Wel, rhaid i'r Llyfrgell Llyfrgell a'r Llyfrgell Pwyllgor Llyfrgell Llyfrgell. Mae'r rhagorau a'r gwrthodd, rwy'n gweithio'r gwaith, yng Nghymru, Donna Edwards ac Charles Bustani, yn ysgolwch ar gyfer cyflawni a'r cyflawni'r gwaith o'r bydau o'r cyflawni o'r Llyfrgell Pwyllgor Llyfrgell. Mae'r rhagorau a'rifeil Cymru fyrdd yna, ni i ddim o'r eithaf يndig i gyflawni'r mynd i'r ddiwethaf a'r cyflawni, gyda i'n defnyddio ammhlygon ac y pryd eich cyflawni a'r Rhagorau a'r Ymwysg. Dyna fyddi'r ymwysg a'r cyflawni i'r ddaf o'r bydau o'r bydau, ac rhi'r obfwni am fydd yn ei fod yn hyn syl y brifence. A'u gwirionedd, wrth gyd, i'n gerchwyn mewn gweithio'r bydd. Felly rydyn ni ddigonwydrwydd fod yn gweithio ddweud ar y dyma yn yr Oed. Ond yna'r amser hynny chi'n yn fwyannau ddim yn ddechrau'r ysgriffa. Dw i'n lawer o gwyfaint y cwestiynau ar fynd yn y Gymru. A'r yfnod olig wrth ei gwleidio'r ddwy дляr gweld, ac mae wefnod y cwestiynau. Dwi'n amser gallwch chi nid o gyfer swyddion give mewn cyngwyllt. Felly ddim wedi rhoi ei falw ymddirionedd a chyfyddechrau'r cymdeithasol yw. Rhyw hand yw pob iawn i'r newydd. ac yn meddwl, rydyn ni'n adnod o'r gwybod wedi ychydig i cion, mewn gwnaeth ar gyfer gyfer ymdeithas, dweud i'n fïrth pergynig, fel ydych yn eich gwybod? Prydych yn angen i'n adnod yma. Rydyn ni'n wneud i chi ydw i… Mae hyn yn fan hyn a ph sansyn am digwydd y preonon i'r bob yn ymddangos. Mae'n iawnio'n gael i fynd i'n gwneud i chi ar gwygon. Rydyn ni'n adnod, Edward, cyfan ar bob gyfodol gyda five-tyfr ar gael 2008-17, I described myself sometimes as an accidental congresswoman. I lived in my congressional district, which is right outside of Washington, D.C. in the state of Maryland, and I was very active in my community. And then finally just got really annoyed with my congressman and decided after asking a whole bunch of other people to run against him, and nobody's saying yes, because he had been in congress for I think at that time seven terms. And then I said, well, if nobody else is going to do it, I'll do it. And so I signed up, I wrote a check for $100, because that's what it costed my state to run for congress. And I didn't tell anybody about it all weekend long, including my family. But then I decided that in order to be a congresswoman, I would actually have to start telling people. And so I ran, the very first time I ran I actually lost that election. But because it was very close, I decided I would run again. And the second election I won by 23 percentage points, having lost by two points before. And I served on a number of committees, we'll be able to talk about that later on. But I will say that holding elective office and being in congress was one of the greatest privileges that I've had. And the ability to make a difference in people's lives in big ways and small ways. And so I'm excited to be here with you today. And you all can ask us anything at all. And I'd love to take your questions. Thank you very much, Cara. Well, my name is Charles Bustani. I represented a district in Louisiana famous for hurricanes. And I made a decision to run for congress at a time when I was very busy, married with two children, both in high school at the time. And I was a practicing cardiovascular surgeon. I did open heart surgery, lung cancer surgery. Had never really been in politics before, but I was interested in it and I followed it. And around the time that I made the decision, the news, this was in 2003, actually late 2003 before the 2004 election. I was very disturbed by our drift with the Iraq war and the problems that we were seeing in Iraq and the mistakes that were being made. Two young men who were in high school with my son had been killed in Iraq. And it really disturbed a lot of individuals, families in our community. And then being a doctor, I saw all the problems with the healthcare system. And I had a great deal of difficulty sleeping one night thinking about all this. It was sort of floating around in my head. And I got up very, very early in the morning and I went to the kitchen, got myself a cup of coffee. And as I started looking at the newspaper, I was getting angrier and angrier about what was going on and dissatisfied with the fact that I'm down here in Louisiana. All these things are going on and I want to do something about it. So right then and there I made a decision that I was going to run for congress. And my wife later came into the kitchen wanting to know why I was up so early. And I said, well, honey, we need to talk. And her face just went completely blank. She got very pale. I could see fear like what's coming.  He's leaving me. There's some bad news here.  And then we had a three day argument. And finally she said, I've known you since we started dating in college and you have a very hard head. And once you make up your mind, you won't back down. So go ahead, run for congress. I think this is a terrible mistake and when you get 15% of the vote and get totally humiliated, I don't want to ever hear about this again. Get it out of your system. So I was excited being the optimist that I am and then I realized I don't know what I'm doing. I've never run a campaign before and I realized, OK, well, I need to hire some people who know what they're doing, which means you've got to raise money. And so then I started working on that and ultimately put a very good campaign together, stumbling through it for the most part and ultimately beat three very well established politicians through the primary and the general election. Nobody thought I could win, but we worked very, very hard to gain the trust of constituents one after another and just outworked everybody. And I won 55-45 in that first election. I was the first Republican ever elected to represent that district, but I was able to bridge the trust gap by making personal contact with people and continue to do that and continue to win elections. The last one in my constituency, I won with 80 percent of the vote. Then I got greedy and ran for the U.S. Senate with an open seat and I ended up losing that race by a small margin, but politics had shifted in my state and the Republican Party went much harder to the right in the state, which I'm more of a centrist Republican and so ultimately lost that. Here I am, as a former member of Congress. As Donna said, all questions are on the table. Thank you both very much for those introductions. I thought I would just get us rolling. I was wondering what surprised you most when you first got to Congress? What do you think you misunderstood looking from the outside in? What was the most surprising thing? I would say I think a lot of members of Congress were really hard, but I was actually surprised at how many members really were not readers and students. That shocked me because I would take everything home and read it and study. We did the health care bill when I first came into Congress and I was one of those who took that couple of thousand pages home and I read every single page and I'm a lawyer by training. I went to law school and was licensed and I put tabs on the side and wrote notes and flipped through every single page of it and I thought everybody did that and it turned out that wasn't true. I would agree with that. I also surprised me because my background as a doctor had to study hard to become a doctor and then I felt a strong sense of obligation that if I'm going to vote on something I need to know what it is and I realized a lot of folks had a very shallow knowledge of what was actually being voted on. It was funny, I remember when I first started because I'd never been in politics so I was very fortunate to hire a very experienced chief of staff who helped me build the right kind of staff around me to be effective and he told me on the very first day he said, keep this in mind, Congress is like high school. It's like a big high school campus and there are clicks and people gravitate into these little clicks and you get this little herd mentality here and there and I thought a very, very accurate description of how Congress operates internally and so by kind of keeping that in mind it helped me to understand some of the politics that play out internally in the halls of Congress, who's talking to whom, why are they making decisions the way they do, why this little group is deciding they're going to vote against the leadership even though it's in the same party, those kinds of things but then it also forced me to realize that people come from very different backgrounds they represent different types of constituencies and it's important to understand that too to really get to know the people you're working with. Thank you, so do we have any first questions from the floor? So for those who are in here, my colleagues have our roving mics so don't be shy. Don't be shy, this is an opportunity to learn now. Okay, lady at the front. Given that you were not previously a politician do you think there's a specific thing that constituents like to hear from you to gain their trust? Yes, I think I mentioned earlier that I was the first Republican to ever win that office and all the local politicians told me, oh we like you, we know you're a respected doctor but wrong party but I kept working hard reaching out to people across, I had a rule basically, I'm not going to let anybody that I pass, I'm not going to ignore them, I'm going to walk up to them, I'm going to shake their hand, I'm going to ask them for their support and I'll tell them about me and so often times when we were on the road we would just stop in a small grocery or filling station and I would do that while my person with me was filling up the car or whatever I would go and talk to everybody. Half the time I ran into people who were not even constituents that were from different states but it was a great exercise and when you do that you start to really meet people and understand what motivates them and by doing that I was able to circumvent the political establishment and to gain such support that once I got through the first round and went into the second round I was actually able to convert many local democratic political office holders in my corner because I developed this trust. Being a doctor helped as well. Physicians have a certain level of trust, it was relatively unusual back then for physicians to run for political office and so that helped me as well. I would say, I'm not a physician, I'm a lawyer and there are a lot of lawyers in Congress but I had never been in politics before and I actually thought that was an advantage because I ran against an incumbent member of my own party which is just not done and so the party apparatus was completely opposed to me and I did what Charles did, I went around that and went out where people live in their neighborhoods, communities or grocery stores at the gas station. Any place that I could find people, shake their hands, introduce myself, ask them what's important to them. I also shared my story and my history because although I'm a lawyer and I obviously had an opportunity that a lot of people don't have, I started from very humble beginnings and at the time I had been raising my son who's now 30 but at the time he was in high school as a single mother raising this young man and I was able to share that with people and identify with them in their own lives and I think when you're in politics when you open up your own life and your life story people just see you as a regular person and it endears you to them and so when I won that second election it was because I really connected with people and then thereafter won my elections with almost 90% of the vote in my district but I think it's really about those personal connections. So you've obviously done quite a couple of terms over the years. How did you guys, how are you managing to not