Stop Blaming Presidents. Fix the Incentives - Startup Playbook for Fixing Politics | Neil Thanedar

Watch the full episode: YouTube

Episode Summary

Neil Thanedar, executive director of the Michigan Campaign Finance Network and author of Positive Politics, shares his startup playbook for fixing politics. From campaign finance reform to building a Y Combinator-style accelerator for political candidates, Neil explores how entrepreneurial thinking can transform civic engagement and create lasting democratic change.

Key Topics: campaign finance reform, political entrepreneurship, positive politics, Neil Thanedar, startup mindset, civic engagement, direct democracy, ballot initiatives, political accelerator, dark money

---

Conversation

Evan Meyer: 00:01.748 Hey everyone, welcome to Myers side chats. Today's guest, Neil Tanadar, executive director of the Michigan campaign finance network, a nonpartisan nonprofit watchdog focused on transparency, dark money and campaign finance reform. Neil's lead investigative efforts is to dig into how money flows into Michigan politics. You know what? I'm going too fast. I got to start it over. This thing is a little too fast.

Neil Thanedar (00:24.95) Hehe.

Evan Meyer: 00:29.108 We're going to start it again. It's OK. I'm going to cut that out. Here we go. Sorry, you're working with me on this first teleprompter read. I usually just read the intro. Here we go.

Neil Thanedar: 00:30.947 Nice.

Neil Thanedar: 00:39.299 No worries.

Evan Meyer: 00:42.004 Hey everyone, welcome to Meyerside Chats. Today's guest is Neil Tanadar, executive director of the Michigan Campaign Finance Network, a nonpartisan nonprofit watchdog focused on transparency, dark money, and campaign finance reform. Neil has led investigative efforts that dig into how money flows through Michigan politics, helping citizens better understand who's funding campaigns and how that funding shapes public policy.

His work sits at the intersection of accountability, ethics, and civic empowerment, areas that are central to meaningful democratic reform. He's also the author of Positive Politics, a proven playbook to get into politics, change your life, and change the world. Released in November 2025, in the book, he lays out a practical roadmap for citizens who feel shut out of the political process, offering concrete steps to move from frustration to participation.

Beyond the nonprofit leadership, Neil brings experience advising political campaigns, including his father, US Congressman, Sri Tanudar, and working with tech startups, giving him a unique perspective on how modern tools, funding structures, and civic engagement collide in today's political landscape. Neil, welcome.

Neil Thanedar (01:59.64) Thanks for having me.

Evan Meyer: 02:01.492 It's great to have you on. You're up to some really awesome work. And it's interesting. You have this very interesting background, especially growing up with your father in politics and now a US representative, congressman, and helping him. And so I'm really looking forward to this discussion. Thank you.

Neil Thanedar: 02:25.998 Yeah, absolutely.

Evan Meyer: 02:29.723 First thing that I find, you know, when I have a lot of these conversations, I sort of dig into the psychology of why things happen the way they happen and and how to get around our belief systems that can that can often hold us back. Right. And when it comes to money in politics, I had this conversation with Tiffany Mueller, who's running and Citizens United. You probably know it well. You know,

even when we change all of the dark money in politics that you're working on for the, Michigan, right? And trying to work to address those issues. How do we change the incentives even when, let's say we fix all the problems with dark money.

And I want you to tell me a bit about what you're working on right now. But underneath that, there's this layer of incentive structure for politicians, revolving door, campaign financing strategies, all these sort of levers that they have. How do we change that? And is that the real issue?

Neil Thanedar: 03:20.396 Yeah. Yeah.

Neil Thanedar: 03:36.867 Yeah, I think so. And that's what I wrote in the book Positive Politics is it's going to take an entirely new positive sum instead of structure to make this work. Some of that's going to be thinking much more long term with politics. Right. So thinking in decades and what can we do in decades in some ways the same way we talk about that in startups. Right. In startups we say, you know, are you willing to give a decade or more to this mission when you start a startup? Like you feel that.

And I have a startup that I started 13 years ago that's still running and we're still fighting the mission and still doing things, right? And we're very proud of that work. And that's actually the success. The success is actually the businesses that last or the politicians who actually spend a decade or more fighting for something. And it's not always just politicians, right? It can be activists. There's a great story of a woman named Granny D. She went till 100 years old as an activist, like fighting for...

nuclear test ban treaties and campaign finance reform and all these other issues. She was an active politician basically. She was active in politics in a positive way her whole life. she only ran for office one time and lost, but the rest of her life was all these amazing wins that she had. I think that politics can be so much bigger when you just get beyond the elections and you think about what you can actually get done.

that I call all of that together positive politics. That's what the book's about and it's what I try to do to make the next generation of politicians win, which potentially could solve the game in a way beyond money.

Evan Meyer: 05:13.395 Right. Well, and that getting the right people to even be motivated to run.

is sort of an entire, you could spend 100 years just figuring it out. I don't know, maybe all of humanity we've been trying to figure out. So how can we get better people to run? Or people who are not part of the system, right? What is, and does it have to take 10 years? Does it have to take losing your first two campaigns to win the third one, right? What does it take?

Neil Thanedar: 05:42.104 with

Yeah. Well, I think a lot of people quit after that first race. So I think that's the biggest one. I think starting outside of politics and getting into politics through activism, picking a specific issue like campaign finance reform. it could be education or health care or jobs or housing or transportation. There's all these huge issues that the same way that when you get into a startup, have this like, well, I want to take a startup in transportation versus housing versus like there are these.

