Nuanced. - 66. Joel Bakan: The World Economic Forum, Psychopathic Corporations & Twitter Lawsuit

Episode Date: July 26, 2022

Aaron Pete & Joel Bakan discuss the role corporations play in western society and his recent movie The New Corporation. The two also discuss Mr. Bakan's recent lawsuit against twitter. Joel Bakan is an author, filmmaker, musician, podcast host, and a professor of law at the University of British Columbia. His work examines the social, economic, and political dimensions of law, and he has published in leading legal and social science journals as well as in the popular press. Mr. Bakan recently released the film The New Corporation. Bakan has won numerous awards for his scholarship and teaching, worked on landmark legal cases and government policy, and served frequently as a media commentator. He is currently suing twitter. Learn more about Joel Bakan on his website: https://joelbakan.com/Send us a textThe "What's Going On?" PodcastThink casual, relatable discussions like you'd overhear in a barbershop....Listen on: Apple Podcasts   SpotifySupport the shownuancedmedia.ca

I'm Joel Bakken, professor of law at the University of British Columbia. In terms of my background, it's not that exceptional in terms of people who teach law. I did a degree in psychology at Simon Fraser. I then was fortunate to get a Rhodes Scholarship, so that took me to Oxford, and that's where I studied law. law for my first degree. I then went to Delhousie to get a Canadian law degree, and I then clerked at the Supreme Court of Canada for Chief Justice Dixon after that. Went to the Harvard Law School to get a graduate degree. And then I practiced for a little while. I articled in Toronto, and then went into teaching, started at the Osgood Hall Law School, and, you know, ended up here.

So your parents were psychologists. Yeah. What was that experience like for you? Did that sort of shape your worldview? You obviously took psychology early on. How did that sort of come about for you, and how did that impact you? Yeah, I came from a family of psychologists. My parents were, my father's brother, my uncle was.

He taught at the University of Chicago, and then at York University, his wife, my aunt, was a philosopher. Their kids were all sort of academics. So there were a lot of academics, and I think more than just psychology, it was growing up in an academic environment and an environment where scholarly questions were typical dinner table discussion. where there was a reverence for ideas and just a kind of sense in which that was normal. It was normal to sort of debate philosophical ideas and ideas about the self and human nature and science and history and politics and and all of that. And I've only realized since getting into the real world that that's fairly unusual. But that was my upbringing, and I think it created, at a very early time, a real kind of intellectual curiosity, curiosity about why the world is the way it is, why we are the way we are. What made you choose law over psychology, because you obviously have a path sort of already paved for you, but you chose to take the legal route?

What brought that about for you? Yeah, I think when you look at law and psychology, they have one thing in common. about human behavior. That is what drew me to psychology and ultimately to law was a question of why people are the way they are, why they do what they do, why they feel what they feel. And I guess I was frustrated studying psychology.

I kind of focused on the brain sciences, the more biological side of psychology. And I was frustrated with what I felt was a kind of disciplinary boundary that what you were really interested in was how the things happening in the brain affected your behavior and determined your behavior. And there was never really a questioning, at least in the kinds of courses I did, about how the brain was shaped by what was going on outside. It was less about that. And I became more interested in that. And that's really what law is about. Law is the outside. Law is an institution that's all about trying to

shape human behavior with incentives, with coercion, with rules, with principles. So all of these things are about shaping behavior. And also, I was always very concerned about social justice issues. And law, of course, was about that, too. So law was about trying to create a world trying to promote behavior that aligned with principles of justice and in particular of social justice and creating a society that sort of promoted that at its best. That's what law is and that's what drew me to it. Interesting. So you went to Harvard for your LLM. What was that experience like? Was it what people might imagine it to be? It's an intimidating idea for so many to consider going to something like Harvard Law School.

What was that experience like for you? Yeah, I mean, I was well prepared for intimidation by my experience at Oxford. So in that all of a sudden, you're among people that are incredibly smart. And it's easy to feel that, you know, you're the one who isn't, that you're the imposter, that you're the one who isn't as knowledgeable, doesn't have as, sharp and analytical mind. And so I learned at Oxford to actually put those feelings away. I learned to deal with them, to manage them, to understand, to, in effect, feel proud of myself and not feel like an imposter and feel like I could play in that league. And so I went to Harvard. It was really just

kind of a repeat of that. And I think my experience at Harvard was maybe a little bit different in the sense that I had clerked at the Supreme Court. I had done a lot of law. I had done law at Oxford. I'd done law at Dalhousie. I had a lot of law and very intense places of studying law. And I had become not cynical, but a little bit skeptical of the relationship between law and justice. That is what my experience had led me to. In fact, I'd been taught in law school that there were two different things. And so I really became interested in that problem. And that drew me to a school of thinking about law that was quite critical from left perspective.

called critical legal studies. And it drew me to this sort of, I guess, main mover in that school, who was a person named Duncan Kennedy. And so I chose to work with Duncan Kennedy and do my thesis with him and learn about, you know, I'd sort of learned about how laws constructed and functions and operates. But for that year at Harvard, I learned. about how to deconstruct law, how to understand its hidden presumptions, which are often

problematic, and how to think about law in a very critical way, in a very broadly critical way, not just, oh, this law is bad and this law is good, but to think about the entire system of what's often described as liberal legality, the kind of Western legal system. And it's conceits in relation to property, in relation to colonialism, in relation to the interests of workers, of women, LGBQT plus people, of all of it, and just how the gaps between law and justice are not necessarily accidental. So that's the feeling I think so many people have, just average Joe people, is that the law isn't there for them. that somehow, and I talked to Nikos Harris about this, of this challenge of a petty crime where you steal a chocolate bar, you end up in court, you're found guilty, maybe you get some prison time or maybe you're just asked to repay, but you have big corporations and the people who are responsible for really impacting the livelihoods of people across a country often just pay a penalty, and they still make profits at the end of the day on whatever criminal activity they had. I think 2008 might be an example of that. Is that what you were seeing? And was there a nail in the coffin for you

where you went, this isn't what I thought it was going to be. This isn't the direction. Did something stand out to you? I mean, I think there are many, many, many instances of the law's sort of departure from justice. And I ended up sort of looking at a particular set of those issues in relation to corporate law and how it operates. And there's no question that we live in a legal system that is very, very punitive for what's called common crime and very permissive for massive crimes that are committed by corporations. So, you know, whether it's 2008 or whether it's any scandal you can name since then or it's

the deep water horizon explosion that almost destroyed the Gulf of Mexico, or it's the various crimes of pharmaceutical companies when it comes to the opioid crisis. I mean, you can just go on and on and on. And, you know, the justification for it is that, well, you know, we need to allow for a certain amount of harm to happen in order to create capital. in order to, you know, create wealth. But then when you look at how that capital and wealth is distributed, what happens is a pretty small group of people

end up getting the benefits of all of these egregious things that happen at the hands of corporations. And it's sort of the common, ordinary people who end up suffering the detriments from it, which is what I try to show in a lot of my work. And, you know, it's not simply about petty crime versus corporate crime. When you look at, in politics, you look at the groups who have the loudest voices about law and order, about saying that, you know, people should go to jail for 10 years for stealing a candy bar or three strikes out or whatever.

The very sort of those who advocate law and order tend to also be the same people. promoting deregulation of corporations. So it's quite shocking that, you know, that you see that, especially on the right wing of the political spectrum, parties saying law and order, well, except for corporations, they should be deregulated and allowed to self-regulate. And it's that kind of contradiction

that I'm interested in in my work. When did that come about for you? And was this unpopular at the time? Obviously, since your first movie, the idea that corporations are flawed started to really take hold and people really started to think about what we had to do in order to have all the luxuries we have. But at the time, it doesn't seem like that might have been a popular position to have because within the legal field, the people usually paying the bills and supporting the legal profession are the corporations. So what was that

sort of early journey like for you? Yeah, I mean, again, it was primarily an intellectual journey in the sense that I had come into teaching law as a constitutional law, a lawyer. I was very interested in the charter. And I wrote a book about the charter at the end of the 1990s, published with the University of Toronto Press called Just Words, constitutional rights and social wrongs. And the basic thesis of the book was that, constitutional rights didn't have much scope for addressing the real injustices in society,

that those tended to be beyond the scope of the charter because they were in the so-called private sector. So they were injustices about, they weren't injustice caused directly by legislation, but they were injustices caused by what might be described as the capitalist system writ large. Inequality, racism. all of these kinds of things. And so when I finished that book, the conclusion of the book was, so I think that the real problem is the constitution that we don't normally see, which is the whole network of laws that support this kind of corporate capitalist system,

property law, contract law, and corporate law. And so I thought, okay, well, for my next project, I want to look at that constitution. And in particular, I want to look at the constitution of the corporation because that seems to be particularly problematic because of the way the corporation is created always to pursue its own self-interest. So that struck me as really interesting. And I began an academic study of that that then sort of through a whole variety of weird circumstances ended up being a film. and a popular book rather than a scholarly book. Interesting.

Can you tell us about your, we're in a weird time where the charter is being talked about a lot and the ramifications of that, the goods, the limitations of it, the flaws. What stood out to you during that time? Because I don't even know if we always do a good job of realizing how controversial it was at the time and repatriating and what that process looked like. Today, we all sort of describe it as something we take for granted a little bit. So what did you see during that period? period, and what stood out to you as interesting about it?

I think what's interesting about the charter is, well, there are a number of things. I mean, one is that our entire constitutional system, including the charter, is a colonialist instrument. And, of course, the AFN opposed the charter, as did the government of Quebec, because they saw it as a continuation of this colonialist legacy. But, you know, that is, that's one story. Now we have the charter. And I think the interesting thing about the charter, if you ask most people on the street, what do you think your rights under the charter protect you from?

