Take it from me: Elections matter.

Distributed intelligence is the key to the advancement of human civilization. Dictatorships, communist countries, monarchies in the past all eventually collapsed because of their inefficiency in moving information.

Now we have things that are obviously false, leading us to war, leading us to deny people health care, leading us to ignore the climate crisis. We have to restore the integrity of the democratic conversation.

The constant drive for campaign dollars has distorted decision-making in Washington, DC, to the point where our systems can no longer effectively address complex, long-term problems like the climate crisis. Which brings me to my other major concern - the short-term focus of capitalism. It distorts the allocation of resources and the decision-making processes of companies.

All I'm doing, all I have done for 40 years, is spend time with the best scientific experts, gain their confidence, and take advantage of their patience in explaining things to me over and over again in progressively simpler language that I can understand, so that I can read it back to them and get their sign off, where they say, "Yep, that's it, Al. You've got it." When I understand it, I know I can explain it to other people. When the scientists' predictions end up being true, I see that as an opportunity to say to people, "Listen carefully to what they're saying now."

We have to use our reasoning capacity and set long-term goals based on our deepest values.

(George Bush) betrayed this country! He played on our fears. He took America on an ill-conceived foreign adventure dangerous to our troops, an adventure preordained and planned before 9/11 ever took place!