I was gonna get to talk Mike I mean, I've been standing up here looking like a puppet and I've met most of y'all upstairs And if I didn't meet you that's my fault so cool that you're here so cool that you're here. This is my no, I'm talking Okay, this is my this is my 38th season in the national football league straight I've done a pretty good job of tricking people for that long like I know what I'm doing But every year this year this time at this time of the year is so exciting It really is because everybody's got fresh hope you got a fresh start and it's it's really good And since I haven't been coaching since I've been doing this with Mike Keith now I get to interact with y'all which y'all are the lifeblood of what goes on y'all the lifeblood of this stuff We had a season where we had nobody in the stands how strange was that strange strange, okay? I don't ever want to do it again, but I'm so happy here to be here with you guys Now what do you want to ask? Okay? What I want to ask you is what you think of the schedule coach Mac well to me when as a coach as a former coach For 31 years in this league the first thing you look at if you look at where your divisional games are, okay? We've got a pretty good Backloading of our divisional games. That's important. You also look at your altered scheduled games Everybody looks at at your sheet. We've got three altered scheduled games right, okay? And so when you look at that because as a coach you're looking at your schedule as to how you're going to get Your guys ready the next thing and we'll find out when we get a master plan I always wanted to look at and see how many teams I am playing after they're coming off their buy Right and especially where it is during the schedule because that makes a difference Because this stuff takes a toll on these dudes bodies out here And you'd kind of like to know where you where you line up there the next thing the next thing you look at Not only is where are the national games? How do the national games fall as far as what happens after them then do you have any sandwich games?  This to me is a much more linear and an even schedule than last year last year Was very very chopped up, you know as far as Thursday night games How much rest you had how much you didn't I'm just telling you as a former head coach That puts a lot of strain on you trying to decide how much to work your guys when to work them Special with the injuries that we had last year That's a double load on you to do that And so that's just a little overview of what you look at as a coach when you look at this stuff here Let's look at the month by month if we could in September the Titans obviously open the season on the road at New Orleans Can we stop you minute? Yes, sir. We go to Chicago, right good preseason. Yes I was a head coach of the Bears for six hours didn't know what for three true story true story true story All right, so back to the preseason. Here's August one more time Okay, I'm gonna write a book so y'all get a copy when I write it. This will be two chapters in fight now go all right So that's your preseason. That's obviously August We don't have dates and times yet Those will be set as we go forward as the clubs work this out and we figure out what the TV schedule is So to September we go and you look at the home game with the Chargers Sandwiched in between the road games at New Orleans and Cleveland October's an interesting month Because the Titans bounce around First of the month and the end of the month home games Indianapolis and a trip to London and the buy on October 22nd Mike Vrabel is five and oh after buys in his time with the tight night. Great was a good football coach guys I mean, I know good from bad in this league and Look, I know he's a good ball coach, but when he's looking at this He's telling you some of the same things I'm telling you right now as far as in his mind now how the wheels are turning how he's going to get his teams ready for this The reason he is so good after a buy because he he Assesses where his team is and then he knows how to get him ready with a little extra time. All right So let's look at November. It's a tough month three straight road games to begin The Thursday night game at Pittsburgh then at Tampa and Jacksonville finally home for Carolina Those three straight road games. That's a tough test. That's a tough test and what you got a Thursday night game in there So what you want to do with a Thursday night game is? Because you're gonna be coming off of a short week with that Thursday night game It's really really important to have your guys as healthy as you can be going into that one Because that's the stretch there to me when we're looking at November when you've got Thursday Then you've got at Tampa Bay at Jacksonville. That's gonna that's gonna test your medal a little bit that one right there Then five games in the month of December three of them division games wrapping up with Andy and then back to back or Houston in three weeks play them two times in three weeks some tough work there and as you go into January just sort of a Continuation then the home game with Jacksonville a lot on the line for the Titans down the stretch But the schedule plays back into their hands with all the home games and all the home Division games down that's such a huge point Mike because look the clearest way to the tournament and the national football league is to win Your division and so having that having that back loaded like that You need to have your team hitting on all cylinders when we reach that point and look the league does this on purpose guys They do it on purpose because all of these games really they're all important in the national football league Because you only got 17 chances, but back loading everybody's schedule with division games That's a big big stretch there and the divisional match-ups Indianapolis and Jacksonville Early on and and really you talked about Indianapolis in week five Jacksonville on November the 19th and then Indy Houston Houston December Jacksonville in week 18 if the Titans can do enough to put themselves in contention Then they have a chance to take care of their business on their own as you move down the street Yeah, and you know when you roll it back and you start looking you know when I was coaching We had 16 games so it's very easy to do the math We would divide it into quarters now that you got 17 you still want to divide it into quarters But you've got you've got a mile post you want to reach in each of those months and to do just what you said Mike Put yourself in a position to make a run for the pole in the in the last month of your schedule I want to talk about flexible scheduling for just a minute Sunday night flexible scheduling for Sunday night football twice they can flex games between weeks five and ten and then at the NFL's discretion Weeks 11 through 17, so there is flexibility there this year We'll also have Monday night flex scheduling potentially the NFL can flex games in weeks 13 through 17 Games can be moved throughout the year from noon to the 305 or the 325 window Week 18 is interesting because there are two games on that Saturday, January 6th 330 and 715 and then on Sunday There are noon and 325 starts and then obviously there's a Sunday night game start times Networks for everything announced at the conclusion of week 17 So as they sort of map out the horse race They can do whatever they need to to make week 18 as exciting as possible Well, and that's why they do it of course we all know that television drives everything that we do, right? I mean, and then that's that's why they do it I mean, it's genius the way they do it now as a coach again As I say when if you've got a chance to be flexed then you've got to start making Two schedules you start making two schedules because regardless of when you're playing You got to be ready to play right and so But the league has done a genius move there because every game Especially in the last month and then the last two weeks of the season is going to be meaningful because you can pick and choose Who's playing on the prime time shows depending on what the record is all right So if you look at the schedule and you say how do we end up with these opponents in these situations? The Titans and the rest of the AFC South this year play the four teams from the AFC North the four teams from the AFC South and the NFC West opponent who finished in the like position as you last year this year for the Titans That's Seattle Seattle finished second in the West. So that's the opponent divisions You kind of look around you say well, how does it affect your schedule in terms of the win percentage? Jacksonville is playing the toughest schedule in the division this year 477-win clip Titans opponents last year won 44.8% of their games Indianapolis 434 and Houston 431 No real big advantage in any of that. Yeah, all that stuff, you know really is nice to look at numbers wise But it depends on where your team is at that time I mean, that's what you're looking at now and we know we're going to play these guys twice, right? So without even looking at numbers, I know this we've got to beat these people twice every one of them That's what we have to do If you could win five of six, you'd be happy. You'd be real happy coach You'd be very happy and the hope springs eternal about the NFL and this stat really bears it out since 1990 33 straight years at least four teams at least four have made the playoffs who did not make it the year before Last year six of the 14 teams that made the playoffs did not make it the year before So you every team goes in feeling like they have a real chance to get in the tournament Well, absolutely and parody is what this league is all about It's the best professional sports lead going because of the parody everybody and of course now it comes down to injuries It comes down to breaks, you know during the game But that's what makes it so exciting when Mike Keith called me and asked me to come back here and you know start broadcasting He's really sorry. He did that eight years ago But since he did I mean just the excitement and being able to be involved and especially look he does all the games Mike Keith does with the windows wide open Because he wants to he wants the feel of what it's like and I get that as a coach I was down there on the sideline for 31 years you get you get the feel of it There's nothing like it. You guys are part of it You see it the thing I'm happy about when he talked about our weather schedules. I'm so glad we play those cold teams You know early, you know, and so it's not cold because