They would say, well, any kind of violation of my human rights, of my equality, of my freedom of expression. And what they don't know, including students when I asked this question in first year law, is that the charter only applies to government. It doesn't apply to their employers. It doesn't apply to their landlords. It doesn't apply to anybody like that, only to government. And so that is interesting. And the second thing that's interesting about is when it applies to government,

the way the courts have interpreted it is it only applies to stop governments from doing things. So if government wants to do something to help people to promote equality or something like that, that's not something the charter is going to require them to do. They may or they may not do it, but the charter doesn't require them to do it. So the charter, A, it applies only to government. And B, it only applies in a way of saying you can't do this and you can't do that. And that's profoundly limiting in a world where much inequality and many of people's rights are actually restricted, not directly by government, but in other ways.

And so it's that kind of contradiction, I guess, that I play out in that book I was mentioning just words, but that I continue to think about as I teach charter and also as I'm involved in litigation now, because it's actually that problem is at the heart of a current case that I'm litigating against Twitter. Right. Do you think that sentiments have changed around the charter over time? Because I certainly know that many indigenous communities are very proud of Section 35 now and have a very different perspective on it. Do you think that's a broadly true that most sentiments around the effects of it have been viewed as mostly positive?

So I think the first thing to note, and I don't want to be too much of a constitutional law teacher here, but Section 35 is not part of the charter. But it has a really interesting analogical relationship to the charter, obviously. But it is the section just after the last section of the charter in the Constitution Act of 1982. Now, that doesn't really matter, but there's no question that despite initial misgivings by the AFN and other organizations, that Section 35 was a very kind of watered down. commitment on the part of the Constitution to indigenous peoples. It's turned out that the courts have, though it's taken them some time, the courts have from the Sparrow case onward, really made, I'm not going to say it's anywhere close to perfect, but they're on the right

path, it seems to me. They're on a path that attempts to actually give some real substance to 351. I mean, the language of 351 recognized and affirmed is arguably very weak language. It doesn't necessarily guarantee. It just recognizes and affirms. And I think what the courts have done is they've sort of resisted the temptation, perhaps, by a dominant colonial institution to simply say, well, look, it's just recognizing a firm, so it doesn't really do much. They've actually said, no, this section does something. And I think there are ways in which around some of the other section, section 15, equality, section 2D, freedom of association, the courts have in an analogous way to 351 taken a more substantial and more bold approach to those rights.

And that's great. And in the case I mentioned, Twitter, case where asking them to do the same with respect to freedom of expression. But it's far from a perfect scenario. I think what I would say is the courts are on the right path, but it's not a straight line by any means. You've talked a bit about the judiciary and their role in interpreting these laws. Can we talk a little bit about clerking with Chief Justice Dixon and what that experience was like for you and perhaps a bit about the Oaks test. Yeah, sure. Clerking with Chief Justice Dixon was an amazing experience. I mean, I'm now, I don't know, probably 40 years away from it, maybe more. And it still remains a kind of seminal experience for me. I learn more about law

during that year at the Supreme Court, I think, then perhaps in any of my degrees. And I can't say enough, I can't be affectionate enough about Chief Justice himself, Brian Dixon. He was just a really great person and a great mind and a great mind and a great heart and a great soul. And we had a really, a really great relationship, a working relationship, and personal relationship. So, yeah, I just have very, very fond, very fond memories of him and of that time. There were big cases that we worked on during that time. We worked on the, whether the right to strike is protected by the charter.

And Chief Justice Dixon dissented when the court said that it isn't. He said it should be. And that position has now been vindicated. Now a majority of the court has adopted that position. And the Manitoba language reference was a huge case. It was the first case. I remember my first day of work coming into, the chief's office, and he had these stacks of books, litigation books, you know, factums

and books of precedents and all of that put together by the lawyers in this case, which was going to be heard, or I think which had been heard. And this was the first day of my clerking job and this is a huge case. It involved whether or not the entire legal system of Manitoba was invalid because the laws hadn't been enacted in both English and French over the years since 1870 when the Constitution said they had to be. So everything that had been done had been done only in English and therefore was technically constitutionally invalid. And And so the court was faced with whether they were going to invalidate the entire Manitoba legal system, which of course means every incorporation, every marriage, every legal act done would be invalid moving forward,

which was crazy and a huge intellectual challenge as to, on the one hand, you can't do that, it's impractical, and on the other hand, the constitutional demands you do do it. And so that was the pickle that the judges were in. and Chief Justice Dixon said this will be your first assignment, right, go figure this out. And so I went off and worked on it, and it was hard and sort of crafted some kind of an idea that we talked about and that ultimately seemed to work. And then, of course, there was Yokes case deciding sort of what the scope of Section 1 is. And that was huge.

I mean, the way that happened was a decision had been drafted by another clerk, actually, before I'd come. And up to that time, the way the court dealt with Section 1 was just kind of, they'd spend all these pages talking about the right, be it, you know, presumption of innocence and Oaks or Freedom of Religion and Big M, all these big cases. And, you know, all this fine analysis and everything. And then it gets section one, it's like, okay, well, we think it's fine or we think it's not. Like, you know, in like one paragraph. And the Chief Justice, you know, and this was how the Oaks decision read, and the Chief Justice said, we just can't do this anymore.

We, like, this is too arbitrary. It's not principled. We need a test. And so that was the task that was the task that, that I became involved in working with him to try to figure out a test and the end result of that was the Oaks test. Can you walk us through the Oaks test? Because I think for so many, the law can be so intimidating for average people.

They're like, I could never practice. Like, I've talked to people and they go, I can't believe you went to law school. Like, it's a whole different thing. But I think there is something to be admired about the Oaks test, about these simple, perhaps short sentences that bring such complexity that really humble you to a problem and you have to work through very similar to a math problem, how to come to a decision and you have these guiding principles that shape your perspective. And that really is the law. But for so many,

it seems intimidating to read a legal case. It's intimidating to go into a courtroom. So can you walk us through that test and maybe how it came about over time? Yeah, sure. I mean, the test, I mean, first picking up on a point you're making, I just think there's a lot of unnecessarily obtuse writing in law. And it's not that you can simplify everything and, you know, we need to have plain language and all of that. It's just that sometimes judges are simply, I think, not clear enough in their own thinking, and then the end result becomes a sort of muddle. And we as lawyers and law students have to then sort of grapple with that. And it's not a criticism of individual judges so much as it is of a system that just works them too

hard. There just isn't the time. There aren't enough judges, perhaps. There isn't the time to to really deliberate think something through and write something that's really clear and really well thought out. So a lot of times we end up as law students being, as you say, intimidated and thinking, oh my God, this is so complex and difficult. I can never understand it. Whereas really what's happening is it's just not very clear thinking and writing. And it's not our fault. So, So, yeah, I mean, Oaks, I think, does make an attempt to not do that. And it's based on, I mean, the research that I did as a clerk was in many of the traditions of legal thinking that have had to deal with this problem of how do you both grant people rights, but also leave enough wiggle room for the state to function. because sometimes it is necessary to restrict individual rights for the collective good.

So this is a problem that, you know, philosophers have been grappling with and lawyers have been grappling with forever and politicians and politics. And, you know, it's all about where do we find the right balance between respecting individual autonomy and enabling individual autonomy and promoting collective goods that enable good lives for everybody. You know, these are problems that we can't avoid of any organized society. And so in the German and European constitutional law system, going back to sort of legal philosophers like Hans Kelsen and others, this idea emerges called proportionality.

And it's this notion that it may be okay to restrict rights if there's a, proportional relationship between the harm that's caused by the restriction and the good that's caused by the restriction. And it may be okay to restrict rights if there's a proportional relationship between the goal of the government on the one hand and the means that are deployed to achieve that goal. So those are kind of the two different dimensions of proportionality that you see when you read in this literature. And the Oaks test is really an attempt to bring together into a test the last hundred years of thinking about proportionality

and to do it in a kind of ladder way, to do it in a way that says, well, maybe there's a rational connection. You have to show that as a minimum, but you also have to. to show that it's the least impairing way. You don't want to impair rights more than you need to to get to your goal. So the way the Oaks test works, you asked, is you need initially to identify the purpose of the writer, of the legislation.

And then you need to ask two basic questions about it, the first one having two parts. The first question is, is there proportionality between the means and the ends? So is there a rational connection between the means, and the ends of the legislation is are the means the least impairing of the right to get you to the end? So that's kind of the two-part first question. And then the second question is, is there proportionality between the good effects of the law and the bad effects of the restriction of rights that it causes? If the good effects outweigh the bad effects, then you meet that test. And so all of those tests you can find in different ways when you read this sort of scholarly

literature and look at cases from, say, the European Court of Human Rights and the German Constitutional Court and others, all of those tests are kind of there in different ways. What the Oaks test does is it kind of brings them all together into a coherent metric. And I think what it ultimately does, from a jurisprudential perspective, there's a legal philosopher named Ronald Dworkin. And what he says is that there's no such thing as a right answer in law when you have hard cases. In other words, difficult cases,

you have counsel on one side arguing X, counsel on the other side arguing why you're in an appellate court or an apex court. They're both good arguments. There isn't any kind of metaphysically right answer. So the best you can hope for, says Ronald Dworkin, is that judges make decisions in a principled way. And the best way to ensure they're principled is to give them sort of rational rules and principles and tests that will ensure that their mind doesn't simply go, I'm just going to decide this because this is what I think. think. So to take them into a principled psychological frame. And to me, that's what the Oaks

test does, is it requires you to to seriously address these questions, rational connection, minimal impairment, deleterious effects versus salutary effects. What is the purpose of the law? You know, it doesn't mean that your own subjective views aren't going to shape your analysis, but it does mean that if you go through all those gauntlets, you're going to, to be in a kind of principled frame of mind, a principled analytical frame of mind, not simply saying, well, I think this is good and that's bad. I want to say confidently that one of the examples is drinking and driving traffic stops was one of the examples that maybe people can kind of integrate and see this play out where there is a really good argument that drinking

and driving causes a lot of consequences for people. Innocent people die as a consequence. And so while it may be an infringement to stop random people and have everybody kind of answer a few questions or check their driver's license, the benefits of that far out way because then we're not losing people and people who are doing dangerous things. Like, I truly believe that if we reinvented the car today

and all of a sudden we had cars, we wouldn't let most people drive it because of how incredibly dangerous it is on almost all metrics. And so kind of understanding how that impacts people and then having them not have all their faculties while operating basically a bullet on the road is a really good example of where that kind of plays out.

