Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late month series Real Time with Bill Maugh.

All right, here we are. Now Lawrence, this is for you. If you do not win the Democratic nomination, come on.

What are the chances of that?

Will you run as a third party candidate?

Look, I want to be a Democratic candidate. I want to have a chance on the Democratic stage to rally people to what I think is an issue at the core of the Democratic Party.

Restoring democracy to the people, and that's what I want to do. I want the chance to do that. Now it's been hard because, you know, I'm a teacher. I'm not a billionaire.

I'm not a politician. If I were a politician, I could be paid while I was running for the United States presidency.

But as a teacher, once I start running, I got to give up my job. So there's a period of time where I can run on credit cards and savings accounts when they can't pay me from the campaign or anything,

where I try to get into the race. And what I did in my case was raise a million dollars and less than 30 days. That's more than five Republican candidates.

It's more than Jim Webb and Lincoln, Shafe, and it's just about exactly what O'Malley raised. I rally 10,000 people to the campaign.

We have a real campaign staff. I qualified for public funding. But the Democratic Party wouldn't even acknowledge me as a candidate.

And so the polls wouldn't include me on their polls. And so when they said 1% you have to be at to be in this race.

I would be careful about this is kind of what Jim Webb was doing the other night.

You know, I saw that you know, yeah, you know, it comes off as whiny and then people don't like during during the debate.

It will let me talk. During during the debate, I tweeted that you should be included. So I was trying to help you out.

But the point but the question is, Bill, do we know that was really

You said, but you're on the other side there, John. I know. I'm all for all for all.

I don't sit there play. What do you have to do to be able to real out everybody in the Republican debate?

But you know, I think we've been on this small worry bush, but the issue I think is being raised by the other candidates.

But if the issue is, how do we get a democracy first? Like how do we make that the priority?

What Bill, what Bernie said in that debate, the one line that I think was the most important line, not mentioned by anybody.

He said, if we're going to have any chance of addressing these problems, we've got to deal with with campaign finance, which is exactly my.

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