it doesn't matter what it is We've done games at Green Bay Where I promise you If I hadn't have been a lifer in this league, I'd quit. I Mean ice on the microphones ice on this and and it was last year You know it's when Brad Willis who does a great job with us and Philip Noel You know they're the they're the the brains of it and they put it all together the engineers So before Mike came in the end of the booth. He said hey look It's really cold I'm going to propose this to Mike and they all of y'all to be on my side He said if we could just keep this window over here Open and this one over here could we close these other two so we could still hear it But we wouldn't get blasted. He said is everybody with me going oh, yeah, we're with you comes in Mike We're thinking we're going to leave these he went no So I'm so happy So happy to be in Miami in December. Oh my god. That's a bit for those windows don't open anyway. No, they don't We're by J Lo's club. That's right. So we're going to London. Who's excited about going to London. I mean, yeah We're gonna play at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium Which is supposed to be state-of-the-art and designed for American football, which Wembley is not no No, it's not and listen playing at Wembley was awesome But sitting out amongst the people doing the broadcast is great at school desks like we were not as good as what this is going to be Baltimore in October in London our second time to go do it Awesome, this will be my fourth London trip with a team It'll be my sixth overseas trip in my tenure in the National Football League for the London Wanda Gutenberg Sweden when I was with the Bears played the Vikings and then one to Berlin to play the 49ers when I was with when I was with the Bears London look London I went to the the first one they did I was with the Bears went and played the Cowboys in 86 over there in London They were just kind of getting the feel for how this NFL thing was gonna work in London So there was a few hiccups. Okay, but the atmosphere is fabulous Now they have got it so smooth and a shout out to Brenn Acres and our ops crew because they this trip is planned so well By these people here the last time I went in 2018 smooth trip y'all are planning on going go I mean it is it's worth the trip. It is worth the trip because I see it right there saying hey look I told you The coach Max telling you it's a cool trip. It's a great experience. It's a great experience and everything is like the Super Bowl You got everybody there. They're were in different jerseys and they make noise the whole game, but leading up to it It's a cool cool experience and as I say I've been doing this for a while And I was like wow this is really good So that stadium that stadium is really cool because it's got a it's got a soccer pitch because it's a soccer stadium So the pitch but then they can the pitch can move and then they raise a football field I mean it's a it's a fabulous fabulous Mechanical marvel over there that they've built so I'm looking forward to it What kind of advantage is it that Mike Vrable is doing it for the second time big time big and it's big for Mike for this reason He's doing it for a second time and he's doing it with the same ops crew So they know exactly I mean he's Brenn Acres and those guys I mean he's already as soon as this thing popped up that we were going They already started planning as far as to what it's what was going on and It's it's flawless the way we travel It really is and for you guys that are coming it's it's it's really planned out very very well But for Mike Vrable for a coach there's a there's a feeling of it removes all the what ifs when you're a coach If you've already done it once and you've done it with the same ops crew So it's really smooth and how many different Pubs did you hang out with with Titans fans? Coach look you went to like every one. Yeah, I did We had a we had our radio show we did it one. I can't remember the name. I mean I called it bed, bath and beyond That's not what it was Not a good connotation at this moment I understand it was banker barrel and bar, you know, it was fabulous and so many Titans fans in there I mean to the rafters a great thing about it was it, you know, I'll tell stories all night I don't know how long we got but we we went in there and the seahawks had already been there the week before right They had been they had set up at the same bar Well when we came in To set up the seahawks guy was still in there taking his stuff down And so he started trying to tell brad willis what you don't tell him anything You know about how they set up and here's how you should set up He let it go on for about five minutes And I'm looking over there at brad just and I mean his nickname is the water moxon because he will go after you And so he sure he wanted that out Doesn't matter. I mean the fabulous person. Yes.  Yeah, we had a great time over there. I mean y'all y'all come please I mean you'll love it. See this is why you should listen to titan's radio. This is every week right here Dave McGinnis. Thanks very much. Thanks guys That's great stuff. All right. So coach back is going out. Jim rice is coming in He is the vice president of titan's ticket sales And uh, there's a lot to talk about because the schedule is out You've had a chance to ruminate through it Jim rice a lot of great options. Welcome. Appreciate that Mike. We're glad to have you I'm just wondering. I'm not going to tell you to stop talking But how are you going to make me follow acts like ran and coach back? Well, that's that's why you're here We saved the best for last. How about that? Yes, let's talk flex plans. All right Tell people what flex plans are what they need to know and how they can go about getting Yes, so it's a great option for those folks that maybe don't have the time to come to all 10 games or the budget And so we've got a variety of different packages We've got a two game pack sponsored by twice daily that allows you to pick any two games that you want to come out to during the season We've got our afc south pack where you can purchase that and Come out and watch us take on all of our rivals within the division And then we've got a five game flex plan Which is a basically a half season where you get the one pre season and any four regular season games you want All right, so I love the fireball fast pass idea You you've been selling those. Do you still have some available? We got very few left. Yeah, tell people what they are Yeah, so again another option for those that are on a budget, but this one gets you to all 10 games So it's a 300 level ticket But with that it's a different seed every game And so you get to try out a lot of different options and it's only 400 you get you get every game this season So that's great. Great deal and playoff priority and playoff priority. That's with that and and the flex plans All right, so if I wanted to buy season tickets, I want to buy psl I can still do that you can still do that. Obviously, we've got the the new stadium coming up That was huge news for us a couple weeks ago But yeah psls are on sale. We've got Extremely limited inventory in the club in lower level Things have been going well for us the last couple years with the winning records and the playoff runs But if you want to give us a call<PHONE_NUMBER> we can definitely find something that fits your budget And something that's newer to us, but really exciting group sales groups. Yep been around for a couple years now So whether it's family friends company outing church school youth groups Whatever it is All you need is 10 or more pick whatever game you want put down a $250 deposit and then two weeks before the game Firm up what your numbers are and pay the rest and you guys can come out and have a grand old time So for all of these options that we just talked about<PHONE_NUMBER> you got it. What else do I need to know? Jim rice new stadiums coming up? So that's that's another big talking point. Um, and right now if you purchase psls through us The value of that psl will transfer to the new building. So that's it's a big time. That's great. That's great. All right, Jim Thank you so much appreciate it. Well done all right So one more run of the schedule as we wrap this up from the bed mgm studio Preseason at chicago at minnesota final preseason game new england Opening the regular season september 10th at new orleans Home for the chargers on september 17th at cleveland september 24th Cincinnati on october 1st at nissan stadium At indianapolis october 8th the london game against the ravens october 15th the by october 22nd Atlanta comes to town on october 29th four days later the titans play thursday night football at pittsburgh Road games november 12th tampa bay november 19 Jacksonville carolina at home november 26th indianapolis at home december 3rd monday night football at miami on december the 11th Home for houston december 17th home for seattle christmas eve At houston on new year's eve day at noon and then the final weekend week 18 against jacksonville to be determined saturday or sunday So we shall see where it all ends up, but it is incredibly exciting as we talk schedule a special thanks to rand karthon coach dav mcginnis and also to jim rice and mostly to all of you. Thank you so much


