Lawrence Lessig

that path? Well, my own view is we have an existential crisis facing us right now with this next election, and it's critical not just um to get responsible leadership in the White House, but also to get a Senate

that is responsive to the needs of Americans. And if we could get both of those things, then I think the first thing that next Congress needs to do is to take up the challenge of removing the corruption that that's at the core of our of our government, and that's by passing the kind of reform that makes it so that representatives care about what the people want instead of what the tiny fraction of funders of their campaigns want. Let's start right today, Right as we speak, there's a

crisis with the USPS United States Postal Service. Uh, they're going to have hearings. Can hearings make any difference? Yeah, what we've seen is that there's basically nothing that stops this president. And so as as extraordinary as the post post office crisis is, I think it's even more astonishing to think what it signals about what's going to come, because you know, what the president is doing with the

post office is literally, um, incomprehensible. I mean Jackson. It turns out Saint Jackson did something similar way back in the day when he was trying to get Martin van Buren to be elected after him. Um. But since then there's been a pretty clear understanding that the infrastructure of the post office is not a political pawn for the president.

But here you have a president who has appointed his number one contributor to dismantle the infrastructure of the post office for the purpose of making it harder for somebody to beat him in the next election. Now, of course, the post office is not just a system for delivering ballots. You know, there are people who have medicine, um, who need that medicine, who will have that medicine delayed because the post office isn't functioning well. I I sold two

things on eBay. It took six weeks for them to be delivered using you know, the standard parcel post. The standard away should have taken four days. Um. So we are dismantling infrastructure to make it easier for him to be re elected. Now, the idea that he to do that shows there's nothing he want to And what terrifies me is that the system we have for electing the president is so fragile. It depends on people of good

faith on both sides participating in election. If you have somebody acting in bad faith, especially with courts as pathetic as our courts have been. UM, I'm not sure what happens when he does everything he possibly can to make sure that he gets another four years in office. Let's talk for a second. What is Larry Lessig selling on eBay? I was selling some used technology. I had an original Apple TV and then I had from a G three

power book. I had one of those c D drives for the G three power Book, which you know, got ten dollars on any pay but whatever, okay, because the remuneration is so low and the effort involved, I wouldn't say as significant, but certainly takes time. Do you appreciate the experience? Why do you take time out as opposed to just leaving this stuff on the shelf for recycling it? Yeah? You know my wife, Um, I love my wife. My

wife is obsessed about recycling and waste. So um, you know, the the expense of the time, the hassle uh in selling is tiny compared to that guilt that I would feel if I if I tried to get rid of it in the in the more rational way. So yeah, I I try to sell it now. You know some of these things like you know, the CD for a G three power book. Um, there are not many out there. And if you've got a G three Power book, I don't know what you're using it for, but you know,

I'm sure you're happy to have that CD. So um, part of me is okay with it. Okay. Staying on that same topic, you know, there're been a lot of articles, even the New York Times magazine that recycling doesn't work. I know this is a little off topic going to your wife, but you have any take on that. Yeah, we certainly have not built up a profitable infrastructure for recycling. And you know, there's I think there's a real debate. Are we just trying to train people so that when

we get to that profitable infrastructure, we can deploy it effectively. Um. Obviously other countries are much more creative about ways to reduce or to channel waste. Um. You know, in Switzerland you pay per I can't remember it's cubic meter or pound, but whatever, you have this extraordinarily high price you pay for every bag of trash that you might want to get rid of. So it really changes that consumption pattern. And and um, you know, we experiment with what we

can here. I've got three kids. Um, so there's a limit to how idealistic we can be about these issues. Okay, let's go back to the postmaster. Assuming you were advising the Democrats, are those in power, what strategy would you employ to try to fix this situation? Well, I don't know that there is a strategy now. I mean what frustrated me in March and April is that they did use the leverage they had over the response to the COVID crisis to guarantee that we would have the infrastructure

necessary to make this election work. Um. Everyone was so obsessed with, like what do we do in the immediate term, and of course in the immediate term they bent over backwards to make sure businesses and relatively successful people were taken care of, and there was a little bit of a you know, six benefit that everybody could take advantage

of if they needed it. But they didn't build in the guarantee for vote by mail at the states, and they certainly didn't guarantee build in a guarantee that the Post Office would have the capacity to do what it needs to do. Having not done that, um, you know, I think the most that they can do now is

just to drive people's focus to this fact. Now, that's that's a hard thing to do in the media environment that we live in right now, because you know, a certain chunk of America is focused on a channel or a couple of channels that will never cover any of these issues in a way that reveals will suggest that there's anything problematic with what the president is doing. Um. And so you know, it's there's a limit to the extent to which the Democrats can even get people to

recognize what's happening. But I think that, you know, we need to begin a drumbeat of getting people to realize a just how um just how extraordinary, how unprecedented. This behavior is number one and number two. Get people to begin to reflect on what will America look like if this man is re elected in a way that everybody believes is just theft. Um. You know, how does the nation hold itself together? Because I think, you know the other side, my side has been pretty patient after two

thousand and two thousand sixteen. Those were two elections that were ordinary. They happened to flip the result from the Democratic majority. But through ordinary process. We could argue about Bush Vigor and Florida. But okay, we'll accept it. But the idea that this man would be reelected through means that people perceive as basically fraudulent or criminal and then expect to govern peacefully, I think is just crazy talk.

And I'm terrified about what happens to our nation. Um if we get to a place where that has happened and there's no effective remedy, because obviously Congress can't impeach the man. The partisan premise of Congress means there's no impeachment at least depending on who controls the Senate and UM, and that means that we're not going to have any opportunity to remedy what you know will be an astonishing moment in American history, the basic theft of the basic

theft of an election. Well, if we look at what we'll call the Black Lives Matters protests with George Floyd, it's he was not the first African American whose life was taken at the hands of the police force. Yet there was an international conflagration of protests after that. Uh, do we anticipate any protests either before or after the election spontaneously because as you said earlier, it depends on the public serving the public. So does the public have

to rise first and then pull the politicians along with them. Well, I don't expect unless there's some well, I mean, let's be clear, there there are scenarios where, yes, there would certainly be extraordinary protests in advance. So our constitution, which is um, as I said, extremely fragile here, according to the Supreme Court, plainly allows a state like Florida to declare that, um, it's not gonna have an election and

it's just gonna pick its electors how it wants. So Florida could declare before the election at least it's clear after the election it's not as clear, but before the election, the legislature could vote, well, we're not going to have a vote, We're just gonna give the electors to the Republican Party. If states do something like that, I think

you'll see tons of protests before the election. But if we go through and we try to have a real election and um, and it seems like there have been games that have been played or I don't know why we call it games. If there's criminal um, corruption of the process of voting, uh, and afterwards, the consequence of that is that um, President Trump is re elected. I

certainly think there will be extraordinary protests. How I'll be out there with them because it is just not acceptable, and it's there's a certain moment at which you've got to stand up and fight for a democracy. And and we've seen so much contrary to the norms of democratic order over the past three years that at some point we've got to say we can't accept it anymore and do whatever it takes to make sure that it doesn't

have its effect. For those who are not constitutional scholars, could you please walk slowly through the process of Florida or another state picking electors and essentially punting the election. Well, the Constitution, of course, doesn't directly elect I'd say that the president will be directly elected. What it says is that states get to a point in whatever manner, they choose electors, and their electors then vote for the president. So, um, the states appoint the electors. So they set up the

process to appoint the electors through state law. And if prior to an election, the state changes its law and says, you know, we originally thought there'd be an election, but now there won't be an election. We'll just pick a

slate of Republican electors. The Supreme Court has said, most recently in Bush versus Gore, but before that a hundred years ago, in a case called McPherson versus Blacker, that this that the states retain the right quote at any time to recall the selection of electors and execute extors eyes that power themselves. Now at the founding, there are many states that did exactly that. Many states didn't have elections, They just picked electors. Um. Some states had elections, um um.

Some of those elections were by district, others were at the at the state level like we have today. Um. So there are lots of different systems. Originally, we've all converged now in the idea of the public having a say through a vote, But the constitution doesn't say that

it must have a say through a vote. And so if the state of Florida, governed by a Republican legislature and a Republican governor, comes to believe that the only way Donald Trump gets re elected is if Florida goes with Donald Trump, and the polls seemed to suggest that it won't, I am I would not be at all surprised if they exercise this power to say that Florida

doesn't get a vote. Um. And I think what ought to be happening right now is that people ought to be clear about this possibility and demand that people like the governor of Florida UH or the people running the legislature in Florida, answer the question will you promise to have an election? Will you promise not to cancel the election?