burn out and keep going in terms of just not stopping after one or two terms? What was keeping you going? For me it was the work. I mean for me it was the ability to get in and to get some things done. When I ran I think like Charles a huge part of my message was around the Iraq war and around the foolishness of going into Iraq and I actually ran against a gentleman who supported the Iraq war and it turns out that our constituencies our constituents really did not. I ran on an agenda of bringing healthcare to people I shared with them that there was a time when I didn't have health insurance you all don't sort of have that system here and I found myself in an emergency room without any health insurance and I ended up with thousands of dollars of healthcare bills that almost bankrupt me and I wanted to go in and fix that system and so it's doing those things that really kept me going and I went on a foolhardy adventure too I ran for the United States Senate in an open seat that's what we shared Charles and lost that election but continued to figure out ways like this to continue to serve the public When I was in medicine and would perform open heart operations and helping a poor person who was scared to death of what they were facing and their families were afraid and then to help them through that and see them come back to my office six weeks later feeling good feeling much better than they did and it inspired me that I was helping people and my time in politics and I served six terms, 12 years from 2005 to 2017 and the ability to help people on a bigger scale always gave me enthusiasm I woke up in the morning every day I was in Congress enthusiastic about the work I had to do and even when I was tired in the evenings ready to go back at it I was very inexperienced I was having to learn the ropes how Congress works how to be in politics other than just being somebody who related pretty well to people My area was hit by two major hurricanes Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita and I traveled around the district I was getting maybe two or three hours of sleep at night for weeks on end because so many people had lost their homes they had lost their businesses because there was a lot of poverty in my district and the fact that I was able to help so many of them made a difference I'll never forget we were driving in a very rural part of my district which had been hit very badly by hurricanes and I saw this man, he was elderly and he was carrying all this stuff across the front yard of a house and the yard was all mud where a nice beautiful lawn had probably been before and he was slogging through the mud and I made my staff person stop and I walked across the mud to help him carry this stuff to the front and we started talking and I said would you show me what happened to your house and he said this is my daughter's house I'm helping her because she had to go to work and the kids had to be sent to a different school outside of our area to continue their schooling he took me in there and this was an area that had been terribly flooded there was a large kitchen appliance that had been completely thrown across the room and wedged under a counter there was this much mud in the house and we walked through that house and it smelled awful, it was just a terrible scene and I'll never forget this walking in a living room and the only thing that was kind of normal was a picture of the family sitting on right above the fireplace it was splattered with mud but it was still there and it just struck me and I told the gentleman I said that is symbolic of who we are your family and in that picture it shows that they've withstood this and they will be back in this house and this house will be cleaned and that kind of stuff just motivated me to go hours on end with fatigue and until I would get home that's when I'd realise how tired I was because when I was helping people it didn't stop, you wanted to do that it gave you this strong sense of mission I'll just pick up on that obviously there's a balance between needing to do your job in Congress and needing to be at home in your constituency how did you balance that how did you make sure that both parts of that job you thought you were doing them effectively well I mean obviously you have your congressional staff on Capitol Hill and then each of us have a staff to handle day to day problems in the district I was very fortunate because my district was very close to Capitol Hill so I got to just live in my district at home all the time spent time going to schools to visit school children and places where seniors gathered and all across the district visiting with businesses and I did find that having a congressional district that was close to Washington DC meant that I almost never took off in fact I actually didn't have a vacation I didn't take a vacation I didn't realise this until after I got out of Congress for the entire time that I was serving I don't think that's a good way to balance things but I didn't really notice it to be quite honest with you and there are things that you see when you're on the ground in your district as Charles just described that remind you of why it is that you're serving Congress you're not serving to introduce some bill that somebody else introduced that's never going to get passed you're there to serve the people in the best way possible you know in their daily experiences and most people are concerned about just a couple of things where their children are being educated how they're earning a living what their healthcare is and they want you to make sure that their children's lives are better than theirs I mean that really is very fundamental and I'm sure that's true here in the UK as well and I think when you're a member of Congress and they focused on that then you don't pay attention to all the distractions My constituency was quite a bit of distance from Washington I had to take two airplane flights and I would fly from Washington to Atlanta sit in the airport for a few hours and then take another flight down to my hometown in Louisiana so if everything went well with the flights it was about a six hour you know a period of time six or seven hours at one time it took me 23 hours to get home the most important thing in fact when I was in the district with the constituents I was always even busier than Washington so I never had time like Donna I don't think I took much time off it was a seven day a week situation often times flying back and going straight to an event before you even go home that kind of thing but the most important thing in all of that because the schedule is so busy is to have a scheduler who understands the district sympathetic to your constituents needs and know that your constituents come first so the way we if I was in Washington the top priority obviously was to cast votes on the house floor or in committee but if I had constituents who had flown up even if I was in a committee meeting I would step out to say hello I might have staff address the major concern and spend more time with them but I always took the effort to step out and ask them how they were doing if I knew some family members or friends of theirs I would try to make a personal connection it's a very demanding schedule and it leaves no time for yourself because what little time you have you want to give to your family we would try to block out Sunday morning for instance or at least one meal on Sunday when I was back home to spend with family the rest of the time I was going to events and it's quite a busy schedule and in Washington for any 30 minute block of time you may have six different demands on your time and you always have somebody leading you leaving something earlier than you want to to go to something you have to go to and then before you finish that you're off again to something else it's a very hectic schedule and that was hard for me because as a surgeon it was always okay I'm going to see this patient I've got this operation then I've got my rounds to make on the hospital patients then another surgery it was a very linear schedule it was nothing like that in Congress Wonderful Any more questions from the audience? Having seen things from the inside what would you say is the biggest failing in the current American political system for example in the UK people often point out the shortcomings of the first past the post system what would you say needs fixing or changing in America or could be changed if anything? I think we probably share this but I think that the biggest problem I think that contributes both to inaction and to conflict is structural it's the fact that members of Congress especially if you're in a competitive district you have to spend between 35, 40, 50 hours a week on a telephone calling people to raise money to campaign and that begins almost from the moment that you're elected and so if you can imagine a work week if 40, 50 hours are spent what we describe as dialing for dollars calling donors to ask them to give you money doesn't leave a lot of waking hours to do other things to get to know your colleagues to do your homework to pay attention to constituents the way that you need and so I think that we have to change the money system and allow members of Congress to come in and really focus on being members I fully agree with that so I won't repeat what Donna said that is an absolute fundamental flaw in the way our system is set up now but it's made worse by the fact that current American law allows for these outside groups that could be single issue groups or maybe just a few core issues to put together an organization and raise unlimited amounts of money that they use to put pressure on members of Congress not to deviate from those issues and it's a very polarizing atmosphere they drive division they raise a lot more money than Donna or I can raise for our own campaigns because we have limitations put upon us on that so you're limited in your ability to counter it and if you couple that that type of scenario with that money and those influence groups that social media a 24-7 news cycle gives you no space there's no political space to build relationships and to work on some issues in a more substantive way right now everything has to be put into a tweet or even a bumper sticker type of slogan so the opportunity to do the substantive work to solve the problems that everyday families are dealing with around the kitchen table and healthcare and education even foreign policy issues that affect communities those things don't get addressed in a thorough manner in which they should be addressed because all the pressures are placed on you politically and there's just no political space to actually work on those things I would like to ask you about your personal experience with partisan polarization and how you deal with that when it comes to complications about voting on something within Congress I mean it's a real issue I think one of the structural problems that we haven't had a chance to talk about is when we do apportionment we count the number of people divide up the congressional districts and then those districts are drawn many of them are highly gerrymandered they're highly drawn so that there's a concentration of Democrats in one of the other districts and because of that there are very few districts where you find that happy middle so that you can have ground for compromise and so that's something that we have to work on and I would add to that I recall a circumstance where I was working on our science committee overseeing the national aeronautics and space administration funding that should not be a partisan issue funding space but it became a partisan issue and what I found is that when I stepped aside and made a phone call to the chairman and said let's sit