Hi everyone, Joe for Jaspy's Case Breaks.com coming at you with 2023 Panini Zenith football six box half case. Pick your team number four. Second half of the case that we popped open not too long ago. Very big thanks to this group for making it happen. You're on Tuesday the 26th, Barry you got last spot mojo the Falcons before we pulled the remaining four teams out for the random number block. We did that in a separate video but here are the results of that random number block randomizer. So it's a serial number break for those four teams just for pick your team four. Penny Sleeves here. I feel like the first half was alright but we did not really see a huge quarterback name or anything like that. Let's see what we can find in here. We've got a Mari Cooper 21 out of 50 and a Bryce Young.  That's that Bryce Young and the Mari Cooper will go to the Raiders that's going to be for Jeffrey. There is a redemption in here. We also have Quentin Johnson, Donner's Optic Basketball one out of base football that is one out of 23. We have Donner's Optic Basketball right there hybrid edition. Chargers that's going to be for Joseph K. And the redemption is, whoa, Doug Williams, Steve Young, Vinny Tester Verde. Team Summit autographs gold. Let's go to the checklist. And they're all Buccaneers. Nice. According to the checklist, card number 15, team summit autograph, card 15, all Bucs. That's awesome. Tampa Bay, Robert J with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, there you go Robert. No randomizer. Love that. And gold, I'm not sure what gold is number two but that's awesome. Off on top. Let's go that way right there. All right, we've got Jimmy G. Two out of five Jimmy G. Still Raiders edition, Jeffrey. All aboard the Big Hit Express on a two Tuesday, two out of five. Got a Will Leves, Zeal of Approval, Jackson Smith and Jigba. And oh, there's three hits here. We've got Kendry Miller, I'll take an extra hit, 12 out of 23, that's only supposed to be two autographs. That's going to go to the Saints, that'll be for Eric Leal. We've got a Drew Sanders rookie autograph to $2.99, Broncos, that's going to be for John and a nice rookie patch auto, Jordan Addison, $2.31 out of $2.99, real strong. It's going to go to Douglas and the Vikings. All right, next box, Josh Jacobs, different team now, so it's safe on Barclay, different team now, Devon A, Shane, same team. Whoa, Justin Herbert autograph, 29 out of 50 for the Chargers. Joseph K. with the Bolts, did not expect that. It's a nice surprise out of Zenith and a Clayton named that tune, 111 out of 2.99. Three boxes to go. All right, Steve Young to 50. That's Niner's edition, Gibbs in battle. And then we have, Tajé Spears, 10 out of 25. That's an artist proof autograph going to the Titans. Derek with Tennessee, Steve the artist proof logo just before the RC badge. And then we've got Jake Hainer, 197 out of 2.99, three color patch and autograph for Nolans, that's going to be for Eric Leal with the New Orleans Saints, Justin Jefferson to 50. Donald Garoppolo, Quentin Johnson, Devon Singletary reveals Z-Graths, Neil Smith, 11 out of 25. That's our first card for the random number block group. And that's going to go to number one, and that'll be for Michael H, there you go Michael. And there's Zach Charbonnet, 205 out of 2.99 for UCLA's UCLA guy, I feel like he's got some still have some upside in the NFL, was really good in college, Adam with the Hawks of the Sea. All right, there's Russell Wilson, Z-Stars, Jackson Smith and Jigba named that tune. And we have Jahan Dotson, 38 out of 199. That's going to go to Kevin and the Commanders, and behind Saquon is Bijan Robinson, 8 out of 10, Barry Roberts. Great job, last spot mojo, last spot mojo, 70% of the time, last spot mojo hits 100% of the time, quad relic and autograph, great way to finish it, there's the Saquon right there. And the randomizer for the potential non-numbered cards in that random number block, no, that's not going to go into a number block, too many non-numbered cards. All right, let's roll it, randomize it, 4 out of 4, 8 the hard way, and the name on top from that number block group, we'll get the, what should we call it, the non-numbered cards. 2, 3, 4, 5, and there you go, Jahan, after 8, congrats, you'll get all the, any potential non-numbered cards for those four teams, Houston, Indianapolis, Kansas City and Philadelphia. Thanks for watching, thanks for bringing with us, I'm Joe, I'll see you next time for the next one, bye bye.


The number one question I'm asked by musicians is how do you keep people on your team motivated, get things done, or keep wells in momentum from occurring? We all know musicians get real motivated for a little while and then have big spans where they do nothing and everybody forgets about them, and then their fan base gets bored and diminishes. Especially since we know that consistent sustained promotion is one of the most important things for building a fan base, this becomes a huge problem for musicians trying to build up their fans. And it is okay that life gets in the way sometimes, but if you learn how to keep people motivated and keep things getting done, those lows will disappear and you'll gain more momentum. With some simple methods and some software, you can not only make tons of progress on your music, but also keep track of what everyone is supposed to be doing and hold them accountable and keep them motivated. Hi, I'm Jesse Cannon and this is Muse Formation. So what we're trying to learn today is what the corporate world calls project management. And while I'm an anti-capitalist nerd, I gotta admit when these suits do something right. If you're constantly noticing that people on your team are doing the wrong thing when something else was more important to do or that things constantly fall through the cracks and things don't get done and you lose momentum building up your fan base all the time, what we're gonna go over today is crucial. So the main tool we're gonna be using today is a free software called Trello. Let's get into that. Okay, so this is Trello. This is what I use to organize any team I work on. What I like about Trello versus a to-do list is it has lots of accountability tricks. Like for example, one of the best things that subtly tricks people to realizing on a team that they're being lazy is that it'll send notifications on the mobile apps or even on the desktop app when people are completing tasks so you know you're not making progress when other people are making progress and that bullies people into thinking they gotta work harder. And you know, that subtle trick kinda does work. Anyway, I like this though for a lot of reasons. So what I do when I set up a Trello, and as you can see, I've done it here for my band in Cell Hype Beast. I've made a bunch of categories. So each of these verticals is a different type of task. So we have anyone can do it, which means that anyone on my team, the manager, me or anyone in my group can do the task. This is the work we have to do for the next video we're making. Everyone work means somebody can just pick this and do this. Jesse work would obviously mean I'm doing it. And then the manager work here would be the manager do it. And then when the last vertical we have is completed. And what's good about that is that you can then see when things have been done. And as well, you know where has happened with tasks. And most of all, it's like you can look back, you can know that something didn't get slipped out of the wayside, it got done. Sometimes you're not always thinking of everything, especially when these boards are stacked. What I also like right here is this activity feed. Since as things happen, it'll show you what's been going on and who's been making progress. This is especially good if you had a day or two away from your project, you were dealing with your day job, something like that. You were on vacation. You can look back and see everything that's been happening and know where you're at with things. So let's really get into though, how I like to use this. So I just add a new card. Every time there's a task to do, we can do a task for clean the van for anyone can do it. And so then if I wanted to say, well, the manager's not been pulling their weight, I could add it to their work if I wanted to. As well in there, you can also tag different members of the team. So if it was more than just me and this team, I'd be able to put someone else on this and it would notify them that they've been doing this to however they have their notifications set up. The key is you do have to do this. We should also talk about this. It is super, super important that somebody takes the task of being the taskmaster. No band ever is an equal dispersion of responsibilities. No team is ever it, but somebody has to be the person who's motivating people to get things done. And pushing things forward. And sometimes that is more than one person, but really somebody has to take care of this board and nudge and remind people that they're not getting things done. So one of the other ways to do that, as you can see here is I have a due date on this. And you can do that. That check mark says it's complete if it gets done. But like I like to put the due dates on things by when they would need to be done and like really make people plan it a little bit more. There's all sorts of calendar integrations here for if you want to use this with a calendar and it'll put things on people's calendars and show them when they're due. There's tons of ways to unlock this. So let's get into this a little bit more too is that like for the video work, you could put this in the order things have to get done so that people know what to prioritize. One of the biggest problems I noticed with managing groups is people just do what's easy, not what's actually needs to be done. And that is truly like the biggest problem. So you as the taskmaster can prioritize things and what I like, especially when I've had a boss on this or I'm somebody's boss is I can really let them know what needs to be done because we all know how often those fights happen. But yeah, and then once things are ready, so let's say I have finished the mix of Iowa sketch break. I put that on our completed tab, then it goes there and everybody will get a notification on their app saying that that's done. But what I really, really like a lot about this is, is Trello compared to other to-do apps makes a nice visual way to do it. It looks great on the mobile apps and it really works well for making sure that everybody knows what can be done, which word should be done and every band I talk to who starts using it says it's a miracle for their productivity. So I hope the same thing happens for you. That's it. Am I missing anything? Is there any way you would have done this? I need to know your questions and what no one else is telling you since I wanna answer them. So leave them in the comments. I hope you liked this video and if you did, please like and subscribe and get notified for my future videos since I'm gonna be breaking down the concepts in this video along with tons of others on promoting your music and how to make music you're more happy with. As well, I have a Facebook group that's linked below that has only helpful information. No one tried to sell you anything, playlist or con artist, only helpful information for musicians looking to be better themselves. If you wanna learn more about me, make a record with me or check out any of my books, podcasts or anything else I do, head to jessicanon.com or at jessicanon.com on any of the socials. Thanks for watching. One last thing, if you liked this video, there's two playlists here with tons more videos that you'll probably enjoy. One's about how you promote your music and the other's about how you make songs you're happy with. Otherwise, you can hit the subscribe button here to see the rest of my videos. Thanks so much for watching.