In startups though, you have this challenge sometimes where as much as you want your mission to be, we're going to change the entire world's housing or the entire world's transportation problems, startups end up often focusing on really point solutions. And so I think one big thing about politics is to focus on these systemic solutions, these meta solutions. And to me, one of the biggest meta solutions in politics is a better candidate recruitment funnel. If we can get better people in, these people I call ambitious optimists.

in a what I it's Y Combinator is the the startup accelerator that I we went through in 2015 with Labdoor. It's an amazing program. It's now thousands of startups have gone through it. If there was a Y Combinator for politics where we were able to make it easy to enter like an easy front door into politics in a way where before YC

getting a VC investment was hard, You might have to be the person who is MBA buddies with their finance guy. They were able to make that deal in a way where in the year 2000, where in 2010, maybe an engineer is pitching a VC directly because they've gone through YC, they have that credibility, and then now they're just pitching the top VCs themselves. so now there's not that layer of abstraction, that layer of money on top of the talent basically in startups now.

Neil Thanedar (07:32.76) That's like one of the things that YC really did was it allowed the engineer, it allowed the person who was actually building the product to directly pitch and directly create the company themselves and then build everything around them. YC teaches those, like I was a scientist coming in and they teach scientists how to be CEOs too, right? And there's this like really cool way where once you go through YC, it's a 12 week program and then you pitch hundreds of investors where it completely changes your strategy and your mindset.

you're around hundreds of other really ambitious people from all over the world, having that kind of funnel and pipeline into politics would be amazing. And so that's what I call a positive politics accelerator and is what I want the result of the book to be.

Evan Meyer: 08:19.221 So the accelerator would help you get your first win, for example.

Neil Thanedar: 08:22.958 Yes, yeah your first win could and that could be your first raise but it also your first win as Pick an issue pick a bill pick a ballot proposal and run with it from start to finish Right. I tell us I'd like to direct democracy is just such a huge part of what we should do There's a great story of Katie Fahey in Michigan using direct democracy to pass an anti gerrymandering initiative so now Michigan is one of the seven states that has an independent redistricting committee. It doesn't go through the

Evan Meyer: 08:32.956 I love that.

Neil Thanedar: 08:51.458 these state legislatures like it has in all these other places, very controversially, doing something like that nationwide would be incredible. But that's the picking an issue and just running with it. That took Katie two years, right, to do that. It involved creating a nonprofit and recruiting hundreds of volunteers to get thousands of signatures and then get it on the ballot and all these things. But it looks like a startup. in like all the things, there's a leader and there's a mission and there's a specific thing that needs to get done.

Evan Meyer: 09:13.331 Yeah.

Neil Thanedar: 09:21.132 There's a team that gets built. a tight team and there's concentric circles of bigger and bigger teams. And then you've got to go and pitch. You've to convince hundreds of thousands of people to get on your side. If you've got that startup mentality, think it transfers really easily into politics.

Evan Meyer (09:38.13) Yeah, it's, mean, the idea of, of not getting set back, right? No, knowing that failure is not a real word in your vocabulary, right? It's, we call it learning, right? And, and what not to do, Nick, startup mindset. So I, I mean, I guess the question is for the age group, let's say people who are

Neil Thanedar: 09:47.426 Mm. Yeah.

Yeah.

is start a mindset.

Evan Meyer: 10:05.798 in their 20s, 30s, 40s, family, career building, that whole time of their life, right? Where they're setting up their life for their later life kind of thing and their time is spent. How do you end the squeaky wheel syndrome largely of elderly folks in these neighborhood meetings? I was part of one. was president of my neighborhood board and I think most people were something like 30 years older than me. I was

Neil Thanedar: 10:13.368 Mm-hmm.

Neil Thanedar: 10:17.005 Yeah.

Evan Meyer: 10:34.705 in my twenties at the time or early thirties, right? And it was like, I mean, I was the youngest by so much. It took a lot to kind of bring in some younger blood. How do we shift that type of person who can even do that in the first place and willing to do that? Because you're not this, this nest isn't necessarily a money conversation for these folks.

Neil Thanedar: 10:42.371 Yeah.

Neil Thanedar: 10:55.662 Yeah, I think it's hard for, it should not necessarily be a retirement job, right? Like that's the tough part. It could be a lot of people's first career, it could also be a second or a third career. So I think there's a lot of mixing and matching that you can do in politics. can spend, there's a lot of volunteering and activism work that I did while I was still running Labdoor, right? And so getting on the phone and calling people, writing, like...

one good blog post about a topic can go a lot further than you think. I recommend that to so many people who have, oh, I've got this big idea and I want to convince people and like, this should happen in politics. Like write it down. Give me a thousand words on that. know, like if you give me a thousand focus words on that and put it on the internet with a link, like I can share with other people and they can share with their friends and politicians can share it with each other. Right. And if you can go a step further than that.

You can draft a bill. You can talk to the politicians yourself. The steps into politics are relatively simple. And so keep wanting to convince people to like, you can do that an hour a week. You can do that on the side while you're still working. Especially if you're focused on a very specific issue, you might not need to be, it doesn't have to be your life. I think on the other side, you could jump all the way in too, and you can just make it your job.

is something that I've increasingly pushed myself on is between MCFN fighting campaign finance reform and then positive politics, writing this book and pushing this accelerator. Like those are the things that I think are the two biggest issues in politics. It's money, dark money is kind of the biggest problem. And I think the biggest opportunity is candid recruitment. And if we just like solve these problems, yeah, there's like, you put yourself in a place kind of in that startup mindset as well as like, I would be happy doing my whole life doing just this.

If I just saw these two things in my lifetime, I'd be a good place. Whenever you start zooming in that way, I think that's always the right place to be. But you can start looking for those things and finding those things while you're working anywhere else.

Evan Meyer: 13:00.938 Yeah. Yeah. I think one of the sources of what happens, my opinion, it's so hard to be an entrepreneur. Like the startup mindset is rigorous. It's disciplined. It's structured and potentially even has room for whimsical spontaneity, right? Like there's, it's a very well balanced, habit machine.

Neil Thanedar: 13:11.085 Yes.

Mm-hmm.

Neil Thanedar (13:28.65) Yeah. Yeah.

Evan Meyer: 13:28.989 that, right, in terms of not just what you do day to day, but how you think and how you interpret failure, how you interpret challenges, how you see opportunity, how you look at learning something new, right? how...

