Hello and welcome to Tech Talks, a podcast by the Technology Education Collaborative.
Tech is an Arizona nonprofit that empowers people with useful
information about the technology they use each and every day.
Today, I'm sitting here with Sam Stone.
He is a national political consultant and host of the show Breaking Battlegrounds.
Hello, Sam.
Hi, Christina.
Sam is one of my unlikeliest of friends, and we definitely nerd out together about politics.
So I brought him in here.
She ambushed me, folks.
She ambushed me on the job.
No, that is not what happened.
That is exactly what happened.
I'm chief of staff.
I was chief of staff for one of the Phoenix council members.
And this woman shows up to talk about a bus stop near her house with seven volumes of war and peace.
No, I had a PowerPoint and two pieces of documentation and three maps.
How big was the stack of books you brought with you?
Just be honest.
They were my notebooks.
And how big was the stack?
I cannot be held accountable for the complexities of municipal governance.
Well, nobody's held accountable for the complexity of municipal governance.
Well, speaking of the complexities of governance, that's actually why you're here today.
But we are going to talk about this from a more tech perspective.
So you and I, we have a, you know, a begrudging and unlikely, but very sincere friendship.
Indeed.
Yes.
And although we do not agree on a lot politically, we do at least agree on food, which is probably what has helped.
It helped.
I mean, the funny thing is, it's like a lot of stuff these days.
If you start getting down to the nuts and bolts, the disagreement is less about the what than the how.
Very much so.
But that's actually our challenge for today is to not quite go there.
Well, yes and no.
So here's the deal.
I am going to mention some pieces of tech legislation.
I am going to use those to frame questions.
You and I must resist the urge to debate the actual legislation.
And instead, we're just going to use that as like a framing mechanism.
And I'll ask you some things about just technology and policy and how it works its way through the governmental system and any thoughts or insights you have for that.
First of all, why don't you give our listeners some background and why you are qualified to have this conversation?
Well, am I qualified to have this conversation?
I'm still not sure if that's actually the case.
But as alluded to, I spent about five years as chief of staff to one of the Phoenix City Council members.
For folks who aren't familiar with Phoenix, Phoenix is the fifth largest city in the country, but it has a relatively small governing body.
You have eight council members and a mayor.
It is a weak mayor system or strong city manager, however you'd like to rephrase that.
Which means that each council office has a rather significant amount of responsibility as opposed to a strong mayor system when they tend to be more advisory.
So you do have a direct role in policy making and not only policy making, but in terms of the sausage that goes into the policy.
I think that's where a lot of activists kind of mistake things as they think that they're going to affect the end product and they don't take the time to go back to the start of the processing.
And jump in on that end, which is something you understood, but a lot didn't.
So anyway, did that for about five years.
I've worked national campaigns across the country for about two decades now and obviously have our own podcast where we talk about a lot of national political issues, international trade business and so forth.
Which resides obviously at the intersection of tech and governance.
Which is what we're going to talk about today.
So I thought it would be best if we went from a, first we're going to talk a little bit at the congressional level and then we're going to go down to like state county.
I can see the joy lighting your face.
Oh, yes.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
And then we're going to...
Technology in government is my favorite subject.
I know.
And so and then we're going to get, we're going to go into the municipal government and then I just have like a couple of other follow up questions for you because we only have an hour.
So are you ready?
You better get rolling if that's all you got.
You got a lot of ground to cover.
I know.
I do actually.
OK, so going back to the ye olden days of 2018 when Mark Zuckerberg testified before Congress in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica data breach, you had a lot of, there was a lot of justifiable conversations surrounding that testimony and those hearings around the fact that you had Congress people who just did not know how anything worked.
Like famously, there's the, you know, I think it was Senator Hatch, I believe, who asked like, you know, how does Facebook make money?
And Zuck says, you know, we sell ads, sir.
And then you had another senator that was asking about if I send an email on WhatsApp, which of course is a chat service, and then another senator asking about the categories of data points that were collected.
So there was, it just, it really showed a lot of the level of ignorance in terms of the machinations of tech, right?
There's a huge disconnect between the elected officials, the information technology departments in government and the actual tech world.
Right.
There's a disconnect between each of those elements.
Yeah, and we're definitely going to talk about that for sure.
I think that's a really good way to put that.
And then you also have legislation, though, but more to the point, you have other legislation, like, for example, the Earn It Act, which was a kind of revision of a section of the Telecommunications Act.
And on the surface level, it basically was there to, it was there to basically address, you know, child pornography on public platforms, but it also deincentivized privacy and it also deincentivized encryption.
I don't want to get into the nuts and bolts of that.
But what I'm trying to say here is, it seems like whenever there's tech policy before Congress, right, for the most part, it falls into two categories.
Either there is an ignorance of unintended consequences, which you don't even need to be a technologist really to understand, or the second half of it is, it seems as though it does become a, and this is true of any facet, to be fair, but it becomes a political discussion as opposed to a technical discussion.
And then the technical discussion is no longer feeding into the political decision.
So what that boils down to for my question for you, though, is, so how is this possible?
Because, yes, Congress people are dealing with thousands, hundreds of pieces of legislation every day.
They're very busy.
They're constantly running for reelection, blah, blah, blah.
Yes, that's fine.
But they also have a army of staffers.
They have plenty of hearings.
They have hearings all the time.
They have plenty of expert testimony.
It doesn't seem as though there's a lack of resources to get a base level of knowledge.
And furthermore, you know, they have staffers that run their social media pages.
They use smartphones.
So you're actually hitting on a root cause of the problem is that they have staffers who handle their cell phone.
They have staffers who handle their social media.
They have staffers who handle their email.
They have staffers who handle their IT.
They have an IT department backing them up that provides all the technology to their office, the security.
Everything that they do is run through that office and then through their staff.
So what you're talking about is essentially a massive layer of insulation between our elected officials and actually people who use technology.
They are not.
This is a problem I saw at every level in politics.
You have about five years after an elected official gets into office when they'll still be connected to the actual real world.
And then that connection will dissipate because they're so insulated.
And so what you see is within five years, they're incapable of utilizing even basic technology on their own.
I can't tell you how many times I had someone ask me things like, well, how do I send that email or how do I respond to that calendar invite?