down just the two of us and talk this through and we sat down with some coffee and on a napkin highlighted the things that we each wanted to see then we went back and wrote a bill and then we passed it unanimously and then it went to the floor and it passed unanimously that should have happened in the beginning but it did happen because the two of us had a relationship and we were able to step back away from the cameras and sit down and really do the work One time we were trying to get this bank called the Export-Import Bank reauthorized and set up to operate and what that bank did was it provided help for small businesses who were trying to export and it provided financing and some insurance and so forth it became a very hot button political issue because there were outside conservative groups that wanted to cut government cut government spending and get rid of programs so they targeted this program even though it wasn't really directly funded by the government it was a self sustaining entity and every country in the world uses it to a great advantage even Ronald Reagan father of modern conservatism with a Republican party used it extensively to help promote American business interests around the world well the chairman of the committee who is entrusted with the reauthorization of this bank wanted to get rid of it for political reasons he wouldn't even have a conversation a fellow Republican on why it's so important and I had 160 small businesses that depended on this in South Louisiana and they were going to be threatened by an inoperative bank like this and so I tried to have a conversation with them it was all for naught we knew that there were enough Republicans and Democrats combined that if we took it to the floor for a vote it would pass easily but the chairman was blocking it and the Republican leadership didn't want to do anything about it and so we knew there was a kind of a little used tool to bypass the congressional process and force a floor vote and if we could do that we could win so the key was we had to find enough Republicans and we were going to have the courage to go sign what's called a discharge petition to force the bill for a vote and that is never done by people in the majority going against their own party leadership so I decided among a few others that we were going to do that and our Democratic friends welcomed it and we went down publicly to the house floor and each one by one signed that book and we got to the necessary 218 votes which required about 30 or so of us on the Republican side to do this and we forced that vote and we won there were some arch-conservative fellow Republicans who came to me and called me a few names on the house floor called me a traitor and what angered me more than anything was the fact that they didn't even understand how the bank worked and I had done my homework and the sad thing is the arguments about this is how this works this is why it's necessary they weren't willing to even listen to those kinds of answers and that's a problem but it always took a level of courage to do those kinds of things and then they'd be able to take the heat sometimes you had to vote against what most of your constituents wanted because it was the right thing to do for the country and ultimately for your constituency but you took a lot of heat for that and those things requires a level of courage to do it Did those things ever really come back in primaries? Did you find yourself... Repeatedly Now go ahead I was just going to say I had them come back repeatedly on television ads but then as you start to accrue more and more of these it gets to be a problem that's ultimately one of the factors that contributed to my loss in the Senate race even though I think if I'd have run for reelection my congressional district out of one again but in the Senate race it was just too much to overcome Well I was just reminded that one of the tough votes that we took was following as the great recession was taking place and the entire world economy was caught up and we had to pass emergency legislation under the George Bush presidency to really save our economy and to this day Charles can probably go out and I do, some people actually still think I'm in Congress but to this day people will walk up to me and ask me about that tarp vote because they still remember it and that was one of those things where it was $700 billion and that's a lot of money and a lot of people didn't want to spend that money but it was absolutely necessary to do or the entire economy would have collapsed and I believe that, I believe those arguments but it is one of those votes that cost you politically I voted for that too and I think it was one of the most important votes I ever took and 80% of my constituents were vocally against it and I heard about it in every subsequent election but people like Donna and myself and others who were doing our homework and trying to understand what was really happening rather than just the politics of the day we took those hard votes and I'm convinced it helped our country from going into a depression Gentleman in the middle If both of you are entering politics today running for office for the first time today how do you imagine that might be different when you did first enter politics maybe running points or alignments? I'm not sure how much it would be substantial policy but I will say the environment has changed when I ran for Congress it was really at the beginning of the use of social media in campaigns and I would say now that in terms of spending resources to run a campaign far more emphasis would have to be placed on figuring out ways to reach potential voters through social media and you know voters now are so segregated into small groups groups that you can reach on Facebook in this way or Twitter in another way or Snapchat and Instagram and I think that makes it more complicated it also makes your message as a candidate more complex as well because it is tough to drill down a complicated policy issue into 280 words or something where people will read a paragraph on Facebook and it really does our politics I think a great disservice to try to drill everything down into such a narrow cast and so I think that that environment changes the way that one would think about running a political campaign today Right, Donna is absolutely correct with the proliferation of social media and all the different avenues to communicate it gives you an opportunity to directly communicate to your constituency but also because of all the other things going on other groups and other entities can do the same and reach the same constituency so it's created a much more anarchic campaign environment it used to be conventionally you would run your television ads you'd send your direct mail to reach out to constituents and do town hall meetings that kind of thing and as a candidate you could control the message coming from your campaign now because of all the money combined with all these forms of communication you no longer can truly control your campaign and so it becomes a race to see whether you can present the image in the platform that you want to project or somebody is going to define you from the outside that's the big challenge what has not changed is you're still trying to win the trust of your constituency it's just a much more complicated environment in which to do that and I would say on that trust element there's so much distrust of politics and politicians these days and I think it takes some special people to try to restore that and restore the value of public service there's a lot of energy that's spent at least in the United States by outside groups sort of banging on Congress and on government all the time and the net result of that is that people have lost the confidence in their public institutions to be able to solve big problems and so I think one of the challenges I think for your generation is to think about politics in a different kind of way to begin to restore that kind of trust in our institutions and the people who want to serve so if you want to run to become an MP here and look you're here because you're interested in politics you're eager to learn and you're probably here as well because you care you want to do something you believe that public service is something good even at my age and having done this I still think it's one of the most noble things a person can do so I hope you do it and you learn a lot about yourself when you do it be authentic care about people learn the issues and don't be afraid to express what you believe and I think you can build trust but your generation is going to have a big task ahead in rebuilding that trust as Donna has said because we have seen the trust level in our democracies completely eroded whether it's here in the UK the US and the US nobody respects expertise anymore for the most part they denigrate it everything has become reduced to slogans and name calling as opposed to let's talk about real substantive issues and problem solving so I'm glad you're here and I hope your generation can step up and do some good things to restore that trust in institutions I found it quite interesting how you mentioned one of the challenges within campaigns now is stopping people from labelling you from the outside and obviously labelling people are something that Trump's quite good at so considering that do you think anybody could run a successful campaign against Trump in 2020? Well I think on the Republican side it's going to be at least it will be very difficult for anybody to challenge him because he has kept the same level of support in the core Republican group that existed before whether they had when he started and so the conventional wisdom in Washington now and among many who watch this do not believe you will have a legitimate primary challenger now on the Democratic side of the aisle and Donna can speak more authoritatively on this than I can but there are a lot of people lining up to run against him and I think there is a possibility depending on a number of factors that a Democrat could beat him in the election but a number of things have to happen and this is going to be this is going to be a very unconventional campaign cycle and it's going to be quite interesting to watch but as a Republican I don't recognize the kind of party that Donald Trump has put together around and that's not my positions are more like the first President Bush George H.W. Bush who served in the 80s who took a more expansive view of a number of these issues behaved as a gentleman with civility respected both his rivals and his friends and conducted himself above board and I think we need more of that you know in politics we're going to disagree on issues but there's a way to do it in a way at civil it's polite it respects boundaries and that's what's deteriorated today and that's what Donald Trump is taking advantage of well I mean I certainly think that the President is beatable but you don't beat a person by being him and so I think it's going to be really important for whichever Democratic candidate emerges to display that authenticity and to be smart and to rely on facts and to reach out to the public I think the argument is there to be made and when I look at the range of candidates that are already in the field for one it's exciting for me because I think there are five women who are have either now announced or running for President of the United States I believe that that space for a woman nominee in our party that that ground work was laid and opened up because of Hillary Clinton and she took a lot of the arrows as a result but I think it opens up the field for those women but I see more talent on the Democratic side in terms of the numbers and the diversity of candidates and I have seen in