Because I think that there are so many scenarios where you know, the pandemic recurs and there's all sorts of anxiety about safety, and they say, well, we can't safely imagine people going out and voting, and so rather than risking their lives, we're going to cancel the election, and we know that there's a Republican state anyway, so we'll

just give it to the Republican electors. There's so many ways they could get away with it, and so I think we right now need to start saying, Okay, just be clear, are you going to commit to an election and are you going to commit not to cancel the election no matter what? Because you know, you know, we've we've run elections during wars, We've run elections during the Civil War. Uh. You know, Lincoln was re elected in eighteen sixty four, it was another year before the war

was over. Um. So we've done it before, and I think we need to be committed to doing it now. But the danger is that there could be a strong incentive for some states to flip if they're going to try to make sure Donald Trump gets reelected. Okay, there was a recent Supreme Court case relative to the obligation of electors to vote according to the public will could you explain that case in the effect thereof yeah, it's

actually my case. So um I UM UH was working with electors from the state of Washington and UM and my organization Equal Citizens had sort of teed up this case both in Washington and Colorado because in two thousand sixteen there was a question raised whether electors are free to cast their ballot however they wish um, And we thought it was really important that the Supreme Court answer the question whether they have that freedom before it creates

a constitutional crisis. So we teed up the case and we got electors in UM in Washington in state um uh. These electors had been fined because they had voted contrary to their pledge in and then there was an elector in Colorado who had been kicked off UM. He cast his vote contrary to his pledge and he was kicked

off and replaced with another elector. And so the question we wanted the court to answer was whether, by being given the power of a quote elector and told to cast quote their votes, they're allowed to vote however they want, or whether, as Justice Kegan put it, like a Soviet system, they had to vote as they were directed. Well, the answer to the Supreme Court was it's a Soviet system, um, they have to vote as they are directed. UM. And that made a lot of people happy because they don't

like the idea. And I understand at first glance why one would not like the idea that electors have this kind of discretion. Um. I actually, by the end of the case, I argued the case in the Supreme Court, or I argued it by telephone from my office in

the Supreme Court. Um. But by the end of that, by the end of my preparation for that case, I became pretty con vince that it was going to be a huge mistake if the Supreme Court said that electors didn't have discretion, because you can imagine that discretion being the final safety valve in this whole disaster of an election that we're seeing. But but the way the Court decided it, electors are basically pawns. They can't do anything

except what they're directed by their state to do. And so, um, if they're directed to vote one way, they're gonna have to vote that way regardless. And so what do you feel about the status today? Well, I think that there are many ways in which this goes south. Um. Uh, you know, he's just one. You know, imagine God forbid, but imagine uh Joe Biden m wins the popular vote but then passes away before the Electoral College votes the twenties.

Amendments passed in the nineteen thirties addresses the case where a candidate dies after the Electoral College votes, but before he's sworn in as president, and they expressly thought to themselves, well, there's no reason for us to deal with the problem of a candidate dying before the Electoral College votes, because the electors have a discretion. They can decide to vote however they want. And so if you know Joe Biden died, you would imagine all the electors would vote for um

uh uh Kamala Harris. But the Supreme Court's decision means they have to vote as their directed to vote. And though the Court said, we're not actually addressing that case here, we're not addressing that question. Um. If that scenario happens, there's going to be a fight because if they vote, if they're required to vote for Joe Biden, and then they vote for Joe Biden, Joe Biden's vote can't be

counted because Joe Biden is not alive. So that means it would throw the election into the House of Representatives, and the House of Representatives under the constitution, votes one vote per state, so you could have a clear majority of people voting for a Democrat. But depending on how the elections happen in you could have a majority of

states that are Republicans, state delegations that are Republican. So you could have the Democrat win the popular vote and would have won the electoral College vote, but for the weird way that the votes get real allocated. But the way the system ultily results is that House of Representatives votes, and the House of Representatives votes for the Republican and and again I think most people would be astonished at that result. But that's plainly on one track in the

way that this election might unpack. What is the experience, whether it be live or over the phone of arguing before the Supreme Court certainly views of the some other lower court, so it's pretty inferior compared to a lower court. UM. I had two arguments in the last couple of one in May and one in June or one in July. One in the Supreme Court it was in May, and

one in a district court was in July. And the problem with the argument in the Supreme Court is that the Chief Justice set it up so every justice gets basically two minutes to ask questions. UM. And uh, you know, that's less than a congress person has. And so they come into their argument with a list of questions. They're not really listening to what other people have asked and not really interested in creating a understanding around the argument

about the case. They're just interested in getting their particular questions asked. So it it's a very it was a very unsatisfying experience because I felt like so much was being missed and every single answer you gave could be no more than a hundred words, you know, no more than a minute, because the chief would cut you off

so that somebody else can ask a question. When I argued in the district court in California before Judge Judge chen Um, uh you know, we had it was just me and another guy and this uh Ted Olsen, pretty significant lawyer Um and the judge. You know, we probably went on for an hour an hour and a half. The judge asked questions, He let us answer them as long as it took to answer them. He probed the questions.

He you know, he really understood by the end our argument, whether he agreed with it or not as a separate question. But the point is it was an actually effective context for for engaging in in in the question. And and what's frustrating is, Um, you know, the case that I was arguing in the District Court involving a regulation involving cell phones. Um, you know, we think it's important enough,

but it's not the Constitution. And so the idea that you would end the argument and feel like the judge understands the question and can now decide for this cell phone issue, but the Supreme Court barely pierces the issue around the Constitution's uh electoral college was ultimately incredibly unsatisfying. I've argued, you know, live in the Supreme Court, and the differences when you argue live, there's no you know, they don't go around one by one and say, what's

your question, Justice Thomas, what's your question? Justice ginsburg Um. They just basically the person starts arguing and then people interrupt him or her and ask questions, and that dynamic actually builds, um, a kind of arc of the argument. So you can the questions build of each other, and by the end the case has kind of been you know, resolved, you kind of understand the strong points and the weak points on the basis of how people have engaged in

the argument. Now, even then, I think the Supreme Court has been wildly to conservative and the amount of time that it gives people to engage with them, um, you know, and uh and and maybe you know, there was a time when the Court was deciding a hundred and fifty cases a year. It's down now to like less than eighty. Um. So it's not I don't understand why they can't give

it more time. But um. But in either context, it's not as great as it can be in the kind in you know, other contexts like lower courts, and you get stage freight or you intimidated at all in arguing in front of the Supreme Court. I don't think that I felt frightened. Um. You know, so no, I don't. I don't feel that, I imagine, um, you know. Part of that is just I had the extraordinary experience of clerking at the court, and that was you know, an

honor and um and incredible fund. But it also is an experience that taught you just how human the justices were. And uh. And you you know, you realize these you're not legal gods, um uh. And they're just trying to understand the case, and you're kind of helping them to understand the case. So it's not about being afraid of them. Um, they're not gonna you know, evict you from the country or get you fired. Um, it's just trying to figure out how you bring them to the right place and

and and that's always hard. It's you know, it depends on the case. It can be extremely hard, especially when the result that you're arguing for would be a very difficult result for the court to give given the political reaction to that. So, you know, our side was arguing electors were constitutionally free. UM. And we thought that was an important position, and we thought, you know, I would defend what the electors that I was representing did. There

was a CNN documentary about them on Saturday night. UM. And you know, the basic story with these electors was that after they saw that the candidate they were going to vote for, Hillary Clinton, was not going to win, they tried to work with Republican electors to get enough of them to vote for someone other than Donald Trump, so that the House of Representatives could then decide should Donald Trump be the president or should another Republican be

the president. Nobody imagined Hillary Clinton would be the president, so they were trying to exercise their discretion um to bring about a result that was closer to what the people who had voted for them wanted than the election of Donald Trump would have been. But uh still, I think when people talk about the so called faithless electors, that's how they're referred to. It kind of scares people