Literally things like that.
So you're telling me that a congressman is pretty much the same as like a high level corporate CEO at most companies?
Oh, absolutely.
At least as insulated as a CEO.
And in most respects, I mean, if you're considering like a tech CEO, they still have to have some basis and inability to understand what the issues at hand.
That is not the case at all with governance.
And then you alluded to the various hearings that they're holding.
But you also alluded to the politicized nature of those interactions.
If the point of a hearing is to score points to have a 15 second soundbite to put out on, you have a staffer put out on social media for you, you're not going to get much information.
If the point is actually to have a deep conversation, those hearings are never going to give it to you.
Because now, over the many years that this has been happening, the bureaucrats have been trained not to say anything, right?
Ollie North changed the game when he walked up into Congress talking about the Iran-Contra affair and said over and over, I have no recollection of that.
I think to some degree, you even saw that more recently with the Secret Service chief.
We saw that was the most recent, you know, most egregious example.
But this is the nature of almost every, if you watch them, this is the nature of almost every single congressional and senatorial hearing now is a bureaucrat sitting there saying, I do not have that information.
I cannot give that answer.
I'll have to check and get back to you.
And an official trying to get a soundbite of their own that makes them look good.
So that's not a good forum for it.
The next problem is that their schedule, these are actors on stage for all intents and purposes at this point, right?
Yeah, very valid.
When it comes...
The perpetual election cycle is not useful for legislating.
No, I mean, it used to be that you campaigned six months, Congress talking about now, where you have an election every two years, you campaigned six months out of two years and that left you 18 months in each cycle to do actual politics, to do work, to do policy.
That's gone.
You have like six weeks after the election before you're campaigning again for the next cycle.
A lot of that comes down to the money because races are so TV based and so dependent on financials.
But at the end of the day, what that means is that I have a staffer who's going to take those briefings, right?
And then that staffer has to transmit that information to the elected official.
Here's the next problem.
That staffer is not a tech expert.
Right, absolutely.
Okay, that staffer graduated with a degree in political science or communications or law.
Their perspective is going to be taking whatever information they got from a briefing and tech, like many other facets of society, does not fall into tweetable, neat, tidy boxes and bits, but they need to have something to end their campaign speech on.
And so that's why you get some really silly takes, but it's also why you get some really sort of black and white takes by politicians on this.
Like, let's ban TikTok or not ban TikTok.
Right, exactly.
Let's have a much more nuanced conversation about the kind of data that social media apps are collecting on us and how algorithms are being used to affect human psychology on a mass level.
And hold the government accountable for its purchases from data brokers.
But that's another podcast.
No, but all that ties together, right?
So, I mean, at the end of the day, if you want to start addressing these issues, for one, you have to get some tech savvy staff in there.
That should be almost a mandate.
But that also means paying them better than they paid junior staffers, because this is the same problem we can get into with the IT departments.
But your government IT department is staffed by morons.
Well, I hate to, I'm not trying to be, yes, I am trying to be mean.
It's true.
Listen, it's not, it's not, it's not their fault.
It's, it's in a sense, not even the fault of the people hiring them.
It is the fault of government pay caps.
So we're going to talk a little bit about that, actually.
So hold that thought.
Okay.
But on that cheerful and optimistic note, let's move on to like the county and state level.
Okay.
Right? Because I think you and I have a tendency to agree that the closer you get to hyper local politics, the more the rubber's meeting the road, the more impact you have, the more useful it becomes.
And the less partisan it becomes.
There aren't many federal programs that are administered by the federal government.
Yeah, exactly.
Almost all of them are pushed down to the county or municipal level.
Exactly.
So, but on that note, so let's talk about here in Arizona, right?
So there was a massive amount of funding through the Infrastructure Act to get broadband to rural and underserved populations here in Arizona.
The, we'll talk about this more later, but the city of Phoenix got a huge FCC grant.
It's getting affordable and accessible high speed internet to underserved populations.
So that's, those are all like very good things, right?
Well, they could be.
Yeah, I was going to get that.
But on the state level, we also have, there's been, so okay, starting in January 2025, you can now use cryptocurrency to pay any state agency, including your taxes.
And then there's been several attempts over the last few years.
There's this continual push for cryptocurrency to include it in the state retirement fund, to use it as legal tender, to not tax airdrops, right?
Arizona is one of the few states that is opposed to kind of the sort of opposed, sort of not, that gets complicated, but is not in alignment fully with the federal regulations there.
But we do not tax airdrops here in Arizona, right?
Which brings up a lot of interesting questions about crypto mining and also the incredibly detrimental and negative impacts of cryptocurrency.
And it just makes me wonder, like, have state legislators not heard about El Salvador?
I'm just confused.
Well, I mean, so there's a very different, El Salvador, it's, so that's not a great comparison within the United States or any government with a large and effective central banking system that has stability.
Sure.
So you have to separate that out a little bit.
I'll give you that, but only a little bit.
No, I think actually, that's an important separation.
I think there is a place for crypto, and I think it has very significant potential value.
In particular, it has value as a counterbalance to currency corrections.
So...
I am going to manifest physical restraint and not respond to that because we said we weren't going to get into the actual policy.
The question that I have that's related to this, right, is, and I actually know because I've participated in some of this process, I know the co-founder of this organization has testified before the state legislator on certain proposed legislation.
And this kind of goes back to the expert testimony question.
So my question is, is if you have access to more local resources, then let's say, I mean, if you're legislating for an entire state, if you're a congressman, that can get complicated.
Or if you're trying to put together national policy, right, there's a level of complexity there.
And it just feels like once you're one step removed from that, if you're legislating for an entire state, not to diminish the complexity of that, but at the same time, you do have access to resources, to businesses, you have access to expertise, you have access to workers, you have access to constituents on a level that are impacted by this proposed legislation to a degree you don't necessarily as a national congressman.
So why isn't that more helpful?
Like, why are hearings still not effective at the state level?
Why do we still have state legislators that, you know, they'll go on a tour of Intel, they'll tour Intel all day long, they'll meet with Taiwan Semiconductor, they're doing the thing, it just feels like they should be in a better position, and yet they clearly are not.
