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Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well-trained, well-equipped, and battle-hardened. There is not a liberal America and a conservative America. The United States of America. Good night and good luck. Hey folks, welcome back to the Lincoln Project Podcast. I am your host, Rick Wilson. I am joined today by Kwame Jackson and Jason Palmer. These guys are absolutely interesting to me because they are involved in Together.
And Together PAC is a common sense movement to get people to engage in politics in a different way. And to engage in politics, I think, in a more impactful and honest way. Okay, Kwame, I got to ask you the question because it bubbled up in the news this week. Just a little bit. You know, I have to ask you the question. Okay.
What was that experience like seeing that sort of reminder of Trump's character and behavior? And if you want to share any stories, we are always open to hearing a little bit more about how somebody who really saw it up close experienced it.
Well, you know, Rick, I'm always okay with a little Trump bashing, right? I'm somebody who got out early and got out often. I'm your huckleberry. Yeah, I got out early and got out often and spoke against, you know, his character, his judgment, his decision-making, his wisdom, and just his temperament.
for the job way back in 2015. And I know you and I were both on MSNBC, won a lot of that. And, you know, unfortunately they didn't listen in that election and we got four years of Trump. And then hopefully we'll be able to kind of stop some of that momentum going to 2024. But for me, that constant reminder of who Trump is over and over is something that has never left me since I, you know, got off The Apprentice. You know, I joined The Apprentice in 04 when it was a fun, you
entrepreneurial NBC exploration show. And I thought, you know, this would be a great platform to brand myself as an entrepreneur, do something exciting in business, and then maybe even pivot into media. I wasn't even exactly sure where it was going to go because that was kind of the dawn of reality television in 03, 04.
So we were the first big competition show and I was proud to be part of it. But what it evolved into after that with Celebrity Apprentice, with, you know, the birther movement that grew out of that when Trump started to really call out Obama, that's when it really started to break my heart.
break my heart where I said, you know, this guy is really not only is he a racist, but he's a xenophobe. He's anti-migrant. I mean, just so many different things that started to come out as a cacophony around his inner soul that really just kind of hurt me and wanted me to distance, you know, from that particular incident.
So when I found out, as I've heard in the kind of ether for a while about him calling me the N-word in this particular episode, obviously I wasn't on set. And he's not crazy to say that to my face. And I'll make it very clear. However, through Bill Pruitt, who was a friend and a producer on the show, I found out about this. And there was kind of all this bubbling around it maybe one or two years ago. And now...
Now that Bill's NDA has expired, he's come out and kind of give the full-fledged story. And I always say, you know, I can't give him a red badge of courage for that. I can't say, you know, you're a profiling courage on JFK for that. But I'll commend him and say, look, we are where we are. The information's out. I hope more will come out around the tapes and possibly, you know, finding out what's really going on. But it just serves to reinforce why I kind of like –
Stop messing with this guy so many years ago and told the country what I thought, because, you know, I think that leadership is a moment and it's not about being popular. It's not about what other your friends are doing. You know that it's always the right time to do the right thing. And for me, that was way back in 2015 to say this guy is wrong for where we're going as a country for our pursuit of happiness, our more perfect union.
He is antithetical to all of that. And so I wanted to speak out early. So, you know, what he said and hopefully more will come out and some of the witnesses may come out and actually share that. That for me is neither here nor there. It's about those downstream effects of a permission of racism, a permission structure that has been granted to the country that we've seen over and over again. And then trying to bottle that and battle that back in so that we can create more unity in America with structures like together.
And so I wanted to talk to you guys today about what Together is all about and to get an understanding from you guys on where and how you see it going and sort of get a read from you on American political life and how offering something like this is a necessary element in moving forward in this country.
Sure. Yeah. I mean, the reason why we co-founded together is because of young people, especially. I'm an investor, an entrepreneur. I work with a lot of young people and they are so turned off by politics these days. You know, our last survey I saw said 81% of them are completely turned off. A large percentage of them are not going to vote.
