Hey everyone, before we get started today, I just want to make sure everyone knows Lincoln Project

television, LPTV returns next week bigger, better, brighter than ever. Tuesday night, 8 p.m.

Eastern, Tara Setmeyer and Rick Wilson will relaunch the breakdown and on Wednesday night at 8 p.m.

Eastern, Lisa Senekal and Maya May will be back with we're speaking. And as always, you'll be

able to find it on Twitter, YouTube and Facebook. Hope you'll tune in. And now here's the show.

Welcome back to the Lincoln Project. I'm your host, Ray Galen. Today I'm joined by Aaron Dobson

and Greg Jenkins, the co-executive directors of the Franklin Project. They are allied with us

here at TLP and their mission is to address the increasing imbalance of power between the government

and the government. Just for full disclosure for everybody out there in Radio Land, I have known

Greg and Aaron for about 20 years. They have known me since basically childhood. I can tell you guys

that the first time I ever met Greg was on the snowy plains of West Des Moines, Iowa where he got off

a press bus for then the governor, George W. Bush campaign for president. Saw the mess,

the enormous mess that I had created in a hotel lobby with the press charters check in and looked

down at me because Greg is a tall man and said, I don't know who you are. I don't know how this

happened, but fix it. And he walked away. And there I was shaking in my 10 and a halfs,

figuring out what the hell I got myself into and the rest is history. So Aaron and Greg, welcome.

Thank you for having us. Thank you so much. So Greg, tell me a little bit about the Franklin

Project, what the inspiration is, how it got started and what you guys see as its core mission.

Aaron, I've been talking over this sort of notion for a couple of years at this point.

And what we concluded was although there's a lot of work in the pro-democracy anti-authoritarian

space, what we feel is the key and missing ingredient is the level of citizenship participation

that is required and built in to how this country is founded in order to keep representative

...