So that's actually not on the legislators and not on your local elected officials, that is on your local tech community.
Because pure and simple, that means you're not engaging as a tech community, it means you're not going to the hearings that you need to be going to, you're not attending and pushing them, you're not prepping those officials beforehand by going and setting appointments and speaking with them and making sure that they understand it before they go into that hearing.
And again, most of it comes down to you have access for any company, any company, say here in Arizona, that wants to go meet with one of our elected officials at the state level, if you call them up and say, hi, I'm the CEO or CTO of this company, I need to meet with you and discuss this bill with you, or this potential legislation, whatever it is, they will take that meeting.
So I have to agree but disagree because like I myself have been involved, I do agree with you, I think there are two kinds of, I think Arizona specifically has three different tech communities, I really do. And I feel like the tech communities that are the people who are actually building and implementing the technology that definitely impacts people's lives every day.
And I'm not saying it needs to be necessarily regulated, but it's absolutely something that legislators should have an understanding of or the finger on the pulse on, I will totally agree that that specific sector of the tech community, in my experience, at least is completely disengaged, they have no idea. And then the argument there is that's because they're building things that make the world go, which is not totally untrue. But one has to wonder if there is no responsibility there.
Well, no, there is. So I would say that you cannot excuse their lack of engagement.
No, and I don't disagree with you. I really don't.
It's something for instance, Henry Ford wrote about, is that when he was changed, what Henry Ford did, changed the entire world.
Sure.
Right.
Yeah.
He started that process without involving government, but then he realized that he had to start engaging government because of the impacts of what he was doing on the broader society.
Right.
So when you're doing the kinds of things that are happening in the tech world, and you are having a massive impact on a broader society, understand that it's not your politics.
Politics always lags culture, and it always lags society, partially because of just the age, right?
Yeah.
Partially because when someone gets into politics, by the time they're moving up to a high level, they've been doing that for 10 or 20 or 30 years, that's their world.
So you have to step into their world.
Right.
You really do.
And you can say that they have an obligation, and I agree that they have an obligation to be curious enough to ask those questions and bring people in and start having those.
But I will tell you also that the reality of it is that that person lives by a schedule on their Google calendar that someone else programs for them and handles.
And they get up, and they go to their appointments, and they do exactly what's on that schedule each day.
And at the end of that day, they're not looking to add a bunch of stuff to that and take on more work, which is what you're talking about.
They'll do it, but you have to ask.
So here's the other question I have for you, because I think this is kind of like something we're not mentioning that you sort of have to.
I agree with you about the lack of participation.
I think that a lot of the builders, the developers, the people who are creating technology are completely missing from political discussions at almost every level.
And that being said, on the other hand, like I said, I have testified, you know, I have colleagues at this level that have testified, like I'm not saying there's zero participation.
It's not just testifying, though.
You understand you have to start early.
Yeah.
I tell people all the time, like this comes up every year when the City of Phoenix, for instance, does its budget process, right?
And they go around and hold a bunch of community meetings.
Yes, 13.
13 community meetings.
Too virtual, but only by request.
Right.
Here's the thing about this.
There are no decisions that are left to be made by the time those hearings are held.
Absolutely.
You are absolutely correct on that.
They're taking a $1.3, $1.4 billion budget, and there's $10 million that they haven't allocated by the time you get to those meetings.
Yeah.
So what are those meetings?
They're show ponies.
But they're show ponies because of, going back to tech, though, you have the Arizona Technology Council, right?
You have commercial-based technology companies, and this is actually in agreeance with you.
I'm actually agreeing with you here.
It feels like the only people that have legislators' ears are basically going to be commercial interests.
It's going to be commercial interest in tech, right?
It doesn't have to be.
Again, the reason a commercial interest does is because they hire a lobbyist who tells them, we're going to set these meetings, and I need you to come meet with this person.
So if I'm like a developer, and I really do think that Phoenix neighborhoods could benefit from what's called a Li-Fi network, which is kind of like a super-resilient meshnet.
It's internet for a neighborhood within one square mile that is super-resilient to national disasters and very private and secure, is what that is, just for any non-technical audience members, okay?
They're very cheap.
They're very easy to install.
You just need a couple of volunteer neighbors to say they'll put a note on their house.
It's a little bit like a mesh network.
It's not quite a mesh network.
It's called a Li-Fi network.
And let's say I'm like, well, there's a lot of pockets in Phoenix where the broadband internet or the high-speed internet isn't great, and you could actually benefit from that.
You could even just have an apartment complex that has a Li-Fi network, and it would be low-cost to everyone.
You'd have direct impact on people that would benefit from this.
It would be great.
So if I'm someone who goes and meets with their legislator, and this isn't really hypothetical because I have, and I talk about, hey, I'm not getting any answer at all from the city.
And this is something that could be incredibly beneficial.
It increases the national security because it increases the city's resilience in the event of an attack or national disaster.
There's all these advantages.
It doesn't cost a lot of money.
What is the deal, seriously, right?
The answer to that is going to be, you know, Cox and telecoms don't want you doing that.
But that's the key point because here's the thing.
So here again, I'm just going to use the examples from here in Phoenix when we have essentially Cox, Comcast, and CenturyLink, right?
And then there's a few other providers, but those are the big three.
Okay.
Those three have all had meetings with one of their executives and their lobbyist with every legislator and local elected official in the state of Arizona.
And they've done it multiple times.
Yeah.
So you have a friendship built up with them.
I can tell you right now, one of the first things on my to do list this morning was congratulating somebody who has been working at Southwest Gas and now got a job at APS.
That's how close I am having worked in politics with their lobbyists.
And it's not because I caved to their agenda or I was trying to do it, it's because I had lunch with the guy 20 times, right?
So at the end of the day, you can't just say, hey, I have a better idea and I'm going to tell people about it and then it's going to happen.
You have to build the relationships the same way that the legacy corporations have done.
So, okay.
So that's actually a good segue that goes into the city of Phoenix, right?
Because on one hand, the city of Phoenix, I will say has had some pretty good technology initiatives that it's implemented.
Like there is, you know, they finally got Wi-Fi into like some of the public spaces, like public, you know, library parking lots, things like that.
There's a network, you know, for the Heritage Square.
