Ben Wikler

speaker

485 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 23 Jul

Ben Wikler’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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On with Kara Swisher · Ben Wikler Has a Plan to Save Democracy · 23 Jul 2026 podcast

And that to me is the goal is, you know, parties can get things wrong.

Presidents can get things wrong of both parties.

You want the public to have the ultimate say.

You want to have a system that's not rigged for one side or the other.

And that allows you to have the flexibility to adapt to a world that is being transformed by AI and by so much else.

As long as the public can write the rules and as long as when people are hurt, they have some recourse to do something about it, I think that we can get through just about anything that the world throws at us.

But in a world where all the power and the decisions are made by a tiny group of people who are interested in serving themselves, then things can go terribly for millions of people.

Yeah, this is my issue with the tech people.

Mark Jessen is this Nobel Prize winning economist, and he did this deep study that found that there's never been a famine in a democracy.

And the reason for that is that having a democracy means that if people are starving to death, it becomes a political problem for the people in charge.

You have famines in colonies, in places where...

someone is in charge who's not accountable to the public.

And I feel like we sort of have a political famine right now because we don't have enough democracy.

There's so many ways the government is not responding to basic needs that people have for childcare, for housing, to be able to afford the food they need, all this kind of stuff.

This only happens because you have a government that is not ultimately accountable to the needs of the public.

And it could get worse or it can get better.

And this is the plan is my roadmap for how we make it better.

We should have the expectation that Trump will use every one of his powers to try to stop the democratic process from working.

We've seen him testing things like seizing ballots, trying to seize voting machines, prosecuting local election officials.

I mean, that election results were invalid.

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