Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening, wherever you are. And welcome to the politics guys with your host, Jay Carson and Michael Baranowski.

Welcome to the politics guys. I'm Michael Baranowski, a political scientist at Northern Kentucky University.

My guest today is Steve Hilton, the founder of CrowdPack, which he created in 2014, to help reconnect regular people to politics by making it easier for everyone to learn about politicians, find and support candidates that match their beliefs, and even run for office.

Prior to starting crowd pack, Steve was the director of strategy for former UK Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron.

In addition to running crowd pack, Steve teaches that Stanford University's Institute of Design is a commentator for Fox News and is the author of more human

designing a world where people come first. Welcome to the show, Steve. It's great to be with you.

Thank you. You know, I guess I'll start with the most obvious question. Why did you start

CrowdPack? Well, really, it came from a combination of the experiences I'd had

working in politics and government in the UK and then around the world and realizing how

it had just become more and more of a closed system where the insiders, both on the left and

the right, those who know how the game works, who know how the funding of politics

works, who know how to use the system to get the results that they want, had just taken more

and more of the power to themselves, which left people who, in theory, were supposed to have

the power. That's everyone else in a democratic system, really feeling that their voices

were not being heard. And then when

we moved with our family to California, as you mentioned a couple of years ago, and I was teaching at

Stanford, and right there in the heart of entrepreneurial Silicon Valley, I thought, well, why don't

I try and do something about it? And thought, well, this is the perfect time to try and use technology to really put power back in people's hands in a way that hasn't really been seen before,

especially focusing on one of the main ways that the insiders assert control over the political system.

And that's through money, through political contributions, through campaign donations.

And that's, again, it's a completely non-partisan issue.

It's both you see this on the left and the right.

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