Again, they are administering the FCC grant.
I think they've done a really good job working with some of the bigger companies to make sure that they're participating in that program.
So I want to be clear, like I will give, you know, credit where it's due all day long.
I think you know that.
But I'm also going to point out that there was a 35 million dollar multi-year technology contract to basically administer essentially auxiliary IT services to the city that had no competition, which is ridiculous.
Because as you said, this is the fifth largest city in the country.
Phoenix is, I think, you know, now Congressman Stanton, but back then, Mayor Stanton's work trying to turn Phoenix into kind of like Silicon Valley light.
I think he actually was very successful in a lot of that.
Some of it's filtered into Tempe, but I think for the most part, that foundation is here.
I would say, I would actually say Ed Pastor, Stanton and Doug Ducey were the three.
I would agree with that. That's fair.
Kind of in that order and how they came along.
Yeah.
But yeah, those three were the ones that moved it forward.
Yeah.
Yeah. And I think I will, I mean, you know, again, I will give credit where it's due partisan regardless, like party regardless.
Look, I would never vote for Greg Stanton.
I live in his congressional district and I'm never going to vote for him, but I'll give him credit for the things he did.
I'm a Stanton fangirl.
I'm not going to lie.
And I think we probably disagree about Ducey, but that's okay.
Probably not.
But anyways, but my point here is that, but what I'm trying to say here is just basically, okay.
So on one hand, yes, you have some initiatives that are being well done.
They're being pretty well administered.
You have things like that, but then you have these other things where, you know, Valley Metro only just now, you know, got into a digital fare ride system and kudos to it.
And this is not throwing shade here.
I mean, I'm glad that it does, you know, but why did it take this long for Phoenix to have the ability to scan your phone to pay your bus fare?
Why was there only one company trying to get this pretty good contract for the fifth largest city in the country?
Because all of these cities and counties and states use one of two methods for contracting, essentially RFP or RFQ.
Request for proposal or a qualifications list.
Request for qualified vendor services.
Here's the issue.
I never once saw a RFP, which is the dominant form.
I never once saw one of those at the city of Phoenix that valued cost at more than 10%.
I never saw one that devalued product at more than 20.
I never saw one that valued experience at less than 30.
And what experience is, is have you had city contracts before or county contracts or state contracts?
So if you have a younger, more innovative company that has some fresh blood and some good innovation.
They have zero chance on almost any RFP.
Right. Even if they can deliver something with lower cost because they're maybe using open source software or whatever or more secure product.
It's going to be a superior choice, period.
But the scoring of their proposal will be significantly lower than the legacy vendor.
So this brings me to another question.
And I know we keep kind of circling back to this, but another thing Phoenix, I think, is doing a I would give it like a B minus grade on is implementing certain actual smart city technology.
Now, disclaimer, I want to say that by smart city, I mean any technology that deals with the collection, aggregation and real time analysis of a macro level of data that involves a government entity administering it.
So this is getting into like the automated water sensors for like water treatment, for example.
So now they can find someone who's legally dumping something in a drain almost immediately.
That's fantastic.
You know, you have garbage trucks that can basically have their routes optimized in real time to pick up only full trash cans, which saves you on gas.
That can save a city millions.
Like again, huzzah.
Like Phoenix is doing some pretty good stuff here.
They're doing a pretty good job implementing smart technology.
They should probably be a little less loosey goosey in defining smart technology because some of their definitions of smart technology are just technology.
Like it has nothing to do with being a smart city.
No, but that's another discussion.
But what I'm saying here, though, is but at the same time, there's again, there's this lack of questioning about, you know, just basic things.
And I don't think you need to be a technologist to understand these discussions are happening.
Like, where is this data going?
How long is this data being stored?
Who owns it?
What if the city needs it?
Is it subject to federal like, you know, prism searches?
Is it, you know, is it being sold to data brokers?
Have that conversation, though, with an average American, you're dealing with a blank wall.
I mean, I don't mean to be but if you're listening to this podcast, and I say this in political circles all the time, if you're listening to this podcast, you're not a normal human.
Fair enough.
I mean, no, I think you're making a valid point.
Something else.
Yeah, right.
You wouldn't be sitting here discussing the intersection of tech and government.
You wouldn't be caring about this conversation.
But if you're an elected city council person, you should.
Yeah, but you're not a normal person either.
Unfortunately, Christina, though, that you are.
You have this vision of elected officials as having some necessary, and I don't disagree, necessary nobility of purpose behind them.
I don't know about that.
I think that vision has been sufficiently trampled having tried to work with the city.
But it took me five years to get sign toppers.
Like, we are thoroughly disillusioned.
It's okay.
At the end of the day, they're actors.
Look, I mean, politicians, for the most part, here's the thing.
There was a John Hopkins study that was done about 20 years ago now, right?
They IQ tested all the members of the House and Senate.
The average US Senate IQ was 97.
Now, I know there are some 140s and 150s.
So what do you think that leaves the other half of that room at?
Okay, but here's my question.
You were a chief of staff, right?
So like, let's say it was just, this is hypothetical, but let's say some of this, you know, one of the RFPs, it's before you, right?
And you know, it's going to go to your councilman.
And you know that there's these conversations about privacy and about surveillance and things like that.
And you know, what data is that camera going to capture, right?
And you're, I know you, you're going to be plugged in enough to know there's going to be people talking about that, especially in conservative circles, I might add.
So are you not going to go to your councilman then and say like, hey, when this comes up today, maybe you need to ask these five questions.
And they may not even know why they're.
I'm not even asking for them to understand why they're asking those questions.
But I am asking that, like, even someone like you or some other staffer is at least, like, at least tells them to do so.
Well, I mean, I always did.
But that's true.
You did.
In all fairness, you did.
But that actually made me unusual among chiefs of staff.
Sure.
I mean, and I'm not, look, I'm not trying to thump my chest, but you were around the city of Phoenix.
I got, by the end of my term there, I got treated very differently than the other chiefs of staff by senior city permanent employees, because they knew I would dig in on every bloody issue they put in front of me.
Yeah, you did.
You were very good about that.
And so then I would make sure that Sal DiCiccio, the councilman I was working for, he was prepared to ask those questions.