Absolutely. I mean, I think there are many examples that we've encountered during the pandemic in terms of masking requirements, vaccine requirements for employees. I mean, all kinds of quarantine requirements, all provinces not letting people in. We've had all kinds of instances

of quite profound restrictions on people's liberty for the sake of the collective good of some scientifically based argument that if we do that, everybody will be better, even though you may want to not wear a mask, we're going to require you to wear a mask, or you may want to go around while you have COVID, we're going to require you to quarantine. We've really tested our sort of sensibility as a society around these kind of individual versus collective conflicts. And I don't know that we've done very well when you look at, you know, some of the the occupation of Ottawa by truckers and sort of these anti-masking mandates

and all this. We, it's caused a lot of friction. And as a society, I would say we have maybe, you know, a C-minus in terms of being able to see these larger issues of collective good and the need for sometimes restricting individual freedom. Interesting. The only, I guess, challenge I would have to that is that Justin Trudeau before he put in any mandate said that this would be a very divisive issue if he were to push forward on it. And then we've seen that kind of divide. But moving away from that, I'm interested in your thoughts on the United States doesn't really have a similar sort of Oaks test. And they seem to

really take two hard-lined positions. So I'm interested in your thoughts on whether or not the Oaks test is maybe able to depoliticize issues for us where there are infringements, but since they're justified, it doesn't allow people on two extremes to kind of maybe go to war with each other. I mean, I think the Oaks test reflects a very sort of Canadian sensibility. We've never taken an absolutist approach to rights in the way that the United States has. And in the United States, you see that absolutist approach in, you know, different domains and freedom of expression. For example, hate speech restrictions aren't permitted. Restrictions on discriminatory, misogynist speech aren't permitted.

When you look at gun laws, there are no, you know, in Canada, we would deal with those under Section 1. If we add something like the Second Amendment's protection to bear arms, we would deal with it under Section 1. And we'd say, well, yeah, true, you have that right, but we have to balance it against the collective good. And so I think, you know, the Section 1 is a reflection. of the fact we're in Canada. And Oaks simply plays out the sort of balance that Section 1 construct. Section 1 says that these rights are guaranteed, subject to reasonable limits prescribed by law,

demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society. And that gives invitation to judges to say, yeah, you have that right, but. And Section 33 furthers that. by allowing governments to override the charter altogether. So, you know, we are, I think, a system that pays much more regard to collective notions than the United States does and to restrictions on individual rights in the name of collective goods. And Section 1 reflects that and Oaks reflects that.

Another question, just before we move on from your work with Justice Dixon, is that you see in the United States, most people seem to know who's on their Supreme Court. And they also, I think to their detriment, know their political leanings and biases. And it's very different in Canada. I think our disadvantage is most people don't know who our Supreme Court is made up of and how they approach things. I think Beverly McLaughlin has said in a tremendous example, we have images of her here at the law school and a very admirable person. But, not an overly well-known person to the everyday person. There might be benefits to that,

but you got to see the work that goes into shaping our society, making sure that governments are held accountable. What was that experience like? And do you think we could do a better job of maybe hearing from those people in a non-political sense of just knowing that these are the people, we know who Justin Trudeau is, we know who our average prime minister is, but we don't get to hear from the people who are usually the person holding people like him accountable. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think it gets that. This is not a perfect constitutional system. There's something highly imperfect in the fact that nine fairly anonymous, as you point out, really smart lawyers basically, are deciding what democratic governments can't do. That's a problem. And at times in history, it's been a huge problem. And you see something.

for example, in the United States, the current Dodd's case, the abortion case, and you know, you have a change in the Supreme Court and all of a sudden all of these rights are totally wiped out, whereas people on the other side of that debate, people who are anti-abortion, would say, well, these judges just created these rights out of, you know, thin air in the 1970s in Rowan Wade. So you have this problem that it's very undemocratic to have these nine individuals who weren't elected by anybody deciding what those people who were elected by everybody can and can't do. But the other way of looking at it is you can't really have a democracy unless certain rights and freedoms are protected from the, the democracy itself from the majority.

So the right to vote, the right of freedom of expression, all the rights that we have in the charter are necessary in a democracy. And if you leave it to the people who are elected to decide what those rights mean and what their scope is, then the fear is they'll do it in their own political self-interest. And so it's an imperfect system to have so much power in these judges. Now, would it help if people were more aware of who they were and what their values were and perhaps taking your point a bit further, more involved in deciding who gets appointed to the court? That's a tricky question.

I mean, part of the reason why we're so aware of the different judges in the United States, and most Canadians, if you put a microphone in their face on the street, would be able to name those judges before they can name ours. But part of that reason for that is because the courts become so politicized and that each of those judges is associated with a particular sort of ideological position. And I would say it's a nice thing. It's a good thing that I would like to think anyways that our Supreme Court of Canada members approach things in a more principled way rather than a kind of crass ideological way. And I think that's the case. It's certainly been the case historically.

But having said that, it's still the case that the Supreme Court of Canada and its current composition is highly unrepresentative. There are three members of Quebec, but there's no indigenous member, for example, which is, I mean, given that our sort of current way of thinking is that there are three kind of founding peoples of Canada, the French, English and indigenous, and the fact that there's no indigenous member of the court, I think, is just intolerable. But even if there were, you know, that one or two or even three indigenous members don't necessarily represent all indigenous people, just like the French Quebec judges don't represent all Quebec people. So there are real problems. And I've written about this. I've been quite critical about this. But it's hard to think about how to get out of that, at least without radically sort

of restructuring our Constitution. So when you're in the court, the judges definitely feel the weight of that responsibility. At least that was my experience. And certainly with Chief Justice Dixon, that it was really, it was felt very viscerally. and all the time that this was a very large responsibility. And along with that, that we shouldn't undo the decisions

that have been determined democratically, unless there are very good reasons. And along with that, there was a real kind of social democratic bent to, and there continues to be to the court, a willingness to allow government, to restrict the rights of the powerful in order to serve the interest of those without power. And that's been a theme of the Supreme Court and continues to be. I'm saying all this with some concern that our court is becoming a little bit more politicized,

a little bit more in the sort of mold of the U.S. court, a sort of conservative disposition. there does seem to be a very quiet shift underway, which needs to be observed. Can you say more on that? Do you think that part of that change is because Beverly McLaughlin has stepped? What do you think the clause is? I think it partly as a result of certain appointments that were made by Prime Minister Harper. I don't want to name names or anything, but I'm sure that, you know, They are, the judges I'm thinking of are not unprincipled.

It's just their principles tend to be of a more conservative cast in a way that we haven't seen so much during the charter era. One of the big fears is always that we follow after the United States and we're just 10 years behind the mandatory minimums being, I think, a really obvious example of that. Is that the sense you might be starting to feel? Is that perhaps a more liberal government is going to try and put people on who are going to have more liberal ten, and then we're going to have more of that sort of representation or move in more obvious politics? I think it's larger than that. I think that we are in the West moving in the direction of a kind of, I hesitate to use the word populace. because I think that word is wrongly used,

but a kind of quasi-authoritarian right-wingism that is packaged and sold as populist. You know, the Italian Prime Minister just resigned. The most likely government, the most likely government that will be elected in September in Italy will be of that cast. We've got Hungary, we've got Putin, we had Trump, we just see, we have Brazil, we just see things that we wouldn't have seen 15, 20 years ago, governments that are kind of illiberal, questioning the basic sort of constitutional norms of liberal legality and being much more arbitrary and personal in their exercise of power. power. And that's that's kind of what unites these movements, the, you know, the Le Pen in France, to some extent, even Boris Johnson's conservative government in the UK, though a muted version of it. And so this is new. And I think that it's creating a new kind of zeitgeist that inevitably is going to be reflected in not only government,

but also in the judges that they appoint, and just in a kind of broader sort of ideological sensibility, which inevitably affects legal sensibility. Right. You talked a little bit about dissent, and I find that most of my professors actually admired the dissent. So when the Supreme Court comes to a decision, certain judges are able to have an opinion that differs.

Sometimes it's on a more minor detail, Sometimes it's on a larger issue and they fully dissent and move in a different direction. Sorry, there's a concurrent decision that's different, but there's smaller issues they'd like to see changed, and then there's a full descent. I felt like, from my experience, that was somewhat missing from the debates we maybe, I imagined we were going to have. When people told me to go to law school, they're like, oh, you love to debate, you love to disagree, you should go to law school. That seemed like the part I was surprised to not see more of, which is two people sitting downstairs and them just going back and forth based on policy or some sort of grounded arguments, but like a real energy of just like we don't have to agree and we can just debate back and forth. I think it's more formalized, obviously, in moot courts, but being able to have just topics of like, is this good or bad, Nikos Harris touched on that as well, where he used to have to calm people down and say, sit back down in your chairs, let's just do this all very civilly before. phones came about and before laptops became commonplace.

