Lewis Bollard: belief

Transcript context

…What would it actually take to… It's not clear what exactly you would do if you wanted to get this message in front of them. Abstractly, you can give money or whatever, but how does that actually transfer to political influence? My sense of what the industry does is that they get a whole bunch of their executives to max out on donations to politicians. The politicians then give them meetings. I wish this wasn't the way the system worked. I wish instead that politicians were actually just responsive to what the voters want. But given this is how the system works, I think that what people need to do is to bind together with a couple of other friends who care about this issue, max out on your donations to a politician, and then meet with the politician and say, "I really care about this and I'm watching what you do on this issue. " Frankly, you don't even need to just start donating. There are a lot of people listening to this who probably already donate significant amounts to politicians. If they started saying to those politicians, "By the way, this is something I really care about, and I'm watching what you do on this issue," I think you would start to see the political dynamic change. You wrote in one of your recent blog posts that the meat lobby spends on the order of $45 million in any given election cycle. They seem to be able to have influence on the topics they care about, which would be astounding and make all of us in tech jealous. There are probably people listening to this podcast who could spend on the order of that kind of money on politics. But the ability of tech to have an impact on the kinds of issues that they care about is quite minuscule compared to the meat industry. What's going on here? What's the political economy of meat here?…

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