Neil Thanedar: 13:41.134 Yeah, you're always on. You're always on. always thinking anything can be a piece of information that could be useful. It happens a lot in politics, too, right? So it's like something cool about politics. think those startup people transfer very nicely into politics. The biggest challenge is the is the maybe there's like too much of a negative branding around politics, right? like startup people sometimes have a negative association with politics. But I think we're working on a lot of same problems.

Evan Meyer: 14:10.931 Yeah. Well, I think a lot of that is because the incentives are different. With startup in a business, you can make money. You have a lot more control. In politics, you're suppressed ultimately by bureaucracy. You're subject to the system. There is a feeling of power. But a lot of times that comes with the need to want to do a lot of good community work, right? And that can over...

Neil Thanedar: 14:17.024 Yeah. Yeah.

No.

Mm-hmm.

Neil Thanedar (14:30.51) Mm-hmm.

Evan Meyer: 14:36.305 it could supplant a lot of the drive to make money. And then you end up with not a lot of money, which I've seen a lot before also. Politicians who just like can't figure out how to make money. Right? They're often lawyers.

Neil Thanedar: 14:47.318 Yep. They're very separate people. there's also people, it's like the, have you ever heard the thing, like basketball players want to be rappers and rappers want to be basketball players? It's like, it's like that for like, like, like founders want to be politicians and politicians want to be founders. Like there's something very like both sides think that they can do the other side better sometimes.

Evan Meyer: 14:58.216 That's funny. Yeah.

Evan Meyer: 15:08.094 Yeah.

Neil Thanedar: 15:08.862 Even in my case, I actually think I'm good in startups. I love the Deion Sanders story, I grew up with that. If I'm like baseball Deion in startups, I want to be like football Deion in politics. There is something to me that, as much as I love startups, think politics is truly the biggest game and the oldest game. And I also think it's the one that I care about the most, I think is most important to me.

Evan Meyer: 15:25.263 Hahaha

Neil Thanedar: 15:37.664 And so I'm doing everything in my life to the same way that I try to, like as I was pitching it in the book, I was almost like pushing myself to be like, every time you tell someone else this, like you should be doing that too. Like fully commit to politics. Like you want to do the accelerator, do it earlier, like pull that forward. Like any of these types of again, it's somewhat of a startup mindset, but bringing it into politics, even like a hackathon, like what would a 48 hours in politics hackathon look like?

Those types of mindsets are just changing what people can do. Think about what people can do in 48 hours. I would love to see them draft bills, put teams together, pitch politicians all on a weekend. It's all possible. It lights people up when we talk about it. People want to do something in politics. You go to a town hall, yes, people are angry, but even more so, they're like...

Evan Meyer: 16:05.211 I love that.

Neil Thanedar (16:28.91) They're like ready to go. They're like they're like jumping out of their shoes to do something and if you just tell them like well Go vote or like we've got an election coming. I was like, that's not enough Like what else like what can I do today? Like let me walk out of this building and do something right now It's like you need to be able with like politicians and the politics needs to have an answer to like the call to action has to not just be like vote or even worse donate like the the call to action has to be like act like do this like take action like call this person do this thing write this bill, know, like

Evan Meyer (16:41.63) Yep.

Evan Meyer: 16:54.995 Right.

Neil Thanedar: 16:58.572 petition the government. The direct democracy is way more powerful than we think.

Evan Meyer: 17:03.721 Way more. I have a whole thing on donating and just how bad I think it is at so many levels, local, state, federal, just the idea of give money to me for my personal brand.

Neil Thanedar: 17:18.092 Hmm. Yeah.

Evan Meyer: 17:18.581 Right. It's like a weird because essentially as a politician, you're like a you're a sole proprietor or a single member LLC building your reputation and your money that you get is essentially your product and you're selling yourself. And it's and it doesn't mean there's any real outcomes. There's really no promise of outcomes. So you're kind of donating for a hope. What's that?

Neil Thanedar: 17:24.718 Mm-hmm.

Neil Thanedar: 17:32.577 Yep.

Neil Thanedar: 17:40.866 The feedback loops are Yeah, the feedback loops are tough, And then there's these issues, right? Where like, are you donating for ideology? I mean, there's a lot of these people who donating for corruption, right? And so you're competing with the when you play the money game, you compete with people who

have a lot more money than you, first of all, and also have worse incentives than you. They're going to spend money and then get more money back from the government versus you're going to spend money and not know where it comes back. Sometimes the best option is not, money might not convert to power particularly well in politics, but work converts to power pretty effectively, especially if you're very targeted with your work.

And that's a lot of I talk about in the book. It's a lot of what I, like when I tell friends and family and everyone on like on a podcast or anything, it's like, it's easier than you think, but just to get really focused on whatever your biggest issue is and just run with it. And I think that's, it's a huge, huge opportunity.

Evan Meyer (18:42.45) Yeah, but why would they do that when they could just type something nasty on social media and not even have a face?

Neil Thanedar: 18:45.858 You

Yeah, social media is a tough one. think that's the other thing that I'm like hoping to get people to transfer that energy is like bring that energy from social media into the real world and take action. you'll end that feedback loop is actually pretty fast, right? Like the feedback loop from action to some result is great, especially if you like you're talking to politicians, you might find a lot of these issues are not as partisan as you think, right? It's like,

sure the budget is a super partisan thing, if you're working on a certain issue with school lunches, it might be a, it's not a, first of all, it's not a federal issue. It might be a local issue and it might not be, you know, it's, it's not about Democrats versus Republicans. It's about, let's not cook the food in plastic for the kids or whatever. You know, it's like, there's like little details that we could get right that are just not partisan. And you like go to a single school board meeting and just pitch them. Or it's like,

I don't know, if the kids are complaining that they don't have options with milk, whatever. These are things that can be solved at a local level. And I'm trying to find that push, that motivation to kind of pick whatever you care about. If you have young kids, find the things in the schools that can make their life better, right? If there's something that you care about in housing or your local community. There are...

just so many places that you can plug in and you will potentially never have to deal with an election or even have to like never have to fundraise. You might never even have to be public. This could be done in a private, introvert, friendly way and it's fine. There are so many rules for politics that are outside the spotlight in a good way.