Right. You obviously attended school prior to laptops and cell phones being very common. What has the change you've seen been like within the law school setting over the years? What have you kind of seen developed? Because then you come to Peter A. Allard School of Law later on. So what has that been like? You know, I don't think that legal education has changed fundamentally for a very long time. I mean, the curriculum we teach in first year would not be surprising to somebody who showed up from the late 19th century at a major law school.

And so on the one hand, it's been quite conservative. On the other, you know, we've introduced, at least in a kind of pronunciable, in a kind of proclamational way that we care about social contacts, that we care about diversity, that we're going to bring all of these discussions into our discussion of the law. But it's often the case that even those discussions become formalized and not sort of subjects for debate, but simply here are the norms,

and now we're going to learn them. And so I think that the reason for that has in part to do, with the fact that we straddle being a trade school and being an intellectual experience. And often the trade school side wins out. And what the trade school side says is you have to know the law. You have to learn the law and then be presented with a hypothetical on a three-hour exam and be able to apply it. Well, in that trajectory, you don't want to know anything about the dissents because they're not law. They don't count. And so from a purely practical perspective, they're useless. They're a waste of time. If you quote a dissent in your answer on a law exam to a hypothetical, you will lose marks because your professor will say, but that's not the law. It's a dissent. And so from a trade school perspective, all of that's useless. Debate is useless to some extent.

You simply have to learn what the law is and then learn how to argue within that. From intellectual perspective, it's exactly the opposite. From an intellectual perspective, I want to truly understand the Justice McLaughlin's dissent versus Chief Justice Dixon's majority opinion in the Keekstra case. It's a fascinating case about hate literature. And here you have these two legal titans, you know, battling it out. Dixon's saying we should be able to restrict hate literature. The government should be able to do that.

McLaughlin's saying the government shouldn't. Each of them writing brilliant judgments, sort of chock full of philipel philosophical debate and examples and counter examples, you know, I would want to teach a whole course on just that debate between Dixon and McLaughlin from an intellectual perspective. From a legal perspective, McLaughlin's dissent is meaningless because it doesn't count as law. And so we're always sort of straddling those two things. Now, I think over the years, it's arguable that we've moved more. in the direction of the intellectual side.

I mean, if you go back to the late 19th century or even my education at Oxford in the 1980s, it was just, just learned the law. You know, they're just learned the law. And to the extent you have intellectual questions, they're intellectual questions within the law. They're not intellectual questions about the law, about what it should be, or they're simply, you know,

what does this case mean? Does it mean this or doesn't mean that? We can debate that. But we can't debate outside of that frame. I think it's fair to say that there's now more license to get into sort of deeper debates about what the law should be about law, not just within law in the classroom. But there's license. Some profs do it. Some don't.

Some do it a little. Some do it a lot. And so you're going to get a fairly spotty experience in law school in terms of how much of that. you get. And in saying that, I'm not saying one is better than the other. I'm just saying they're different. Yeah. So what was it like to come to Allard as a professor? Were you excited? You came here with your late wife. What was that experience like to come here and to try and share your passion with others? Well, to be very, very honest and Frank, Alard has, and this is probably a controversial view among my colleagues, but Alid has changed radically.

from the time that I came here with Marley. I was at Osgood, and Osgood was a very, sort of very oriented to the intellectual side that I've been describing, very much about critical approaches to law, feminist approaches to law, even Marxist approaches to law. So that was what Osgood was about.

And it was more about that at the time than I think any other law school in North America. So that's where I started teaching. And that was kind of my experience of a law school. Did you like that experience? I loved that. Yeah, I loved that. I mean, because that's what I've always, as I was saying at the start,

I have always been drawn to laws and intellectual kind of discipline. So that was fantastic. And I was sad to leave. But, and when I came to UBC, UBC was, I think, at a different point in its evolution. It was more oriented towards the practice side of things. There were great people here, great scholars, but it seemed to me that they didn't define the ethos of the place as a whole,

whereas at Osgood, that was the ethos. Here the ethos was much more practice-oriented when I arrived. And it wasn't that you couldn't do intellectual work, In fact, I think Marley and I were hired here and embrace positively because the faculty wanted to expand that kind of work. And there were already people here doing that kind of work, like Elizabeth Grant, who's still here doing fantastic, work in that way. But there was a strong orientation to the bar and bench, to the local bar and bench, that kind of defined the overall ethos. That has changed. We are now, we've gone almost 180 degrees. We're now a much more, more like Osgood was in those days, a much more kind of intellectual law and society, feminism, all these different approaches to law kind of school. Right. And so what was that kind of journey like? Did you, have you enjoyed that changeover? Were you a part of that change over?

Yeah. I mean, I was. Fortunately, Justice Lynn Smith, who was dean of the law school, appointed me as the chair of the Appointments Committee for a few years. And I really saw it as, and as did she, as kind of an important project to try to bring more scholarly scholars into the law school, to try to build the kind of law in society, law and context, feminism and law, to try to build those approaches. And Marley and I were both very much involved in trying to steer the law school in that direction. And, you know, critical mass sort of developed maybe 10 or 15 years ago, and we haven't really looked back.

It's now a very energized place intellectually. You went through a lot when you lost your wife. I'm wondering if you can tell us a little bit about that because you tried your best to make something positive out of that. And I think that that's something that I saw that was incredibly admirable. I can't imagine what that experience was like, but I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about that. Well, it's an unimaginable experience,

especially when you have a young child who's who's going through that and who you can't help but empathize with. Myam, our son, was three when Marley got sick and five, when she passed away. And yeah, it's just, it's impossible to put into words what it is to lose, to lose somebody you love and to lose the mother of your child. But, you know, both Miam and I, you know, we became very close through that, obviously, and supported each other, even though he was just like three and four years old. My ability to get through it was because of him and his embrace of life, his passion for life. Which, you know, yeah, and he just graduated from U of T law, so. Oh, wow.

Yeah. That's amazing. I mean, just, he just yesterday wrote his bar exam in Ontario. So, yeah, very, very proud of him. And, yeah, and, you know, a year or so later, I met, I met Rebecca and, and her daughter. and her daughter, Sadie, was Mayam's age, and so we pretty quickly became a family, and it was wonderful because now Sadie had a brother

and Mayam had a sister. And, yeah, and Rebecca is a musician and singer and film and TV actor, and so we, we have a lot of work that we do together. We play music together. And Myam actually is a really great drummer. And so we have an album out there where he's on drums. And Rebecca's singing and I'm on guitar and we have a bass player.

Was that when your passion for music really started to take off? Because you do share your music. Your website has a very humorous thing that if Donald Trump is going to go out there and speak, then I'm going to share my voice with the world. old and I thought that that was very humorous. But is that when that really started to your passion for music? I mean, my passion for music started, I think, when I first heard the Beatles when I was five years old.

And I played music professionally starting when I was around 16 years old. I had played guitar and rock bands and stuff from the time I was very young, like 10 or 11. And in high school, I became involved with the jazz band. And so I very quickly kind of really developed a passion for jazz and started playing jazz and played with, in Vancouver, some of the people who are now kind of the icons in the jazz world in this city. You still play with them sometimes. So, yeah, through.

high school and university while in Vancouver, I was playing jazz often on a professional basis. And then in Oxford, I sort of, there was a jazz club and we formed a band. And we were playing at gigs like, I don't know, twice a week because we were like the only jazz group in Oxford. And so we were playing parties and balls and pubs. And yeah, did a lot of playing in Oxford and sort of haven't looked back and but I tell Rebecca she's the best musician I've ever played with and for me like I you know I played with a lot of really great musicians who have gone on and had great careers but but we have a very symbiotic sense of jazz and other kinds of music and so it's just very very easy to

play with her and the same with myam so it's been a delight playing with rebecca and myam's not here anymore but but and we still we still play together and i also play in a rock band called the eliotonics uh and we just finished an album so amazing one of the questions i guess i have is one of the challenges i think just academics in general seem to face is a sense of over time maybe elitism or a sense of ego about how much they know and then they feel like they can't relate to the average grocery store worker because they're so intelligent but it seems like you have an admiration for your wife you have so many different interests that I think keep you humble that allow you to stay a student and continue to learn and enjoy I'm just wondering what that

journey has sort of been like yeah I mean I I love intelligent but intelligent intelligence takes so many different forms. I mean, you know, Rebecca is absolutely brilliant. I mean, to be able to, I just am in awe when I see her ability to understand text and turn it into a character, for example, or write incredible songs that are just like unbelievable melding of poetry and music. And she actually edits my books because she has just a real sense of language as an artist who works with language and really, really provides great notes. And in fact, two of my books, she's done the audio book for it because she's also a voice artist. So, yeah, so her intelligence, our daughter Sadie's incredible intelligence, I mean, she's not an academic, but unbelievable perception and that, again, just I look at different people.

