Part in a conversation on bipartisanship, politics and public part to see. Wake Forest University and wins them sale and North Carolina is the host of this event. Good evening and welcome to all of you and welcome to senators burr and senator warner. Senators, both of you have had very long careers in Public Service. I know that you were in the house in 1994 and senator warner, 1989 worked with doug wild or before becoming governor yourself of virginia. What inspired your career in Public Service . What would you say to young people today who would like to pursue a career in Public Service . laughs i like to think that i was i actually am a little bit older than richard laughs he colors his hair. Not anymore. At least i have here i like to think i was old enough to get touched by the idealism of the sixties, not old enough to be jaded by it. I have grown up in the midwest in indiana, illinois, connecticut and worked for the same company for 35 years. And i was the first my family to graduate from college. And somehow, my parents werent political, i had boy scouts and church and community pizza, but not political. Somehow i always had the and there was a time when i went off and did business and into college and law school, during college and law school, but one of the things is for all the frustrations in politics, when you actually get stuff done, its becoming rarer and rarer, at least in our day jobs, the ability to affect peoples lives in an extraordinarily positive way, and we need it more than ever now. You know, many people in this room you my father and mother. Those who grew up in the community. And they instilled in me that there is a time to complain, and when thats over, you need to sign up or shut up. I remember the day i told my wife i was going to run for congress. Im still reminded of it 25 years later laughs . You know, the reality is weve all got to pick where wed like to make an impact. Mark and i serve in an incredible, important place in an incredible, challenging time. And i think we have talked about it. 20 years from now somebody will look at how we conducted the intelligence committee. How he interacted with 70 intelligence agencies. And they will look at the precedent we set and hopefully they will follow that. It just so happens we do it at a time when there is a completely different approach on the house side. The bar has been set pretty low. But the obvious thing is, you cant do it if we dont trust each other. Now, we dont agree on everything and when we dont agree, we get together and we hammered that out. If, in fact its a tie, chairman still gets to win. But to my knowledge we have never exercised that. And the reality is that i think the institution and certainly the committee has a responsibility and they are better off because we do it. You mentioned trust. How do you engender that trust between the two of you . A few glasses of wine along the way. laughs i think that we i got to the senate, i had never been a legislator. The business side, you are measured by what you get done, i had an opportunity to be governor. I got to the senate and i had to throttle back. Throttle back a few times, you realize you are not going to get everything done right away. There was richard and a good friend of richards, sacks b chandlers, former senator from georgia. We became good friends and we didnt agree on everything but i think at the end of the day, the secret sauce that is missing from too much of our politics is eighth trust and that trust means that sometimes you have to be willing to do what you think is right, even if your team doesnt agree with it and until you can show your willingness to stand up for something you believe in, and front frankly your team doesnt agree with, you dont fully earn that trust and i think richard and i have hand tried to earn that with each other. We gave each other plenty of grief along the way, we travel, we have traveled on some of these times around the world. But it starts with a personal relationship and a recognition that the friendship and and relationship is more important than short term partisan points. He doesnt know what its like to subpoena the president s son. But he did turn to me and say, you are going to do what . And the fact is that doing things like that, is not something you expect to do when you take this job. But its part of the process that he and i committed to at the beginning which is, we are going to follow the facts. And if you cant talk to everybody that might be connected, how in the world can you determine whats factual . I think we will probably talk later on about social media and about the world we are in now. But im asked, what am i scared about . Im scared about what i dont know. What i dont understand. And what you see on the National Media is not indicative of the relationships we have in washington. Mark and i have a good relationship, and you would believe that 98 other people dont. And the truth is, if that was the case we would get nothing done. Because the senate rules allow one person to stop anything at any time. We do know which guys are the designated jerks on both sides. And there would be, in any kind of poll i was asked earlier by susan, how do you get things done . You identify the people that you have a common interest with. You may disagree with them with 60 of the things, but 40 you will find agreement on. If its health care, im doing bob casey. It used to be, i was doing deals with ten ted kennedy and. Why . Because we believed in the same things on those issues. But, also we were looking for somebody who covers the other ones back. I think, in the case of the intelligence committee, we do an extremely good job of communicating with each other and covering our backs with our members even on the committee when we are taking a tough position. But also, give him appropriate credit. It would have been so much easier in todays world for richard just to say, im going to go with the flow as opposed to where we started. Based on the russia stuff where we said, no, we are going to follow the facts wherever they go. And one of the things that i am more proud of is the folks that we had do most of the investigation, the folks they talked to didnt