00:19:32 · Jeff Guo, Bob Bailey, Erika Beras, Stacy MacGyver, Jasmine Dawson
[00:19:32] S3: But he did say there was a lot of debate. [00:19:35] S6: Occasionally, someone will get up and propose something, and there will be some good natured, you know, snickering, at individual tables. Like, can you imagine if we did this or that? Or someone gets up and they've got a little bit of a strong rebuttal, and a lot of us will kind of chuckle and like, oh, Charlie's feeling himself today. [00:20:01] S3: Stacy, the occupational therapist who loves to talk to people, found that all of this conversation and debate about big topics led her to connect with all kinds of people. [00:20:11] S2: Have you made friends? Yes. Do you text each other? [00:20:16] S10: Are you gonna tell on me? No. It's almost like... Seems like a secret society, even though it's not what it is. We do text each other. Yes. [00:20:25] S2: It wasn't just Stacy. People in general started talking more in small groups, and not just about tax policy. [00:20:31] S6: A tradition has been ice cream at Ben and Jerry's. After one of the sessions, they are offered free ice cream, and so that's been a bit of a tradition as well. [00:20:40] S5: Well, I would say one of my people is, miss Arlene. She's an older woman. We bonded over our Caribbean backgrounds, and we always have lunch together.
00:20:40 · Jasmine Dawson, Jeff Guo, Helene Landimore, Erika Beras
[00:20:40] S5: Well, I would say one of my people is, miss Arlene. She's an older woman. We bonded over our Caribbean backgrounds, and we always have lunch together. [00:20:50] S3: Alen Landomore, the political scientist who studied ancient Greece, she's been in the room at these citizens' assemblies. And she says this is kind of exactly the natural arc that they tend to follow. People meet, and at first, they are wary of each other. They bicker. But pretty soon, they start helping each other, building on each other's ideas. And by the end of it, something magical happens. [00:21:13] S4: People who normally would hate each other across their screens, across party lines, across age differences, race differences, etcetera. When they are brought together in that way and are given proper conditions, enough time, etcetera, end up actually striking very deep friendships, gets the the the love dimension of politics. [00:21:38] S2: There's this idea from Aristotle that friendship and civic love are at the heart of politics. These days, it might feel like there's more partisanship, but Alain thinks these citizen assemblies are a way to bring love back into politics. [00:21:53] S3: After the break, Connecticut's citizens assembly reveals the plan that they came up with to solve the state's property tax conundrum, but not before these new friendships get put to the test.
00:21:53 · Jeff Guo, S0, S12
[00:21:53] S3: After the break, Connecticut's citizens assembly reveals the plan that they came up with to solve the state's property tax conundrum, but not before these new friendships get put to the test. [00:22:08] S0: Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from BUILT. Rent and mortgages keep getting more expensive. That's why BUILT created three credit cards designed to offer rich rewards on everything you spend on. You can earn up to 1.25 X points on every housing payment with no transaction fee, which can be redeemed for flights, hotels, a future housing payment, and more. Apply at joinbilt.com/money. Terms apply, subject to approval and eligibility. Billed cards are issued by column NA, member FDIC, pursuant to license from MasterCard International Incorporated. Support comes from our twenty twenty six lead sponsor of Planet Money, Amazon Business. Free your team from time consuming procurement tasks. Discover smart business buying where unmatched selection meets AI driven tools to simplify complex processes. Learn more at amazonbusiness.com. [00:23:05] S12: This message comes from Doppel. Doppel is the agentic social engineering defense platform fighting back against impersonation and manipulation. As attackers use AI to make their tactics more sophisticated, Doppel uses it to fight back, automatically dismantling cross channel attacks, building team resilience, and providing agentic email protection. Doppel, dedicated to outpacing what's next in social engineering. Learn more at doppel.com. That's doppel.com.