I mean, those are just people in my life, but different people, musicians, I work with just people I know, people in the film, crew, you know, people who do sound or or shoot or just, yeah, many, many people in the different things I do. And I'm always just intrigued, curious and kind of gobsmacked by the intelligences that they bring. And so I think, I mean, I think for academics who think their form of intelligence is somehow, and I would add, you know, your common five-year-old that you talk to who will say something and you'll go, what? I, you know, so I think academics who think that somehow there's a hierarchy of intelligence and knowledge and that they inhabit the sort of platonic heights of intelligence, I feel sorry for them. Not only, you know, can you

criticize them for being elitist or snobs or whatever, but I feel sorry because they're missing out on so much in life, so much, so much beauty. Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. I think the one that I always saw was the academics thinking that they don't need to exercise or stay fit because their brain is their bread and butter, so they don't need to do that. Then the corporation comes out and you start to break down and it sounds like you use your background in psychology to sort of diagnose and pull out a problem that you had been thinking about over the years can you talk about what it was like to write that first book and to have such a strong response yeah i mean i have been thinking

about it for years because having done psychology uh and learned about personality disorders in particular sociopaths and psychopaths. And the basic sort of nub of that was an inability to have concern for other people, to feel responsible to other people, to feel, to care about other people, to care about anything but your own sort of debased, often self-interest. And so, yeah, that was psychology. And then when I was studying questions, corporate law in law school at Delhousie, actually, we learned about the best interests of the corporation principal. And the fundamental principle is that directors and managers have to always make decisions in the best interests of the corporation in terms of the corporation

self-interest. So that's interesting because the corporation is a person. You also learn that in corporate law. It's an artificial person. And its personality is that. that it always has to act out of self-interest, not allowed to be concerned about others. And I thought, bingo, that's a psychopath. That is the person I learned about in psychology as a psychopath. So that was an idea that was just kind of kicking around for a long time. It was like one of those ideas that you have and you just think, okay, that's interesting. And it sticks, you know, but I never thought I'd really write about it.

But then I began working on this corporation project. And for the reasons I talked about before, you know, I'd finished just words and concluded that the real constitutional issue was the constitution of the economy and the corporation was a part of that. So I'm looking at the corporation academically. And a colleague of mine here, a friend of his passes away. And he's Jewish. The friend is Jewish. And at a Jewish funeral, you need to have a certain number of Jewish pall bears. And so he asked me on behalf of his friend, could I be a pallbearer?

I don't know this person at all. I said, sure, I will. And so I go, I do that. Another Paul Bear, who's also a friend of my colleague here, is a guy named Mark Akbar. And he's a filmmaker. And he had made the film about Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky and the media. And I love that film. And so after the funeral, we're at the sort of reception kind of thing. And we start talking. He's like, yeah, I'm Mark Akbar and I made

that film. And I'm like, oh my God, you know, that's one of my favorite films. You know, I'm kind of starstruck. And he's like, well, what are you doing? I'm like, well, I'm writing this book, you know, about the corporation, an academic and here's my thesis. And he's like, wow, that would, you know, I was thinking of my next documentary is going to be about globalization. Like, we should talk. And so we start talking, one thing leads to another, and we're making a film together. And the book then moves in a more sort of popular direction,

because now for the film, we're thinking about interviews, doing like what you're doing, talking to interesting people, putting together stories, and that's not academic, right? That's not sitting in the library. And so I'm thinking, okay, well, maybe this book can be a more, kind of popular kind of nonfiction book and so I start working on the book and film together and then the idea comes back from when I was sitting in corporate law well that's an interesting idea if this is going to be like we need a hook you

know for this kind of more popular non-academic thing that psychopath idea might be it and so yeah that's really interesting to me because when you talk about I had Elder Eddie Gardner on and one of his comments that stood out to me was that, yes, we have corporations with personhood, but they lack a soul, that they lack a sense and a sense of heart or a sense of emotion towards what they're doing. And that seems to be a really big shift that, as you describe, we don't find in nature. Even with indigenous economies, it's between people and there is no separate legal entity that can avoid responsibility and so we have years of um i find it really interesting that we had um contracts

that you'd pass on through generations which would be terrible for those indigenous people for certain indigenous people because they would have like maybe their grandfather made a bad deal right and then they're stuck with that they're stuck with the bill and we don't have that anymore so benefit but downside we now have these legal entities that aren't designed to care for people right but i have Camden Hutchison in my head saying, but they're shareholders and they're the soul behind the corporation. What are your thoughts on because the corporation can't move without a director and human beings being involved? So how do we play that out? Why is it so harmful? Yeah, I mean, the point is if you go back to the 19th century and all of the debates about incorporation,

I mean, the idea of creating this separate entity to have responsibility was very controversial. You know, the book Dr. Jekyll, the strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a lot of literary critics see that as a metaphor for this idea of separating yourself into a body that is moral and one that's amoral, very much related to the incorporation movement in the late 19th century. And so, you know, people were up in arms about it. They thought this was just absolutely immoral. for a person to be able to invest in a company

and take the benefit of that investment but not be liable for anything. So this idea that shareholders are somehow make up for the absence of a heart and soul in the corporation is with respect to Camden Hutchinson, ridiculous, because firstly, shareholders have virtually no operational impact on the corporation. They're not involved.

They're not supposed to be involved. You know, they go and they elect directors and managers to do their work. So, you know, shareholders are are phantoms. They are absent from what the corporation is doing. They're simply, you know, your typical shareholder probably own shares in thousands of corporations, mutual funds. And for them, it's just a matter of whether their stock is going up or down. They have, they're, they're not even close to what's happening. So then you say, the managers and directors. Well, the managers and directors are people, they're human beings, they're making decisions, but again, typically, because of the corporate veil, they're not liable

for those decisions. Ultimately, if things go sideways, if worker gets killed, they're the environment's destroyed. It's the corporation as a person that is sued, that's seen as liable and the managers and directors just walk away. So it's very hard to talk about the actual people, whether they're shareholders, managers or directors, giving a humanity to the corporation when the whole institutional design is to ensure that they have absolutely no responsibility for what happens when that corporation acts. And when you add to that, the fact that, the fact that that they are beholden to the best interest principle, that they have to make decisions

that are in the best interests of the company, not in the best interests of anybody else. Even if they have a heart and soul as individuals, the institution that they have to serve doesn't. It doesn't have the capacity to care about others. So it's just a very thin argument. I think the better argument is to say they have no heart and soul.

They are psychopathic. What do we do about that? And there are really only two things. One is we do away with the corporate form altogether. We say it was a failed experiment. We go back to the 19th century critics who were saying it's a bad idea. And we say, you know, you were right. I think that's not going to happen.

It's highly unrealistic. So the second thing we can do is say, let's acknowledge, and this is what I advocate in my work, let's acknowledge that this is a dangerous institution, but it's also a useful institution for raising money because if I'm going to invest in a company, I don't want to be liable for what happens. And so the only way you're going to incentivize shareholders to invest their money is if you limit their liability and if you leave them out of the equation if things go wrong. And so, yes, this is a good vehicle for raising large sums of money to fund large enterprise. So we'll keep it in place. But let's not

be naive about it. And let's regulate it. Let's accept that it does some good and let's ensure that it doesn't do harm as much as possible. When we're talking about corporations, Should we put it into context, though, that we're, you're referring to bigger institutions that are usually national or global, because there's so many local small businesses that are incorporated, that are doing, trying to do good in the community, trying to shop local, trying to have some sort of strategy. I just spoke with Taco Rio, and they said they stayed open, they opened in the morning during the pandemic, not because it was going to be good business, but because they wanted to keep on those staff members they had found that were real. diamonds in the rough that they wanted to say, hey, we're going to invest in you now when maybe we're not going to make a lot of money during this period, but we're going to show you your value now so that when we come out of this, you still have employment, you know that we care about you. So when we're talking about this, are we talking about the top 10% of kind

of corporations the most wealthy? I mean, I'm very clear in my work to say I'm talking about publicly traded companies because the difference between a publicly traded company and a private company, especially a small company, is that in a publicly traded company, because you have anonymous shareholders, you have the law saying to the managers and directors, you have no choice. You can't decide if it's not good for business to serve your employees. You always have to make an argument as to why it's good for business and why it's good for your shareholders. So that's my only beef is with that kind of company. When you're dealing with non-publicly traded companies,

sold proprietorships, whatever, it is up to the people who run that company to decide what is how much money they want to make and what sacrifices they want to make. If they sacrifice the business's interests, they're the ones losing. And if they say, I want to sacrifice my interests for my employees' interests, good on them. And that's great.

I have no beef with that. But in a public trade corporation, they can't do that. They can never say, well, we're going to sacrifice our shareholders' interests in order to serve the employees or the environment. They can only say, maybe we'll sacrifice the short term of our shareholders' interests because in the long term it will benefit the company. but they always have to act in the self-interest of the company. Right. So what was the response of the first movie and book like? Was it surprising to you?

Was it really motivational to you to see your work really change the perceptions in the mind? There's certain points in time that really stand out to us that really shape our perspective on a topic. And I think that that was your movie. It really helped us understand the problem. And then you see Occupy Wall Street and you see these different issues. They're all touching on. something that you sort of helped kind of get us talking about. What was that experience like for you?

It's still ongoing. I mean, I feel really pleased that that work sort of dropped at a time when people were really concerned about these issues and that it somehow answered questions that were very much at the front of people's minds and gave people a way to understand and talk about things that I think, I'm not going to say, precipitated the Occupy movement, but I know the book and film were well known to the movement's organizers, one of whom is in my recent film, Michael White. And Callie Lawson, who lives in Vancouver, who was a big,

he and Michael White were kind of the two people who started the Occupy movement and both of them were very well-versed with the film and book and sort of fellow travelers and all of that. So yeah, I mean, I think that movements and shifts in thinking and these kinds of things, resistance, these kinds of things are overdetermined. they happen in response to many different factors coming together. But I think the film and book were definitely one factor in that mix that led to this kind of consciousness and critique about corporations,

about globalization. I think the problem is that despite that, everything that we talked about in that film and in the book got worse. You know, climate change, colonialism, racial and economic injustice, busting trade unions, all of that that was in the film got worse after the film. And at the same time, corporations started to say that they were getting better. And they were getting bigger. They were becoming more powerful, more concentrated.