But then if you talk to them for a little while, and I do because I work with a lot of social impact entrepreneurs, they really care about our country. They really want to make the country better. They're actually starting businesses to do exactly that and nonprofits too.
And they wanted to be involved in politics in the past, but they said, I just, I don't want, I don't want to do that anymore. So we want to create together to get young people to have a space to actually communicate with each other, raise money for the causes that they believe in, learn about campaigns of young people who are running for office that are actually a lot like them and give them a chance to see politics a different way, engage with politics a different way.
Yeah, for me, I'd add, Rick, that from a marketing standpoint, I think you hit the nail on the head right in the first intro, that there are iterations and movements and waves that come about during certain parts of our kind of history and political cycles.
And so if you think of Rock the Vote, if you think of Lincoln Project, if you think of all the different movements that have come about, I think this is the next iteration. We're really laser focused on Gen Z. We are focused on getting them engaged around causes,
around clubs and around community. And so we're trying to blend those three together and give them a platform, both from a technology standpoint, a fundraising standpoint, and an organizational standpoint to make all of their kind of cause initiatives come true. So we're trying to ride that momentum from Rock the Vote, really try to be the new wave, making voting and political engagement sexy and fun and exciting, bringing in the influencer community, and then really engaging and trying to
to focus on finding the next talented individuals in the political spectrum. So that's what we're about. You know, Kwame, you said something just then that I think has been missing from politics in a very broad scale. And it's been missing for a long time. And that word is community.
Because people, even in this social media era, even in the COVID and post-COVID era, people are still desperate to connect. It is so wired into human beings to want to connect with people with like interests, to want to talk to people that are in your community. There is a deeply held connection.
cognitive function for people. And, and, you know, look, some super PACs are functioned or designed to function as specific mission area. I think that has the potential to ramify out the,
into a really broader movement because it is something, I mean, I hear it in focus groups. I hear it talking to voters. It's like, I'm alone. I don't know what to do. What am I supposed to do? How can I make a difference? You know, all that stuff. It strikes me that you guys have made, you made me right on like the cusp of a big thing here.
That's what we think. And I mean, you know, Jason and I, our community building effort goes all the way back to 1999 in the early days of social networking. We were classmates at Harvard Business School. Jason and I co-founded a company called Mascot Network.
where we were really focused on building that early social networking community within the college space. And then fast forward, you know, 20 something years later, Jason's running for president. He's the only presidential candidate to beat Biden for delegates in American Samoa. Two years later,
all the time. And what he did is he got the band back together. You know, he gave me a call. He said, Kwame, I need your help and would love you to come on and, you know, help us really engage and keep the brand young and fun and sexy and influential. And that's what we're really trying to do. Make causes and politics almost morph together to really hit Gen Z where they live.
And it really is something I think people have underestimated in the broader political equation. The baby boomers have been such a dominant block. Yeah.
for so long that, that people didn't really figure out until about a year ago that Gen X is now the largest cohort. They took them this, this shock of that. And there was this traditional voter behavioral evolution over time where as they grew older, they grew more conservative. And, and as, as they grew older, they, they were more likely to watch Fox news and therefore became much more conservative. Um,
Gen Z is a gigantic iceberg out there in the night that the American electoral system is about to run into. What is it that's really driving Gen Z voters right now? The sort of cliche is they all care about Gaza and that's it. What are you guys hearing and seeing that they care about right now? No, they actually care about a lot of different things. That's the most important thing to know. They're not a monolith.
but they care passionately about their areas. And so for some of them, the ones that have been protesting on campuses, it has been Gaza, but it could easily be climate change. It could be women's rights. It could be LGBTQ is huge in this generation, actually. But then you find out there's a huge libertarian contingent on campus that cares a lot about balanced budgets and shrinking the government, and they care just as passionately about that.