to imagine electors having that kind of discretion. So if the Court had ruled with us UM, you know, I would be suffering an extraordinary amounts of hate from people all across the country saying, how could you do such a thing. Now, Donald Trump can bribe these electors and they can vote however he wants them to vote, and all of that, I think it's just crazy talk. But but it still would have been anxiety producing and maybe anxiety is the last thing the world needs right now

in the middle of this election. Staying with the Supreme Court, the Conservatives tend to go with an originalistic originalism interpretation of the Constitution. Give me your take on so they want you to believe, But I don't think it's actually true that that principle constrains them. It's more tool that they can deploy when it fits with what they they think they have to say, or what they what they

want to say. You know, I I've argued two cases in the Supreme Court where the originalist answer was pretty clear. The first case I argued was a case about whether Congress has the power to extend the terms of an existing copyright. So this was the sunny bono Copyright Term Extension Act. Congress extended the term of copyrights in eight by twenty years. That was the I think the eighteenth time they had extended the term of copyright, and that

prior to twenty five years. Um. And so our claim was the Constitution says Congress has the power to set terms, set quote limited times for copyright, and it makes no sense to say that every time that limit expires they can extend it again and again and again. And we had tons of originalist argument to say the frameworks were very skeptical about the monopoly of a copyright and they

would want it restricted. Um. And I went, I made that argument, and I fully expected the Conservatives would pipe up and say, yes, that's what the originalist position is. But they sat silent, and they joined. The five of them joined an opinion by Justice Ginsburg, who's not an originalist, So there's no complaint against her um which allowed Congress to do whatever the hell they wanted. UM. And the same thing with this case. UM. You know the original understanding.

You know, Justice Jackson, in an opinion two said, no one faithful um to our Constitution can deny that the framers contemplated what's implicit in the text, that electors would have would be free agents, free to cast their vote however they wanted. So an originalists would look at this and they look, there's no doubt that's what they expected. Whether that's what we expect or whether we should continue to respect that as a separate question, but there's no

doubt that's what they expected. And an originalist I would have thought, would have taken that seriously. But once again the originalists were silent that the opinion UM written by Justice Kagan is not Justice Keagan is not an originalist. Justice uh Thomas wrote a concurrence. He agreed with one part of our argument. He added something else from left field, but but there too he was not constrained by original understanding.

So I I still have faith that will get them to do the originalist thing when it's an important thing to do, even when it's not an important thing to do for conservatives, just an important thing to do for the constitution. But I don't think it's fair to say that they're consistent originalists out there. To what degree is the Federalist Society important and impacted the court system? Leave, Let's say the Republicans have played a long game over decades.

They were a minority in the educational system, They invested money, they formed this organization. In the decades later, it seems to be paying off. So to what degree is that an effect? And to what degree is their concomitant effort on the other side, the Federal Society has been the most success full influence organization in setting the direction of the federal judiciary ever. You know, it's begun in the early nineteen eighties at Yale Law School, UM, Stephen Calibraze

and someone else. I'm blanking on the person's name. It might be Lee Lieberman, UM start the start the organization, And originally, you know, it started the Yale Law School, which is a hotbed of liberalism. It started really UM as an intellectual balance, as an organization that tries to create an opportunity for conservatives to express their views in a context where mainly liberals were um, holding holding the court, um,

the local law school court. Um. And you know, I think from that, from that perspective, what they were doing was perfectly fine. It was great because of course, adding diversity to the intellectual environment of law school is what we should all be aspiring to do. But over time they developed very tight connections with the infrastructure for appointing judges, and they almost became a kind of clearing house. Um. You know, the ADA is supposed to be a clearing house.

The American Bar Association supposed to vet judges and give their views thumbs upper, thumps down about qualifications. Um. But the Federalist Society became an almost um you know uh um a farm league or a feeding uh, a system for feeding a supply of judges to presidents. Republican presidents keen to appoint more judges. So at the lower court, in the lower courts, district courts and courts of appeals, they've been enormously important. And um, you know, this president

has appointed an extraordinary number of judges. I think the numbers something like three hundred. But the point is, Mitch McConnell views, this is the one thing he knows he can get done UM, and he has bent over backwards to a point as quickly as he can. Practically everybody who's come through UM. There's no UM filibuster check anymore that allows UM a minority to stop that type of appointment.

And we've seen some extraordinary appointments. People which the A, B. A is that are plainly not qualified have been appointed nonetheless because they are perceived to be UM extremely loyal in a partisan sense at the lower Court. And we'll see what the long term effect of this is will be. UM. You know, I'm not somebody who believes that a person who's a conservative is not qualified to be on the

court I or any court. I clark for Judge Posner, the Seventh Circuit judge Judge Easterbrook was on the court at the same time. They were both Reagan appointees, extremely conservative, but you know, two of the best legal minds in the history of America. So I think that there's you know, extremely talented people on the right, like there are talented

people on the left. But I think that this effort to appoint reliable votes as opposed to talented conservative lawyers is a real mistake because it really UM dilutes the integrity of the judiciary, and UM we've already seen um, the beginnings of that. And I fear, you know, these appointments of people who are in their forties, UM, thirties in some cases, UM isn't a is a It is an act that's going to have an effect for the

next thirty years, next forty years. Well other than railing against this and being aware of it, certainly under Trump's reign, UH, is the other side doing anything or they organized to combat this effort by the right. I don't think that they're organized in the same way. There's an you know, a parallel organization called a c S UM, the American Constitution Society, which UM, you know UH runs liberal direct directed conversations on law school campuses. But they have not

tried to build the same kind of recruiting infrastructure. I mean, you know, you could call the head of the a c S and the of the a c S. I'm sure we'll have people to recommend, but it's not like the business model. UM. So you know, if there's a democratic president elected, UM, and there's democratic control of the Senate, UM, I expect there will be a lot of democratic judges um who are or judges appointed by the Democratic Party who? Um?

Um you know who? Um. I will say, maybe this is just stupid blindness or ignorance or bias on my part. I will say they they are not going to be people who the A B A says they're not qualified. Um. You know, there might be young people. I hope they are young people. Um, but they're not going to be um that kind of people that Ms McConnell has affected. And that's a good time. Okay, let's switch to an earlier point, which is the silos that people receive their

information and leedless. Just say, in a three network world, we have the fairness doctrine. Uh, if we ultimately go all the way to see clear broadcasting, there used to be a limit of the number of television stations you could own. However, on the other side, their social media. There's Facebook, there's Twitter, Snapchat and the other outlets that there was just yesterday in the newspaper that uh, Facebook

increases the views of holocaust deniers. So what do we do with a the raw issue of people not being informed and be to what degree to these outlets contribute to it? And what can we do about that. This is the worst and hardest problem. Um So, first we have to identify the source of the problem. And the source of the problem is not technology and the abstract. The source of the problem is the business model of

the technical technology platforms as well as television stations. You know, when there were three networks, the business model of news, which remember was coordinated. It's exactly the same time news came on all three networks, so you know, you're watching TV, you're gonna watch the news, and the business model of those news stations was to shoot right down the middle. It was a very kind of plain vanilla approach tell the story and the way that was the most inclusive possible.

I'm not saying it was unbiased in some absolute sense. I'm not saying it was comprehensive. There's certain issues that never got covered. There's all sorts of ways you could criticize it. But what you couldn't say is that it

was trying to create tribes in America. It you know, Walter Cronkite thought that what he was doing was speaking to America, and he wanted to tell the truth to America, and the consequence of that was a kind of understanding a common understanding that was shared by almost everybody, because that's all there was, those three networks, and at that

time every day news was being covered. But once networks were no longer the center of television, once cable television came along and and you weren't forced to watch one of three channels, you could watch one of a hundred and money channels. Then the news needed to compete. You know, news had to compete with Home shopping or um with ESPN, and so it needed to find a way to bring people to it. And the critical business model innovation was

Roger Ales at Fox News. You know, when Fox Rupert Murdoch brought Rogers Ales in and he pitches to Fox News how he imagines running Fox News. Um, he startles everybody by saying that he's not going to try to pitch the story to all of America. He's going to focus on what he called the base. He's going to build a network focused on the base of conservatives. And by doing that he would build a loyal and coherent public,

which it would be easier to sell advertising too. And so the idea of the business model focused on a fraction of America is the critical change in cable television. And initially only he is doing that. But now you know, if you look at the ideological content of the three major cable networks, they're perfectly separated. You have Fox far to the well, not in an absolute sense, but relative to UM, I mean Fox far to the right, MSNBC to the left, and CNN kind of bouncing in between.