Evan Meyer: 20:22.579 Yeah.

Evan Meyer: 20:31.442 Right. People think they can't make change and they really can. And especially at the local level and the smaller your community, the easier it is to make change. Right. Like and lunches is a great example. Things related to trash, things related to whatever idea you have. These people are generally accessible every other week in a room.

Neil Thanedar: 20:40.141 Yeah.

Neil Thanedar: 20:51.628 Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Evan Meyer: 20:53.365 you can go speak publicly about your idea every other week in a room and they'll all hear you at 7 p.m. on Tuesday night or whatever, right? So like you can totally do that, but I think a lot of it is like, so there's a confidence factor there. There's also like a blame cycle that makes it's way easier to complain that things didn't work out and why people's life purpose or why they didn't fulfill their career goals or whatever. It's just so easy to blame things. And then

There's a feedback loop there of satisfaction, where if you blame, now you don't have to do anything and you're actually good. You can sort of just sit there, right? There's a habit loop, right? Probably something in the habit loop category of like, of that feeling, saying why depression is a habit in a lot of ways.

Neil Thanedar: 21:24.866 You

Neil Thanedar: 21:38.829 Yes.

Neil Thanedar: 21:44.908 Yeah, there's a lot of self-fulfilling on both sides, right? Yeah, and so I'm trying to build that positive self-fulfilling cycle, right? It's like, if we can say that, if you take one action, like pick your biggest issue, take one action, go for it. I think that positive feedback loop is just such a difference. And so I would love to see more people just take that leap.

Evan Meyer: 22:09.394 Yeah. Blame is a big deal, though. And I'm going to segue this a little bit into something a bit more federal. like, right. And because that's where it rings for me at the moment. But like. It's the same way, like if you blame the president, whatever president. You find all your cognitive bias, you know, you get past all of those and.

and you go into confirmation bias now and look for all the things that will make you right. And you find why you've never been able to get good healthcare or whatever and your kids can't get you right and there's someone sick and it's all because of Donald Trump.

Neil Thanedar: 22:53.678 Yeah.

Evan Meyer (22:54.48) or Biden, whatever, right? Or or Kamala. Like it does. And there's this loop and these presidents get blamed. It's the craziest thing for like the most mundane, like everyday things. It's like it's because of Trump. It's like that is it's such a crazy thought. I find that a lot of it is is.

Neil Thanedar: 23:16.089 The classic example is the stock market. Like the market goes up today and it's the presence thing and they like yet tomorrow goes down is also the president's fault. And you're like, the president's like pulling levers somewhere like like making.

Evan Meyer: 23:23.484 Right. But it doesn't. That's right. These are usually very long term initiatives. They can have some initial impact, but they but people blame the president like, for example, if the economy is good now and you don't like the current president, you attribute it to the previous president. The. The presidents do it to the presidents do it to.

Neil Thanedar: 23:30.819 Yeah. Yeah.

Neil Thanedar: 23:39.054 Yeah.

Yeah, like this all started two years ago or like whatever. Yeah, it's it never worked. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think I heard Trump recently saying what parts of the of the economy are yours? The good parts. Yeah, of course.

Evan Meyer: 23:56.665 Right, right, right. Right, this is an epidemic, I think. There's a blame cycle of feeling that the president, the people, like Newsom, right? There's so much local counties and local electeds could do.

Neil Thanedar: 24:05.474 Yeah.

Neil Thanedar: 24:11.543 Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Evan Meyer: 24:12.678 right? Or state elected to that. But no one knows who those people are. They don't know their city council. Most people don't know their city council members, county supervisors, state elected. They don't know who's handling their state control. They have to vote for these people, but they don't know who it is. So whose fault is it? Governor Newsom's the number one guy. And guess what? He's probably to blame for a lot of stuff. It's probably also shouldn't blame him for a lot of stuff, but you can't just finger point directly just because you have a problem.

Neil Thanedar: 24:18.241 Yeah. Yeah.

You

Yeah.

Evan Meyer: 24:42.194 with your foot today.

Neil Thanedar: 24:43.895 It's also the hardest, but the higher up you go with your blame, the less impact you can have. I think that's the important part of the blame is I think the more you can focus specifically on where is the actual problem, like where do you actually fix the problem, that you might find is like, I don't know, it's like you really want high speed rail in California. There's a bunch of things blocking it and the governor's not one of them or they might not be a big part of it. And so there might be things that

Evan Meyer (24:53.8) That's it.

Neil Thanedar: 25:13.436 And then that might go the other way too. Like Newsom might be standing in front of a high speed rail project that he doesn't have that much to do with as well. And he'll take credit for it on one side as well. Right. So you like too much credit, too much blame. Like I think the president does get is like the classic example of too much credit and too much blame. It's just like maybe that just matters less in a positive politics world where you just say, hey, I'm like, I'm focused on.

Evan Meyer: 25:23.444 Right.

Neil Thanedar: 25:40.321 If I'm focused on campaign finance reform in Michigan especially, maybe that's statewide. Maybe that we're gonna go state by state. think Montana, there are campaign finance reform advocates who have what they call the Montana Plan, which is kind of a like a and Citizens United at statewide level essentially. And the idea is like if Montana can figure it out, like other states should copy and we could potentially solve the problem state by state. It's fascinating to think about, hey, it's like,

there are two ways to solve this problem. One is a few people in Montana sprint on this and provide an example and we get done. Or we all think about how hard it is to make a constitutional amendment. I think obviously we should be fighting for both these things. They're both important things. But I think the more sometimes we focus on these kind of unusual things that might have already worked. are cases where Michigan is actually late. There are 48 states

that require Freedom of Information Act disclosures for all their state politicians. And Michigan and Massachusetts are the only two that don't. And Massachusetts is going direct democracy in 2026 to make FOIA count for all state politicians. And then Michigan will be the only state left that is not gonna do it, hasn't done it yet. And so if we wanna do FOIA in 2028 in Michigan.