a really long time people have served in the United States Senate people have had other life experience before they came to the office as they hold and I'm absolutely convinced that it's the kind of primary where at the end we will have emerged a really solid contender for President of the United States and it will be their job to unite the Democratic Party I mean there's every opportunity to divide it but it will be the job of that nominee to unite the party and I think part of that unification comes because we've engaged in a very spirited primary and that that process is going to lend itself to having somebody who's going to be able to go toe to toe without going down into the mud with the president in this upcoming election I know you've already touched on campaign finance but given the fact that legislation has failed before do you feel there is a way to present a bipartisan piece of legislation that will withstand what has already happened to the other ones So long before I came into Congress I think over 25 years ago I started working on issues of campaign finance reform for a non-profit a non-governmental organization and the very first debate I ever had on national television was against the current majority leader in the senate Mitch McConnell on campaign finance reform so it's been a long slog but I do think it is possible because I think the public has reached a point right now where they are absolutely sick of this system and on the Democratic side in the House when the Democrats took the majority in January their very first piece of legislation HR1 that passed in this session of Congress was about campaign finance and ethics reform and that's a first step but we need a compliant senate which we don't have yet and we need a president in the White House who's going to sign it and so we probably are still a ways away from doing it but it's not because it's not what the public wants I would agree that public attitudes now have shifted significantly and I think they are really tired of this and probably across party lines I think there are still Republicans who because they see an advantage in the current system that they are vested in wanting to protect the current situation status quo I think the senate majority leader Mitch McConnell is one of them and he's going to draw the line and he controls the agenda this potentially could become a campaign issue I think in 2020 I hope it does because I personally based on my level of experience with elections and what happens I think it's needed because the money has really infected the system and it's distorted it terribly and I think if you had an honest conversation even with many Republicans now who've been through tough elections and have had attack ads coming from entities where you don't even know where the money is coming from but it's seemingly unlimited I think they would in an honest conversation with you say we've got to do something the biggest issue that is somewhat of a hurdle is how do you deal with this given our first amendment situation but I guess you could argue the opposite side of it and say okay well you can't hide behind first amendment rights to protect all this money because at the same time you've got a lot of people who are being disenfranchised or being hurt by the fact that their voices aren't being heard in the system one of the most important things that could happen would be to have full disclosure of where the money is coming from that would be an interim step and I don't know why anybody would ever be against that to be honest with you but I think there are still people in my party who are against that and I don't understand it it's interesting because many years ago when I had this debate with Senator McConnell he said oh we'd love to just have disclosure why can't we just do disclosure and now here he is there was actually a bill that passed for full disclosure and he's opposed the bill now for full disclosure that's how you fast forward 25 years but to your point there have been several of the 2020 candidates on the democratic side who have come out and said I'm not going to accept political action, committee money and I'm not going to accept independent expenditures that are spent on my behalf I don't want that to happen and I think the more candidates who do that kind of thing then the more likely it is that we're going to end up with somebody in the White House who's willing to sign that kind of legislation Do you think that the USA would benefit from a multi-party system instead of the dominant two-party system that they have come up with? I don't and it's interesting because you know there's been this talk of Howard Schultz who owns Starbucks founder of Starbucks is going to run as an independent and in the United States it's never really been the case that somebody running as a third party has or an independent has actually kind of lasted very long I think that will be true again and really those kind of parties after Ross Perot ran an independent campaign back in the 90s and then he attempted to start a third party after that and it really just fizzled out and that's happened multiple times over the course of our history At the presidential level election wise third party candidates oftentimes become spoilers for one or the other candidate and the two dominant parties but there's an interesting development on going right now in the legislature, the congress because on the Republican side through the speakerships of John Boehner and then Paul Ryan we saw the emergence of a tea party faction which then transformed into the freedom caucus so you had about 40 very arch conservative, ultra conservatives who oftentimes blocked the Republican agenda while we had the majority in the house because things weren't good enough they wanted the unattainable they wanted something hard right when many others didn't go along with them and so it divided the Republican majority so that they didn't have a workable majority so that division is crept in to the Republican side and with the last election a lot of the more centrist Republicans in the house lost so there's more party purity now on the Republican side interestingly that same type of development now occurring on the Democratic side of the aisle where you have a very strong left progressive wing represented by Alexander Ocasio-Cortez and others and then you have a more traditional wing of the Democratic party and those differences now that they're in the majority are starting to emerge Speaker Pelosi has done a wonderful job I think in holding it together to win the speakership but now there are some divisions cropping up on procedural votes that just happened in the last week or so she's having a deal with that you may have more insights into that issue but we're seeing this balkanisation in both parties which effectively sort of acts like a multi-party system on the Republican side when we had the majority we often talked about how we don't have a unified Republican party we got two separate parties within a party I would say that on the Democratic side that group that is way to the left is probably significantly smaller than the party Freedom Caucus faction in the Republican party my experience in working with Speaker Pelosi and I was part of her leadership team when I was in the congress but my experience of working with her is that her style of management of the Democratic Caucus is very different from Paul Ryan or from John Boehner where she individually meets with each of these individuals groups and figures out sort of where the leverage points are within those members and so that's how she's been able to hold that together and I do think it poses a challenge but I also think that there are significant numbers of people who describe themselves as the progressive caucus but who also are very connected to the leadership which is again a little bit different from the Republican party but it is going to be a challenge but I don't see those things emerging as official parties even though within the two big parties they can't operate as competing factions I would agree with that I don't think it becomes institutionalized I think we will have a two party system for the foreseeable future and part of that is because we have a presidential system and it tends to break out in two parties and that sort of follows through downstream We're already very concerned that congressional authority has been so limited that it's created an imbalance in the branches of government that if we were to see parties emerge that would just be another way of empowering the executive to the detriment of the legislative branch in my opinion Commenting on what you were saying before about the styles in which politicians like to discuss their ideas in what ways do you think civilization in modern day politics has eroded That's a loaded question It's a lot to it too The biggest issue is civility It's driven such harsh rhetoric that people get entrenched and it becomes a zero sum game I think that's the problem In years past in the parties you had Republicans, Democrats and there was a considerable overlap between the two and the people serving in Congress who whether you had some liberal Republicans some conservative Democrats their views were very similar and it created the opportunity to work together and you didn't have the other things that drive division the money, the social media the special interest groups out there that were empowered by social media and money and grassroots opportunities kind of have conspired to create the partisanship the harsh rhetoric and the zero sum atmosphere and I think that's where things have deteriorated If we're going to salvage our our democratic institutions we're going to have to reverse that trend and it's not going to be easy but it starts with having a conversation about it and Donna and I who both served, we've been through those fights we did our best to counter some of the really more extreme sides of our parties our respective parties to find ways to work together you know, we've ended our official political careers now all we can do is speak out about this and encourage the next generation to take up the mantle so that when you do run for council position or parliament here in this country you'll keep that in mind and recognize that when you hold public office you have a higher obligation to not stoop to that kind of level and not make it zero sum all the time there are going to be differences there are going to be space for people to say okay we can agree on these sets of issues let's go fix these problems here's where we really disagree and let the ideas clash but in a way that's respectful it's missing and I would say there are some systemic reasons that members of congress no longer have quite the ability to communicate with each other to become friendly with each other and one of it is about structure so for example it used to be the case that most members of congress during the entire session lived in Washington they brought their families to Washington their families interacted with each other they socialized together in addition to legislating they developed relationships that actually allowed them then to work on issues now members come in for three and a half, four days they leave there are big breaks in between and when you're in Washington the only thing that you really have time to do is go to your committee sign let's go to Florida to vote and raise money and so it doesn't allow for that kind of personal interaction with one another anymore there used to be a lot more congressional travel where bipartisan groups would get together and they would travel to different countries on fact fighting missions but a lot of the non-governmental groups beat them up and said you're wasting taxpayer money