I'm going to bring up tonight's introducer, Dan Zaharapul. Let me just say that Dan has been a wonderful friend to me and to the museum since before the museum opened. We've worked together on lots of different projects. He's worked with our middle school students. He's worked with us at our galas. And he's just been a tremendous supporter of math outreach. I know you'll enjoy hearing from him. He is the executive director of the Art of Problem Solving Initiative, which runs BEAM, which is the bridge to enter advanced mathematics. So if children maybe don't come from a situation where they're being given enrichment in math and encouragement in math, Dan goes out and finds them and brings that to them. And we're delighted to partner with BEAM on many initiatives. And I'm delighted to give you Dan Zaharapul. Thank you, Cindy. It's an incredible pleasure to get to introduce Ben Blumsmith to you, because he is one of my favorite people. And I'm very excited for all of you to hear his talk. I am excited to hear his talk. I want to tell you a little bit of a story. And what I want to show you is how democracy infuses into Ben's soul. He taught for us many summers. But the first summer he did so, he was teaching a class called Group Theory, which is a fairly advanced mathematical class, especially for students the summer after seventh grade. We work with underserved students with talent in math. And you could see just from his being there that he cared very deeply about making mathematics accessible, including to those whose families maybe don't have the financial resources to get there themselves. He worked so late into the night, preparing this masterpiece of a class where they learned about symmetry by dancing. He would play the guitar, and his TA would call out dance moves. And they would see how their formation changed and use that to better understand group theory. And it was the sort of thing when Ben wears a suit, it's a sign of respect for his audience. And this was in the summer in a classroom that was air conditioned, but not necessarily that well. And every day he was there in a suit. And there was this. So one part of it is he cares deeply about this access. That is a side of math and democracy for Ben. But another part of it is that he infuses democracy into his classrooms, just into the environment of it. He's sort of like a Thomas Jefferson of the classroom, except without the bad parts. So what he's doing is that he doesn't move forward unless everyone in the class understands why and how things are working. His motto is honor your dissatisfaction. And so he's making sure that everyone is there. Everyone within it. It's a communal effort of the class to move forward. So Ben and democracy, in my mind, have been very closely linked, even if I didn't put that word to what he was doing back then. Now he's here to talk about how you can actually use math to study democracy. All of his work is about using math to advance society and to advance democratic principles. And it's basically remarkable.  He got his undergrad degree from Yale. He went to Tufts to get a master of arts and teaching and taught for several years in both Boston and New York public schools. He then went to NYU to get a PhD in mathematics. He's now completing a TED residency. He'll be giving a TED talk, I believe, at the end of this month. And afterwards, we will see. But I'm sure that it's going to be a quest toward something great. So please welcome Ben. So thank you, Dan, for that absurdly lovely introduction. I was like, part of the talk, I was going to thank Dan for the introduction. I knew that that was going to happen. But I didn't know it was going to be like, I was going to plot. So thank you for that introduction. Cindy and the museum, thank you for hosting this talk. I'm going to be telling you things that I think that every citizen should know. So I really appreciate the museum supporting this conversation happening. And there's some other people I have to thank before I do anything else, which is the Tufts metric geometry and gerrymandering group. So this is run by Moon Duchen, the one in the middle there with the label. And she's a mathematician. Like me, her training in mathematics is in pure mathematics. She's a geometric group theorist, if that means anything to you. She did not start out doing something about how society works. But that's completely where she's landed. She started this group working on gerrymandering at Tufts. They've run this whole sequence of conferences in the last year. I went to three of them. And their work just really informed, like taught me about what I'm about to teach you I learned from them. So I had to thank them. And also explicitly Mira Bernstein, who's the other label one, I'm using several times in this talk, you'll see source MGGG somewhere on the slide. And that means that I got it from Mira. So thank you to those folks. They're amazing. Look them up. All right, gerrymandering. So just to make sure that we're all on the same page, what's gerrymandering? Every 10 years in the United States, the new census comes out. And when the new census comes out, it might affect how many representative states get in Congress. So they have to redraw the boundaries between their congressional districts every 10 years. And gerrymandering is redrawing those boundaries in such a way to benefit your political party or sometimes to try to cut out a racial minority from the political process. That's those two types of gerrymandering are the main types, partisan and racial gerrymandering. This talk is going to be just about partisan gerrymandering. Because they're both extremely rich problematic issues. And they intersect with each other in a lot of really rich problematic ways. So in the Q&A afterward, I invite questions about that relationship if you're interested. But I'm going to talk about partisan gerrymandering because the Supreme Court has found ways to set limits on racial gerrymandering. They're not ideal, but the Supreme Court has knocked down maps as a racial gerrymander. And it has yet to do that with a partisan gerrymander. So this talk is focused on the particular problematic of partisan gerrymandering. A little tiny bit of history. That's Elbridge Gary right there. It's spelled gerry, though, with a G. Elbridge Gary, in case you didn't know, is one of our founding fathers. He's a signer of the Declaration of Independence. He was the vice president to James Madison. And he was the governor of Massachusetts in 1812 when his legislature passed a districting of the congressional districts of Massachusetts that was designed to shore up support for his party. What was his party? The Democratic Republican Party. And it was very controversial at the time because there was this district. Anybody recognize geographically where we are based on some of these names, Ipswich and Andover? Yeah? Yep. This is just west of the North Shore. This is right north of Boston. And there was this district consisting of Salisbury, Amesbury, Haverhill, Mithuin, and so on. You could tell I'm from Massachusetts because I said Haverhill, right? And people were just like, what is that? Like the shape of it in connection with it, the obvious connection of that shape with the intention to shore up support for that party, was very controversial. What you see here is a political cartoon from the time mocking this district as some sort of like beast. Or maybe a salamander. And that's where the word gerrymander comes from. So that's your history lesson. Here's a contemporary such district. This is Pennsylvania 7. And this district was just struck down as unconstitutional under the Pennsylvania State Constitution by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in January, very recently. So this talk is about gerrymandering. Before anything else happens, I need you guys to do some gerrymandering so we know what we're talking about. So I'm going to tell you what you're going to do. And you're going to do it on the you all got a piece of paper with eight copies of this image. If you need a pencil, the MoMath staff has some pencils for you. So raise your hand if you need a pencil and they'll get you a pencil. Here is what I want you to do. Think of this square as a model of a state. This image is from the MGGG, the Tufts Group that I mentioned before. And they call it Squaretopia. So I'm going to call it Squaretopia. Squaretopia is comprised of 90 voting precincts. The voting precincts are the squares. Each voting precinct, we should think of it as having the same number of voters as every other voting precinct just to keep things simple for ourselves. And each voting precinct, again, this is just for the sake of simplifying, we're going to think of each voting precinct as being entirely loyal to one party. And there are only two parties. The parties are the purple party and the white party. So here's what I want you to do. First, on one of those things, gerrymandered this map for purple. I want you to divide it into 10 congressional districts, each comprising nine of the precincts in such a way that you get as many of those 10 districts to be majority purple. After you gerrymandered for purple, take another of those Squaretopias and gerrymandered for white. So again, divide it into 10 districts of nine precincts each, nine little squares each. Except this time, try to have as many of them with a white majority instead of a purple majority. That's probably all you'll have time for in the time that I'll give you. But if you want a challenge and you're done with both those things, then see if you can create an even more partisan map for one or the other, or see if you can make a map whose outcome