And so imagine it's a cluster of a lot of little mini clusters where they're finding their groups, they're building their own clubs, but it's all on campus. But then you see they graduate school, everybody disperses, and then it's like on hold. Like right now we're on three-month hold over the summer. But when August comes, they're going to be back in full force on campuses and getting together. And there'll be lots of different protests this fall. It won't just be about Gaza.
You know, it's interesting you mention that, the libertarian streak, because it is something that –
that there are two, what I call the two negative and a positive ideological horseshoe. On the negative side, you have vicious anti-Semites on the far, far, far, far left and vicious anti-Semites on the far, far, far, far right. You also have people who believe that individual freedom and individual liberty on the far left and on the far right are really important, which is why I think in the post-Dobbs environment, we've seen this shift
group of, you know, frankly, Republican women who were like, uh-uh, nope, that's not for me, joining younger, more progressive, pro-choice women and men in the Gen Z space.
You know, what's interesting is I also feel like Gen Z to add to those causes, whether it's gun control, whether it's student loan forgiveness, I think they feel like the system is broken and we got handed a broken mission statement. Right. You told me if I went to college, if I got a good job, if I did X, Y, Z, then I would have this outcome.
Then they can't buy a house. They can't move out of their parents' house. They can't really become engaged in kind of the economic development of becoming a full-fledged quote unquote adult or citizen. And that's why you hear all these jokes around like adulting is so hard or things like that. It's like,
People feel like they're trapped in a situation that you told me to do X, I did X, and now you haven't delivered on that promise of the broken American dream. And so what we're trying to do is kind of piece that back together, listen to our constituents, listen to Gen Z, and then give them the tools to amplify their voices, organize and empower and fund their causes. So that's really what we're trying to do as we build these kind of micro communities across America.
So you said something important, and I want to hear from Jason on this as well, to organize and fund them. There are a lot of people who look at, oh, we're going to build a –
social media platform or social media system or groups under some other platform and it'll self-organize and it'll run itself and it'll have a political impact. But what you said also is to organize them and to fund them. Talk to us about how that works because that's really the secret sauce of a lot of these things is for them to be able to go out and say, okay, we're not just going to
talk about getting somebody turned out to vote. We're going to go fund a program to go knock doors in Arizona or Ohio or Michigan. Absolutely. So talk to us about how that works with Together. Absolutely. So that's the technology that we're building right now. And as somebody who's built a number of technology companies and funded a number of technology companies, we're
we're using wherever possible existing technologies and then building a mobile layer on it. These are people that are used to using Venmo to quickly give money back and forth. They could give money very quickly to causes. And a lot of this is based on the research I did at the University of Virginia, and not just when I was in school, but more recently. So I've
I've been down there to meet with Larry Sabato multiple times and his Center for Politics there. And there are multiple students groups that are there that I talked to who I said, what is your biggest difficulty? And I really thought it was going to be, you know, these conversations that are happening on campus and civility. And that came up as a high thing. But much more so was we can't get any donations for these things that we want to do. We just need fifty dollars, one hundred dollars, seventy five dollars.
And there needs to be an easy way for people to find out about those things and to fund those causes that they're doing. And even find out about the events too, like just having a basic events calendar and being able to know where the events are for other like-minded people who care about that cause. That's super hard these days.
And it's kind of amazing that nobody has built a technology like this for this generation. And so right now we're recruiting an advisory board of young people who are engaged in politics in these issue areas, both from the right and the left and a good number of independents, too, so that we make sure that they're the ones that are helping to design the product. They're going to be the early users of the product.
And then we're going to roll it out to the million students that we want to get registered to vote this fall on all these 300 college campuses who will be signing up for and using the Together application at the same time as they're registering themselves to vote. The piece that I add to that, Jason, is like I've always said, is no money, no movement.
And people always forget how that connects. And that goes back to that economic lockout that Gen Z feels, right? Like they can't buy a house, they can't participate, et cetera. And then even in their cause life, which is really where they're driven, you know, having a purpose, having a mission statement in order to go to work, having mission-oriented funding, all those things are locked out when they can't fund it.