why are you doing that well one of the purposes that Paul serves is so that members can understand the world together visiting the UK together visiting Afghanistan Iraq together they understand the world in a different kind of way when they do that together that contributes to good lawmaking it also helps people to build relationships with each other one of the ways that I got to know the former speaker Paul Ryan and his wife was on a congressional delegation travel to Saudi Arabia together and that shared experience meant that when we came back to Washington it didn't mean that I didn't agree I agreed with everything that he said or wanted to do but it meant that when I was engaged in a debate or a dispute it's really hard to beat upon somebody once you've known them you've met them or with them and you've met their wife and children and so I think that to the extent that we can begin to return to that kind of normal kind of activity that it would actually contribute to the ability to work in a civil way I have similar experiences through travel and when I first got on to the House Ways and Means Committee which is a very important committee in Congress that makes a lot of money decisions we were in the minority and there was someone who was in Democratic leadership who also sat on the committee he represented a Los Angeles district that was heavily Latino I represented a Louisiana district in the south more rural very different constituencies but I saw him as a very smart person and I contacted him one day and I said let's go have breakfast together and we did and you know it was an interesting conversation I respected him because I thought he was a really smart guy he respected me we said look we're going to disagree on a lot of things but if I understand your district and you understand mine better we'll know where each other is coming from so we agreed to meet regularly from time to time for breakfast and then we kind of expanded the group on our committee and we developed a little bit of a sense of collegiality that we sort of pledged to each other that when we have a heated debate in the committee we won't attack each other personally and we pretty much held to that one time it got right to the edge and he got really testy with me I got testy with him and we immediately caught it it was almost simultaneous we caught ourselves and backed off of it and so when that debate was over with it was sort of a race to see who could get to the other person quickest to shake hands and really apologize and we always sort of had that kind of working relationship but it requires you to put yourself out and to try to meet others one other anecdote along those lines one time we were walking back from votes and I was walking back with some Republican colleagues and somebody asked what do you think the Democrats are going to do on this particular issue and I had some insights into it because I had been talking to friends who are Democrats and so my colleagues said well how did you find that out and I said well I just asked and they said well who did you ask and I told them and they said they talked to you and I said yes we're friends and these were Republicans who never took time to go get to know somebody on the other side of the aisle but there are pressures out there that prevent that and I'll give you one last example without really belaboring this but one time we were having a very vigorous debate on the floor of the house I was leading our effort on the Republican side Democrat who was actually the chairman of the committee at the time I was leading the debate we were both scoring points in the debate and it was a good debate so as soon as it was over I walked over to the other side to where he was, to Shea Cans this was all televised and c-span and I had constituents who saw this who were very partisan and next thing you know the phones ringing constantly in the office email starts coming in social media just chastising me for speaking with the enemy and being friendly with the enemy and I'm thinking really? that's not the enemy it's a fellow member of Congress who I like and we just happen to have different views on some things but that's the kind of outside pressure that comes to bear I'm afraid to say we've run out of time but I think that was a really wonderful lesson for all of us in talking to each other and the value of listening and discussion which I hope you've all enjoyed today I'm just going to say a few last words to explain that this event has been part of our Congress to Campus UK program which is a program that brings former members of Congress to the UK to meet with general audiences and to talk about contemporary US politics and I'd really like to say a big thank you to all of our partners who've helped make this possible the US Association of Former Members of Congress of which both Charles and Donna are members in Washington help select the members to come to the UK but in particular our UK partner the Rothamere American Institute at the University of Oxford who've done the lion's share of the organizing for this week and also our supporters at the British Association for American Studies and in particular the US Embassy in London who've been really helpful in getting this session and this live stream off the ground so will you all join me in thanking our guests Donna and Charles thank you so much and thank you very much to all of you for your wonderful questions and to those who've been watching us online so thank you very much


speaking today. So what are we doing today? So first off, I hope to explain what I even mean by a Ramsey-Like theorem. I'm certainly going to talk about Ramsey's theorem, that is sort of the prototypical Ramsey-Like theorem, but we're going to talk about a few others as well. And then we're going to take a detour to the abstract and sort of talk about some properties that the collection of sets might have. A collection of sets might be a filter or an ideal or an ultra-filter, etc. I'll define all these things. Three is where the connection between two and one becomes apparent. We're going to start talking about partition properties in terms of positivity on filters and in particular in terms of these ultra-filter things, which I will define. And then lastly, where the proofs and stuff? What sort of stuff you might ask? Well, we're going to... So a lot of you have probably seen proofs of Ramsey's theorem, especially the Torx people or the logic people probably seen proofs of Ramsey's theorem, but we're going to provide an ultra-filter proof of Ramsey's theorem and ultra-filter proofs of a few other things. And I'll explain what that means. And of course, the RFID is we're going to actually build an ultra-filter that do what we want. Let's start with number one. What are some examples of Ramsey-like theorem? These are all going to have the flavor of I have some set with or without structure. I split it into some finite number of pieces. I want one of those pieces to still contain some structure. So let's start easy. So if I take the natural numbers, let's just say my natural numbers contain zero for today, all it matters that it's countably infinite. So say that I take the natural numbers and split them up into finitely many pieces, but then some PI is infinite. Equivalently, I could say that if I take a finite union of finite sets, then their union is finite. And when the problems are this easy, that's sort of obviously equivalent. We're going to see later that those are sort of really dual, dual notions of attacking or anti-like problems. So you need to talk about partition regularity, the sets that are positive, or you talk about a collection of small sets being finite. So the small sets in this example are finite sets. Slightly harder. Save it. So this notation means the collection of unordered pairs of natural numbers. I'm going to take this and break it up into finitely many pieces. Infinite. So this, well, I've just written down as the first non-trivial instance of Ramsey's theorem. You've probably seen it described if I take a graph, a complete graph on countably many vertices, and I color the edges of this graph into a finite number of colors, then some color class contains an infinite click. Well, this is really the same thing. So these PI's are just what color are we assigning each pair. And then this set A here would correspond to the set of vertices in our infinite click. What we're going to see is that there's also a notion of, so this problem was sort of phrased in terms of a notion of largeness containing an infinite click like this. But it also, if you dig a little bit, there's a notion of smallness working here, namely collections of pairs which do not contain an infinite click are going to be small in some sense, and we're going to elaborate on this. Then let me, I'm going to just skip that example, and then let me bring up one kind of wackier example. So this is easy but different. So the thing that I'm going to say about trees, the trees are going to have roots. They're going to be branching. They're going to just keep going forever. They're going to be height omega, that's called. And every node has, what these things are that's not a problem to describe this example in more detail. If I get there at the very end, I might not. That's okay. Picture kind of looks like this. Here's a root. Here are a finite list of successors. Each of these nodes has a finite, but at least two successors, and then so on and so forth. I just do this forever. So that's what the tree is for me. To describe a Ramsey-like theorem for trees, if and some PI contains a, I'm going to put this in quotes for now, a strong subtree, fine strong subtree at the very end if I get there. I just want to put this example on the board now to illustrate that Ramsey-like theorems don't necessarily have to be Ramsey's theorem. They can look quite different, but they all, this flavor set with structure, split it up into some pieces, hope that some piece still has some structure. For those of you who are curious, this theorem is an instance of what's called the Halpern-Bloy-Clee theorem, which is a kind of fun partition result in that theory. So these are the sorts of problems we're going to be addressing today. So with these examples floating in the back of your mind, I want to sort of disembark on some abstract stuff, which I hope isn't too tedious, but they're technical things that we will need going forward, put x beyond the set section of subsets. I want some non-triviality conditions. These are going to look like this.  