We don't have to invent anything. There's no some crazy new magic that needs to happen. We just copy what 49 other states did, pick the best of it, and just go direct democracy and get it done. Sometimes people don't think about that. Sometimes it's just like, well, let's ask the legislature to do it. Let's lobby our politicians to do it. And then they don't do it. we're like, well, a Democratic speaker didn't do it, and a Republican speaker didn't do it. like, well, how are we going to get this done? It's like, well, we go direct democracy. I bet you we'll get over 60 % of the population.

Evan Meyer: 27:33.416 When you say that, when you say that, you mean getting something on the ballad?

Neil Thanedar: 27:37.232 Yeah, so get something on the ballot. Particularly in a lot of these states, increasingly that will be the... That's also a more permanent solution to some of these problems, right? So if you get campaign finance into a ballot proposal, that changes the constitution. It doesn't just change the law. And so if in two years or four years, especially in Michigan, where the parties can change, the House can flip every two or four years in the state level, you could have that law change in two or four years, right? Something that gets a ballot proposal that is like...

That anti-gerrymandering ballot proposal, there's now a huge section of the Michigan constitution that is different because of that. And so you can see the paragraphs that are different. That's like, let's go add a few paragraphs to the Michigan constitution that says that every state politician is required to follow FOIA.

Evan Meyer: 28:11.602 Yep. Yeah.

Evan Meyer: 28:25.054 So will the accelerator help get those more people's ballot initiatives?

Neil Thanedar: 28:30.659 That could be one of them. That's what I would say one of the best, like, that's why I would say like a project or a sprint could be a ballot initiative. if I was going through the accelerator myself, this would be my idea. Like, I would, I'd use the FOIA project and I'd run with it. Maybe I'll do it myself. Like, maybe I can go through the accelerator while I'm building it. But that would be what I would do in the next two years. And I think there's like a way where there's an organization that needs to be built around it, but you could get really far in 12 weeks. Like, you could get the potential, like the...

the language built, could maybe have a pro bono lawyer look at it and get some language around it. You could have potential endorsers around it. You could have politicians who are agreeing with it. You could have a poll conducted. There's so many things in 12 weeks that could be done. And that if you're pitching at the end of 12 weeks and saying, we need this many volunteers, this much money, and with this organization, let's build it, I think we could get some great.

nonprofit foundations and leaders to be in the audience for that. So that's like, that's what I'm imagining is like very much that YC for politics. And YC does this like, they really help you practice this two and a half minute demo day pitch like the actual deliverable is each founder gets two and a half minutes on a big stage. And I remember like, you know, like Joe Montana was right there and Ashton Kutcher was right there. There's all these like, all these other famous investors, but those are the ones that everyone else would know who they are. And

is just like you're in this like you have this perfect pitch that you've practiced over weeks and like you have spent 12 weeks sprinting to make the graph go up as much as you can to like get as much done and with everyone else also doing that at the same time. All that pressure and all that energy around it like by the time you pitched 12 weeks later you were like your two and half minutes is so sharp. Like I used to like practice like dropping my mic and like picking back up and like not phasing me or like any little detail.

Evan Meyer (30:08.34) Sure.

Neil Thanedar: 30:19.888 of like, I knew what I was going to say. If you could be that in politics and you're like in 12 weeks, like they've got their perfect stump speech. It could be for running or it could be for action. Just get, think there's a lot that can be done that 12 weeks.

Evan Meyer: 30:34.483 Yeah. Do you have a current event, say, in the last, I don't know, several months that you've dealt now with either people coming to you through the accelerator or that you've spoken to one way or another? I'm not sure how far the accelerator is right now, but have you spoken to anyone who's using your philosophy?

to help do some of these or achieve some of these outcomes or at least get into the startup mindset around something in current events, like pick your issue.

Neil Thanedar: 31:16.086 Yeah, think the one I'd love to see more of, I've been writing about it recently. I think that there's a lot of arguments around immigration. And I see this in Michigan, especially my wife's family is Hmong. So their family fought with the US in the Vietnam War and then became refugees afterwards and came like thousands of Hmong people came to the US afterwards. And they're in a situation where kind of a few Hmong people like

never quite got all the way to their citizenship. was like, should have been easy 10 or 20 or 30 years ago. But for various reasons, like people were like, just like they thought they'd be fine with a green card, it would be okay. And now we're like really struggling and like people are in, in chance of being deported and just like fighting for these like specific cases of people who are like community leaders and you know, they're like, like some of these are like their grandparents or parents like now, like these people have been here for 30 plus years. Like the stories of people who are

Like they haven't even been, because they were refugees, like their parents were refugees. So they were born in a refugee camp in another country. like in Thailand, let's say, but they're from Laos. They got deported to Laos. They don't even know, they've never been to Laos in their life. Literally like they're not from there, you know, like they don't know what to do there. And so I've been working with a few of these cases where the, because we kind of, it's like family or like friends of family to like.

advocate for these stories. so, and I think that's the, and maybe like the broader story around immigration as well. Like I think immigrants also get a lot of blame around kind of the problems in the country, right? But I think like a lot of what you see in the kind of Hmong community is a very interesting, like I think like if you, if you brought like the average like Southern American, like to a Hmong community, like there'd be so many similarities around it.

among people in America drink Bud Lights and barbecue and hunt. They're just as American as anyone else. They're all Lions fans around here and you're gonna get complaints even in a slightly bad season like this year. It's so similar to any other place in America, but there's not that vision into, you're not hearing these stories.