And so they feel locked out, not just from the capitalist system and the traditional career corporate climbing, but they feel locked out from being able to kind of go out and do good in the communities as well. Support for the Lincoln Project podcast comes from Odoo. If you feel like you're wasting time and money with your current business software or just want to know what you could be missing, then you need to join the millions of other users who've switched to Odoo.
Odoo is the affordable, all-in-one management software with a library of fully integrated business applications that help you get more done in less time for a fraction of the price. To learn more, visit odoo.com slash Lincoln. That's O-D-O-O dot com slash Lincoln. Odoo. Modern management made simple.
Hey folks, welcome back to the Lincoln Project. My guests today are Kwame Jackson and Jason Palmer. We are going to continue our conversation about how to access, motivate, organize, inspire, and fund Gen Z candidates, Gen Z causes, and Gen Z activism. I think that frustration, because again, that's a generation that
They saw 2008. They saw that promise get fundamentally broken in this country. I think there's a lot of, I won't say it's just resentment. I think there's some resentment, but I think there's a lot of frustration that you seem to be tapping into where they saw 2008 happen. A lot of them saw their parents lose homes. A lot of them saw their economic futures turn very different than what they expected. A lot of them were frustrated.
at a point where they were becoming politically aware and saw the world burn down around them. And no one ever got punished for it. No one ever had accountability for it. No one ever had to get frog marched out of a brokerage house. And these kids are like, wait, I'm playing by the rules. I'm paying my college loans. I'm doing all these things. And I'm the one who gets screwed. I think there's a lot of energy out there
Because of that particular moment, I think COVID had an effect on their sort of political orientation as well. Yeah, the COVID especially. Think about that. Some of them graduated in 2020 and didn't even have an in-person graduation. Or if they were going to college that year, their first year of college got completely disrupted.
And, you know, it was some of them two years that they were completely disrupted. And they just don't think that the people are paying attention to their needs at all. And, you know, we need to give them a chance to amplify their voice. Young people have been ignored in our society for decades, actually. I mean, that's why the average age of a person in Congress is 59 years old now.
So, you know, it's almost skipped a whole generation. Like people me and Kwame's age, we're almost skipped as well. There are not even that many people that are our age that are in Congress. Yeah, no, it's definitely a older person's game at this point because and in part because redistricting is so it makes it so makes people so immobile.
Once you hold a seat, you hold that seat until you get carried out feet first. That's right. For the most part. But these young people are not just sitting on their hands. They're starting nonprofits. They're starting for-profit businesses. There's so many. There's more entrepreneurship in this group of Gen Z and millennials than in any group that came before. And it's probably because entrepreneurs like Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, they've become lionized in a different way that didn't exist 20 years ago. I used to be a teacher for the Close Up Foundation Institute.
in Washington, D.C., and we would play a little game where we would put names on people's backs of all the famous politicians, and then you would walk around and try to guess what name was on your back. And for one time, just for fun, in 1995, I put Bill Gates on the back of one of the students
And everybody's going around. Nobody knew who the heck Bill Gates was like he was. Is that some I've never heard of that person before. Like just not that long ago, like technology leaders didn't they weren't even part of the consciousness at all. And so entrepreneurship is where all these students are going. They want to build companies. They want to change the world for the better. And in a way, government's being left behind. Yeah.
I'm always fascinated by it. Go ahead, Kwame. I was just going to add one other piece about where we are in the evolution of politics and organization. If you think about if we were able to go in a time machine and get in front of the wave of baby boomers and then lay the groundwork in terms of a platform, something to organize around, fund around, et cetera, it's like we're laying the groundwork before that wave is really here. So that's what's exciting about it.
we're doing with the Gen Z community. And it's the same on, you know, like I said, what Rock the Vote did for the Gen X community when I was coming up. It's like, we're really trying to get out there and give them the tools so that the road is smooth ahead, that it's easy sailing, and that they're going to be successful.