And so on the one hand, you know, I'm very gratified that the film had the reception and impact that it did. On the other, I think about that first film and book as abject failures because the things they criticized not only didn't go away, but actually got worse. And it was right around that time that corporations really started to double down on the idea that they were good guys now, that they were good actors. And it's because of that that I made the second film and wrote the second book. That is what I think is particularly terrifying to me is that through so many different ways, you have branding now that says that you're green, that you're moving in the right direction. And then I spoke with Peter Ross, who's an internationally known ocean pollution expert who talks about how our polyester is terrible for our oceans and impacting the Indian and all these people. And so the problems haven't gone away. And so what was the early stages of starting your next chapter of this?

What kind of was the catalyst that said, okay, we got to go now? Yeah, I mean, unlike most things in life, I actually do remember the exact catalyst. And it was 2014, and we were doing a big 10th anniversary celebration for the first film. So we rented a theater downtown. We showed the film. We had a big party. champagne. You know, isn't it great? We did this film. It had this impact. And about halfway through the film, it just hit me that this film was a total failure because, and this is before

Trump still, 2014, because the world was going in a direction of more corporate power, bigger companies, worse climate change, worse pollution. Everything was, you know, going in the wrong direction and corporations were somehow getting away with running this line that they were the good guys now. They were a solution to the world problems, no longer the problem. And so all that kind of came together and I thought, time to do a sequel. And around, like maybe, and so I was thinking about, I was talking to Mark Akbar about it. And about a year later, one of the producers of the film, Trish Tolman, sort of had it called a meeting with Mark and me and said, why don't you guys do a sequel?

And so it was already on my mind. And then we started. And what was the mindset for this one? What was different and what did you want to see discussed that maybe wasn't getting the level of depth or analysis that you thought it deserved? I think there were two points that I wanted to make in this film that really distinguished it from the first film, that built on the first film, but were different points.

And the first one was that this argument that corporations make that they are now woke or socially responsible, sustainable, good actor, stakeholder capitalism, whatever you want to call it, is fundamentally a deception. It's not that some corporations aren't doing things better, more recycling or whatever, but as a whole, this idea that the corporation has changed is belied by the fact that it hasn't institutionally. There's nothing in the law that has said the corporation, as the law constructs it is any different than it was before. And so it's a massive deception, and we need to grapple with that.

The second point I wanted to make was that's not only a massive deception, but it's a profoundly dangerous deception. And the reason it's a dangerous deception is it's because it's part of a narrative that's saying that corporations are now publicly minded institutions, and therefore, we don't really need governments anymore. They can do what governments do because they've morphed into something that is like government, publicly minded, concerned about the public interest.

And that's why I spend a lot of time at Davos at the World Economic Forum meeting in both the book and film because that narrative is very powerful there. And so it becomes a way to justify deregulation, if corporations have a conscience, why do we need to regulate them? They'll do the right thing by themselves. A way to justify privatization. If corporations are good now, let's let them run our schools and our water systems.

And our prisons. And our prisons. They can do a better job than government. So that was kind of the insight that I really wanted to drive home, is that this whole new corporation movement, this idea of the good corporation, is actually part of a massive play for power. And that's how it's unfolding.

And I think that's a really chilling message because it is part of why democracy is so vulnerable at the moment. It's not just the rise of right-wing authoritarianism, but it's also this idea that somehow we can be governed better by good corporations than by democratic governments. That was definitely a sentiment when we were talking about Donald Trump and the idea that he was a business person. Yeah.

And he was going to bring his business acumen and it was the same Kevin O'Leary here in Canada, this idea that business people, they see something, they're going to be able to make profits for us and make us a richer country. But putting on interviews, I'm interested in what that experience is like for you. Is it, I heard in an interview, you were speaking with the head of the World Economic Forum, how do you conceptualize, how do you prepare for an interview like that? Because as you mentioned in another podcast, I heard you, and you were talking about how he believes in his heart, and you felt this,

that he was on the right track, that he's actually acting in the best interest of other people. And so is it that you, like, do you go into it just wanting him to say that and then we're good to go? Or is there a part of you that would like him to see maybe, like there's a Jahari window that he's missing a perspective and maybe during that interview you can kind of show him a part of him that he might be missing or a perspective he's well how do you approach those interviews yeah well you probably think about this as an interviewer yourself I mean that my my job as an interviewer is to draw out the most articulate uh the most thought out the most thoughtful the best illustrated story from the interview subject that I can

in terms of what's in their mind and in their heart and in their soul. I want to know about them. I always find it difficult in the interview chair, being an interviewer, not to debate, to engage, to try to persuade. But I resist that. I don't try to debate. don't try to persuade. I will put pointed ideas out there, but always with the purpose,

not of convincing the person, but of getting them to better articulate their position against sort of a devil's advocate kind of thing. But it was probably my steepest learning curve as a filmmaker and an interviewer was to put myself, take myself out of the picture. I mean, both literally and figuratively, and really just see myself as a vehicle for getting the best out of that person. Yeah. Is there any nervousness around interviewing someone like Klaus Schwab that you're not going to, like, after the interview, he's going to be like, scrap that, never mind, I said the

wrong thing or I wouldn't have because sometimes that's my concern is that I'm going to ask such a pointed question that it's hard to respond or it makes them feel uncomfortable that they don't want to continue or something like that runs through their mind and so was that ever a concern where because I know you met with him one on one first I think in New York and then you ended up being able to go to the world yeah for him so was that was that a challenge at all yeah I mean look there's a simple answer to that and that is you get them to sign away before the interview you didn't do that with me but don't worry it's fine but but that's what you do and so it's all very legal and if they're unwilling to sign the

waiver you don't do the interview because you don't from a sort of journalistic ethics perspective when you go into that interview you want to be able to ask them anything and they you know they can respond accordingly or they can say no comment, but if they want to play and they're volunteering, nobody's forcing them to do the interview, then those are the rules. And you can't do the interview without it. So, yeah, so no, I mean, I wasn't concerned about that. My main, I mean, I don't really get nervous, but my main sort of work before an interview was to get into the right space of keeping the person interested enough in their own ideas to talk about them in an exciting way.

And we had a particular technical thing that our director of photography used whereby I would be talking into a box with a mirror. And so the person would be seeing a mirrored reflection of me. And behind the mirror and reflection of me was the camera lens. And so the person was talking to me, but actually talking directly to camera. And so that's when in both the corporation and the new corporation, people are talking directly to camera. And it creates a real intimacy with the audience. But it also creates a real ease on their part because it's really hard to talk into a camera.

it's easier to talk to a reflection of somebody so we're having a conversation but then in effect they are talking into the camera that's really interesting just from from my perspective of learning about that kind of process what was is the term like the road to hell is paved with good intentions a good example of maybe the world economic forum I think it's a good intention of this whole new corporation movement that I talk about in the film and book I I think that You know, whether it's Jamie Diamond or whether it's Klaus Schwab or whether it's Shannon May, who's the CEO of a company we criticize called Bridge International Academies, or whether it's any of these many, many, many people working in the sustainability or corporate social responsibility space, whether as consultants or as VPs and companies or whatever. I mean, it's just, it's a huge industry. I think for the most part, you're as likely to find people genuinely committed to doing good there as you are in a church or a trade union or a university

or any other institution. Most people don't like going to work thinking that they're trying to trick the world. You know, they like going to work thinking that they're doing something that's meaningful and positive and good. Um, and I think most people in this space do think that, um, which makes it that much more, uh, powerful. Yeah. And more difficult and dangerous and dangerous. Yeah. I don't think it's just a sham. Yeah. What was it like to be there and to understand that like all that you kind of described it as like all the most powerful influential people in this one room? Was that at all that like that would be a trip for me just to be like, Oh my gosh. It was cool.

How did that come? Oh, it was very cool, you know, going around there and seeing, you know, passing Trudeau in a corridor. And, you know, the Trump was there and Merkel was there from Germany and the prime minister of India, Modi. And, I mean, it was, it was surreal. everybody in this kind of small ski resort tons of snow it was really cold and our we had this chalet up on the side of a mountain that I don't know how we got it but for us and our crew which was about a 40 minute drive from from the site and it was really touch and go these kind of sort of windy ice roads going up the side of a Swiss mountain. So it was definitely an adventure.

What was your biggest takeaway? My biggest takeaway was that the most powerful people in the world think they're on the side of the angels in propagating what is basically an undemocratic, global, political, and economic sphere. Could you explain that for,

I listened to that podcast, So I know exactly where you're going with this. But could you elaborate on how it becomes undemocratic? What that sort of looks? Yeah, I mean, it's very simple. The corporation is not a democratic institution. I mean, it may be quasi-democratic for the shareholders that are its citizens. And I say quasi, because even they don't have many rights.

But certainly for 99% of the people who suffer the consequences of whether it's high prices or as is current today or pollution or climate change or colonialism or horrible work conditions, exploitative work conditions or unemployment or all the other things that the corporate sector does, the people who suffer those consequences have no say in what corporations do. And, you know, the argument is, well, they can, you know, vote with their dollars well a lot of them don't have dollars a lot of them especially in the

developing and global south aren't consumers um or in any kind of way that gives them any power and as i argue in both my books uh and the latter film um consumer power is a myth you you have very little power as a consumer to truly dictate uh what a company is doing this idea that if you buy organic or whatever you're going to change behavior it's it's a very very um untested hypothesis let's put it that way so I think it's very hard to say that corporations are in any way democratically responsive and so to the extent that they take over more and more domains that are important to us to the extent that they operate with less and less regulation to the extent that

that those things are happening, they're governing us more, and governments are governing us less. And so to that extent, if governments are supposed to be democratic institutions and corporations aren't, to the extent corporations govern us more and governments govern us less, democracy shrinks. Democracy shrinks further as those corporations impact what supposedly government, democratic governments are doing. So to the extent that they are in, influencing democratic governments rather than citizens, that also shrinks democracy. So both those things are happening now, and that is shrinking democracy. The people in Davos aren't worried about that.