realize which ones were democrats, which one where republicans in terms of staff. There have been a host of other areas, and dragging him into the 21st century on technology stuff. He has a flip phone on technology, he recognize that in many ways there is no committee of technology in the senate. You speak to this better than i have, we have kind of carved out that area on a whole host of issues. I made this comment at the president s house earlier, its not liberal, conservative, red and blue or future past. This is a guy willing to grapple with those future past issues. Really important. You painted a rosy picture of washington, but you have 2015 study of millennials, harvard study of millennials, 74 express distrust in the governments and there was a more recent gallop poll, americans approval of congress remain at 20 , this is from 2019. Americas approval remain at 20 for the second consecutive month for congress. And this having declined after two years. So, is washington you said washington is not broken, but the statistics suggest otherwise. What can we do to restore faith in our government and processes . Look at the last 40 years. The majority of america, they get their news as an alert on their phone. Look at the alerts you get at 8 00 in the morning. Look at the alert at 8 00 at night, see if its different. The likelihood, it is. Maybe we should be talking to the journalists in the class about the standards of journalism where, historically, they came out and you had to have two sources, one of them had to be a name. Every source today is anonymous, it doesnt matter whether its right or left, its an anonymous source. Imagine if we had to operate in a world where everybody was anonymous. We have interviewed over 200 people in the russia investigation. There maybe 13 that you know who we interviewed because they came out publicly or there was some acknowledgment of the subpoena. There were 180 plus people that you will never read about, hopefully, that came in and that we interviewed because we do do things behind closed doors. We are not ashamed of that. We think america is safer because we do our business behind closed doors. Our members dont talk about it, but ill tell you as a vice chairman and the chairman, our biggest challenge from this is over, its to get to when our members dont talk to the press. We do our business which is oversight over 70 agencies so mark and i can look at you and absolutely assure you that everything we do lives within the letter of the law or the order of the president. If, in fact, we breach the confidence that we have with 17 intelligence agencies, we are not going to get the information from them that we need to do correct oversight. He would like to be in the press every day. laughs the fact is, thats not where our committee operates and its certainly not where we gain the trust of the people that we actually do the oversight on. I would first of all say, some of those statistics in terms of congressman we have earned it. 20 . As a matter of fact, 9 get something. Thats relative. I think theres these inherent contradictions, whether its 9 or 20 . Yet we still see reelection rates on individual members that topped 75 into the last couple cycles. Its easy to hate congress but love your congressman. Number one. Number two, i do think an institutional problem that we have at this point is we have driven too much power in both the house or the senate to the respective leaders, majority leader, minority leader, speaker and when you dont legislate most of the year and you wait until these big hairy balls of mass that happens at the end of the year, whether its budget wise, tax policy wise, that is not a rational way to do this. The largest institution in the u. S. Government. Number three, i think that we too often, and i think there was less of this when there were lots of separate pieces of power rather than power going through a majority leader, minority leader. It doesnt matter which team, and that he or she raises the money and you have to be, first and foremost loyal to your team more than loyal to your country. Which is a huge flaw. But i spent longer in business than i did in politics. The biggest difference in business, you get measured by what you get done. And many people i work with in politics, they can tell you and i work with in the congress they can tell you what theyve been against most of their life but really what they are for. And unless and until we all start to hire people who are willing to get to yes and even if that yes it may not be it geologically perfect, we are going to continue to have those. And i dont think that we can continue, and we have a unique relationship in the realm of intelligence oversight, we have a little more freedom to get things done and the things we get done dont always necessarily appear in the press but i do think there is a huge problem in a world thats moving as quickly as our world is moving and you mentioned 65 americans get some or all of their news from facebook news. That has no i did tour cool regulator at all. If we dont show that we can get to yes on certain minerals, and millennials and i say this as someone who does love the press, i know you want to ship throw a shoe at the tv when the news comes on, i feel the same way and im inside the tv. laughs if you tune out and say to hell with all of it, all you are doing is turning the keys over to what i call the wing nuts in either political party. And i think there are a host of issues around technology that may be able to be real formulated, there might be certain areas when it comes to business, economic incentives that are not relitigating health care and education, everyone has their established position. Maybe going bigger is actually easier to get common agreement. On certain areas we ought to find where we can put some points on the board so that even if its not the worlds biggest issue, the congress and the government can say, we have actually fixed that and we are going to move on to something else. And i think there are a host of issues we could get into tonight where we can do that. I want to ask you, you both have mentioned now social media, and i know you both feel strongly about responsible