is as partisan as your white gerrymandered or whatever, except the districts look better, more blob-like and less tentatively. This is what I mean by a district. This is just an example. Every completely connected thing made of squares that are touching edge to edge, not corner to corner. Any questions about that? Last time somebody asked an additional question that I'll answer now just in case, which is you also have to have the districts be what a mathematician would call simply connected, which means don't have an O. A district is not allowed to completely surround some other space. The U shape one in Chicago, but it doesn't join up, though, right? It's just you're allowed to have a U. Actually, that raised a good clarification. A U and a C are OK. It just can't link up so that it completely contains something else and separates it from everything else. Does that make sense? OK, so I'm going to give you a few minutes to do this. Raise your hand if you got a gerrymander for red, for purple, with at least eight. Put your hands down if only eight, nine and up, nine and up. 10 and up. Well, a lot 10, right? So how about white? Let's talk about white. Anybody get five white districts? How about six? Six, six. How about seven? Anybody seven? Yes, some sevens. Yeah, so here's one. Here's a solution. Here's just one possible solution for purple, a gerrymander for purple, winning all 10. And here's a gerrymander for white, winning seven of the 10. They don't even look that crazy. They could, I mean, they're a little funny and long, but right, so the first take home lesson here is just the power of the pen, right? The votes were the same in the left and right scenarios. So that means that the person who controls the district thing is controlling the difference between 100% of SquareTopia's representatives in Congress being from the purple party and 30%. It's a lot of power. Take a second to reflect on how, what were the techniques that you used as a gerrymander? Because they come down to two basic techniques, right? One was to pack all of your, as much of your opposition as you could, into a small number of districts that they win in a landslide.  This is how you force your opposition to use their votes inefficiently. Either they're winning in a landslide and then half of them weren't needed to do that. They don't get anything more out of winning a landslide than they would out of winning by 51%. And in the other cases, they're in districts where their votes are not electing anybody. So if you look at what you did, you'll see that's what you did. You can see that's what I did, especially. It's super clear in the white gerrymander on the right here, there are these three districts, this one, this one, and this one, where between the three, there's a single white precinct. So those are the packed landslide purple districts. And then in every single other district, white won by exactly five to four. So there were four purple votes that didn't elect anybody. Historically, both parties have gerrymandered every chance they get. The issue seems to me anyway to have a partisan tint at present. And the reason for this is because of a conscious Republican strategy aiming for down ballot races in the 2010 election so that they could control the redistricting process. So here's an op-ed by Karl Rove in the Wall Street Journal in 2010 discussing this all freely. For him, it's pure political strategy.  And reading it, it's just like he's just like, he had the feeling it might be a Republican wave year. He was like, I think Americans don't like what Obama's doing. I think this could be a Republican wave. So we're just concentrating on riding that wave into control of state houses that are gonna allow us to control redistricting. And we think that's gonna make a big difference for the next decade or more. So it's not, there's no question about what the moral implications are, or anything, it's just pure tactics or the legality or anything, which is partly an illustration of the fact that the legality is murky, which I'll get to again later. Nonetheless, so in the present, there was a very successful Republican strategic move in 2010 that got control of a large number of state houses. So there are a large number of effective Republican gerrymanders at present, currently active in the house US congressional maps. But there are still Democratic controlled states that are suspected of gerrymandering. Illinois, I'm mentioning Illinois and Maryland. Maryland is one of the two partisan gerrymanders that's before the Supreme Court right now. So to me, it's clear that this should be seen as a non-partisan issue.  And gerrymandering is the legislators choosing which voters are gonna be in the district that elects them. So gerrymandering is the legislators choosing the voters instead of the voters choosing the legislators. So Americans across the political spectrum don't like it. You might think given that, why isn't this somehow solved by now? But it's actually a hard problem to address. And I'm gonna mention two ways that it's hard. One is that there's no law against it. I was, you know, I pointed this out with the Carl Rove piece. Like he's just out in the open saying, let, yo guys, let's get control of redistricting. Let's put money into these down ballot races so that we can have those state houses and then we can control redistricting and then we'll just win. This is gonna be awesome. Like on the Wall Street Journal, like, you know, you might think it's illegal but it's clearly not. That's the point of that. Why is it not illegal because who would have to pass a law? I mean, okay, so how it could be changed, that's a big question and this talk is part of. But in the absence of a law, it falls to the courts to set limits. And the courts need to understand what is the legal theory of harm and who is being harmed in order to have a case that they can say something is unconstitutional. So is it, you know, is the issue at play the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment? Is the issue at play the first amendments right to political free expression? It's not clear, but I am not a lawyer and this is not the Museum of Law. So the other problem is the one I'm gonna concentrate on. The other problem is how can you tell when a gerrymander has gone too far? And there are two methods of gerrymandering detection that loom large in the public mind. Funny shapes, right? There's Goofy again. And this goes back to the original, you know, the nominal, the name, the gerrymander that started it all. Not gerrymandering, but the one that started that word. And highly non-proportional outcomes. So this is just a quote from a report by the Brennan Center on the case, the Wisconsin case that's before the Supreme Court. Right now it basically just says, look at the wide gap between the percentage of votes statewide that Republicans got in this election and the number of Republicans that were elected. These two ideas dominate public discourse about why we think we're being gerrymandered at. This talk can be summarized in the following way. Neither of these is the right way to think about detecting gerrymandering. However, there is a much better way due to some fairly recent mathematical innovations and I'm gonna share it with you. That's the talk in a nutshell. So before I share you the way, I have to convince you that those aren't great ways. To do that, I'm gonna have you gerrymander a little bit more, just a little bit more. Here's what I want you to do this time. Not, you're not gonna gerrymander actually, you're gonna try to make a fair map, but I'm gonna ask you to try to make a fair map in two different, prioritizing two different things. The first time I want you to just prioritize making the districts compact and geometrically nice, like as close to a blob as possible. Avoid tentacles, avoid elongation. The second thing, once you do that, so do that, and then after you do that, I want you to try to draw another map where what you prioritize is proportionality of the outcome. By which I mean the vote is 60% purple. So the second time what I want you to do is try to draw a map where purple wins six of the 10 districts.  Six out of 10 and also geometrically nice and nice. All right, so you have a few minutes, go. All right, I'm gonna stop you. Okay, so here's my solution. There's lots of solutions for both of these, but here's one solution. On the left is my compact. I got as many three by three squares as I could, and then I made those as close to two by four rectangles, but they have to have nine. So it's a little funny, but like pretty good, don't you think? Nine out of 10 purple, 60% of the population elected 90% of the representation. Then I tried to make it proportional. Here's my attempted proportional. I got some squares in there. I got four little nice three by three squares instead of six, but four, but I had this funny guy, and this like, okay, this is not that bad, but it's clearly not as good as that. Take home lesson. Geographic compactness does not yield proportionality. This is like the first big message that I wanted to leave you with, because the public discourse about gerrymandering is like, look at that horrible district and look at these unfair non-proportional outcomes. We have to go after these horrible districts so that we can get proportional outcomes, and that's not gonna work. If what we want is proportional outcomes, which I'm not committing to what the objective should be, but people perceive wildly disproportionate outcomes as unfair, and if they attempt to address that unfairness by going after geometrically funky shapes, it's not gonna be successful. So that's the first big take home