The people in Davos are of the belief that benevolent corporate dictatorship is actually a better option than what they see as dysfunctional democratic governance. And, you know, that penny drops in the film when I'm interviewing, I'm interviewing Richard Edelman in Davos. And Richard Edelman is like the sort of guru of business gurus. He's got offices here and all over. Everywhere, every. He's got an office in Vancouver.

Yeah, he's sort of, his company really is highly, highly influential. And he's a huge advocate of corporations as good actors. And he talks about that in the film and how they're becoming better. And he says, you know, and they are filling the voids left by government. Those are the words he uses. And he said that in the interview. And I said, well, okay, my question was they may be filling the voids left by government, but they're not democratic so isn't that a problem and this is one of my interview pushbacks i wasn't trying to convince him i genuinely wanted to know what he thought about that and his response to that was i'm not much of a believer in political citizenship i believe in the power of the marketplace

well political citizenship is democracy and and so that's the mindset in davos is i don't think they're much believers in democracy. They believe that the market, corporations, elites should be vested with more government power. And so it's kind of, if you think about the Putin's of the world and, you know, the very, the trumps of the world and all of that, on the one hand, you have them attacking democracy in a very frontal way, saying that we should just, just have sort of governments that don't have to worry about the niceties of democratic principles and just sort of exercise power in a dictatorial way. And then on the other side, you have this kind of benevolent dictatorship of corporations idea

where these people are not the same as those people. These people would be abhorrent, are find abhorrent what those people are doing. But in their own way, they are all. undermining democracy because they're saying you know we can rely on good corporations and markets to solve the world's problems does that did that give you chills or like I guess part of you already knew that but we hear and we learn in law school and maybe in life the idea that like democracy is delicate and that's like a nice thing to put on a bumper sticker of a car but

when you hear a person say it and say it not in like a flippant way but in a genuine I've bought this idea hookline and Sinker, does that, is somebody who believes in social justice, what was it like to hear that? Chilling. Chilling. I mean, all the more chilling because of the sincerity of the belief on the part of people who have that belief. Yeah, and then I don't know if you've heard of it, but there's this great series called Explained on Netflix, and they did one on billionaires, and they talk about Elon Musk and him getting involved in the Flintwater crisis and how great it is. that this individual, this one man is going to go in and engineer the solution.

And then I think it was one of the children of the family of Walt Disney that was like, you do not want these powerful people, because who knows if they're going to be there at the next situation. That's why we have democracy. That's why democracy developed. That's why people fought and died for democratic governance in the sort of history of the West, is because monarchs and plutarchs and autocrats didn't really, weren't really reliable

in terms of serving the needs of the people. So, I mean, democracy is highly imperfect, and certainly the history of Western democracy is not without a lot of horrors and awful things and colonialism and wars and everything else. but going back to a system of unaccountable power, which seems to be a direction that both these camps are advocating, both the sort of Davos benevolent capitalists

and the autocratic dictatorial right-wing, so-called populace, both those schools are pushing us back to a pre-democratic approach to politics. And I think it's the sort of existential crisis of our time to not only resist that, but to take the ideals and idea of democracy far forward from where they are now. I mean, I see this moment as being a very undeveloped, thin kind of approach to democracy, but nonetheless a start. And the idea is to take that into a direction that where people are truly empowered to govern themselves in their communities, more broadly, in their larger national or regional things. and, you know, with respect for plurality, diversity. I mean, that's where we need to go.

And Western democracy is kind of a halting start. But these trends that I'm talking about, right-wing populism and benevolent corporate dictatorship, are really kind of scary in that they are. they are attempting to push things back. Yeah, it's terrifying to me that I read John Stuart Mills and timeless work. And I don't know if we have an equivalent today that is writing and describing and the way that his document, I think, was shared at the time

and was really just informing people and getting them to think about the power of these rights is just something. We just, we don't share that as much anymore. We live in a very cacophonic time. Sorry, what is cacophonic? It's a cacophony of like a chaotic sort of mix of noise. And it's very hard to break through with any kind of idea-driven sort of thesis. It's just, it's very, I mean, as a sort of writer and cultural creator, I feel that very viscerally.

it's just anything goes you know you can say whether the moon is made out of green cheese and there'll be you'll have 3,000 followers on Facebook you know it's just it's kind of crazy but but having said that I think that there's you know I have a lot of hope for people activists indigenous activists environmental activists social justice activists As I show in my last film and in the book, various kinds of local politicians who are taking a more progressive approach. I have hope that there's a real yearning for a kind of deeper kind of democracy. It's, you know, whether it prevails or not, I don't know, but people around the world are fighting for that, fighting for. for rights and sometimes succeeding.

And, you know, I think if we don't win that fight, I think humanity perishes. You know, it's like we're just this little speck in the universe. And if we can't figure out how to be together in a truly sustainable and loving way to each other and to the earth, you know, I think we'll go the way of the dinosaurs. There's no reason why we shouldn't or wouldn't. Yeah. I love the quote, Life imitates art because you make this incredible movie. And then Twitter kind of gives you the exact thing you need,

your case of like exactly how this. Can you tell us about how that came about for people who might not know? Yeah. I mean, in a sort of nutshell, and you can go to the movie's website or my website and find out more and see the legal pleadings it's all there and he also has a podcast on it so and a podcast on but in short we make this film we get long listed for the Oscars we're trying to make a trying to get a US distribution deal a European distribution deal and so that kind of stuff like

trying to get attention for the Oscars trying to get a distribution deal all that Twitter is really important for independent filmmakers. We don't have the marketing budget of Sony. We can't plaster the sides of buses and, you know, Times Square with ads for our film. So Twitter is a really important vehicle because it is the platform that gets the attention of journalists and sort of thinking people and cultural elites and all of that, the people that we want to target.

And so we try to promote an ad on Twitter. And promoting an ad on Twitter simply means that you pay them a certain amount of money to, I mean, it needs to be said that when you tweet something, it doesn't go to all your followers. It goes to a small percentage. So if you boost your tweet, it'll go to more of your followers. And if you boost it even more by paying them more money, it'll go to people who aren't your followers. So that's the business model of Twitter. So we attempt to boost the tweet of the trailer to the film, and that's all. And we immediately hear from Twitter that our attempt to do that has been barred because it violates their policies.

So we ask, what policy did it violate? It violates our inappropriate content policy. What's inappropriate about it? They respond, oh, actually, it violates our political content policy. What's political about it? it. You know, we're not advocating for a party. It's not political advertising. I mean, it's political, but so is tons of stuff on Twitter. You can say that that is one of the primary things about Twitter that makes it different than Facebook or LinkedIn. Yeah. And Twitter

itself says that. So why is that a problem? Oh, well, it violates our sensitive targeting policies. And we're like, what now? You've told us three policies it violates. And all of these responses seem to have come from a bot. They've been automated. So we say, can we talk to a real person? So we talk to a real person. The real person says, no, you know, we agree with the bot. It violates our policies. So we're like, there's nothing we can do. Like, can we appeal this? Yeah, appeal it. So we appeal it. No change. We agree. Okay. So we've exhausted all of our possibilities with Twitter. And so, you know, being a constitutional lawyer and a contract lawyer, It's like, oh, well, maybe we should sue.

And so then you start looking and you run into all kinds of problems, right? Twitter is a private entity. It's not government. It's not subject to freedom of expression, all this stuff. And so I and a colleague of mine, Sujee Chowdhury, who's a constitutional lawyer in Toronto, and says he wants to be involved in this case, start to think about how we can do this. And so not to get too into detail about it, we come up with two different legal strategies

and arguments that represents the two different cases that we filed in the Ontario Superior Court, Ontario, because that's where Twitter Canada resides in Toronto. One argument for those who did constitutional law and remember the cases of Hill and PepsiCo, those two cases say that when you have two private litigants, and there's a common law rule that's governing their relationship,

that common law rule can be tested against charter values. So even though you've got two totally private entities, the charter kind of comes in through the back door. And so our argument is we're in a contractual relationship with Twitter. The doctrines of contract law govern that relationship. And what we're saying is those doctrines of contract, law have to comply with the freedom of speech guarantee. And so when Twitter uses its contract law power to say, we're not going to run your trailer, it can't do that because contract law

has to comply with the freedom of speech guarantee. So in a nutshell, that's the argument. You can read it in more detail on the pleadings. A second argument we have in a second case is we're suing the government of Canada and saying that under the charter, you have a positive right to protect freedom of expression on the platforms. And both these arguments are based on the fact that the platforms, particularly Twitter, are not just like the Globe and Mail or CTV. They've become sort of two-way communicative responses and devices between government and citizens. And so they become part of the infrastructure of Canadian democracy. So they're kind of like public squares in a town. And so that doesn't mean they're directly subject to the charter, but it does give air

to the arguments that we're making both on the, both in the lawsuit against Canada and the lawsuit against Twitter. Can you put on your tinfoil hat? Why are they doing this? What's going on? What was it about your documentary, when so much nonsense ends up on that platform reaching people. I've seen sponsored ads that are terrible. And so what was it, do you think that stood out to them? I don't know if it's reached the highest levels of their organization, but what do you think stood out to them is the concern? Beats me.

I mean, that's the $64,000 question. It's an anti-corporate, powerful. the trailer is I mean you can insert it into your podcast it's a minute and 50 seconds it's hard hitting and I I don't know

it doesn't have any more violence or it I really I don't know the answer to that question and that's kind of what we've been scratching our heads about and hopefully in our court case the judge will scratch their head about it Do you feel like this was a response from other organizations? Do you think that this is a sentiment among corporations? They don't want to hear it.