And that's a business model decision. And the consequence of that business model decision is the people who get their information from television increasingly come to believe, um, the world is different from people who get their information from a different channel on television. Barack Obama says, if you if you watch Fox News, you live in a different planet. And if you read the New York Times, um. And so that consequence of this separated tribal world is a

consequence of the business model of cable television. And it's the same thing with the digital platforms. You know, Facebook is a platform for selling ads. That's where they make their money. I mean they you know, gussie it up by pretending it's all about community and all about enabling people to share and connect and blah blah blah. But the thing it sells Wall Street, the reason why it's stock is valuable is that it's an extraordinary machine for

selling ads. But the way that it sells ads is to figure out everything it can about you so that it knows exactly what will work with you and so that it can promise advertisers a higher return from their ads than anybody else. And the way it does that is it spies on you. It spies, watches everything you're interested in doing, shows where you're, where you're going, who you're talking to, what kind of things you're interested in.

And then after spying, it pokes you. It tries to make you angry or happy, and it sees how you respond. It's a constant experiment to develop a really sophisticated model of you so that it can sell ads. And the unfortunate thing for democracy is that it turns out fueling this politics of hate is a really effective way to

learn things about you. If we can like hold up the kind of red meat or um uh, you know, to kind of inspire you to get angry, you'll engage more, you'll share more, you'll be more responsive to what is coming across your news feed. And the more responsive you are, the more they know, and the more they know the

better their ads are. And so once again it is the business model of the platform that is driving them to engage with our political environment in a way that weakens our capacity as a democracy to do what we need to do in the context of an election, which is to come to a judgment about which candidate or which party is actually in the best interests of America. And in both cases you can imagine a different business model. Um, you can imagine a different way of like deploying the technologies.

But unfortunately we've backed ourselves into the worst possible pair of business models. And the consequence of that is these platforms are not contributing to a better democracy. They're contributing to a more polarized, more tribalistic, less capable democracy than one we've had than any we've had since the Civil War. Now the ship really is sailed on broadcast television, the ratings, the actual number of people watching these news channels is

astoundingly low. Despite the press. The younger generation is finding their information online, so focusing on that, you know, a Twitter, they say they're not going to have any political ads at all in this cycle. Is there any way to address the problem. You just delineated. Well, you know, there's this some there's this great health movement called the slow

food movement. And what the slow food movement says is the only way to respond to the terrible way people eat is to look at how the human body works and fit your consumption to the human body. And so it turns out that if you cook your own food and you eat it over a long period of time, like over dinner with friends, you know, two or three hour dinner, that that way of consuming food will be

the healthiest for you. Like you can't poison yourself the way you do with processed food, and um, you'll eat the right amounts and you'll eat it in a in a at a pace that will actually um complement the process in the body. So the fat slow food movement is about finding the way to eat that fits our physiology. There's an equivalence. We could call it the slow democracy movement.

And so the slow dog democracy movement, like the slow food movement, says, you know, we do democracy well in some context, and we do it poorly in other context. So we do it poorly in a kind of Facebook or Twitter environment, like we get riled up, we we you know, act on the basis of a tiny bit of information, were easily misled, were easily um guided into the wrong understanding of the facts. We're just not good. We're not We're not good in that environment. But there

are environments where we are pretty good. So, you know, my favorite is an environment like this, a podcast, UM where people have a chance, over a long period of time to hear the arc or the development of a story or an argument they understand and they have a chance to reflect on it the way you know, humans have that understanding and their ordinary interaction with ordinary people, and that in the context of that type of engagement, they learn about issues in a better, more comprehensive way

than they would ever over Twitter or over their news feed on Facebook UM or you know, narrative um uh UM content like um television shows that are um you know, there are not documentaries necessarily, but that try to tell a moral story or tell tell us story about some historical moments that gives you a chance to imagine and envision and see um played out the tensions of the you know, moral issues or the the struggles. You know, my favorite, even though there's a million reasons to um

uh to criticize the series. But like Homeland, which over the arc of its six or seven series, you know, brought in an incredible number of Americans to a differ different, deeper understanding of the story of the Middle East than they had when that series began, which was you know, this kind of simple, black, white, good versus bad picture of the Middle East. I think what the solution is U is for us to find ways to channel more of politics into context that we have a good reason

to believe humans can process. Well. Um, you know some people's responses to say, we'll get humans out of the mix, like let's just have experts, Like forget democracy, let's just have a technocracy where you know, the smartest people, you know, Harvard law professors, get to decide everything. And you know, having known a bunch of Harvard law professors, I can tell you that would be a disaster, would be the worst thing in the world to imagine turning these decisions

over to the elite of a araka. But instead of like giving up on democracy, I think we have to wait to find a way to make democracy work by giving people a chance to understand and engage on issues in a way that we know they can actually process. And so that means channeling away from the five second ad or the thirty second ad on television or the Facebook feed or Twitter into places where they actually have a sense of what the issues are and they can

get a real sense of the people involved. But how does that address the silo issue? Well, we don't have the ability, given the First Amendment, to address it through legislation. So we're not going to blow up the silos um. They're going to exist until they're no longer profitable. So the way to deal with the silos issue is to just to give people a different sense of what they want to do, what they want to consume, and then

they consume differently maybe hopefully. You know, that's the same fight in the d of healthy food movement, like you know, if all this unhealthy food, how are you going to deal with it? You can't ban it, I mean, you know, Michael Bloomberg thought you could basically do that with sodas in New York, But you're not gonna across the country ban it. The most you can do is get people to reflect on like what's the actually healthy way to eat?

Like what sort of things should you be eating? And let's develop the right Um, sensibilities of how we should be eating and what balance we should have, and practice that take responsibility, you know, both for your diet of food and your diet of information. Be a responsible consumer in both dimensions. Um. Now, I say that, and I'll be the first to say, I'm not optimistic. You know. I think that we're at a moment that we literally

have never been in before, a moment like this. I mean, people historians will say the media a hundred years ago was just as fragmented, just as polarized as it is today, and they're right it was. But the difference is a hundred years ago, there was no way to know what the public thought. There was no polling, so you could have a public that was partisan and divided and lived

in their own little echo chambers. But actually the people who made policy were politicians in Washington, and they understood both sides of the issue, and they were engaged in real debate and deliberation about what they should be doing, and and they did what they did, and kind of

what the people thought was irrelevant. We live in a time where the public is polarized and divided, press is completely partisan and drives people in their own little silos, but we can see what the people believe, and so you can always point back to what the people believe as a justification for whatever crazy thing you want to do. So seventy four percent of Americans think we need to invade a rock, um, you know, based on misrepresentations and

falsehoods and ignorance about the actual facts. But that's what America says. So that's what we have to do. And so I think the problem is that we both um have a system for un understanding what the people believe, but don't have a system for giving people the chance to believe what they actually would believe if they understood the facts and had a chance to reflect on them

and deliberate about them. Okay, So you were essentially saying there's no place for the legal system to address these problems and social networks, not in America, not right now, um, because any effort to directly affect the content of these networks is going to be resisted by claims the First Amendment.

I mean, there are things to do on the margin. Um, you know, I think that the legal system, you know this, Donald Trump has sent something close to this, And I don't want to sound like I'm mimicking what he said, because I think it's importantly different. But I do think that we can think more um Uh, we can think it a smarter way about how to make platforms responsible so that they don't allow misrepresentations UM to propagate in

a way that can be destructive. Right now, the legal system basically gives them total immunity UM for defamation or false information that they are allowed to spread UM. And of course, when the business model is as it is, where you have a strong interest to spread false information for political reasons or even just for advertising reasons, UM, that creates a really dangerous incentive. So I think the legal system could, on the margin, tweak that and do

that better. But I don't think that the core problem with the business model is going to go away because of fixing that. So then you want to say, well, can the legal system come in and you know, ban advertising UM. And my my view is I'd love to try. I'd love to say, let's see what happens if we ban political advertising for six weeks before an election. I mean, you know, it would be stupid to ban it all the time, because you know, advertising is good for selling products,

and products drive an economy. And it might not make sense to say ban advertising for like, you know, the local state representatives, because that turns out to be a really efficient way for them to get their message out there.