So if I want to describe a notion of largeness that subsets of x might have, the whole thing had better be large. So I'm going to say that the whole thing isn't actually large. If I take nothing, the empty set, that had better be small. This should not be enough. If I take a as large and b as bigger, b should be large also. And this is maybe a bit less intuitive. It depends on sort of what your mental picture is, but three I like to think of as saying that this particular notion of largeness is really, really large. All the sets that we're calling large are really large, although I mean by that. So if I have two sets, which I'm calling large, they are so large that if I intersect them, not only is their intersection not empty, but it is also large. It's worth noting, put this in a box over here, a little side, stronger looking prime, where instead of intersecting two sets, I can say a0, a k minus 1 are large, then their intersection is large. The filter is an ocean of largeness. The sets in there are really, really large. In particular, if I am a set and my complement is large, then I have better be really, really small. So there is actually, we can describe what we mean by smallness. And it is just going to be the dual of this notion of largeness, the dual to being a filter and being an ideal. But once again, I said I'm not going to set. Normally, it's going to be a collection of sets of x. And we're just, it's literally dual. So we're just going to flip all the things that we secure. How do you do that? The whole thing is small. Sub-sets of small sets are small. If I have a collection of small sets, their union is still small. That's the dual. All right, just for two sets, so five a and b are small. And it turns out this duality between filters and ideals, it's more than just superficial. We had this intuition that if I take, if I have a filter and a set in the filter, its complement looks really, really small. And we're actually going to be able to form an ideal out of that. So just to make this duality really explicit, good things to keep in mind. So if Mark is a, trying to be all of those subsets of x whose complements are large, this is an ideal. And that's not too surprising. This, this act of complementation is going to switch all the things that need it to be switched over here to get from one to the other. And similarly, every ideal gives rise to a filter in the exact same way. Similarly, it's going to be the exact same definition really though. Those subsets of x whose complements are small, but then this forms a filter. Just some abstract nonsense, but there's dual notions of large and small. And let's look at some examples. And these examples are going to be suspiciously related to the partition problems I brought up earlier. So very first really basic digital principle I wrote down. So if I take a finite collection of finite subsets of n, their union is still finite. That's all that this is saying. Two, this is going to be the notion of smallness related to Ramsey's theorem. So the ideal i given by, so I'm going to set i subsets of n squared, which don't contain it infinitely. I can say that so there does not exist an infinite so that there's going to be a similar notion for that third partition problem that I brought up. So if t the tree, the collection of if I set i the ideal of subsets of the tree so that there does not exist, I mean I'll use the letter a for my subsets. There does not exist a strong sub tree. Of course for two and three to really be examples of ideals, you have to know that the partition theorems I was telling you about are true or you have to take that in face value. So until we know that we don't really know that two and three are ideals yet. One is sort of obvious. We're going to take one in face value. Suggests let me decide how I want to proceed. I'm defining ultra filters so I think I'm going to talk about positivity. So filters give us notions of largeness. Sets and filters are huge and then if you're in the dual ideal you're really small. So what does mean? So there's a nice in-between notion which is called positivity and that's with respect to filter or an ideal and things of definition. I'll phrase it with respect to a filter. We say the subset of x is f positive. Currently you can form that dual ideal to the filter. I'll write this out explicitly. Equivalently a is not a member of positive sets are just those things which don't have to be small.  My complement was declared to be big. I can't possibly be a largen any sense. Let me expand on this intuition.  So while positive sets aren't necessarily large, there are sets that could become large and I mean that in the following sense. a is a positive. I can take the filter and then I take all the sets of this form a and a second b for b in the filter if this is a filter. So this says that a is a positive, a might not be an f but there's some larger filter extending f which does contain a. So I can make a large by changing my notion of large. So we're about to get into the discussion of partition regularity and the key intuition is that collections of sets which are partition regular sort of behave like the collection of positive sets for some filter. So let me tell you how the collection of positive sets for a filter behaves. Let's give it some notation.  So here's a quick proposition. This looks eerily like those combinatorial problems we were thinking about at the very beginning. A set with some property we split it up. We want one of the pieces to have the property. So this is sort of the abstract notion that's going to unify all these problems, the notion of positivity with respect to a filter. And in this level of abstraction, this proposition is just obvious. Why? Because the proof is just considerably dual ideal. If none of the PIs were f positive, that's exactly saying that all of the PIs are in the ideal, a finite union of small things are still small. But I told you that a wasn't small because a was f positive. So that can't happen. Positive sets for filters have this nice property. So what is this nice property? Let's abstract that out of this. So we're going to sort of abstract this partition regularity property. And then we're going to see that it's not much of an abstraction at all. I might actually modify something in my notes. So definition would be a subset of a first x, I'm not 97. We say that R, we say change what I'm doing. So if I make some mistakes, it's because I'm changing things right now. So I was going to define what partition regular means. I'm actually going to define weakly partition regular, because that's going to be a little bit more transparent for the applications we have. Weekly partition, then some contains a subset in, so what I mean explicitly, i.e., some a subset of PI. So this is abstracting away exactly what we want. We have these combinatorial problems. So we're just investigating, well, what types of collections of sets solve or for what sorts of collections of sets is the problem we're worried about, true list of examples. Once again, all very suspiciously related to the examples from the beginning. So one. And a lot of these are in fact going to be stronger than just weakly partition regular. The difference is I replace to go from weakly to just full partition regular, I replace x here with any member of R.  So one subset of, the collection of infinite sets is partition regular. If I take the natural numbers, split it into finitely many pieces, some piece has to be infinite. This is the partition regular family corresponding to Randy's theorem. Subset of power set of bracket square given by to be the collection of infinite clicks. Likewise, we have a subset of, let me actually preface this, if t is the tree, a subset of power set of t be the collection of strong subtrees. So partition regularity really captures exactly what we're looking for in all these problems. For some, yes, this is so, what we need to do now is, so we arrived at this notion of partition regularity by thinking about positivity. So now we need to go back, we need to describe some filter for which this is the case. Is that always the case? Ah, yes, this is what we're gonna do right now. Maybe I'm, maybe the, wait, I feel like the singleton containing only the empty set is weak. Singleton containing only, because if you decompose the set then the empty set is a subset. Well, let me, you're absolutely right. Empty is never in a weekly partition regularity. Okay, and does that fix it? Yes. Okay. Dang logicians. That's exactly our goal now. We want, we want to get back to the land of filters. And here's where it turns out some filters are better to think about than others. This is where the ultra filter comes in. So we need a tiny bit more abstract nonsense and then we're gonna do some cool things. Filter, filter subset of power set of some set x. x is a non-empty set. Maximal just literally means under set inclusion. So I'm gonna say that a filter f is a, might be a subset of a filter g in every set in f. Every set that is f large is also g large. And why do maximal filters exist? This is our friend Zorn. So Zorn's lemma tells us that these maximal filters, so we can do our hands on them. You do need a little bit of, you can't exhibit an ultra filter. You need some amount of choice. Not all of it though. So anything on the other side does not really get anywhere. Characterization of ultra filters. I mean, because I'm not going to grab a filter and ask, is this an ultra filter? Let's look at all the collections larger than it and see if any of those are filters. That's a really silly way of trying to verify that something's an ultra filter. Luckily, there's an easy way. So equivalently, set as either a, let's say that I write the whole thing as a disjoint union of two pieces. One of the pieces. And so we have those conditions one, two, and three for being a filter. So think of this as, by the number four, ultra filter. And this is going to be equivalent to, I'm going to write down a superficially stronger four prime, which is also always going to be true. So whenever a is a member, so there's two strength to things. I'm not going to start with the whole thing x. I'm going to start with just any member of you. I'm also going to allow not just two pieces, but finitely many pieces a zero. Then some characterization of this ultraness is also really useful to keep in mind. Equivalently, this is a pretty easy consequence of four and four prime. Equivalently, u is ultra. In fact, this is a direct consequence of four as written there. If u equals u plus. So there's no notion of medium for ultra filters. Every set with respect to an ultra filter is either large or small. And that's exactly what four sets here. If a is not in u, then b had to be in u. So there's no, no getting away with b and you have to be large or small with ultra filters. And now I believe let me just check something. Here's a remark that's going to be really useful. So it's related to this zorn thing again. So using zorn's lemma. So we don't just have to grab ultra filters out of the blue. We can be a little bit clever when choosing our ultra filters. So in particular, any filter can be extended to a maximum ultra filter or to an ultra filter can be extended. And so then just some terminology. So if an ideal filter u extends the dual filter of i, I'll say that u avoids i. So this will be really useful. Given any notion of smallness, I can cook up a maximal notion of largeness, which doesn't disagree with that previous notion of smallness. You don't want, I want, I do not want, I want to avoid placing members of i in the ultra filter. And I think we're ready for the key here, collection of subsets. Let's get that annoying empty set of case out of the way. Then the following. Sorry, weekly partition regular, I changed that. Weekly partition regular. And two. There is a filter that is actually non-part of purview filter. It applies two. So if r is partition regular, sub r be the collection those sets. e2, sorry this is the annoyance with weekly versus honest partition regular. So this is the i r prime collection function. Oh, this is weak pr. We put that there weak. We can partition regularity. This collection i sub r is an idea. That was exactly did I need the definition of weekly pr on the board? I did not. Let's think it through. I take my set x, I break it up or let me phrase it this way. Say that i r was not an ideal. What would have to go wrong? That would mean that there's some finite list of members of i r prime whose union is the whole thing, x. So I've written x as a finite union of pieces, supposedly none of which contain a member of r. r is partition regular, weekly partition regular, which means exactly the opposite. Whenever I take x, break it into finally many pieces, some piece contains a member of r. So it would help if I kept the definition of weak pr on the board, but this is this is just definition unfolding. Say I'm supposed not. This means pieces, no pi containing a member of r. We have no hope at building an ultra filter as a number two because of four prime. Any ultra filter on x contains one of these pieces and any one of those pieces is a certificate that you does not behave like this. You contains a subset or contains a set, no subsets of which r and r and that's a problem. So this was the key idea. This really connects weak partition regularity and ultra filtered. What it means for us, I have, I think I have enough time to cover the Ramsey theory example. I don't think I'll get to the tree example, but I will try my best. I want to, so remember goals, we had one two three, which were technical stuff, and then four was gruesome stuff or the gruesome stuff. So we can prove Ramsey like theorem by exhibiting ultra filters with certain properties. And let me show you what I mean by this by proving Ramsey's theorem. And to do that I need, so we need to, we need methods of constructing ultra filters not directly, of course, because ultra filters are these kind of ethereal objects in choice, et cetera. But if I have my hands on one ultra filter, can I cook up a more interesting ultra filter? That's the theme of these constructions. So the first, the construction that's going to come into play in proving Ramsey's theorem is the tensor product of two ultra filters. So let X and Y be sets. U, I didn't define this, beta X is the set of all ultra filters on X.  