And he and I would spend the time so that he could at least grasp, he's terrible at tech, let's be honest, but at least be able to ask the right questions and get the right answers.
Sal DiCiccio was my arch nemesis for many years.
But I will, I mean, again, I will give credit where it's due.
He was a good policy guy.
He did know his policy.
He might disagree with him.
Yeah, I may not, there was plenty of things I didn't agree with him on.
But if nothing else, you could follow his reasoning.
And it was, you know, his votes made sense.
And he explained them in a way that was reasonable, like it was justified, right?
Obviously, I didn't agree.
But it was intellectually consistent.
And it was sound.
We didn't get along so much after she was promoted to mayor.
But we got along very well with Kate Gallego in her office when she was still on the council, in part because that was the only, that was the only other office of the eight that dug in on issues.
That's, that's how bad it is out there, folks.
I mean, literally,
I think Jim Waring on occasion, seems like he's read a briefing every now and then.
Jim's deeply involved in stuff he cares about, that's in his wheelhouse.
He digs, he knows that stuff.
But he kind of just pushes everything else to the side.
If it's not within his wheelhouse, if it's not something he's directly focused on.
So he was, and he's very smart.
Jim, you know, was probably one of those 140, 150s in the room kind of guy.
He's a very smart guy.
You can tell.
We had five offices that wouldn't have known what day Christmas was without somebody to tell them.
Okay, so, so on that note, and we did kind of go into this.
So, so walk me through, walk me through what this process looks like.
If there was like a piece of tech policy or tech legislation, and it's coming before or even a tech hearing, right?
There's some manner of preparation for that or well, again, you know, given
there can be clear, given some of the more recent ones, I'm maybe Yeah, you're right.
Maybe not.
But just give me some inside baseball on that.
What does that look like?
Exactly.
So if I'm, if I'm Senator Eichelkraut here, and I have a hearing coming up on, you know, I don't know, some kind of
you're, you're, you're starting way late in the process if you've got a hearing coming up.
Okay.
I mean, first off, the first thing that's going to happen is either staff or an outside interest, whether that be org, a lobbying group, a business, whatever it is.
Is going to come to the, whether it's the city or the state, and to those elected officials, they're going to come to you and say, Hey, we're looking at doing something in this area.
Do you want to meet?
You can say no, they don't care.
That's just, I mean, the only person who cares in that situation is their lobbyist who gets paid to be there for that meeting.
Sure.
Right.
And a lot of offices say no.
Sure.
I always said yes, because I wanted to know right from the start, and then I could start pushing city staff in the direction that I thought we needed to go.
Now, is this where the politicization comes in?
Because if you look at a federal level, I'm certain the EFF has asked to meet with every member of Congress about FISA and Risa, and all of that.
And I do wonder if those meetings ever get taken, right?
And I'm going to assume they don't.
Half the time they don't, half the time they do it.
Yeah.
It's, it's the, first, there's the ideological break.
But secondly, there's the interest break.
There's plenty of politicians who, well, I'm not a tech guy.
That's not something we're going to worry about.
I'll let others handle that, right?
You get that a lot.
You get that a lot in a lot of areas.
So it would start there with some initial meetings.
Then there would be potential meetings.
Again, if you want to have them, and these, you have to push for follow up.
I would then reach out to, in this case, IT and say, hey, I want to meet with you guys before we go down the road on this any further.
I want to hear from you.
I want to ask you some questions.
Then I would say, okay, let's set up our next meeting when you know what your next steps are.
And so I would be meeting with them on that one issue a dozen times throughout the process before it ever got to a hearing.
So that I knew everything that was going to be said at that hearing.
That's proper preparation.
But that also means you have to put in hours and hours and hours of work to get to that point before that hearing.
And I also see where you're talking about the insulation because the people who might not just have like the IT perspective, which in all fairness, that's going to be largely based around cost implementation and timing, right?
That's a very different discussion than anything involving civil liberties, anything involving private contractor regulations, anything involving some of the infrastructure risks that may be associated.
That's a completely different conversation.
Your office has to be very curious and you have to be able to say, okay, this issue affects privacy.
So I need to talk to people who are concerned with privacy.
This issue affects digital security and storage of data.
So I need to talk to people who are concerned and focused in that area too.
I have to bring in those experts.
Do you think that's helpful?
Like, does that actually impact an outcome?
Yes.
You really, because I'm highly skeptical of that.
I've been that person.
But it has to be early in the process.
Again, it's like those city budget hearings.
It's not going to be affected late in the process.
When stuff starts getting put to paper, I have a very limited ability and any political office at that point has a limited ability to change it.
I know that sounds crazy, but that's kind of a...
It gets on, I mean, this gets into politics, I guess.
But there's a fundamental issue with the fact that we do not have a representative democracy in the sense that it was intended where elected officials are making the decisions.
Because the reality is, like I kept saying, a lot of our elected officials are a little more than actors on stage and the decisions are being made behind them.
So, the fundamental problem with that is that you're dealing with a bureaucratic class that does not believe that elected officials should have the right to oversee them.
So, the only way I can change it, I can't change things by having confrontations with that bureaucratic class in public forums, like at hearings.
I have to change them before they come there, because they're really only concerned with two things.
They're less concerned with politics than people on either side think.
They're much more concerned with continuing their bureaucratic career and trajectory.
And the only thing that damages a bureaucratic career is trying something new that fails.
You can fail repeatedly.
You can fail every single day as long as you're following a path that's been blazed for you.
And you can point to that and say, well, I did what I was supposed to do.
Then failure means nothing.
And that's very culturally different from like the tech mindset and like the tech industry.
It's totally different.
Yeah, very, very different.
You have to understand that that's what you're dealing with.
So, when you're asking a bureaucrat to do something that hasn't been trailblazed by another bureaucrat or an agency before them, you're asking them to take the only thing that can actually risk their career.
Even if it's a positive thing.
Now, if it comes out well, and they're getting kudos, then that's great, right?
Sure.
That's a boon to their career.
But it's not much of a boon because they're limited by civil service rules to how they're promoted and up to the system.
So, longevity counts for more than anything else.
And my whole goal is just not to get fired for 30 years while I work my way up to deputy assistant city manager and I make $450,000 a year for $300,000 a year pension.