that I wanted to leave you with. These are two different competing objectives. Geometric compactness and proportional outcome. And these are issues in practice, not just theory. I'm gonna skip this slide for time, but I'm gonna go to this one. The Supreme Court has explicitly rejected proportionality as a standard by which to judge a partisan gerrymander as unfair. In the 1986 decision, Davis versus Bandemur, they wrote, the mere lack of proportional representation will not be sufficient to prove unconstitutional discrimination. If all or most they continue, if all or most of the districts are competitive, I'm gonna mention that Minnesota is such a state. This does happen, whereas state has mostly competitive districts. Even a narrow statewide preference for either party would produce an overwhelming majority for the winning party. So this is what in fact happens in Minnesota. When Minnesota is in a democratic mood, almost all the districts are slightly democratic and the delegation that goes to Washington is almost entirely democratic. When Minnesota is in an ever so slightly Republican mood, almost all the districts go Republican by small margins and almost the whole delegation is Republican. So this is a real thing. The Supreme Court was not just hypothesizing. Since 1986, several alternative measures attempting to quantify something that could be used to bring a case have been proposed. I'm gonna mention two of them very briefly because the thing that I really wanna get to is a third one of these. But these two I think are worth mentioning because partisan symmetry was the key to a case that was decided in 2006 and the other one I'll get to. So partisan symmetry is based on the idea of trying to predict a range of election outcomes that would occur as the mood in the state shifts between Democratic and Republican. And the question it asks is, does the way that the plan treats Democrats when the mood shifts Democrat equal the way that the plan treats Republicans when the mood in the state shifts Republican? So just to illustrate, I'm not gonna feel free to ask me in the Q and A at the end and I'll tell you where these graphs came from. I won't tell you now. But these graphs are attempting to capture how the representation changes as the vote share changes based on Minnesota's 2016 results extrapolating from that. If the Democratic, this is the graph is mapping Republican vote share along the x-axis and Republican seat share along the y-axis. Percentage of elected people who are Republicans along the y-axis. So it's saying that until the Republican vote share hits about 32%, all the elected officials are Democrats. And then once it hits 32%, they get one district electing a Republican. Once it hits 42%, they get a second district electing a Republican. Once it hits 40, like seven or 8%, they get a third district that goes Republican, et cetera. This is the same thing for Ohio based on again the 2016 congressional election. And what you can see is that Minnesota's, if you believe where the graph comes from, which I haven't even told you where it comes from so you can't evaluate that, but if the methodology underlying the graphs has some kind of soundness to it, the argument goes Minnesota is approximately symmetrical if you rotate it around the middle. Whereas Ohio is totally asymmetrical. So Minnesota is fair between the two parties while Ohio is not. That's the argument. The Supreme Court rejected this standard in 2006 in Lulac versus Perry. They said the assumptions that you built the graph on are not sound enough for us to trust this, to trust a constitutional violation based on this. The other idea I wanna mention briefly is the efficiency gap which has gotten a lot of press this past couple years because it was cited among a bunch of other types of evidence in the Wisconsin case at the district court level before it went to the Supreme Court. And because it was a new idea at the time and it was the court founded compelling, it just got totally up taken by the press. The idea of the efficiency gap is based on the idea of comparing the wasted votes between the two parties where wasted means either I'm a Republican in a district that went Democratic then my vote was wasted because it didn't elect anybody or I'm a Republican in a district that went Republican by a large margin and I'm in the half that was not beyond 50% that was not needed to elect a person. So comparing the wasted votes of the two parties, that's it in a nutshell, feel free to ask me more later. Who knows what the Supreme Court will think of it but to me efficiency gap shares a weakness with the proportionality standard and even with the partisan symmetry is more sophisticated idea but they all share this flaw. All of these methods set a standard for what counts as fair that doesn't look at the specific partisan structure of the state. It doesn't look at where the Democrats and Republicans live in the state. And political geography is biased against Democrats. What do I mean by this? Have a look at this totally amazing picture. Here's what this is of. For 20 different states, the state names are above the graph corresponding to that state. Each dot is a voting precinct. The x-axis is log population density so if you don't know what log is you can just think of it as population density. And the y-axis is the percent of vote in that precinct that went to George Bush in 2000 election against Al Gore. So I think this is fascinating for a lot of reason. First of all, look at that elbow macaroni shape that they all have. Why is this? Well, the left side of the graph is low population density so rural. The right side of the graph is high population density. So this elbow is saying well rural areas are more Republican and urban areas are more Democratic but also more specifically where the elbow is pronounced it's saying rural areas are Republican. Where's a good one here? Indiana, rural areas are Republican. Urban areas are both Republican and Democrat. That's why the elbow. I will just drop for you to notice and I'm not gonna say anything more about it that there are four states that have a kind of square pattern instead of that elbow pattern. Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia and South Carolina. All those deep South states have this square instead of the elbow. That's for you to think about. It's deep but I'm not gonna say anything more about it. The thing I wanna point out to you now is this. Forget the x-axis entirely. Look only at the distribution along the y-axis. Look at Florida for example. The most Republican precinct in Florida, there is one precinct in Florida that's about 100% Republican but other than that the most Republican precincts in Florida are not more than 90% Republican. They have 10% Democrats in them. Whereas look at how many precincts there are in Florida that have no Republicans at all. Tons. You will notice that pattern in every one of these graphs except for the ones like Idaho which are just a really Republican state. The places that are Republican are not as Republican as the places that are Democrat. The Democratic places are Democrat. What does this mean? This means that Democrats are packing themselves as far as packing and cracking go. This is commonly believed to have something to do with population density. It has nothing to do with population density because if there were a ton of rural districts that were 100% Republican, they would be equally as packed from a gerrymandering point of view as urban districts that are 100% Democrat. It doesn't matter rural versus urban. What matters is what percent Republican versus Democrat and what we're seeing in these graphs is that there's a lot of every state has a big portion that's just all Democrats. And half those Democrats feel like they wasted their vote and the 25% Democrats who live in the places that are 75% Republican also feel like they wasted their vote. So that means that symmetry and the efficiency, like a perfect efficiency gap and perfect partisan symmetry and perfect as well as perfect proportionality are things that don't happen naturally if all you're doing is dividing up the state in a geometrically nice way. These are things that are not gonna happen. So all of these previous measures have been vulnerable to that criticism. Here is the solution. This is the other big takeaway that I wanna leave you with. There is a new game in town for how to measure gerrymandering called Outlier Analysis. These are the names of some people who have pioneered it. They're all awesome. Here's the idea. Using some method whose soundness needs to be thought about but this is its own problem but using some method start drawing random redistrictings of the state. Here I've got North Carolina. So these are from Wendy Cho's, Wendy Cho has an algorithm to do this. She's one of the people I listed before. Then draw some more. Then draw some more. Then draw a whole lot more. Tens of thousands at least. Wendy's algorithm actually does many, many more than that and she uses a supercomputer but at least tens of thousands. Now for each of these redistrictings we can ask the following question. Take real voter data from real elections to construct the partisan structure of the state. So here's a picture of North Carolina. The red dots are supposed to be Republican support. The blue dots are supposed to be Democratic support. This is based on actual election data. With that map any hypothetical district in any plan you can plop it down onto that map of partisan of the partisan structure of the state and then ask who wins that district. So if somebody wins that district you can look at the reds and blues and see. You see what I'm