But where you've got these really polarized and potentially um foreign influence driven campaigns for president or for the control of Congress, I would love to see what happens if we just turn off the mechanism for um tweaking or driving the public according to whatever interest the advertiser might have, and see what see what happens. Um. I expect that you're going to see countries that try to do that,

and we might learn something from those countries. And it would be great if what we learned is that's all it takes, just turn off the advertising and uh, you know, it's not that social media becomes great, but it doesn't become the poison and that that it was in and then I think it's to be in now broad concept. Do you do you not believe social media, search networks, etcetera. Should be liable for the content on their sites. I

don't think you can answer that simply. Um. I think there are contacts in which they should be liable, yes, Um, But they certainly should not be liable for everything, regardless of the context or the steps that they've taken to to avoid that content being there. So I don't believe in the absolute immunity that exists right now, and I don't believe we should go to a world where they're

liable for everything that I upload onto a network. You know, it's got to be a more sophisticated kind of notice and takedown infrastructure than the copyright notice and take on infrastructure is. I mean, you know, let's be realistic. So it M let's be real about this. It's not like networks are immune from every bit of content that's up there that might violate the law. I mean, they can defame someone and they're you know, there's st free um.

Or they can allow defamation on their network and they're scott free. But you know, if they allow a Disney movie to be distributed on their network, UM in violation of copyright, they're not scot free. UM. They're gonna be responsible if they don't take steps to take that down. So we've already decided that some content is important UM for us to regulate, to make sure that the legal principles are upheld and I think we could do more to worry about at least defamation UM. And and you know,

I have a broader concept of direct manipulation UM. You know, in the way that UM these fake videos events that is for the purpose of misrepresenting or for um, you know, creating descent where the actual facts don't support it. How you do it is going to be so hard. I don't imagine as a simple statement here or a simple rule, but I do think we shouldn't give up on it, because I think the consequence of giving up has already

proven itself to be really devastating. Let's address anti trust. Okay, generally speaking, the Republicans have been looser than the Democrats on this. We've had a number of very interesting things. We have the Books case. The end result was that books became more expensive. We had the T mobile Sprint thing, where people on the left said, oh, we must have these more competitors. Were as anyone who's a student of the business said, Hey, Sprint is going to go out

of business, We're gonna go bankrupt. Then uh, we have people like Elizabeth Warren saying let's break up the social networks. What are your viewpoints about anti trust? And what should the uh UH decisions be made upon. Well, I think we should recognize that we basically had no antitrust enforcement in the technology sector UM in any significant way since the Microsoft decision twenty years ago. And I think that's

been a mistake. I think we've allowed out these companies to get much bigger than they would have gotten had ordinary principles of anti trust been deployed consistently throughout the period. And I wouldn't blame Republicans for that. I mean, certainly I blame Republicans for what happened under George Bush, but I blame Democrats for what happened under Barack Obama. And the the clearest moments when anti trust should have stepped

in was under Barack Obama. UM. And now we know from you know, Mark Zuckerberg's email, UM that they're intent that their game was exactly this kind of anti competitive acquisition strategy. And and I think there's a real reason to be worried about that. And I think that the reason to be worried about it is much more than just a pure economic reason. Right, the standard Chicago School theory of anti trust is only worry about it if

there's going to be a harm to consumers. But I think you also need to be worried about it because it creates these entities that are so powerful that they cannot be regulated. And so it's a there's this is a um Luigi's and Galis calls the political antitrust, which is a concern for the size and power of organizations, not just because of the economy, but also because of the political democracy. And I think from that perspective, we've

plainly lost control of Amazon and Google and Facebook. Um these are entities which I, you know, as much as Elizabeth Warren was, you know, inspirational in her aspiration, I think it was kind of crazy talk to imagine the government was going to be able to do any of the things she was talking about, given the enormous power that they have because they're plugged into everybody's lives directly. Okay, let's talk about you for a second. Where did you

grow up? So I grew up in the kind of Kentucky part of Pennsylvania, um town called Williamsport, Pennsylvania, which is about a Little League World Series exactly right, Um so, about eighty miles north of Harrisburg. And I, you know, I was there from about the age of six until I went to college. Okay, And what were the political leanings of your family? So we grew up. I grew up a Republican. I was quite an active Republican when I was a kid. I was chairman of the Pennsylvania

Teenage Republicans. I was the youngest member of a delegation to the nine eighty Republican Convention. UM, so you know we were strong conservatives back then. Okay, what did your parents do for a living. My father was a ran a steel fabricating coming his own companies steel fabricators called Williams Sport Fabricators. It was acquired by a company called

High Steel um Structures. And my mom um, for at least the time I was in high school, was sold real estate, but she basically did that as a hobby. And how many kids in the family. So I had two older siblings and one who are about nine and ten years older, and then one younger sister who's two years younger than I am. And the older siblings. What sex were there? Boy in a girl point a girl? So on some level you were in the middle, but because of so many years in between. Uh, to what

degree what were your parents very supportive? Were you lost in the shuffle? Where were you in the hierarchy of the family. Yeah, you're right, So my older siblings are basically gone when I, um, you know, I can actually remember anything about my life, and so I think that they were extremely supportive. I actually went away to school for a couple of years, um, four years, and that was a significant Where where did you go to school? UM? I went to UM. It was called the Columbus Boy Choir.

So it was a professional boy choir UM in Princeton from sixth to ninth grade. And that was says choir. Was it musically oriented? It was a professional boy choir. We traveled around the world and we sang. How do you even get into that? You know? I was singing in my urch choir and my choir director said, you know, you do this pretty well. You should try out for this boy choir. So I tried out and they told me I should come and that that started UM in sixth grade. And that was a big chunk of my

my youth and good experience or bad experience. So you tripped into this question, bob uh. Yeah, So I've been an article written about this that's not announcing anything to do. In some ways, it was the best of times, in some ways the worst of times. It was the best of times because you know, I was a kid from a small town traveling around the world understanding things that

no one at my age would have understood. It was the worst of times because um, for um, two and a half of those four years, I was sexually abused by the director of the choir. UM and um had had a profound impact on everything that happened afterwards. Um and uh um, you know, kind of in my mind defines what the experience was for me. So UM, I don't know. It depends which day I'm thinking about it. Okay. Does one ever get over sexual abuse of that nature?

Can you metabolize it? Does it affect future choices and experiences? You never get over it. It's never gone. And some people it's profoundly significant in everything they do. You know, some people, it probably drives them into their own kind of perversions. Some people that creates an extraordinary insecurity or

um pathology around the ability to connect to people. Um. You know, I I think very few people have a really clear sense of just how destructive mucking about with those emotions of a young child can be um and uh and so no, I you know, I would say, you know, at the at the shrink level, um, um, there's never been a moment that I haven't been affected

by it. At the professional level, I kind of think of most of my professional career as in some sense responsive to the the problem that I was obsessed with when I was there. So that problem was, you know what what struck me about that experience was that, of course there was this criminal at the center, um, you know, who was pathological and just you know, in some sense couldn't stop himself. Um. And I wasn't the only person he abused. He was probably depending on the year it

could have been abusing up to the school. I mean, he was just you know, he was insatiable and unstoppable. But the more striking thing to me was to reflect on the people who were around him and in some sense knew but didn't want to step up and stop what was happening, either because they turned a blind eye or because they thought it would be destructive of the institution,

or whatever the reason is. They were the enablers. And I kind of feel like, if you you know, if you really understood the threat of the work that I've done from the very beginning of my career. It has always been to try to draw attention to the institution or the context of the enablers and to ask, you know, you know, like the last work I did when I was running the Edmund Saffer Center was focused on what we called institutional corruption. And that's that's the corruption not

of criminals. It's not the quid pro quo corruption. It's the corruption of the institution where people, good people in the institution allow the institution become sensitive to our responsive to the wrong kind of desires or interests. So when Congress raises money to fund its campaigns, is there's very little bribery involved in that, So it's not criminal in the traditional sense, but it's producing an institution that is

um not responsive to the ordinary people. And it's allowed to be that way because people enable it and and support it, and they're not willing to step up and just say this is wrong and we have to change it. And so I feel like everything I've done in some senses recurred to that same reflection in you know, very many different legal context but all of that, you know, comes from moments reflecting on what happened to me when