And when am I going to declare that it is large? And I do so if I'm going to use this ultra filter quantifier notation, I'll write it down and explain with a picture.  So what on earth does this mean? This is some new notation. So here's the product. The product looks like square is X is Y. And let's zoom in on a particular X0 over here. X0 is a member of X. And I'm going to look at this fiber above X. And A, A is a subset of the product. And it kind of looks like this. Here's A. So A sub X0, X0 looks up and thinks that these members of Y are good for getting into A. X1 over here, another member of X looks up and thinks that these members of Y are good for getting into A. So now some X's might be very sad. This one's very sad if they didn't see any members of A. But some of them might have seen so many members of A that we might be able to write something like this. We might be able to say that those Y and Y for which X0, Y is in A, it might be large. It might be in V. And so if this happens, I'm going to say that X0 is good for A. And then it might, we might just be so lucky that there are so many X0s or so many little X's that are good for A that the collection of X's that are good for A is a large sense of the X. It's a member of U. And so that is, that's exactly what this tensor product is describing. It says for lots and lots of little X's, there are lots and lots of little Y's that give us N. The other bay of compactification of a discrete space is the space of ultrafilters. For other spaces, it's weird. Any other questions, especially about the construction, we're going to use it to prove Granite's theorem. So what we're going to do, so goal is construct an ultrafilter, the set of pairs of numbers, so that every, so every instead contains an infinite click. If I can do this, then by our theorem, we're done. We've proved Granite's theorem. And we're going to do this by, by looking at tensor products. So step one, on principle, I'll explain what on principle means in a bit, U in beta M. This is going to get us started. On principle means just in terms of that vocabulary of avoidance of ideals, it just means that you avoid the finite ideal. You contains no finite sets. So every, every large set is infinite. Step two, we're going to form a tensor product. Form U. You can, you can form the tensor product of two filters. That's, that's certainly something that's good to do. But what's nice about doing it with ultrafilters is exactly that we get an ultrafilter when we do it. Something might look a little fishy, because this is, this is really, this is not really on bracket N squared. This really, if we're being honest, it lives in beta N cross N, a superficially different object. The first thing we're going to do is let's convince ourselves that this really lives here. So lemma collection less than N is in U cross U. It's really easy. The proof is I'm just going to draw, I'm going to draw a rectangle. So here's, I need the diagonal. So how many, so M, this is exactly the top. The second question is all the stuff up here. I want to show that this is large, whether it's that T cross U. Well, we know that U is non-principled. So if I look at any point here, and I look at the line above it, how many, so this is some little M. How many M to get little M, little N into the set? Well, almost all of them. Whatever N is bigger than M, it's going to work. And we know that U is non-principled, so it doesn't contain this finite initial segment. So it has to have contained the rest of everything. So it turns out every point down here works, and ultra filters contain all N. So that's proof by picture. And so now we can make, this allows us to make an identification. I'm going to identify a pair of natural numbers with this ordered pair here. So just the pair MN with M less than N is going to play the role of the pair, the ordered pair M. We're ready to actually show that this works. And I'm going to do this kind of carefully because I definitely don't have time for the tree example, so I'm just going to do this example really carefully. So let's, so we need to show that every U tensor U large set contains infinite click. So let it be, we need to, the first thing we kind of have to do, all these, these proofs have a similar play, we need to unfold this definition that's a pretty bundled up definition. So I'm going to let B sub little U equal those, so that the collection, so drawing that, drawing that square again, little B sub U is all the points on the bottom whose fiber above that point hits B lots of times. And by definition of tensor product, so definition U tensor U, B sub U is a U, because that's just, that's just what it means for membership in U tensor U. And this B sub U, the engine is going to keep our construction. So I'm going to start, I'm going to pick n zero in right, so B sub n zero to be those n, so that n zero n is in, so what does it mean to be in B sub U? It means that this is in U, so this is in U. So this is in U, this is in U, what's their intersection? Their intersection is in U. So B sub n zero intersect B sub U, is it in U? This first of all, the first thing we should know, this is a pair, n zero and one, is in B. Why? Because n sub one is in B, n sub zero. And that means exactly this, n sub zero, at stage K, I'm going to be a little of the ideas clear at this point, at stage K, what do we need to do? We need to pick n sub K. Membership in B sub U is what allows us to keep going. It had better n zero, nK had better B in B, and one nK had better B in B, all the way up to n sub K minus one, n sub K minus one, nK had better B. Why is this possible? Well this is just a finite intersection of large sets, so we can do that. Finite intersections of large sets are still U large. And so then, then election n sub K, that's all I have time for today, so any questions? Joe? This is, this is quite amazing because it feels like you're proving infinite runcy with only a single pass through the vertices. Exactly, the ultrafilter tells you, the ultrafilter navigates for you. Right, so I have to ask, is there a known proof of finite runcy using some finite reequivalent of? Oh, um, I'm going to say no, we really needed the non-principality to do anything. So the moment we're talking about finite sets, ultrafilters on finite sets are really boring, they're all principle. So, so this really is some, some extra machinery that we're using. That is, that is what I was working on all winter break. Um, so I have, I have something for dimension two, I can't get higher. The one for dimension one is pretty fun, though. I'll make a quick aside, so Ramsey's theorem, Ramsey-Kruti's theorem for not just coloring the pairs, you can color the triples, you can color the k-tuples, what have you, what do you need to do to generalize this sort of machinery? You just form the, let's say for three, you form a three-fold tensor product of your favorite non-principal ultrafilter, same idea. For, for most x-coordinates, there are most y-coordinates, so that for most z-coordinates, you're large, that's an ultrafilter, that's exactly what you need.


Ik organiseer deze conference en we praten over het return van fascisme en alle kreepen die er weer en weer en weer komen. En we praten over science en we praten over de wereld van de arts, etc., etc., etc. want er is nog steeds deze vraag hoe het mogelijk is dat de hoogste cultuur, we hebben de wereld van Beethoven, Bach, Kant, Goethe, Neymet en uit deze. Je hebt wat je showed ons, hoe het mogelijk is en hoe het mogelijk is dat Europa kan committeren. Suicide en genocide op zo'n niveau. At the high time, with the best science, we already had planes, etc., etc., etc. In a way it's done. We live in the afterwards of this in a way of spiritual and moral and physical self-destruction. We are beyond. We are in the ruins of that. We are still art. We can pretend we are not, but we are. Why was it never not possible? It was one of Europe's worst conceits that its culture in some way elevated itself morally. And the connection between artistic cultivation on the one hand and moral behavior on the other is a very fraught connection. Just as the connection between character and art is a very, very fraught connection. Europe was always guilty of barbarism, always from the Middle Ages, through the early modern period, through the slave trade, through the genocide of the Albigensians, through the persecution and the extermination of the Jews, to the treatment of Muslims. I mean Europe has no, Europe's moral reputation, its cultural reputation is certainly deserved, but that is not at all the same as its moral reputation. In fact the tension that you draw attention to, I've always found it easier to make sense of it by just recognizing that this gloppy grey structure inside of our head called the human brain had evolved under pressures in the African savannah, not to find truth, the brain didn't evolve to find truth, it didn't evolve to find what's right, the brain evolved to survive, and survival and truth and morality are distinct considerations and in some sense it's remarkable where the brain has gotten us, like you say, Beethoven, Bach, Einstein, Schrodinger, the fact that we can create great works of art, that we can find great insights of science, that's utterly remarkable, but to have expected that very same brain to have a universal moral center that would always behave in a way that was best for the group of humanity, it's unrealistic and obviously an incorrect assumption. So it's not to me particularly surprising that the brain can do horrific things, unfortunately. You see, a western world is as Nietzsche, no, very well, is the land of sunset, our destiny is fading out, always, every day of our life. And it's true what Lionel was saying that western civilization always brought along with itself barbarian, not only with Nazi, always, always. But it's also true that western, I would say European civilization, if you allowed me, always doubt of itself, always criticize its foundation. And I may be wrong, but I think it's the only culture that does that, always. So culture and massacre, always together along our history, but also we've always been able to criticize ourselves, criticize our foundation, look for new foundation for our old values, personally, I don't agree with you on that. I think we are now desperately looking for secular foundation for transcendent values. We must be proud of that.