use of social media currently. Social media is playing a really big role in our political discourse. Are you concerned about this role that social media is playing . We probably differ a little bit on our approach. Listen, this is a valuable platform for the American People to communicate. From a committee standpoint, what we would like to see is a collaboration with government. Wed like to see a willingness to participate on those issues that deal with National Security or election security. And i might say, if it hadnt been for what we uncovered over two years, we might have had a big problem in 2018. We didnt because we had a level of cooperation and collaboration between social media companies. Not all with the federal government and we were able to put together an architecture that made it through the 18 election without incident. Some of it was a policy change on the part of the administration, brushing people off the plate. 20 is going to be a much more challenging thing. We are fairly confident right now, we can expand this collaborative agreement. I think mark has got some different thoughts as it relates to regulating the platforms, but you have to understand that when we saw social media used to create societal chaos in the United States, there was no legislative remedy for this. Because they are under a First Amendment issue. So we could have rushed out and said, we are going to regulate this and it might have made a big splash. But the two of us realized, we could do that, it will get overturned in the Supreme Court. They will say they are First Amendment protection. So its better in this case, and this may be the model in the future, how government, private sector, academia collaborate together for the good of the country. And thats the theme that we are going out with. I agree and i disagree. I mean, i think that weve got, i say this my background was in technology, i was a Venture Capitalist. I was lucky enough to get in the Wireless Industry in the eighties. I think we became totally infatuated with these platforms and we became way over the top techno optimists. We had a traditional approach, the Republican Party said business, innovation, entrepreneurship. There are the democrats under obama that fell in love with the fact that google and facebook said they are going to be good companies. And i think they didnt even realize the power. And we were completely caught off guard as a government how the dark underbelly of social media could really get us to hate each other, get us on each others throats to, be manipulated by outside forces in ways that i think everybody fully understood. And it will still, frankly, blow your mind. So, where i would respectfully, partially disagree with richard, i am not 100 sure that these platforms and their First Amendment rights, the recent why these companies have no responsibility they have the same responsibilities that a Media Company has in the late 90s we set up rules for social media, we basically said lets consider these companies as dumb pipes or telecoms companies. And maybe that made sense in the late 90s. But 65 of americans get their news from facebook and google, maybe we should be thinking that what was given them an exemption called section 230 exemptions, maybe it needs to be rethought. We already said you cant do child pornography, you cant do sex trafficking, you cant do bombing. Other countries the, uk and australia are starting to look at it. I have to get my spiel in maybe we ought to have a discussion that says, inaudible if you actually had to own your content that you posted on facebook and put your real identity next to that, that might decrease. Countries like estonia have seen so much outside intervention that the only way you get on the internet in on social media in estonia as if you validate who you are. That might work in america, but i think there are things where some of my folks on the democratic side are on break i dont want to simply turn the keys over to large chinese Platform Companies, but i do think and i will take that off the table i do think we have to know what data is collected on us and what its worth. I think we ought to know. If we get tired of facebook, we ought to be able to easily move all of our data from facebook, including our cat videos, to a new site easily. Data portability and still be able to talk to people and remain on facebook. There are pro competition things around transparency, around portability, around certain rules of the road and i think there would be broad bipartisan success in each piece of legislation ive got out there. I think there are bipartisan, and i think the Platform Companies are starting to realize that they are kind of playing an inefficient congress. Its going to come back and bite them because one america doesnt meet the standards, we have not given that leadership to states like california, nevada and others and weve seen the europeans move on privacy. Countries like the uk and australia move on content. And all weve done is set what was the ceiling will be the new floor when we do this. And i think, again, this is an area where i think there is a lot of Common Ground and i agree with richard in the sense that we shouldnt have rushed in because we wouldve screwed up if we brushed it too quickly. The only thing i was going to add to it is we have no jurisdiction on the intelligence committee. Everything i just talked about laughs well, thank goodness. Thats the conundrum. We talked privately about the fact that inaudible the committee of technology of congress, we are the only ones that on a daily basis go to the intelligence that tells us what everybody else is doing and the committees that have the right telecoms policies in get involved in defense issues. They dont have what we have. They cant look at it. And its very challenging. I will tell you its the architecture of color, minutes not conducive to the 24 century. And you might look at academia and the challenge is conducive to the 24 century. What we generate now is the output for the Economic Opportunities that are there. Government is never going to be under its current structure the institution that is ahead technologically because we just dont allow te