You know, one of the things I wanted to talk about is the fact that a lot of people believe that if they sign a petition or if they protest, that they're actually going to get something done. I'm really struck because our kids at school are attending a walk-out as many kids are regarding the gun violence and the events that happened in Florida a little while ago. And what's interesting is you can have a lot of people walk out, get together, protest, hold signs in solidarity and hope that...

You know, one of the things I wanted to talk about is guns and not really gun safety, but the proliferation of guns. It's definitely on everybody's mind, particularly since Parkland, Florida and all the school shootings that we saw.

This is particularly germane to me because in another video I talked about the origin story of iLobby and why I got into how do we change laws, how do we improve things and how do we get more people involved in policy, which is a big step in making that happen.

...

Here are some new features on iLobby:

• Mini status report
• Personalized tracking leaderboard
• Free training 
• Dynamic search
• Integrated arguments

Transcript

Hey, I want to show you some cool things that are coming up in the site. The first thing that we have is when you log in, in case you don't realize right up here, after you've logged in, you've got a status report of how you're doing on your debates. The next thing is if you go take a look at discover great debates, you'll...

Hi, I want to run you through a little thought exercise here so you can get an idea of what many people who are politically frustrated are trying to get done. So let me start here.

This is you, the voter, the average person, and what you want to do is you want to reach this person here and this person is the politician and obviously there are many problems getting to them and there's lots of obstacles in the way and there's many ways that people choose to do it that are not that effective,...

Changing and writing a law is difficult. That's why we have a republic. What we effectively have done is delegated the laws that we want to make to our elected representatives and they do it for us.

But when they make laws that you may not agree with, it's really difficult to change or be involved or have an opinion or get something done. So the question becomes is it possible for the average person to be able to change a law?

And there definitely are cases where people do that and in some...

Here are the six things that politicians want to know, whether you are presenting something to them, either in writing or as an op-ed or as a call into a radio show or you're calling their office.

There's basically six things that are going to come up.

1) Issue

And the first one is what's your issue? So you have to have a clear idea of what specific issue you're focused on and what you want to get done. That's just completely essential.

2) Position

The second part...

Who makes the laws? Well, politicians make the laws, lawmakers make the laws, they make them at the federal, state and local level, and that's generally how we think of it, but they don't do it really on their own. So they are informed by special interest groups, companies, trade associations, individuals who have a particular interest in getting something done, and that's what they do. Otherwise you might think that they just go to Congress and the state capitols and come up with ideas and...

"I hate politics. I don't understand Congress. And I have no idea about who to vote for in the election." That's what I used to say until the political gene turned on in my late 30's.

For me, politics was boring and nobody cared. Congress was just a bunch of guys in Washington and they were going to do whatever they wanted to anyway. Besides it didn't affect me.

So my position was I'd just vote for the candidate who seemed like a rock star and had the best curb appeal. The media and the Party...

According to a recent poll [1] the job performance rating of Congress continues to reflect a very low 7% positive job approval score. Why is that?

Why do we accept such poor performance? Do we think if they did more, worked harder, longer, smarter, they'd get a better result?

Do we want Congress to be more productive and pass more laws with more pages? Even now we learn that Dodd-Frank has 5,320 pages covering 400 new regulations [2]. ObamaCare was a 2,700-page bill and so far has 13,000...