A list of the girls that I'm working on for threesomes with me and my girlfriend, TNL stuff, book flights to New York, design some chairs with Chubba, make sure that my tax gets done, contact the Austrian Prince that I'm friends with, buy some shorts because summer's coming, plus a whole bunch of stuff for Euro tour. Yeah, of course. I always just chill out.  No, the truth is that actually I'm the CEO of a very complicated business that runs across multiple time zones and consonants, managing a team in Singapore, one in Serbia, one in Austria, one in wherever it is that we happen to be. And so I'm always working on a shitload of things. I do try to balance that out with going and doing the kung fu and the sex and having nice sleep ins and reading books in the park and all that other great stuff. But I also work like a motherfucker.  My mother taught me the value and the curse of lists, which is that you always have them. This is my previous book of lists of shit that I've been doing and being an entrepreneur where you're responsible for the lively good of 11 people now. Plus some people have babies. Don't get money even the baby doesn't eat, so I feel responsible for them as well. The natural lifestyles runs live workshops on seduction lifestyle design, meditation and being a kick-ass human being. And we've experimented with a whole lot of different formats for that over the years. Originally, when we started many years ago, eight years ago, we were doing the standard weekend boot camp. And very quickly we changed that because we found that two days is not enough time to get decent change. It's enough time to get started and have some fun and have a catalyst, but it takes more time to get a permanent change. So we started doing more long-term workshops. Now we run a four-day mini-residential, a seven-day residential and an infamous 10-day Euro tour. So you guys will get some behind the scenes into all of those during this summer season of Daily Naturals. Right now we're in Budapest and Lee McCrae and the boys are running a four-day mini-residential, which is our highly compressed action-packed long weekend workshop. My focus and my goal for this workshop is going to be putting you guys outside your comfort zone.   Sometimes it's going to feel tense, you're going to hate me, you're going to want to punch me. Sometimes you're going to feel tired and like you can't do it. But that process is something that we've done with hundreds of guys and it's something that we've designed very specifically to help people overcome the mental barriers that they have and elevate to the next level of their consciousness. I'm really excited to put you guys in that flaming hot inferno of intensity and see what comes out on the other side. As well as infield, we hid microphones day and night. All right, it's day three and we just finished lunch and we went up to this girl and scared the shit out of her by saying hello when she was walking fast and in her own head and she freaked out jumped out of her skin like oh my god but because he understood the principle of pressure and release he released the pressure by saying don't worry I'm just here to say a compliment to you relax and she's like okay good you scared me he's like I think you look beautiful and she melted she was so happy that she said no one has ever come up to me on the street and talked to me like this before so what a beautiful thing from being able to go up to someone and not get the perfect reaction but still communicate your desire and then even when she's scared to help her calm down help her relax that guy looks like the arabic version of Jeff Goldblum so you're feeling that spontaneous energy coming out without like it's an honest reaction how amazing is it to think what if you lived like this every day of your life walking down the street and just shooting out this magic energy to everyone you talk to now the student of mine he just went on an incident with a girl that previously he was saying before he went up uh she's not really my type and guys fall into this fucking trap of believing that this is my type and this is my type so what I said is go find out he ran up he got to know her a little bit and now they're on an instant date that is what happens when you challenge the party yourself that goes no this is not my type because my type is based on previous experience of girls who are much much slimmer similar to each other but even in my own journey I know that there's many women I've spoken to and I thought initially that fuck before I went up to her I'm thinking to myself this girl is really not for me I can tell by the way she walks I can tell by the way that she carries herself her mannerisms I don't like it but I challenged myself in those moments to go you know what I don't just have one particular type of girl because I'm not one particular type of man the thing is at night is that there must be a phase of warming up and I was teaching these guys this because I can see them their body language is very very stiff they're very low and all I know that I needed to do was to just allow them to open up their body language and they just go in and start saying things to girls from the first thing that comes to their mind and this is the way that you can be able to get yourself out of your body and into this moment by getting the things out of you that's sticking you in the moment and a lot of times is should I go say this or should I go do this do it and then get the feedback do it and get the feedback and what will happen is that yourself will come to the surface with each thing that's coming out of you who you are lies behind all your under stress feelings and that's the manifestation of it so it's almost like there's two modes of operating that we we have inside ourselves one is like the mode of fitting in with the herd being part of the pack making sure that we fit into the social construct that's around us and in many ways that's a very powerful thing that's something that we live our lives by because we need to fit in and we need to make things work but at the same time there's another completely different part of ourselves which is our individuality our ability to express and be free and to live life on our own terms outside of the herd ideally we need to learn how to operate from both of these places to understand how to fit into the herd then also how to be our own person and how to operate meditation sessions with Shane Matthews as well as he takes all the guys one-on-one does these basically remodels their brains with his amazing intergame guru technology so we're going to do another intergame class this morning this is going to be a nice outdoor one lots of embodiment lots of meditation this is an opportunity for the guys to really get into the state of understanding the bigger picture of what we're doing during this course which is understanding things like liberation freedom honesty embodiment and really starting to pick up that path of masculine initiation because a lot of people think confidence is just like something they can go and get somehow it's like I'll get confidence from doing this thing I'll go buy confidence in a box and I'll unpack it doesn't work like that confidence arises inside yourself as you start to actually do the work that shows you how to believe in something that's bigger than yourself and for example I mean you're learning as you go out and you go through these processes of challenging yourself and getting different results and learning and getting momentum you're starting to build more and more faith in yourself starting to build more and more seeing that many times with guys they fuck themselves up because they believe that they should go out and then they should just have some magic button that makes them feel good straight away more that because they've done previous approaches in the past that somehow they shouldn't have to have resistance now but the reality is resistance yet again it's always going to come it's exactly the same it's like imagining I did I did 50 push-ups yesterday so I should be able to do push-ups today without any resistance it's like no but the resistance is part of existence you've got to deal with it so the more you come to terms with that and you just get used to it as a realistic expectation then you can actually fall in love with the journey because you just like well how about I just love the resistance as well rather than resist it plus styling plus plenty of role-playing classes that's one of the things about our workshops that really stands makes them stand out from others is that we have teams of girls in all of the cities that we're working who have worked with us trained with us and they help the guys in real time to practice touch intent conversation I used to think that there was going to be some moment like in the movies where there would be a green light where she'd go you can touch me here if you want I like your hands or like something that's really over or she's going to be like now you can kiss me after you bought me the candy or like something where she verbalizes that she wants you to touch her or that she's comfortable with what you're doing she's like feel how big my boobs are so I was always waiting for that moment and that moment never comes the woman's very rarely going to guide you in how to touch her and very rarely going to say that loud so waiting for that means you're just going to be waiting forever and then you're going to have that feeling at the end of the night the end of the day that sinking feeling of like fuck I should have done something but I don't know what it was I should have done and now I didn't make a move and now it's like okay see you next time fuck and this is an amazing opportunity for guys to get real feedback from girls and to be able to adjust and these bloody bells always ringing and they don't ring just like seven times for seven p.m. they ring about 42 times and then they do it every sort of 15 to 20 minutes I don't really know why I think it's just they're just trying to battle my evil right well it's not working yeah not listening like seriously it's still going yes all right it's that's 6 32 p.m. so what could possibly be about 6 32 p.m. that that Jesus really needs us to know about what a fucking crazy four days this is me and I feel like as much as us as coaches have tried to affect you guys you guys have taken that and then gone out and affected the wonder that you spoke to if you'd like to join myself and the TNO crew for one of our exclusive live workshops such as the one you've just seen a little locker about right now then you have very limited time and limited opportunities we only have 15 spots left for the four workshops that we're still running for 2016 our workshops have become incredibly popular and we only take very small groups maximum two students per coach to make sure that the guys that do sign up get incredible life changing results so check out all the details in the next slide and hopefully I'll see you guys on tour if not stay tuned for episode three the most common question that men ask me is actually not specifically about dating and seduction it goes something along the lines of this James how is it that you are able to stay so calm relaxed and centered even under high pressurized social situations now I guess a lot of men presume that that's just my nature I'm just a chilled out relaxed Aussie surfed kind of dude the reality being that I grew up being somebody that was highly stressed angry and cynical and I went through a long process of self-discovery to be able to bring myself to the calm centered position that I am in today how did I do that in one word it's through meditation I went on a long journey both internal and real around the world seeking out masters from ashrams in India Shaolin temple in China and seeking out a whole bunch of different modern and traditional teachers of awareness mindfulness and very specific and powerful meditation techniques for the last eight years I've been coaching men live in my programs around the world in these techniques because it's my opinion that if you want to get good with women socially you know and improve your confidence then it's vital that you look inwards not just projecting out into the world I take guys through heavy and deep inner transformation during my live programs where I teach in these techniques that I've distilled from all these masters around the world unfortunately I'm only able to teach around 50 to 80 guys live per year and so many men from around the world constantly contact me asking okay what's the best meditation technique I know that it's something that is going to be useful for me but I don't want to have to go and travel to the ends of the earth to find the right techniques I don't want to get conned by charlatans and I don't want to necessarily have to sit in a meditation retreat center for days on end to try and figure out what works for me so what I've done over the last year is I've distilled and boiled down all of the most powerful effective and quite simple to learn techniques that any man can take and utilize for say 20 to 30 minutes per day to have a vast and powerful effect on his internal state his confidence and his ability to be focused clean and clear in his interactions I call this the martial meditation method and I will be releasing this breakthrough product which is a six-week course on the 2nd of December 2016 if you'd like to stay up to date with the launch as well as receive behind the scenes bonus material then all you need to do is click the link below put your email in and I'll be contacting you immediately the first thing that I will send you is an exclusive powerful meditation technique which I originally learned from my master in Shaolin temple many years ago at the time I was learning this technique to develop powerful martial arts applications but over time I realized that it had a lot of applications for the man that was trying to develop himself socially and sexually in particular it allows you to focus your attention and your energy in a way that is clean and clear rather than getting lost up in your head or giving into anxieties and fears it means that you can get focused clear in your body and transmit the message that you want to to the women you're communicating with another very powerful benefit is that allows you to gain control over your sexual sexual arousal state it's a very common problem that men don't last as long as they would like to or as long as their partners would like them to embed this happens because you don't have control over your physiology your body gets too excited and nervous and therefore you lose it with this technique you will literally be able to last for as long as you would like to so if you'd like to receive this technique as well as a whole bunch of bonus material that's going to be coming out in the next month put your email in and I'll be contacting you very soon