00:23:05 · S12, Erika Beras, Jasmine Dawson, Jeff Guo, Bob Bailey, Stacy MacGyver
[00:23:05] S12: This message comes from Doppel. Doppel is the agentic social engineering defense platform fighting back against impersonation and manipulation. As attackers use AI to make their tactics more sophisticated, Doppel uses it to fight back, automatically dismantling cross channel attacks, building team resilience, and providing agentic email protection. Doppel, dedicated to outpacing what's next in social engineering. Learn more at doppel.com. That's doppel.com. [00:23:35] S2: Now we talked to the assembly members before their final meeting, the one where they present their proposal, and still none of them wanted to talk about what their final recommendations were. But Jasmine says she was feeling good about their proposals. [00:23:51] S5: I'm feeling hopeful about tomorrow. We have the ideas. [00:23:56] S3: Bob said they'd voted to include about 10 of them. [00:23:58] S2: Are we talking like a phone book, or is this like a pamphlet? [00:24:02] S6: We're trying to keep them all down to about one to one and a half pages each. So this is something that's digestible. It's not the Magna Carta that we're writing here. You know? [00:24:13] S3: Stacy told us these 10 ideas, most of them are not revolutionary. [00:24:19] S10: So that is one thing, that has been very frustrating, for me, at least, but it's like, these are not new ideas. [00:24:27] S2: Yeah. [00:24:28] S10: Some of them are new ideas. Some of them are. [00:24:30] S2: Okay. I'm excited to know what these new ideas are. [00:24:32] S10: But generally, it's like, why why are we not doing this?
00:24:32 · Stacy MacGyver, Jeff Guo, Erika Beras
[00:24:32] S10: But generally, it's like, why why are we not doing this? [00:24:38] S3: Stacy said learning what politicians had or hadn't done before was pretty eye opening. Most of these ideas, the politicians had seen and heard before, yet they hadn't made any changes or reforms. [00:24:50] S2: Stacy was also frustrated because all the work she and the other citizens had done amounted to just a proposal. They had to present their proposal to Sean, the state comptroller, who would then present it to the state legislature, and they would then maybe make them into bills and then maybe vote them into laws. [00:25:10] S10: I left every session completely deflated and thinking there's no way we can fix this. There's no way. How are we ever gonna fix this? It doesn't matter what we say because even if they say they're gonna bring it to legislation, they bring it there and then it gets voted down. Or they do vote for it and then they change it and then put the money somewhere else. So what are we doing? Like, why do you even want us here? What is the point of us being here? [00:25:39] S3: Yeah. So far, most of the citizens' assemblies that have been tried around the world haven't been given that much power. They can't make the laws themselves. Their ideas usually still have to go through the regular political process, through the same politicians who struggled to take action and pass laws in the first place. And this worried Riley, the lifelong Connecticut resident. [00:26:01] S2: What would be the worst possible outcome of all of this?
00:26:01 · Erika Beras, Riley Jano, Jeff Guo, Helene Landimore
[00:26:01] S2: What would be the worst possible outcome of all of this? [00:26:06] S11: I mean, worst possible outcome is nothing. I'd be frustrated. I could imagine being a little insulted. [00:26:15] S3: A couple weeks ago, the citizens voted on the final proposal. We got our hands on an embargoed copy of it. There was gonna be this big press conference in front of the State Capitol Building. Sean, the state comptroller, would be flanked by some of the citizens as they finally revealed this proposal to the public. [00:26:33] S2: But the night before, I got a text from the state comptroller's office. The press conference was canceled. So I called up some of the citizens. It turned out two big dramatic things happened. The first had to do with the last meeting of the citizens' assembly. Some of the citizens were not happy with how the final proposal turned out. They were upset because some of the proposals had been changed without enough discussion, like the millionaire's tax. They had initially agreed on a 4% tax, but at the final vote, the proposal had been changed to 1%. [00:27:10] S3: Nevertheless, the citizens voted and decided to include the 10 proposals, including that 1% tax on millionaires. The second big dramatic thing had to do with the organizers themselves. [00:27:23] S4: One of the organizers had a concern about releasing those proposals in the middle of an electoral cycle, which had always been the plan.