That's my only concern as a bureaucrat.
So, okay.
So, given that.
So, we've kind of touched on several things here.
We've talked about the gap between a certain class of technologists and actual decision makers.
We've talked about, to some degree, a practical inability of policymakers and decision makers to be engaged or informed enough to perhaps make better decisions or what would be conceived by at least some people better decisions, right?
We've talked about how politics and bureaucracy come into play.
So, in your opinion, what do you think is the biggest or the biggest issues with implementing even just cohesive tech policy?
Because even on a national level, you know, we can't just except for maybe I would say, you know, you have FISA and Risa.
I mean, everyone agrees.
Yeah, that's kind of, but even then it's a knee jerk vote by Congress.
They're just going to be like, oh, the NSA says it's safer, right?
And it's like, you know, nobody, nobody.
From my perspective, those are both very poorly written.
Oh, they're terrible.
This idea that in America, we can either A, catch Ted Kaczynski and have complete mass surveillance, like that's warrantless, or B, be completely subject to the whims of every possible domestic terrorist, like that's ridiculous.
It is ridiculous.
This is America.
We can do hard things.
You can still get a warrant and catch your guy.
Well, this is the fundamental problem is that there isn't much evidence in the last few decades that we are still capable of doing hard or significant things with government.
This is the biggest problem.
It's funny because I actually think it's the underlying cause of, one of the major underlying causes of the political division in this country and why people are so angry.
Because if you're on the left and you want government to do more, you're looking at a government that doesn't accomplish anything despite spending more.
And so then they say, well, we just need more money.
So it becomes this, well, clearly they can't accomplish anything they're underfunded.
On the right, you look at it and say, they keep taking more and more of my taxes and they can't accomplish anything.
Fundamentally, this country would be less divided if our government was capable of delivering product better than it does.
And that's a major, major issue at this point.
And tech can have a big role in solving that issue, but it is currently having a big role in exacerbating it.
Well, if you look at the rollout of Obamacare, right, like the website, like that debacle, like there's really no, yeah, that's...
No, I mean, this kind of stuff, this happens all the time, though.
Why did that happen that way?
Because a politically favored entity got the contract.
They weren't really qualified to, you know, you could have given that contract to Amazon and Amazon would have knocked that website out and made it perfect in a week.
Yeah.
Right?
Yeah.
I mean, it's just, you didn't give it to someone who has expertise.
Much of the evil in tech is highly competent, right?
Like a Google product will work.
Right.
It will mine your data and exploit you, but it will work.
But it will function.
It will work.
It will function.
And it will have an easy to use user interface.
Like, you know, Uber Eats might exploit workers, but boy, is that easy to use.
My grandma can use Uber Eats, right?
Right.
I mean, you can't argue with that UX.
Right.
So, yeah.
You know, but here we're patching over 30-year-old software at the City of Phoenix for their bus scheduling.
Oh, I'm aware.
I am well aware of the transit tech issues.
I brought that up for a reason.
Deeply, deeply aware.
But this is what we're down to, right?
Is that, um...
You know, you're texting a number on a bus stop to see if the bus is late and it's like a day behind.
Right.
No, I mean, it's just...
You can just download the transit app.
There's the transit app.
All the listeners should know that.
There's an app called Transit.
It's amazing.
It's even more accurate than Google Maps.
Like, it's called Transit.
Use Transit.
I'm sorry, Valley Metro.
I love you and I love the copper card.
Yeah, I mean, here's the thing, though.
Warm fuzzies for Valley Metro.
This is a perfect example, though, of what I was just saying, right?
Is that we're bad at delivering.
And that exacerbates the problems.
And tech is not making that better right now because government doesn't understand tech and can't afford it and doesn't pay for the right things.
I mean, it can afford it in terms of dollars and cents.
It can't afford it in the way it goes about spending money.
In other words, that money goes to companies that aren't really qualified who just have that experience working with the city and you end up with this mess, right?
I mean, one of the things, like, one of our big issues, for instance, going back about 10 years ago now, but there was the big debate over body cams for Phoenix police, right?
Actually, yeah, sure.
But what people did not understand was that behind the scenes, the bigger debate was not whether we should or should not have body cams, but was how do we handle the data?
Right.
And that should be a debate.
And that should be something you're looking at.
That was the much bigger portion of that discussion.
And it wasn't held in public anywhere.
It should have been held in public.
But I find it reassuring to know it was a part of that discussion, right?
Yeah, but what then that leads to is a sole source bid for that contract.
And so, for instance, the city of Phoenix, it did end up with a contract.
They adopted the body cams, which they should have.
They did end up securing a contract with Taser.
At that time, it was still Taser to oversee and maintain that data.
But it was a zero competition bid, sole source bid.
Sure.
They're the only ones who can do this.
Well, that wasn't true.
But they're the only ones who came to the city and said, you don't have to do anything.
We got this.
Right.
So that makes sense.
Okay, so this is always like my favorite part of any podcast like this.
So now we get to find out like, how do you fix it?
Like, if you could fix it, what are you doing?
How do you fix this?
Well, first, I changed the RFP process.
Okay.
And I eliminate experience.
You don't have to eliminate experience as a category, but you have to redefine it.
Experience should include all experience, not government experience.
Because then you can get some of the younger, more innovative companies out there.
I mean, they can suggest alternatives for data.
They can suggest hosting alternatives.
They can suggest more secure platforms.
The tech, it is out there.
And experience should not be more than 10%.
Right.
Because that's going to come from people who are younger and who generally have a tendency to be more informed on some of the newer innovations that are happening.
In general, there's plenty of, you know, tech veterans who also are incredibly on it.
Oh, absolutely.
It's really, it's just about not locking in the same corporate vendors.
Right.
So giving giving giving actual innovative startups a chance.
Yes, that's number one.
I mean, and that's, that's a pretty easy fix, quite frankly.
That's interesting, because, you know, Phoenix specifically, you have such a vibrant tech culture here around the startup scene.
You have Venture Cafe, you have, you know, I can't even think I think there's AZ Clean Tech, I think you have, there's so many like tech startup incubators here.
And yet none of them now that I'm really thinking about this, at least the ones that are coming into my head, a lot of those companies would never make it through the RFP process.