Neil Thanedar: 33:33.072 And so I think so much about, I like to think of activism as also writing, telling stories. There's all these other ways where you can tell stories and change mindsets. I think immigration is a classic one. It's like the more you know, the more immigrants you know or the more times you meet someone, you're like, it's just like, people are people in many ways, right? And so I like to see those stories work on that. And specifically, I've been top of mind.

Minnesota, Minneapolis, like there's a lot of Hmong people who are in Minneapolis, right? So it's like, it's very interesting to see like be even like two, three, four steps away from current events and just take one, two, three, four cases and just try to make your impact where you can make them.

Evan Meyer: 34:16.648 Yeah. Do you feel that you need to pick a side? And when I say side, mean Democrat or Republican in order to get the kind of leverage needed to get many things done?

Neil Thanedar: 34:35.697 I think to get elected right now at a high level, yes, you probably have to pick a party. I think that over decades could change, right? I think, look, I've written about abolishing the electoral college. think primary should be open, right? I think there are opportunities. Some things that California has done well with open primaries, I think should be done in other places. So I think there are opportunities to do that. I think there's opportunities to go local and be...

independent now. think that's one place I think is you see that with Matt Mahan in San Jose. We were talking about that earlier. You start to see with a lot of these other mayors, you're seeing it with Mary Sheffield in Detroit and Michelle Wu in Boston. We'll see what happens with Zoran Mamdani, but I think he's really trying to push for a lot of these similar kind of positive nonpartisan issues, right? I think there's like

the more you focus on, there's like a phrase, sewer socialism, where it's like, if like socialists just like focus on like making sure that the sanitation systems worked and it's like, if things just like worked, you might actually have this like, that's what earns you the right to get more work done, or like through the government in particular. It's like, if the government has the trust to like, sewers run well, like I can trust them to like build the roads and like then I can trust them to do the schools. And so I think there's like the Mamdani thing of like,

let's make sure that even if like 20 inches of snow falls, like the streets are clean the next day. Like that's the sign. That's like, you can look out your window the next morning. You're like, Hey, like the city, the city is working. Like the government works. like if the mayor himself is out there like with a shovel and like, there's something to be said for that. Like, Hey, like let's keep it as nonpartisan as possible. Like it's the snow. It's like the streets, like we need to like, there's clear, like better and worse. Like there's not partisan nonpartisan. It's like the streets are either cleaner or less clean. I saw I'm like the more we.

focus on those things, what I call the fundamentals in politics. And I also think that comes on to jobs and housing and education and healthcare and transparency. These kind of like, these making people free to succeed kind of problems are not necessarily partisan. And you could potentially fight for some big issues. Like I've said this, I think you can come up with both a very progressive and a very conservative argument for universal healthcare.

Neil Thanedar: 36:57.967 Like you can make the, like, it will save trillions of dollars argument for universal healthcare and you can say like, it can save hundreds of thousands of lives argument of universal healthcare. they're both right. And they come from this idea of what I call lowercase politics. So like, you could be a small L liberal or a small C conservative on certain issues. You know, it's like, you know, I might have certain like small C conservative issues on like, I don't know, gambling. Maybe I think it's like, should be harder to gamble or something like that. You know, like certain things like that. But it's like, I might be like,

I might be small L liberal on the idea that if people are doing it in moderation, it's fine. Let's say, there's these ways where people could sometimes be very like capital D Democrat or capital R Republican, and then it's like they don't actually make any of their decisions. They're just like, well, let me look up what the capital D Democratic position is or the capital R Republican issue is on this, and it just comes out of their mouth. And if you're just like, hey, actually, I think that it's a nuanced issue, and I'm a little conservative on it and a little liberal on it, and like,

Evan Meyer: 37:46.281 Right.

Neil Thanedar: 37:55.054 As long as we were careful with it, it's going to be okay. Let's like, you know, whatever it is. Like, I think that those are ways where those are not necessarily democratic or Republican things. It's just like, we're potentially coming at it from a position of like, let's like, let people be free while also not being hurt or something like that. You know, like there's like, we're coming at it from a perspective of people. It was like, there's like a maximizing the good of people, right? Like there's, think that as long as we're kind of coming from that fundamental perspective, you could shed a lot of the partisan aspects of it.

Evan Meyer: 38:16.254 Yeah.

Evan Meyer: 38:25.011 Yeah, you could shed a lot of it. know, one of the things it brings up, which I think would be still maybe a challenge is, you know, if you have an idea and you don't start to take the side of the people in power, then they don't support. It's hard to get the little wins if you don't mold your idea so that it benefits them to.

in a way that right. now it's like so you sort of have to build you have to compromise potentially compromise your values worst case scenario. But like you almost definitely have to conform to some degree to move up. I mean there's not much difference of that in the startup mindset of finding product market fit and like molding right.

Neil Thanedar: 39:08.072 Yeah, you have to be friends. Yeah, have to be willing to go where the... In startups, we call it like, you want to be stubborn with the mission and flexible with how to get there. That long-term, you're be very stubborn on, but there's like, this week we're going try this business model and next week we're going try this business model. Now we're B2B and now we're B2C. You can completely change the business in weeks. We did that with LabDor.

Evan Meyer: 39:22.643 Yeah.

Evan Meyer: 39:32.367 Hahaha

Neil Thanedar: 39:37.201 Sometimes the answer was both, you know, like you're like, you eventually get to an answer that's like something much more nuanced than you originally like you're like, originally, like, well, there's an obvious answer, right? And then you test five things. You're like, actually, the answer is like B and C, but like half of each or some of that, you know, like, let's make two departments. So it's just, I think in politics is the same way you might, that's why I think there's like different structures. Like there is this, like the negative of money in politics, obviously like needs to be fought.

heavily and I think that's one thing that I'm a big proponent of obviously. I love this AOC quote too, like, you can't beat big money with more money, you need a completely different game. I think that completely different game is the other part of what I'm working for. It's like, yes, we should lessen the money of dark money in politics, but can we just go completely around the system? Is there a completely new pipeline into politics?

that can be built. think people like Emily's List tried that for women in politics starting in 1980s. There have been all these like vote bets and with honor for military veterans and there's all these like very interesting organizations that focus on specific demographics and try to accelerate them into politics. It has been done in even like the Federalist Society is like a way where like some controversial way of like judges being recruited into politics, right? So I think that

These things have existed, but they've existed in very partisan, targeted demographic ways. And I think what is the positive open version of that? I think it's positive politics, and it's what I'm trying to build. That's what the mission is. I'm very flexible on whether it's a hackathon accelerator or some combination of all of it. But I think it's definitely helping the ambitious optimists.

take action as quickly as possible. fundamentally that's what works is just like you get them to take action and get that positive feedback loop going.