I was you know, twelve and thirteen and fourteen. Now did you age out of that situation or did you decide to leave? I aged out. You know, your voice changes and you're gone. So my voice changed and I was gone. Okay, did this affect your relationships with women and girls thereafter? Of course, of course, you know not. I mean, I'm happily married to an extraordinary woman. And um, I know other people who had the same experience who are not. So, you know, I feel but for the

grace of God, there goes I. Um. But you know, in ways I've you know, we've gone far in this conversation part further than I think either of us thought we would. I don't want to go into the depth or the detail of it, but yes, absolutely day to day um uh, that hung right in the middle of everything. Okay, so you age out, your voice changes? Should go back to public high school? What is that experience like? After

being away for three years? It was difficult. People didn't quite understand who, you know, what the experience had been. Obviously I didn't tell people what the experience had been, but it did. But it really affected how I understood the world. I kind of thought, I kind of have sex was at the center of everything, because sex was at the center of everything when I was twelve, So I interpreted everything around me as if somehow sex was

involved in it. So I remember it's extraordinary moment of our neighbor came across the street and to tell me that her daughter had just gotten a car and a bunch of guys had you know, cleaned the car for her and tuned it up. And the way my mind work, given the experience I had had, I imagine, you know, that sex had to be in that transaction somewhere, like that's just the normal thing it would have been there. Um, And I said something that reflected that, and she kind

of was astonished. And I think back on it, and even I'm in stolished. It's like completely abnormal way to think about the world. But you know, that's where I had been delivered. I was delivered thinking that's the normal way people interacted because that had been the normal way I had seen for you know, many years of my life at that point. So you're in high school, you fit in, You're a nerd. Where do you fit in the social total? Nerds total nerd. You know, I'm in

the bands, I I run. You know, I'm like a leader in student government. I'm a smart kid. Um, I'm not the number one, but the number two and um you know, and I have a lot of good friends. But but you know, the hierarchy of high school, I'm not the football player or I'm not the the coolest kids in the room. And and I'm obsessed with obeying the law. So I don't I don't drink, and I don't you know, go out and drive at times I shouldn't be in Um. So you know in that sense, yes,

absolutely a nerve. Well where does that come from? The sense you up to us toil the lawn? Legally? That's totally my dad. My dad was an obsessive um, you know, in the good in a good sense. He just you know, completely absolute integrity sort of person. You know. The thing I think about all the time with my dad is like, um, in college, I worked worked in his firm. In high school, I basically worked as a laborer, you know, doing work

drilling holes and steel. But after college, I I did a summer where I was helping their finance departments, you know, negotiate a merger and transition, and they the way they did businesses they would bid jobs, um, you know, basically usually to the state. They would give a price, they would get the job. And um, there was one job where the bidder forgot to include the bolts. So that

was a million dollars. And anybody would have at that stage, you know, done everything they could to get out of the contract, because a million dollars is a million dollars. That was basically the net worth of the company right there. And I suggested to my dad, well, what are we gonna do. We gotta get out of this. We can't go through it. You can't can't spend a million dollars

because of this mistake. And he said, my words, my word, that's a we're not going to get out of it, and we're going to find a way to make it work. And you know, it's easy for a parent to talk about the right thing to do, but the greatest opportunities to be able to teach by showing somebody that you're doing the right thing when it really hurts. Um. And he did that all the time. And and so that was that was what you made me think about how I should behave too and you know, I just couldn't.

I couldn't break the law. Um, and did he get that contract? He got the contract. He sucked it up. I think they were able to cut back about half of that loss, but it was a huge hit on the on the company. Okay, so how do you decide to go to pen and what's your experience there? Um? I was a legacy. Uh, my father, my grandfather, my aunt, everybody went to PEN. I did early admit, I got in and so I decided to go. And uh I went originally thinking I was going to be a businessman

like my dad. So I went to the Warden Business School and as quickly as I could, I finished my degree there and got into the I was interested in the history of economics. And then I left. After I finished PEN and with a degree from the college as well as the business school, I went to Cambridge to study philosophy. Well well, well, what was the inspiration? I mean, because you've had a long peripatetic career in education. You just said, okay, I want to I want to explore more.

There was no issue of going into the business world or anything. Yeah, I mean when I finished, when I decided I didn't want to be in the business. Um. I then thought I'd go to law school. And then so I applied to law school and I got into law school, and then at the last minute, I thought, I just don't want to go to law school yet. So I was really obsessed with this philosophy course that I had taken in my last term at Penn, and I, you know, it was searching around for how I could

then do something else related to philosophy. And I thought I'd go to England. And I looked at Oxford and it required a thirty page essay to apply. And I looked at Cambridge and it required a six word essay to apply. So obviously I applied to Cambridge and I got in. I went, and I spent three years studying philosophy at Cambridge. And did you end up with a degree. Yeah, I got what would become a master, as they have this weird way that what wasn't originally undergraduate degree matures

into a master. So I have a Masters in philosophy, and I thought it would become a philosopher. I thought I would get a PhD. But then at the end I just felt it was too remote, too removed from the real world. So I came back to law school. Okay, But what did you learn from that experience in the UK other than socially? You know, I think that really important part of education, part of growing up, is to

place yourself in radically different contexts. Now, England is not radically difficult, different from America, but in many ways it was m and so that makes you much more sensitive to what in the background is making the world the way it seems, and what is the part you're responsible for. So, um, I loved my time in England. Um, it was extraordinary luxury because I just got to read and write and uh um and I had already had a degree, so

I felt like I knew something. Um uh. But um, but it's uh, it was you know, that was a time. It was a long time ago. It was eighty three to eighty six. That was a period when you know, Margaret Thatcher was the Prime minister. They were having these massive coal strikes. Um, there was strikes of the students because she was trying to cut back the welfare subsidy to students. Um. So there's a lot of social unrest in the country at the time. But I I felt it was you know, the period where I could go

deepest and think deepest about stuff that was important. Okay, so you go to Yale. What's your experience at Yale Law School? Um? Well, first, I actually went to Chicago and I transferred to Yale to follow a girlfriend who had met in England who wanted to go to Yale. So I spent my first year of Chicago. That begs the question, what's the been Going to the uh University of Chicago and going to Yale for law school? There radically different places. Um, so Chicago is wasn't you know?

I'm sure it still less. I don't have a clear sense of it today. But it's a great law school. Really super kids, really really super professors. I mean, um, you know Richard Posner, Michael McConnell, Cass Sunstein, Jeffrey Stone. I mean, there was incredible mix of people there. Diane would who eventually also became a judge with Richard Posner. Um, and so it was an intense, really intense legal education. Yale was more like a graduate school education. So, um,

you know, they're super smart, smart kids. Um, but they didn't they almost didn't take the law seriously. They didn't want to get deep into that, you know, the messiness of the law. So I felt like, in some ways it was the perfect education because I got a really deep legal education in my first year from the Chicago and then I went to Yale and I could be

more reflective and philosophical about it. And you know, given I decided I wanted to be a professor, that was a pretty good chance to um to be in that environment for that. Okay, what happened to the girl? We were very serious for many years, but in the end it didn't work. Okay, how did you decide you wanted to be a professor? You know, I realized I didn't have the discipline to work on problems I didn't find interesting.