saying? This means now take all your little maps that you drew. You can ask if that had been the map how many Democrats and how many Republicans would have gone to Congress and you get a different answer for each one of your tens of thousands of maps. This gives you a distribution of partisan outcomes. So in this version of the, you know you can see here this means that almost every one of these maps as far as percentages go either six or seven Democrats won. This is how many Democrats across the bottom based on the 2012 election data. If these had been the maps and people voted exactly as they voted in 2012 in the vast majority of the cases six or seven Democrats would have won significant numbers of maps had five Democrats winning and significant numbers had eight Democrats winning almost no map had nine Democrats winning and practically nobody had four Democrats winning. These are the real maps. This was the one that was actually in play in 2012 and then it was ruled an unconstitutional racial gerrymander before the 2016 election. So this was the one that was in play in 2016. We can ask where their partisan outcome fits inside the distribution. Yeah, that's the punchline and we're pretty much out of time so I wanna give us time to ask questions so I'm not gonna go further. So let's do questions. You mentioned for this that they used the real election data from the previous election what if you pick like four of the past elections and the histogram like totally changes from one to the other. Beautiful question, beautiful question. So they do that. So they look at this across multiple past elections. Joey Chen, one of the people who did it does a whole thing where he kind of averages the last seven elections together to try to get what the partisan baseline is but that's a beautiful question because one challenge is okay.  And that assumption needs to be justified. I mean it's empirically verifiable to a certain extent but sometimes you have a really awful candidate and that candidate changes the, you know. And then sometimes there's other political effects like I think in Massachusetts if you compare gubernatorial races to presidential races you'll get very different partisan behavior. So that's a beautiful question and the methods attempt to deal with that by either looking at multiple elections or by somehow averaging the elections. Did that answer? I have a question. So how do you sample from the set of all legal maps? It seems like there should be exponentially many. Yes, how do you generate the random maps? That's the question? Yeah, so that's a beautiful question and that's the mathematically most challenging and interesting part of this method. Where do these maps come from? Where do the random maps come from and why is it reasonable to say that they're random? I think that the story with this is basically that this method was pioneered by political scientists. I mentioned Joey Chen and Wendy Tamcho and then mathematicians got involved. So Mattingly, John and Mattingly and his group at Duke is mathematicians. I was, Joey Chen, Wendy Tamcho, these are political scientists. Mattingly is a mathematician. Maria Chiquina is a mathematical biologist and she has a team of mathematicians. So these guys are really more on the mathematical side and that question evolved when this method went from the hands of political scientists to mathematicians. Political scientists didn't really worry very much about it. They just wrote a computer program that would create some redistricting of the state. They used some kind of random process to generate that redistricting. They did not put partisan information into that random process and they said it's neutral. But they didn't, there's not a theorem underlying their method that says that they are sampling from the true space of possible maps according to some well-defined probability distribution. The mathematicians did what, how they, I mean, they can't prove it either, but here's what they did. They're using, they're using something called Markov Chain Monte Carlo, which is a method that permeates the study of probability distributions on spaces that are hard to understand. So this, what I mean space that are hard to understand. In our situation, the space of possible maps. If you think of every possible map as a point in a big space, where like if you tweak the boundary just a little bit, then you just moved to a close by point, that space is some crazy high dimensional, we have no idea what it's shaped like, type of a space of possibilities of what all the maps could be. And MCMC, Markov Chain Monte Carlo, is the only tool we have for probing a probability distribution on a space like that. So it basically, how it works is you pick a starting point, which is a map that for Mattingly's group, they actually used the 2012 and 2016 real maps. Then you change it in a random way and then you evaluate whether the change makes the map better or worse with respect to traditional redistricting criteria like geometric compactness, but also don't split counties, try to keep communities of interest together. They programmed a measure for like how good a map is in relation to those nonpartisan traditional redistricting criteria. And then, so they start with a map, then they randomly change it in some way. They ask, is it better or worse with respect to that measure? Then if it's better, they move to that new map. If it's worse, then they move to the old map with some probability based on how much worse. And in that way, they kind of like create an algorithm that walks around the space of possible maps and creates different possibilities. And if that algorithm runs for long enough, then there's a theorem that says that the maps that you get are sampled from a certain random distribution that you can explicitly write down on the original space. We don't know how to tell what long enough means. And that's the gap. But Chiquina's group has a way of, has written a paper that proves that they have a way of saying a map is highly atypical with respect to that distribution, even if I don't know that I've sampled the distribution yet. So there's really, I mean, that was the most technical, that little last five minutes was the fanciest stuff I said today. I'm sorry if that was over. You know, I just, trying to answer that question, it's a real, this is really where a lot of the juicy math is. So did that answer? So once you have like done the analysis and done the random maps and the distribution, like how exactly do you find like the map and does the thing you were just talking about take into account like the ideal distribution? Can you ask that question one more time? Okay, so once you've done the outlier analysis and with all the random maps to find like the ideal distribution, how does, like how do you find like the perfect map? Beautiful question. Okay, I understand the question now I think. Okay, so the goal of this whole program is not to find the right map. The goal of the program is only to have evidence that an actual map is highly gerrymandered. So all the whole thing is just building a case against the North Carolina map. You know, basically it's like, look, this map is way out there. So I don't know what the map that most ideally represents the will of the people is, but I know it ain't this one. Like that's what, all this gives you is the range of partisan outcomes that it would be reasonable to expect from a fair map. It doesn't actually give you a fair map. Did that answer? Okay. Okay, we live in a country that has an appalling, appalling rate of people not voting. Now here in New York City when they gerrymandered, they don't gerrymander on the number of people. They gerrymander on the number of people who they know will vote. And there is a big, big difference. And I wonder, does that go into your computation? I mean, we're talking to Clinton, when he came in, he came in with 48% of the people who could vote voted. So he won 24%, Bill Clinton, 24% of the people who could have voted, that's appalling. Right, so the answer is yes, and it's because this, I mean that the method accounts for that gap because the partisan structure of the state that you're getting here is based on actual election data. So it's based on who is voting. So, you know, that, but the method, the only way that this addresses that issue as a net, you know, because you're talking about something being appalling and I agree, it's like, where's our democracy if half the people are not even engaging in, you know. The only way that I feel that this addresses it is that I believe that a lot of voters are alienated by the feeling that their vote doesn't matter. And if this can help combat that by allowing the courts to rule out maps that make people really feel like their vote doesn't matter, then that'll help people feel like their vote matters. But it's not, you know, everything, I'll say this because it came up in the last question session too. This thing that I've shown you here is a very, it's participating in a very concrete reform effort. It's not like a general, this is the way things should be. It's like there's a very specific thing going on, which is there are a lot of extremely gerrymandered maps and as technology increases, gerrymanders are gonna continue to make their gerrymanders more effective using the new technological tools. So it feels very urgent to stem the flow of those gerrymanders so that we can feel like our votes matter at all rather than not mattering at all. But there's a thousand other issues to do with the political process being successful that this is only, like this is only doing one thing. The one thing it's doing is how can we build a case that courts