Evan Meyer: 41:37.384 You know what was told to me to start my journey into civics is I was told to join, I think I said something like, I want to be on the, I don't know, like the planning commission or something like that. Like something, he's like, well, you may want to start maybe like join your neighborhood association first.

Neil Thanedar: 41:58.768 Yeah. Yeah.

Evan Meyer: 41:59.698 before just like jump right. And I was like, and that was the beginning. I don't know 20 years, 20, where I was like, there's neighborhood associations. I see there's also business improvement associations. There's chambers that do a lot of good work, but just at the neighborhood level, it sort of aligns with the most basic local understanding of grassroots government.

Neil Thanedar: 42:05.765 Yes.

Neil Thanedar: 42:09.338 He's even here.

Evan Meyer (42:27.58) and they're everywhere and they meet once a month. So usually I'm just like, if you don't even know where to get started, just like go to your neighborhood association meeting and learn what's going on in your neighborhood.

Neil Thanedar: 42:37.948 Yeah. Or take your uncle that always complains about politics. Give an outlet to the person who wants to complain. I think sometimes that is like, there's a value there. That's like my, it's a one hour solution to politics. It's like literally go at what you were saying, 7 p.m., spend the hour. And then you're like, actually the other people in this room have similar issues to me. They're listening. You actually, you have names to faces. These are people that you'd never would.

kind of connect with otherwise, but they're just, they probably just live down the street from you. Like that's the joy of neighborhood associations. My brother's now a community board member in New York City. And I think it's like, it's such a cool, like to see the, like how ideas build up from the community level to then like the city council members want to hear what the community board finds out. And then like the mayor wants to know what the city council finds out. like you have, you can just go to your community board meeting and

complain about anything or like there's like there's an empty lot that should be something like anyone can talk about that and I think there's there's also sometimes the The more it's personal in a good way I think the better it is like I think I talk about this in politics like the negative partisanship of this like that chapter one starts with Clinton versus Gingrich fighting and it's like that is an entirely fake fight like they are both like

Gingrich's talk is trying to impeach Clinton for an affair while he's also having an affair with someone on the impeachment committee. They are very similar people. They had deals that they were making behind the scenes, they had a healthcare deal and a social security deal, and then they just drop it when they're all fighting later publicly.

Evan Meyer: 44:09.402 Yeah

Neil Thanedar: 44:24.484 But it's like, it was like fake. It was like some sort of WWE wrestling thing going on here where they were using each other as each other's enemy and it wasn't true. I think the more we can get into the, off of that red versus blue, good versus evil kind of thing, say it's just like, it's regular people at a neighborhood trying to make our neighborhood cleaner and it's like,

should the park have an amphitheater or concession stand or whatever. It's like, what do want there? It's not simple. like, is like, well, maybe we should, there's no place for live music in our little town. Let's do the amphitheater. That means that we've got to sacrifice some sort of thing. And we were like, I think our local community board is like, each month is doing like, there was like a March Madness thing last year that they're doing again this year. It was basically like,

Evan Meyer (44:59.39) Right.

Neil Thanedar: 45:20.913 we're gonna like, of this 16 things, we're gonna like try to fund one project. And it's like, let's try to decide, let's like vote and figure out what's like the project that we should do. Like there's a lot that can be done in just the like, hey, let's talk about what the city should do.

Evan Meyer: 45:34.804 Sure. OK, final stage here. want to bring I want to invoke your father, U.S. Congressman Sri Thanedar here for a second, because I think when we're talking about the red versus blue division and now it seems more toxic than ever.

How do you navigate these kinds of conversations when people have ideas of things they want to do and they may get political? Your father is a Democrat. He's led some some strong initiatives against the current administration. And I'm wondering how that shapes your thinking, but also how it shapes the conversations that you have with people who may think differently than you.

Neil Thanedar: 46:24.719 I think for sure. I think the some of the like, it's not personal stuff, I think comes from that. Like I actually did like there was like a death threat that was like a particularly serious one that we got like to our house recently, or like a few months ago. And I kept it because I was like, I was like, to me personally, and like, my brother got one like they my parents, both my parents name on my mom and dad's name on it. so like, there are cases of like, there's just like extreme negativity, right?

Evan Meyer (46:39.86) You or your father?

Neil Thanedar: 46:53.072 These things are coming to our houses too, you know? so, obviously we live not near them. There's all these different things. And so, I think that part of it is, it's a hard life to be a member of Congress. I think it's never been higher, the number of threats to members of Congress and their families than it ever has been. So I think that part of it is,

in many ways, like the worst part of politics. so I think that, and it's hard, I think that part of it is the, the part that I don't want to like scare people away from politics is this like, how much of that is real or how much of it is like, I think that, that I think has to be like, we need to like solve that problem in politics, like the, like actually like making sure our politicians are safe and like, we understand that these are like real people with families. I think that part of it, think we've, some part of it is getting lost, where it's like, we,

I don't want it to get so far into sports where like people do that in sports too where like fans are like screaming at a player on the sideline or like screaming at their family when their family's in the crowd and you're like, that's just like, these are real people, like those are kids, like these are real people. So I want to watch for all those things and I do that, like I advocate for, you know, there should be more safety and there should be like less of this negativity in like the personal negativity level.