So I clerked at a law firm, crevass Wind and More my first summer and on my second summer, and and I saw all these people working on things that, you know, just seemed incredibly boring. And and what struck me was not that they were credibly boring, It was just, my god, how can you actually do that? Because I realized that if you told me I had to work on something and I didn't find interesting, I just physically

I couldn't do it. So I at least. I needed a career where I was free to pick, uh, whatever I wanted to work on, based on what I wanted to work on. And you know, being I wasn't rich, So being an academic was the best way to do that. And that's the freedom that the job gives me. And I've depended on that deeply in the years since. And how did you end up at Stanford and how did you end it up at Harvard? And what are the

differences between those two gigs and environments? So after I clerked, I clerked for Posner first at the Seventh Circuit and then Justice Scalia at the Supreme Court. I went back to Chicago and I taught at Chicago for six years, and then I came to Harvard to start the Center for Internet and Society that was here. And then in two thousand after I got married, Um, my wife is really keen that we see California, so we went to Stanford. I was there for nine, yeah, nine years, and then

I came back to Harvard in two thousand nine. So they're very different environments. I mean, and Ford is like Yale in the sense of being small and very intimate, although of course at the time two thousand and two thousand nine, it was filled with people obsessed with Silicon Valley. At the heart of Silicon Valley, Harvard is huge, um, which I find wonderful because what that means is that there's always someone who is doing what you want to,

you know, be interested in. So there's always students who are interested in the stuff you want to work on. There's always professors who are working in the area you want to work on. So it's, um, it's like a city. It's like New York City compared to a village. But you know, as long as you're comfortable in a city,

it's it's ideal. Going back to Scalia, you know, Republicans idolized him, like the idolized Reagan, where those on the left certainly are not in favorite decisions since he's deceased. Was it hype? Was he really that intelligent? What's your take? Well, I think we have to recognize Justice Scalia as a justice from many years. So I guess he goes to the coordin eight six or eighty seven. Um. And obviously he dies in two thousand and sixteen, UM, so that's a long career. UM. And UM, I think he was

a different justice at different stages of his career. So what inspired me the most about him? You know, when you apply, at least when I applied to be a clerk, you you apply to everybody, and if you don't, you don't get a job from anybody. So you're not allowed to pick and choose based on you know, the philosophy or the part of part partisan character of a particular judge. Um. But I applied and he interviewed me quickly, and he

hired me quickly, um um. But what I admired about him is that, you know, he was someone who was who was deeply committed to um uh, to live out his philosophy of originalism and textualism. And there were a number of cases, number of times when there was a case where the conservative thing to do is not necessarily the originalist thing to do. And in every one of those cases I would say that he was immediately convinced

of the originalist thing. But in every one of those cases, he was eventually brought around to doing the originalist thing, even though it was against his otherwise conservative politics. Um. And so I was impressed that at that stage of his career, at least the principle of the um that he was advancing, he allowed to constrain himself. UM. And part of you know that was he's just trying to work it out. Part of it was his belief that the principles were not UM didn't have a political valance

to them. Part of it was he hired liberal clerks. I mean, I was a token liberal hired by Justice Scalia. The other clerks were very conservative, you know, they were UM. There was a deep skepticism about me early on, maybe all the way through UM. Later in his career he stopped hiring liberals. I asked him once why. He said, well, you know, I figured everything out. I don't need anybody

to argue with anymore, so you know I don't. I didn't spend my career studying the work of Justice Scalia, so I don't feel like I'm an expert in the late Scalia or the Scalia circus two thousand ten. But the Scalia I knew was someone that UM I didn't agree with, and you know, vast majority of cases. But he's certainly someone I respected for for what he was doing.

And how did you go from being a young Republican to the other end of the spectrum you know, in one sense, I don't think I've changed, because I'm still libertarian in the sense that I think society's objectives should be to give people the widest scope for liberty that they can. But what I what changed was recognizing how

much society needed to contribute to that project. So creating the conditions within which liberty can exist becomes an extraordinarily part of what society has to do and what government has to do for that. So that means creating conditions, including conditions of equality, um and. So the more you focus on how do you create those conditions, what education,

what protection for rights, what enablement of opportunities? Um. You know, it was obviously the Democratic Party that was more concerned about those issues than the Republicans, certainly the Republicans today um and and going forward. You know, I think one of the most interesting debates that came out of this recent Democratic primary was Andrew Yang's push for universal basic

income um and. One way to understand the push for universal basic income is again related to this idea of enabling people to have the most meaningful liberty that they can have. There's a really great book called um Bullshit Jobs, which is a which is a wonderful account of um. How you know, up tot of us have jobs that we think of as bullshit jobs, by which he means is defined to mean a job which is doing no good for you or for anybody else in the world.

You just start doing it, but you can't imagine how it's helping anybody. And it's not that other people think it's not helping anybody, you know, like I might think that UM parking ticket person is not helping anybody. It's that you yourself don't think that you're helping anybody, that you don't think the world is any better off because

of that. I think about, you know, the luxury of having a life for every morning I get up and I think I'm going to work on exactly what I want to work on, compared to somebody next to me who was doing a job where they're thinking this is just contributing nothing to the world. That contrast, I think, I think is going to be increasingly important as we think, how do we build a world where more people have the freedom to have jobs where they feel like they're

actually contributing something. They're doing something, they're doing something is meaningful at least to them. And what Andrew Yang was talking about was something that would create the conditions for making that possible. Like ub I would make it so, you know, you would have enough to live and then

you could pick a job. Maybe you wouldn't be able to work forty hours a week on that job, you know, only couple hours a week, whether it's you know, being a h an artist or um, you know, building things in the forest, whatever. But the point is you could be living in a way that was meaningful to you. And I think that would be extraordinary if we set

that as an objective for society. How will we make it so everybody wakes up every morning with the same feeling that I do, that this is what they're doing, what they want to be doing, and they have a chance to do it. And you know, in a certain sense, I think that's libertarian. That's about making sure society provides two people that opportunity for liberty, even though there's a hugely important role for the states, and creating the conditions for that liberty. And you say you have the ability

to choose your projects at Harvard. What are you working on right now? Well, about a dozen years ago, I announced I was going to give up my work on Internet and copyrights to take up the project of um addressing what I was calling that institutional corruption. But basically this corruption of institutions like government meant um and UM. You know, my obsession was trying to find a way to get a democracy that would be responsive um to the public, as opposed to responsive to the special interests

the funders of campaign. So that's the project I've been working on for the last twelve years and um uh and it's the project I'll be working on two we get it done at least for the next ten years. That's kind of I've set you know, seventy is a point where I want to step aside um. But uh so, what I'm working on right now are projects that are trying to elevate and make salient these reforms, democratic reforms. And so we've got a bunch of things related to

this election to try to tee this issue up. Got a bunch of projects related to the electoral college, which we hope, you know, we'll follow this election and give a real opportunity for reform of the electoral college. And my real hope is that if Drew Biden is elected and Mitch McConnell, the dark Lord of the Senate, is returned to Kentucky. That there's a chance that Congress will pass fundamental democratic reform in the first hundred days. Joe

Biden has promised they will do it. Nancy Pelosi has already passed that reform in the House last year, and she's committed to passing it if she has a majority in the House again. Chuck Schumer has promised to pass it in the Senate if he has a majority in the Senate. So we have a real chance for this reform to be enacted. And if it's enacted, I think it will be the most important thing that this administration could do. So I'm eager to continue to push to

try to make sure that that happens. So, for those who are not following as closely as you are, what would be the elements of that push. Well, in um, Nancy Pelosi passed something called the called HR one, And what was significant about that title is that it signaled that this needed to be the first thing that would be done, and that recognized that nothing else was possible until you passed this reform. And this reform includes, most

importantly changing away congressional campaigns are funded. You know, right now, members of Congress spend anywhere between thirty and seventy percent of their time raising money, spending their time on the phone calling donors, and their donors are not the average American. Their dontors sort of the tiniest fraction of the one spent.

So they spend, you know, some people most of their time sucking up to this tiny, tiny fraction of the one percent to get the money they need to run their campaigns or to get their party back into power.

That is a deeply corrupting experience. And so the most important thing I think HR one would do was to create a different way of funding campaigns UM that would liberate them from that project, and by liberating them, give them a chance to think about what their constituents want or what's in the interest of the country as opposed to what the funders of campaigns wants. That's number one. Number two, it would end partisan gerrymandering of congressional districts

in the states. Number three, it would restore the Voting Rights Act so that states cannot exercise their power to suppress the votes. UM. It's of you know, it's targeted African Americans. But the main reason I think for this suppression is just partisan, Like Republicans want to make it harder for Democrats to vote, and where Democrats have that opportunity, they want to do the same thing too. But the point is it's a corrupting inequality on the basis of

partisan um power that we've got to end. And h R one would go a long way to that. And then it did a bunch of other things related to ethics and government automatic voter registration things just to make the democratic process work better. And um, And I think that if we passed that bill, um maybe a little bit better than that bill, more aggressive in the changing

the way campaigns are funded. UM, then there would be an extraordinary opportunity to get a democracy that cared more about what people want than it cared about what the lobbyists or the funders of campaigns want. And sketching in the painting a little bit more, how would campaigns be funded? So HR one has two ideas. UM. It's real emphasis is on a matching fund system. So this is the

way New York City funds most of its campaigns. So matching fund system says if you give a small amount that gets matched up to UM six to one UM by the government, so that small contributions are much more valuable. And the theory is candidates would then be looking for more small contributions, which means they would be more responsive to people who are giving small contributions than to the

small number of people who give large contributions. Now, the other idea, which is the part that I think is really exciting and has enormous potential. Something that city of Seattle has adopted is something called vouchers. So give every give every voter a voucher. Think of it as a packet of coupons that they can use to give to

candidates to help them fund their campaigns. So, if you're a candida running for office, which you know is every single voter in your district has a hundred dollars in their pocket that they can give you to help fund your campaigns, and so you'll be raising money from ordinary people, not from the tiny fraction of the one percent to fund campaigns now. And if you do that, raise money from those people, um, then you're responsive to those people.