At 60, I was born in the very, very, very end of the baby boom. I was born the day before JFK was killed. So that should put me... That should tell you exactly where I fell in that. So I always... I was raised in Gen X more than in the boomer ethos. But there is a sense, I think, that even among...
even among Gen X and millennials, that the Gen Z kids have really gotten screwed. And some of it's a broken government, broken policies. Some of it's just the horrible circumstances of this era of 9-11, of 2008, of COVID, of the Trump era, all these things that have sort of
of high interest rates now that have hit them simultaneously. And so I think what you're doing has a lot of merit because it gives them an outlet for
and a toolbox that, you know, look, there's nothing harder than political organizing. It's hard work. My first job in politics working for George Herbert Walker Bush in 1988 when I was a kid was to go out and do field operations all over the state of Florida. And it was like, you know, there's nothing harder than sitting in those meetings and making those budgets and getting the right people in the right volunteer positions and all that stuff. It builds and builds and builds.
But if you can hand them and train them on a suite of commodity type organizational tools, I think you could unleash something that is also driven by their desire to be unleashed. They want to do the work. They want to be out there hustling and doing this stuff. Yeah. And I think it's, they're the ones that want people to be back at work in the office so that they can be interacting even more so than people in our age. They want to be, they want club. They want that community. Yeah.
And some of the things you were just saying was really interesting. When I was out on the campaign trail running for president, I talked to lots of young people, like young people, and they were mostly interested in my entrepreneurship background, though. I kept trying to steer them back to politics. Sure. It was basic things like that. They didn't have enough money to afford, uh,
the rent deposit and first month's rent and last month's rent that they thought they were going to get a salary job out of college. And instead they're working at this $15 an hour job. And they're supposed to feel grateful because $15 an hour is better than what the minimum wage used to be.
And it really is these, you know, we think of it as inflation. They just think of it as grocery prices or gasoline prices. And to them, all prices are way too high and their wages are too low. And that's why a lot of them have kind of a common, it's very much a Republican economic sensibility, even though they're, you know, much further to the left on social issues than 20 years ago. Right.
You touched on that prior, but this is an amalgam generation. There are things about them that are Ron Paul libertarian and things about them that are AOC libertarian.
social view. That's right. And I've heard both those from the same person sometimes, actually, just like that. Yes. Yes. And all of this is driven through the lens of not politics, but cause. It's a different psyche. It's I care about gun violence. I care about women's right to choose. I care about student loan forgiveness, whatever your cause or the environment, which is one of the hugest, right? They feel like the whole environment
has been handed to them completely broken. And now it's like, oh, Gen Z, go save the planet for everybody. So that's a big ask as you talk about the generation. They may be the greatest generation. No pressure. No pressure. Save the planet for everybody. It's like, okay, you fought Hitler D-days today. I understand. We all should give them a salute. But it's like, okay, now save the planet, Gen Z. We got to one-up the baby boomers. Right, right. So we'll see what you'll see.
So what, what is the, I mean, look, I know the cliche is tick tock, but what, what is the credible and most viable set of communications channels to talk to these Gen Z voters?
Well, it really depends on the age. We are definitely going to be leveraging TikTok. We already have started leveraging TikTok. They communicate in video. They communicate in stories. And it needs to be six seconds of video up to like even this podcast is too long for most people. They're going to want the highlight. We got to cut it up.