None of them have made it through in San Francisco or Los Angeles, where that has been the case for 30 years longer than Phoenix.
Yeah.
And so it's kind of interesting to be fostering this community.
And Phoenix deserves credit there.
It absolutely has fostered that community very much so and it's invested resources.
And, you know, again, I'll give credit where it's due all day long.
But it hasn't let them in the door to government contracting.
Right.
It's not letting them do the thing either.
Right.
At least on the public sector.
So if you think about it and going back, for instance, Microsoft, one of the reasons if if you go back all the way to the sort of ideological split between Microsoft and Apple, with closed source versus open source, a lot of that was because Microsoft wanted to align themselves to government contracting.
That's interesting.
I'd never actually thought about that.
That was a I mean, it was a smart play.
That was a big impact from a from a capital interest.
It was a smart play.
There's no denying that from a business interest.
But but did that develop better technology?
No, no, absolutely not.
Right.
So so that's the thing, right?
Like, if you had Apple's been doing great lately, either.
But well, they've suffered from what I have a theory on tech companies that once you've lost lost your visionary founder, you have a timeframe where you can cash in on your business model, you can refine it, you can do all the things that corporations normally do over time.
To streamline reduce costs, efficiency, so forth and so on.
But the you have to either stumble upon your next great creator who drives you forward, or you're going to be you're going to be at Microsoft and Apple who are now moving into service industry companies, not necessarily tech leaders, except where they're buying people up.
That's fair enough.
Okay, so we'd start with refining the RFP process.
Start by refining the RFP process.
Second, you need to have folks from all the various organizations that you've mentioned here.
They need to start a regular schedule of meeting with the officials, not on official business even, but just developing those relationships with them, so that they can be a go to resource that's trusted.
Okay.
So I mean, for instance, over the years that I different area, obviously, but homelessness, dressing homelessness, which you know, is one of my big passions, right?
I became very trusting of Jeff Taylor with the Salvation Army.
The reason is very simple, because he took the time to forge a relationship, to fully express his point of views, to invest me in his point of view.
So that by the time I was dealing with those issues, I didn't, every time I had a question, and I didn't know what was going on, the first person I called was him.
Right.
Because that relationship was already there.
I didn't have to search for who do I talk to.
Right.
So you have to personalize it.
You have to play the game to some extent.
Jeff, this isn't some like, this isn't the money game I'm talking about.
This isn't like some payoffs and back room.
Jeff and I went out and grabbed lunch.
I pay for mine.
He pays for his.
It's, I mean, you know, but what it does is build up.
Like when I have tech questions, there's a handful of people I could call.
Sure.
Right.
You were one of them, but yeah, there's only a handful.
Yeah, it's never going to be more.
So you got to make sure you're in that handful.
And that brings me back to like, again, though, I know some of the technologists
that do have these relationships, they are talking to people.
I mean, I could think of three right now that I know for a fact have met with state
legislators or, you know, Ryan Murphy, this is so for, you know, for Arizona and, you
know, some of the...
Meeting with state legislatures and building a relationship aren't always the same thing.
That's valid.
That's valid because they have been called for consultation and it's like, and I do, I
will say on their side, and they're not objectively wrong.
It's like, you know, it's like talking to the wind, like they just get ignored.
And that's why I want to make it a point to ask the question, does it matter?
Yes, but you're still missing one last critical element.
You have to have champions who understand your issue entirely.
So what that means is grooming candidates out of the gate who can go in.
I don't need on a nine member council plus the mayor of Phoenix City Council, I do not
need five technologists, but I bloody well need one or two.
On a state legislature, Arizona, 30 in our state senate, 60 in our house.
And technology is on the weirdest subcommittee, like so weird.
I have to have three in the senate and six in the house that know what they're doing.
Yeah, and maybe split it out from, I think it's looped in with what, Child Protective
Services or something?
But the reason it is, is because, again, it doesn't have its own standalone champions.
It doesn't have someone who's going to be a committee chair, right?
We know before Senator Hoffman seems to be, you know, but.
Right, but this isn't his primary focus, right?
He's not Ari Bradshaw, who's running right now might be that guy.
Yeah, maybe.
I mean, right?
Yeah, I could see that.
There's a few others.
But that's what's lacking.
You have to have those people that truly champion and understand the issue.
I mean, for instance.
So you're saying we need like a hardcore software dev to run for state ledge?
Yes.
And they have to be an electable hardware software.
All right, I'll put Chuck up for the next election.
Which means there's like, I don't know, are there two people in the state who's, he's the
only guy though.
But he is, look, he's a good looking guy, he's charismatic, he's incredibly articulate.
Chuck is your guy, 100% Chuck is your guy if he hires me as chief of staff.
If he hires me as chief of staff.
But he can't do that because they don't get a chief of staff.
They just share an office assistant with three others.
But I mean, but where's the eight other?
Yeah, no, I get what you're saying.
I do.
I mean, that's, so like for, I always used to laugh because a developer, and I'm talking
not software, I'm talking land.
Yeah, okay.
A land developer.
Good distinction to make on this podcast.
Yeah, I actually had to stop myself on that one.
Wise move, wise move.
But let's say that someone was going to do any large scale retail or residential development
in the city of Phoenix.
Their first stop would be the council office that that was going to be targeted to be in,
right?
Their second stop would be our office.
Because Sal DiCiccio is a developer of land, and he spoke the language, so they would then
sit down with him and say, Hey, we've just met with Noah Kowski or one of the other
council members.
We just met with them.
We went through all this.
We want to go through all this with you, and we want to get your feedback, right?
We had more impact then on real estate development in the city of Phoenix than every
other council office.
Right, which makes sense.
Because we had a hand in every single one.
We were there at the table from the start on every single one.
There's no council member at the city of Phoenix who's that person on tech.
There's nobody I know at the state legislature in the Arizona who's that person on tech.
That everyone knows we've got to go sit with them because they know it and they can
explain it to their colleagues.
I definitely agree with you there on the state legislature, 100%.
And I think there are some representatives who have attempted to take that lead.
But it's an organic thing.
Yeah, and I think, yeah, I would agree with you there.
And so you look around, that is what is missing.
The tech community for years.