At the same time, I did write in positive politics, positive politics doesn't mean puff pieces. It doesn't mean don't protest. I think there's a sense of if we see politicians or specific people who are being extremely negative and causing problems in our politics, think it's very positive to fight them. And it's like to fight those issues. Fighting dark money in politics is incredibly important, even if it puts you at odds with specific people. And so think that like,

there you have to fight. Like there's a big thing like in this book is like why fight was it was like is a core chapter of the book. And I said it's like fight for the American dream and fight for the fundamentals. These are my things. Like I think the fundamentals are the way we unlock Americans to reclaim the American dream for themselves. I think that's like you've got to that's the kind of the pieces that I've been I've been focused on the most. So I think that's

Neil Thanedar: 49:18.647 Those are all places I think are super important. I also think that you, the same thing that we've talked about in politics with like the focus often goes on the most controversial bills, but the stuff that he's gotten past are things like, you know, like making it easier for small businesses to access government contracts and pitch for government contracts. very like, there were nonpartisan things that we've been working on. We've been talking about like how to make it easier to have like five to nines covered childcare and things like that.

You know, all these like making it easier for like nurses to get training and things like there are all these different programs or in like and like How to get bring money to nonprofits in Detroit and fund better services in Detroit how to do constituent services in Detroit? They're like the vast majority of the actual work of a congressman is like this kind of service work it's either like true constituent services like how do you like get work done for individuals or it's

like passing relatively non-controversial bills, like whatever you can get done, especially in the minority, like let's get bills that are bipartisan, non-partisan, and just pass them with, you know, that like almost unanimous votes that you never hear about, but there's like, there are many unanimous votes that happen in any given month in Congress, and you could be those, you could be some of those. And so those are some of the things I've learned from politics. It's just, it's a very tough.

It can be a tough life, but it's a very energizing life. It's also my dad lost, he's like an immigrant from India, grew up very poor. I like tell my kids this story, just like pump them up and have them understand how much like him just like making it to America was in itself a challenge. And then he built businesses, testing labs, my whole childhood, and then lost them all in the 2008 recession. And so in 2010, when he was done with that battle,

as soon as I graduated from Michigan, he was 55 years old in 2010 and we started a business together. We started a testing lab, just the two of us, and we started running. We only saw the success of that in 2016 and really in 2020 and beyond. He was 60 plus when he was seeing the successes and then he got an apology after all of that at 61. I do think it teaches you a lot of stories. It teaches

Neil Thanedar (51:36.6) politics can be a second career at any age. It can energize you, where I think that his last decade has been the most energizing of his life. So I think that's awesome. Absolutely, there are challenges, but there's just no more meaningful work and more impactful work. And I love helping as much as I can. I love showing my kids. I took my kids to a town hall and showed them the positives and negatives of town halls.

I like, I took them to Congress. I want them to see things. Like I want, I think the more you see what politics really is, it is in some ways like both more exciting and more basic than you'd imagine. And it's just like, it's more human. It's like way, way more human than you'd imagine. And I think more people should know that. And so I try to tell those stories in the book, Positive Politics. I try to tell those to as many people as I can, but it is like, anyone can run. It's an amazing...

journey and opportunity. And I think it works especially well if you have a kind of a clear focus and like specific issues that are nonpartisan that you're willing to fight for beyond the biggest headline grabbing stories to.

Evan Meyer: 52:47.827 Right. Well, hopefully we can change the psychology of people to see that their own self-worth can be activated through meaningful work on these issues that are not dividing people.

And they can go and do and create meaningful change. They don't just have to read things on social media and let the algorithm determine their belief system. And, you know, you care about trash and you're too much building up on your front lawn or on your street or go fix it. Right. But.

You know, I, so I hope the work you're doing can move people in a direction to see that they are possible. It is possible. And if it, if they're not going to do anything about it, you shouldn't hate other people so much who are at least doing things. That's what I say. At least like, at least they're doing stuff.

Neil Thanedar: 53:49.328 Yeah, I think I think it matters. Yeah. Yeah, I think the action is so important, right? I think that that's at least people who are people who are trying. I think that matters. And that I give a lot more credit to people who are trying in a earnest, ambitious, optimistic way, even if they're they're struggling versus the like, obviously, like, we've got to fight corruption, and we've got to fight some of these true kind of polemic issues. But there's not as much of that as you think. I think it's just

it gets a lot of the headlines. And so I think the more we can make politics that, real action that you do yourself, I think everyone will feel happier with it.

Evan Meyer: 54:29.235 Yeah, it's Roosevelt's In the Arena monologue or whatever, right? You know it, right?

Neil Thanedar: 54:35.441 Yeah, I have it up here right now. I have a big plaque of it. And funnily enough, that whole speech, it's a one-hour speech. He's actually giving a graduation speech in the Sorbonne in France. They're Harvard, right? And he's kind of convincing these college graduates to

Evan Meyer: 54:41.074 wow, okay.

Neil Thanedar: 55:00.046 do something important with your life and don't be snooty critics. And the whole thing is talking about people and business think that they're above politics and he really digs into all this stuff and so it's worth reading the whole hour long speech.

Evan Meyer (55:19.83) Awesome. Neil, thank you so much for being on and spending the time here today and sharing your insights and your experience and the great work you're doing. I wish you much success and keep up the positive politics. Any last words to the world?

Neil Thanedar: 55:24.186 Yeah, I'll this.

Neil Thanedar: 55:34.328 Absolutely.

Check out PositivePoliticsBook.com is where you can buy the book. I just recorded the audiobook, so it should be out in April. I read it all myself. It took me 14 hours or four days to get the full recording done. Hopefully you all love that. Check out the book and PositivePolitics.org if you want to apply to the accelerator or hackathon.

Evan Meyer: 56:03.604 Love it, love it. Thank you so much, Neil. Take care.

Neil Thanedar: 56:06.704 Thank you.

---

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity while preserving the authentic flow of conversation.