And I think that has the enormous potential to change the sensibilities of Congress to make them more focused on what ordinary people care about as opposed to these big funders. And and I think that would be the absolutely most important change that could that could be done. And so um um, Now, in this last presidential election, um, you know, we had there was an enormous focus on democracy reform.

Every single major candidate, including by the end um Joe Biden on the Democratic side and uh Bill Weld on the Republican side, promised within the first hundred days to pass fundamental democratic reform. And and in the Democratic side, people like Andrew Yang and Kirston gilla Brand and uh

Um Bernie Sanders endorsed the idea of vouchers. Kirston jilla Brand wanted to give people up to six hundred dollars and vouchers two hundred dollars for every federal race, so two underrellars for Congress, two underrellars for the Senate, to andolls for the president. Andrew Young said a hundred dollars. Bernie was never clear about how much money he was

talking about. But they all recognized that if you could make it so that ordinary people were funding campaigns, you would have a Congress more focused on what ordinary people cared about, not on the you know, the billionaires than millionaires who are funding through their packs or their large contributions.

Now this all sounds great on the surface, but as someone who has seen multiple election cycles, I'm reminded of the famous George Carlin routine, who says, you can vote if it makes you feel good, But the owners of the country are not going to give up power. They are really going to control. And I look at UH. You know, Bernie Sanders, who certainly spoke to the public and eased all his money from individual contributions, as opposed to Biden, as opposed to Commona who ultimately couldn't raise

that much money. It's hard to have confidence. The theory sounds good, but especially UH, taxes have been denigrated to the point where everyone thinks taxes are bad, even people on the left. It's hard to believe as a result of income inequality opportunities in education. You're also talking earlier about long form discussion of problems and issues. I certainly grew up in the sixties when public schools had enough money to educate people how to think, they were not

teaching to the test. And is the system inherently broken or will these brand aids fix it, or is there an elite The funny thing, of course, the elite to a great degrees on the left, people who are worked very hard and educated themselves to gain power, who have contempt for those who work with their hands or in service positions. Are these really solvable choose under the present system,

they are solvable. And I think the kind of changes that I was just describing, for example, if you gave if you followed Kirston jeweler Brand's proposal and you gave everybody six two hundred dollars for federal race, that's not a band aid. That would be a fundamental change and how Washington works now. I think it's a really important

question whether the Democrats will carry through. You know, many skeptical, cynical people said that Nancy Pelosi was able to pass h R one with every single Democrat voting for it because they all knew Mitch mcconnough would kill it in the Senate, so it never was going to get passed.

And the same people say that if the Democrats take control of the Senate and they have control of the House and they have the presidency, don't expect reform to pass because then all the money in the world will be against reform passing and they will stop the Democrats from passing it. And I think that's a fair challenge, and it's up to us to make them do it.

It's up to us to say, you know, we have finally come to the point where the vast majority of Americans realize if we don't fix this corrupted, broken political system, nothing happens. Nothing happens. You know, you mentioned at the opening that I tried to run for president and UH my campaign in UH was expressly focused, exclusively focused on passing fundamental reform UM, and it was almost impossible to

be able to run that campaign. Um, you know, this complicated game that they played to change the rules to keep me off the debate stage, partly because the issue was not salient four years ago. But now every single candidate endorsed this idea of fundamental reform in the first hundred days of the administration. So I think the Democrats UM have said they will do it. I think there's a chance we get enough Democrats in Congress to actually do it, and then we've got to hold their feet

to the fire. And if they don't do it, then God help them, there will be a revolution, and I will be in the barracks in the streets doing everything I can to drive it because we can't get anything done in this country until we fix this problem. There's no climate change legislation that will pass until we fix this corrupted, broken system. There's no healthcare reform that doesn't benefit pharmaceutical companies or the insurance companies until we fix

this corrupted, broken political system. Finally, people get that. And now the question is whether the Democrats will carry through if in fact they're able to stop this president from stealing the next election. Let's just assume election day happens and the ultimate result is up for grabs, the obvious example being the year two thousand. Many people believe in the year two thousands, despite having David Boy's on the Gore team, that they were outmaneuvered by the Republican attorneys.

If it's a jump ball, what should the Democrats do legally to ensure that they have the best chance of things coming out their way. There's so many issues. Who knows what the issues might ultimately be, but certainly there's issues of postmarks on absentee ballots, whether the ballots are filled out correctly. Uh then we certainly have people in charge of elections and states making unilateral decisions. And one can argue in previous situations the Democrats are the opposing team.

The Democrats have been on their heels in this situation. Well, it's absolutely true that this is going to be an incredibly complex election. I'm teaching a seminar in the fall called war gaming, which tries to map out all the things that can go wrong, all the places where the

system can get can be played. So, you know, so if I were to advise the Democrats on what's the one thing they need to be doing in twenty twenty that they didn't do in two thousand, they need to assume the other side is not going to play fair. And I'm not saying that's going to happen, but I think one striking thing about two thousand was that so many times the Democrats were just astonished with what the Democrats,

what the Republicans did. I mean, even the core argument that actually in the end one the argument about the equal Protection clause um controlling or regulating how votes would be recounted. When that argument was made, people on the less of this is just crazy talk. There's no way

such an argument could work. Um. But of course it did work, and the Republicans were willing to do almost anything, um, including remember the kind of Brooks brother riots um in Florida where you had these people who had been literally bust in, who were pretending to be Florida voters pounding on the doors demanding that they're hanging Chad Ballance be not countered or whatever depending on the district, um. You know.

And I think the Democrats were caught off guard because they just couldn't imagine that that kind of behavior would be engaged in. Well, I think now people are being woken up to recognize that this president will not stop

at anything. Literally, he's got everything to lose, you know, not just the election, but given what we know about the you know, criminal charges that are against his organization and his company, given what we know about the fiscal library, financial liability he faces to like Deutsche Bang, incredible amount of money outstanding. Um. You can just see that he imagines that if he doesn't win, it's not just the election,

it's also his whole empire collapses. And when you've got somebody against the wall and they know that everything disappears, that they don't win, They're going to do whatever they can. And I'm genuinely terrified about whether our legal system is kabowle of adjudicating when one side is so is operating

in such bad faith. Um, I just don't know, you know, we haven't seen good evidence that the court system will stand up to this so far, and and what's to say that they will stand up, you know, against it in the context of that election, And and as I said at the very beginning, if that happens, I don't

know what happens. You know, George Floyd brought out, Um, I think it was something like seven percent of America, it might have been seventeen at some number around there who turned out to a protest because of because of that event. You know, take that multiplied by three or four, and you have a country destabilizing event. I don't know what the country is like if people, Um, if there is an election which is stolen and people react in the way that I expect they will react given the

fury that this man has triggered across the country. Now, you obviously have a singular high profile yourself, but to what degree are you integrated with the d n C or Kamala or Joe. Is that something where you have interaction with them? Is the lines open or you on your own separate island. Well, I give advice on UM reform issues to anybody who wants it, and I've given advice to a wide range of people, including people involved in these campaigns, so I will continue to do that.

I'm not inside the campaign in the sense of running anything, and I don't expect to be UM although you know my view is Joe Biden needs to become the president and I will do whatever it takes to make every whatever it takes that my father would approve of, to make sure that that happens. Larry, this has been unbelievable. We could go on for hours, but we're gonna wear

our ears out and those of the audience. But this has been incredibly edifying, especially to those people who don't follow the law on a week by week basis or even a year by your business. Thanks so much for doing this. Thank you for having me. Until next time. This is Bob Left, says m