will find compelling so that courts can throw out gerrymanders now? It's not an activist program to reform the whole voting system. So it's really inserting itself at a very specific point in a very specific reform trajectory. That's like litigation is a really important part of it. The Supreme Court is a really important part of it. I think that it's broader than that because if people see this picture, that that's gonna matter and it's gonna help settle, to me I believe it's gonna help break some of these conversations out of a partisan deadlock. I hope anyway because it's like let's get science involved and find out if this map is typical of the represents the will of the people or not. But it was designed to participate in one point which is to build a legal case. So that only makes sense, that only matters if the path for reform that you're looking at is the legal path for reform. And the issue of inadequate voter turnout might be addressed by this problem being solved partly through the indirect way that I said but I think it needs to be addressed 100 other ways too that involve totally different reform pathways. Does that speak to that? Yes, except that we've stored pictures of people standing online for five and six hours and we were told that their districts had been changed so people are planning gerrymandering based on the fact that they know that some people will vote and some people may not. Right, right. So I guess so it comes down to as far as this goes what it comes down to is the evaluation of gerrymandering is using the same, is ideally using the same data set that the gerrymanders are using. Like this is the map that the gerrymanders are using ideally to figure out where to gerrymanders so that their gerrymander works. And to the extent that we can get hold of the same data they have, then we can show that they gerrymandered. That's what this is trying to do. So it's just, it doesn't step to the side of that. You know what I'm saying? It's like that's part of the landscape that they're working with and that this is working with. So just to summarize, I think what you're really saying is that this last method, it doesn't tell you how to design an ideal division of districts. It gives you a measure of how much they cook the books. I mean after the fact, they measure how much books were cooked. That's right. And that's what makes it of legal interest that it shows that somebody must have cooked the books without you knowing even exactly how they did it. Right, that's right. But could I ask you, you ended up, this was a fascinating talk, but then you ended abruptly because the hour was up. Yes. Could you give us a quick summary of what you would tell us with more time? Yeah, I'll try to do that. I'll try to do that extremely fast because otherwise I feel like I'm just giving the rest of the talk. So, all right. So the first thing I was gonna show you was this, which is a more detailed version of the thing that I just showed you, because this breaks it down by district. Each little box plot is the distribution of the percent of Democrats in the like say sixth most Democratic, sixth least Democratic district. So this right here, I just picked one. So the sixth least Democratic district, the box plot is the distribution of Democrats in the random plans in that district. The purple dot, green dot and orange dot are three actual maps. The purple dot and the orange dot are the 2012 and 16 plans that were actually used. The green dot is a plan that was created by a non-partisan panel of judges commissioned by a nonprofit. So what these graphs show is that the green dots track the medians of the random distribution pretty well. So the non-partisan map is mirroring the random distribution. But the purple and orange dots are extreme outliers, especially not so much on the left side of the graph, but in the middle third and the right. Because these are the packed Democratic districts. This was a Republican gerrymander. These are the places where there are extra Democrats on the plans created by the legislature. And this middle third is the districts that would have been competitive in the random scenario or a non-partisan scenario, but are Republican in the gerrymandered scenario. So that's that. All right. So yes, yay, that was just a more nuanced image of how outlier analysis works. I was gonna point out a subtlety, which is that the Wisconsin gerrymander and the North Carolina gerrymander had fundamentally different goals. Because the North Carolina gerrymander, US House of Representatives, it's like what I had you do. Get as many candidates as you can over there. But the Wisconsin gerrymander was a state house. So all they need is a supermajority. They don't need everybody. So once they have 60 of the 99, they're good. And therefore the goals are different. You don't wanna get as many districts as you can. You wanna get a supermajority worth of safe as possible districts. So I was, this I knew I wasn't gonna have time to do, but just I had the idea beforehand of having you try to do that again with this map. And here's a solution that this is gerrymandered for red, seven districts out of 10. So I figure that's a veto proof majority. But they're all seven to two wins. So what's interesting about this is that the partisan outcome, just the number is not that extreme. You know that when you did the compact districts, most of you got eight. So this is like less red part, less purple party than just a geometrically regular thing. However, the purple majorities are extremely safe. And that means that even if the state swings quite a bit toward the white party, you could lose two, you could have two purple seats flip white in every district and they would still be winning seven seats. So right now they have 60% of the vote. If that happened, they would have like 40% of the vote and they'd still be winning seven seats. So this is a highly gerrymandered map and the reason that's relevant is that this is how the Wisconsin gerrymander works. So you only see the gerrymander when the vote, when the Republican vote share is below 50%. So you saw it in 2012. In 2012 it was less than 50% and the outcome is an extreme outlier. But when it's above 50%, it actually looks like a totally typical outcome. So in order to see it this way, you have to do this, that image that I showed you for North Carolina, you can see the gerrymander here because the red dots, which are what they did are above the distribution on the Democratic districts and below the distribution on the competitive districts. So this last part is not just cooking the books, but adding spices to the mixture. Right, exactly. And then I was just gonna mention some frontiers for further work. That apropos of Solidar's question in the back, how do we create good sampling techniques to build the random maps? How do we understand the geometry of the space of possible maps? Here's some totally different ideas. How about instead of having the legislatures and charge redistrict, we come up with some good game theoretic protocols that two parties could use without needing an independent commission to create a fair map. So I'm involved with a project in the pretty early stages, I don't know if this is gonna go anywhere, but we're trying to develop protocols like that with Stephen Brams. Thank you for that introduction, Sylvan. Another is because single member districts lead to non-proportional outcomes, if you care about proportionality, you might wanna consider reforming the system of single member districts. So people are thinking about how to create multi-member district systems that don't shut out minorities, which is the traditional problem with multi-member districts. So that's another thing going on. And last but not least, what's the relationship of shape to gerrymandering? Cause I've been at pains to show you that shape is not determinative, right? Here is the Wisconsin map, I didn't mention this before, it's not that bad looking. Like there is no Snoopy kicking Donald Duck in this map. And on the left, that's the 2016 North Carolina map. The 2012 looks ridiculous, but the 2016 is not that crazy looking. Nonetheless, the partisan outcomes you could see in that distribution were equally extreme. So if shape doesn't just tell you, but we all wanna believe shape, ever since the beginning, it's part of our intuition about it. So to me, there's a really interesting scientific question, and I've initiated a project about this too, I don't know if it's gonna go anywhere either, but to try to understand what the real role of shape is in limiting gerrymandering. To what extent does it limit gerrymandering? Oh, and this, I should credit MGGG because they have some really great ideas about this. So Moon Duchin, the person who runs MGGG, she comes from a background that deals with graph theory, if you know anything about graph theory. And her idea is to re-envision the geometric structure of the state so that it sees more of the political structure of the state and it's not just a map. So these individual points are like voting precincts and then there are some kind of voter unit and then they're linked by a line if they're next to each other. And maybe we can put some kind of weights or numbers on these links that represent something like how economically tied in these two areas are or how demographically similar they are or other kinds of politically relevant information so that the state's geometric structure sees what's going on politically and not just the map. Maybe if we do that, then we'll be able to see gerrymanders in this shape that we can't see in this shape. So that's the whole thing, now you got the whole talk. A hand for Ben.