Listen, when I became host of this podcast, I was like, it will never be longer than a half an hour, folks. I promise you. And I learned that lesson with my other podcast where the first couple of weeks were longer format because I can talk for hours. And I like talking to people for hours. But
But a half hour for Gen Z is like the godfather, right? It's the godfather trilogy. It's just like, okay, why are we watching this so long? Somebody said to me the other day, it's like, if your audience are Gen Xers and millennials, then a half an hour car ride is their attention span. If it's younger, it's much harder. That's why we clip things up. That's why we break the thing up into more digestible chunks. But
but I mean, are there other areas where they're consuming? Is it YouTube and Tik TOK? I mean, is that really where people to reach them need to go? It's YouTube, Tik TOK, Instagram in the political area too. People have not given up on Twitter. So there's a large number of them that are on Twitter as well. Um,
But imagine the people that are of that generation that care about political issues, it's 20% or less. So that's our target audience for the first wave. Then we want those people, and especially, and Kwame can talk better about this than me, but people who are athletes on campuses, people who are leaders on campuses in different ways, like those are going to be our evangelists and our people on the ground who are signing people up, registering them to
vote, initially using the application, showing how it helps them raise money for their causes, how they want to get out there and toot their horn for the causes that they believe in. And it's going to take a little while to build this, but because so many people need to register to vote and we can get so many volunteers, our goal is to get 10,000 volunteers on campuses this fall. Right.
And there are a lot of young people who want externships and internships and are having trouble finding them. So there's actually a pretty good fit here for all the jobs that they want that are meaningful and have purpose. And I actually can quantify, I got 100 people signed up today. I actually can put that on the resume.
The two other channels that I'd mentioned that are really relevant and really strong in the Gen Z community are Twitch, the gaming platform, because they're huge gamers. And once again, you've got to meet people where they are and hit them where they live. So it's like the more we can use that platform to engage the gaming community, which is very broad and deep in Gen Z, as well as Discord. Discord, even though it has...
you know, some kind of right wing element sometimes to it on the extreme. Discord is really a relevant channel that we're finding a little traction with as we start to communicate in that community. Yeah, that's definitely something that we're seeing. We're seeing a lot. Yeah, you're correct. We're seeing a lot of growth on the right on Discord and Telegram, but it's not exclusive to the right.
It's not simply the right wing on those two, but they're definitely out there as a kind of political force to be reckoned with. So as we start to wrap up the show today, I want to make sure that we give folks the ability to find you guys online. So tell me where we can get you guys individually on your various socials and together on its various platforms.
Sure. I guess I'll go first. So you can find us at togetherpurple.org. That's the website you would go to. And the application will be available in July timeframe. But please do sign up. You can already sign up on the web and we'll start communicating with you right away and you'll be part of our beta program. And then if you want to find me on Twitter, I'm at educationpalmer.
Yep. And I'll be a little bit more direct and blatant. Like I said, no money, no movement. We would love for you to go and donate even a small dollar amount, $1, $5, $10 at togetherpurple.org. That's definitely going to be our site. We're going to be launching also a Kickstarter campaign very shortly. So we're very excited about that. And people will be able to find that in the coming weeks. And then you can find me personally at at
Kwame Inc. That's where I am on my socials on both Instagram and Twitter, and then easily on LinkedIn as well at Kwame Jackson. For everyone who wants to look at an internship with Together or Becoming a Volunteer, you can sign up on our site as well.
Well, I wish you guys all the best. Thank you both for coming on today. Jason, I appreciate you. Kwame, I appreciate you also. Thank you for that very honest take about the Trump era. Folks, this has been the Lincoln Project podcast. You can follow the Lincoln Project at Project Lincoln on all of the socials.
You can follow me, Rick Wilson, at TheRickWilson. You can also check out my other podcast, The Enemy's List. And I'm at Substack at TheRickWilson. Thanks for listening in today, folks. Look forward to talking to you next time. Thanks, Rick. Thanks, Rick. Support for the Lincoln Project podcast comes from Odoo. If you feel like you're wasting time and money with your current business software or just want to know what you could be missing, then you need to join the millions of other users who've switched to Odoo.
Odoo is the affordable, all-in-one management software with a library of fully integrated business applications that help you get more done in less time for a fraction of the price. To learn more, visit odoo.com slash Lincoln. That's O-D-O-O dot com slash Lincoln. Odoo. Modern management made simple.