And I actually kind of appreciated it that they weren't doing lobbying.
Tech businesses for years did almost no lobbying.
Right.
Internet-based businesses did very little lobbying.
Now they're the largest lobbyists other than the health care industry.
And what do you see them lobbying for?
It's the giant businesses lobbying for lots of regulations to keep competitors out of business.
For self-regulation.
They're lobbying for self-regulation in a lot of cases.
Yeah, they're arguing for self-regulation, but that's self-interested.
What could possibly go wrong?
Well, that's self-interested also.
Hi Boeing.
What they're asking for is regulations that prevent, that they can easily meet, but which
competitors cannot.
Yeah.
Right.
So if I'm Apple or Boeing, what I want is a start.
I don't want a startup to be able to overcome me.
Right.
I don't want a startup to go rushing by me.
So I want to make it very difficult on them, but still functional, doable for me.
That's what they've done.
So the way around that is to have some elected officials.
The other part is on staff too.
I never had a tech expert who applied to a staff position.
Sure.
Well, and there's so many, that could be a whole other show, really.
There's a lot of reasons for that, but literally, I mean, I'll tell this story.
Some of you folks out there will laugh, but we had a problem because Seldesico had, I kid you not,
folks, the largest...
They won't laugh, they'll cry because they're not surprised.
They're not going to laugh.
They're going to cry because they're not surprised.
The only largest contact database in the Microsoft Outlook universe.
Okay.
He had 97,000 contacts on his cell phone.
Okay.
In an Apple phone.
Oh.
And an iPhone.
Awkward.
Which broke the connection between Outlook and iPhone.
So he would have constant problems accessing his contacts.
I could see how that could be the case.
And no one ever told him to download an alternate contact app, maybe?
Oh, we tried, but he was insistent.
Okay.
So we called in our IT department on numerous times, and they numerous times failed to solve the problem.
And then I hired Sal's Babysitter to be one of our constituent services people.
This wonderful young lady named Lily.
But I hired her because she was Sal's Babysitter, and she was just graduating from the U of A with a degree in fashion.
Sure.
So she sat down, she Googled a bunch, she fixed the problem, and the IT department offered her a job.
Right.
That sounds about right.
Yeah, that sounds like a pretty...
But that is the fashion major who's now married to a EuroLeague basketball player.
Okay.
She is the single best tech person I ever had apply to that office.
Yeah.
And a lot of people, the roads into tech are varied and great.
Okay, so fair enough there.
And then, do you think age is an issue here?
Do you think having younger elected officials would help?
Because I have frequently had that thought.
And then when you have like, when you look at something, you know, like if you look at like Cory Brooks, right?
Like, I just feel better with him making...
Politics lags society.
Yeah, I just feel better with him making tech decisions.
Even if I don't agree with them, at least there'll be some backing behind it.
It will change over time.
That's something that's going to change over time.
But you speed that up by running tech savvy people, by running tech aligned tech industry people.
The tech industry has figured out how to lobby.
What they haven't figured out how to do is fund campaigns for people who will benefit them in office.
That's an interesting observation.
I'm gonna have to think about that one.
But we're almost out of time.
We're actually a little over.
But is there anything like you think like, maybe we should have covered but we didn't?
Like, what have I forgotten to ask you?
I think the...
There's one other thing, and this is gonna get some people.
But it ties to, and I know there's a lot of politicized discussion about this.
I wish we could have had this conversation a couple of years ago before DEI became a big negative word and a combat word on the right and the left.
There's a lot of requirements in government contracting that are counterproductive.
And one of those is the diversity requirements, which do not meet the intent behind the legislation that created them, but instead are used to exclusionary purposes again, and drive up costs and make things less efficient.
So when I get a winning bid from almost anybody these days, any bid on anything, I have a lead and seven different partners on the thing, because those partners are there.
There's one who checks the LGBTQ plus box.
There's one who checks the Hispanic box, one who checks the black box, so forth and so on.
And that gets them a big score on the diversity element of their RFP scoring.
Most of those companies are going to have no actual functional role.
And they wouldn't necessarily want to be chosen.
You know, there's going to be people who don't want to be chosen for those reasons.
It's just a requirement.
So these companies bring in all these partners to do this, but it's just cutting out a piece of the money and giving it to someone just for putting their name on a piece of paper, essentially.
Which is interesting because, you know, tech is still dealing with it's, you know, mostly male dominated.
And, you know, it's still like even when I look for pictures for our website, and I do up splash and I'll do things like tech meeting or whatever, because I'm just looking for a non copyright generic picture to put in the newsletter.
It is always a room full of like white, you know, youngish men, right?
Which leads to the other problem you have.
So for instance, at the federal government, there's a big study done on construction contracting.
Oh, yeah.
They have all the rules.
I remember the study.
Yeah, go on.
So they have all these rules that require a certain percentage of all government contracts to go to minority contractors.
And the intent, obviously, is that you'd have all these small minority contractors all across the country who would be able to benefit and spread the wealth out and do all this.
Who have the disadvantage.
That's not an argument.
I'm not even I'm not arguing the intent.
Yeah.
I'm arguing the outcome because the outcome is that almost 100% of those contracts go to the same three giant national corporations that just happen to have a black CEO.
Yeah.
That's not the intent of the program.
So that's where we have to really start looking at RFPs, RFQs, and the bid process behind everything is one of the greatest barriers to functional government that we have right now in so many ways.
I think that's fair.
All right.
Well, thank you so much for being here, Sam.
I really appreciate it.
Oh, my pleasure.
This podcast was recorded at the Advanced Cyber Systems Lab at Gateway Community College on the Washington campus.
Come on down.
It's open to the general public from Monday through Thursday, 4 p.m.
to 8 p.m.
We have 3D printers, we have server racks, we have Linux computers, we have lots of cool fun tech stuff.
If you don't know what any of that is or how it works, you should come in anyways and ask somebody because someone in the room will know and they will be more than happy to tell you.
It's a really fun place to hang out.
We have a really nice little community here.
Come check it out.
They let me in, folks.
They'll let me in, they'll let anybody in.
And see, we didn't even, we didn't even fight.
We don't fight.
We debate.
Yeah.
We have robust debates.
Anyways.