Because you said in your first one, there was a positive, not a maybe, there was a sense of like you hit the nail on the head. I'm part of this. You said, somebody said, I'm part of a corporation. We have been kind of seeing the writing on the wall and getting this vibe. It seems like this is the opposite. Right. The response to the first film was, yeah,

thank you for diagnosing the problem. We've got the solution. The problem here is, we're saying the solution isn't a solution and there isn't a solution and so except for more government regulation and that's not a message they want to hear the first film the corporate sector could somehow find a way in and say yeah yeah you guys were right we have been acting badly but now we're going to act good but this one we're saying you say you're acting good but you can't act good it's not within your nature and so they're like oh what's our next move we don't

have one. So, yeah, but I'm, you know, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, and I don't believe that sort of all Twitter and everybody else got together and said, we have to suppress this film. I, like, that would just be so bizarre. So I really, I really don't know. I do know one thing, which is an important part of our case. Our film lies at the core of the kind of expression that courts in this country have said need to be protected under the charter. It's political speech. It's speech that contributes to the discourse about social and political life. And it's the type of speech that the Supreme Court of Canada said is at the core of what Section 2B is all about.

So I know that. Is it content that Twitter doesn't like? I guess it is. But boy, that's not a reason to censor it on a panel or on a platform that purports to be all about free speech. I guess that's what confuses me the most is, and I'd like your thoughts on Mr. Musk, but this weird element

where so many people wanted to leave Twitter when Elon Musk said he was going to take over because he wasn't woke or open-minded or understanding of the challenges minorities face. And so Twitter, as a brand, seems to be very understanding and they want a healthy community dialogue, and they seem to be about the positive.

But it seems to be exactly what, again, your documentary is about, is that they say all the right things and the delivery, the action, doesn't seem to be there. Well, I mean, here's the strange thing. The strange thing is that I actually don't agree with Elon Musk's approach to free speech. His approach is just let anything go, basically, and it's a very American approach. I actually do agree with the sentiment among those in Twitter who say we need some guardrails. We shouldn't have hate speech, we shouldn't have incendiary speech. You know, I agree with that. I agree that we need to balance free speech against other values.

The problem with our particular case is I don't see how in any way our film should fall into the type of thing that needs to be restricted. And what I think the case underlines, and this is kind of at its core, is that we shouldn't have, whether Elon Musk, running Twitter or anybody else, it shouldn't be a private, unaccountable platform that gets to make these decisions. These are decisions that in a democracy should be made by courts and governments. These are decisions about public life, public policy, and public good that should be made by public institutions. And that is really the underlying message of our case and the underlying kind of legal architecture of the case is to say that there is a place for the courts to assess what Twitter does when it decides to censor something.

You should be able to go to court and through this kind of merging of contract and charter law, the court should have a place where they can make a judgment about that. I would rather have a court make that judgment than some bot or some low-level employee in Twitter. Yeah. So I guess the big fear right now, actually I'll just start with your thoughts on Mr. Musk trying to take over because I agree with you. I think there's a danger in one person shaping this. And it again goes back to this idea one person's going to fix the problems we face because he might be able to revamp Twitter. What about Facebook? What about all the other ones? That's not really an end-all be-all solution unless we just hope that billionaires take over everything. To your point. back to the Davos kind of approach. Exactly. And so do you think that that's the step in the wrong direction, or do you think that there is, at least he's reminding us that freedom of expression, communication, that maybe Twitter was taking an approach like you just experienced?

I mean, again, I'm not going to take either side. I'm going to say the fact that we're even having this conversation, that our choice is between Twitter as it currently is, or Twitter under Musk, is the problem. like that you know or or if bill gates decides to take over twitter i mean the fact is that twitter has become rightly or wrongly a key part of our democratic system and as such decisions about it shouldn't be made in a purely private framework that is driven primarily by profit whether it's musk running it or jack dorsey or anybody else who decides to run it um that is the problem. And so in a way, I mean, I don't really take sides. I mean, if I had to say what's

better for the world, it's probably not Musk running Twitter. Fair enough. Now we're in the time. I've been listening to a lot of Michael Geist, and he's been really critical of the Online News Act and policies around regulating social media. So to your point, we have this democratically elected leader and Heritage Canada whose goal is to enshrined. Like, it surprised me that this happened to you because a lot of the rhetoric we've always heard is we need to protect Canadian creators and make sure that they don't get overtaken by the United States. And so it does seem like this would be the area they'd want to step in and say,

hey, this is the voice, this is what we need to do. This is why we developed all of this legislation to begin with. And so I'm interested in your thoughts. Do you think that we're going in the right direction? with the Online News Act, because I've heard of a lot of critiques recently about the approach to social media, and this is our democratically elected system.

The idea of this is that it's supposed to enshrine our voices and make sure that our perspectives are seen, but a lot of people have some concerns. Yeah, I mean, I think the legislation isn't, and I don't want to get into a big discussion about it, because I would want to study it a bit more. But I think the legislation is a very, response to a real problem, but it isn't necessarily the best response. And I think I would say that

about a lot of regulation, but that's not an argument for not regulating. It's an argument for regulating well. And like anything else, you can take any area of regulation, work or safety, environmental, and pick it apart and talk about why it's deficient or why it goes too far or it doesn't go far enough or whatever. And I think it's the same with the platforms. There is a major public interest in how they operate. And they, just like there's a major public interest in not having pollution or in how zoning goes or whatever. And the arguments that people make, and I don't think Michael Geist is making this argument, but the arguments that some people make that somehow the platforms are different than everything else and that there's no way that they should or can

be regulated, I think that's just wrong. I think we need to have some very live debates about how to regulate them. But whether to regulate them, I think we need to understand what the stakes are in terms of their operation and what the potential places are that we're going to we need to protect public interest in relation to those states. What do you think people can do? What is the call to action? What can people, I often tell people to reconsider how they're shopping, try and get involved in their community, try and have conversations like this.

What can we do? I mean, I think all of those things are good. And I think everybody has a different talent set, a different passion set, a different reality set. I mean, if you're working two shifts just to pay the rent, you don't have that much time to be going to community meetings. So we're all very differently situated in terms of what we can and can't do. I think what I would say is we spend a lot of time as human beings, or we should, thinking about who we are in our different roles as workers, as parents, as as siblings, as all these different roles, members of our different communities.

And I guess what I would say in a very general way is to devote that kind of time and concern to the question about your role as a citizen. In other words, to think really seriously about what it means for you to be a citizen. A citizen is somebody that's part of a community, part of a polity, who has, both rights and obligations in relation to setting the terms of collective existence of that group. And so we're all citizens, and we're citizens in different ways of different kinds of communities, but to really think seriously about what we can do in that capacity and what meets our talents and passions and realistic constraints in relation to that.

And, you know, that's, I mean, that's the best, I think, that we can hope for is for people to activate themselves as citizens. Do you think there's any organizations that you believe in that are doing it right, that are trying to get positive messages out? Because we hear about lobbyists in almost the worst connotations in terms of the harm they do, oil pipelines getting lobbyists going. Is there any positive organizations people can consider joining that are trying to be a voice for topics that you're talking about? You know, I mean, I think the thing about organizations is that they differ.

I mean, you know, a university is an organization and it does some really great things and it does some other things that are not so great. The same as trade unions, churches. Like, you know, there are so many organizations that we're in. inevitably part of or we choose to join. And, you know, political parties, right? All of these organizations are grounds of contestation. None of them are sort of, okay, we're all going to push in this direction. There are places of debate and discussion about ideals, about aspirations.

And I just, you know, we, this is a human condition. There isn't a magic bullet. But we do need to, the kind of time we think about, what is the next pair of socks we're going to buy, if we put that kind of time into thinking about what do I need to do as a citizen, that would be a start. Yeah. Can you tell people how they can connect with you, whether it's your podcast, your website, watching your documentary, getting a book? Joel Backin.com is kind of a portal into all the different things. That's probably the best bet. I'm not very good at Twitter.

I mean, aside from suing them, but I don't tweet much. Just, I don't know. It must be a generational thing. I don't know really how to use Instagram and TikTok and all these things. So, yeah, Joel Backin.com. Or look me up and send me an email or get in touch me through my website. Awesome. Just quickly, what was the response to the,

most recent movie other than Twitter? Oh, I mean, it's gotten great reviews, a variety magazine, Hollywood Reporter, has given it great reviews, and it's, you know, the Globe and Mail and Forbes magazine said it's the must-see of the year. So it's, you know, it's gotten a great response. We've just gotten a U.S. distribution deal, so it's been on Crave in Canada for quite some time. And as of a few weeks ago, it's now on all the big platforms in the United States and we'll probably be pushing it out into Europe soon. You know, it's difficult releasing a film and book during COVID,

especially one that is not escapist. I mean, people during COVID didn't really want to read about the world's problems. They were facing them frontally and in their personal lives. and theaters were closed when the film came out, which really denied us a kind of platform for creating buzz about the film. But what I'm really heartened by is both are getting out there in different ways than the first,

not a big theatrical release, but on streaming platforms and community screenings and the book is just signed an Italian publication deal. so it's yeah it's it's not like the first one where it was this big kind of boom and but it's it's doing well I'm really proud of this work amazing do you have any other future plans that you're able to tell us about just you know continuing getting my courses together for the fall and and writing a few academic papers and starting to think about the next big project well I have really appreciated being able to sit down with you and hear about

your journey over the years. It's very interesting to hear about your parents being in the area of psychology and then you applying that and how it has impacted your work today and how that one sort of idea that sat at the back of your mind has taken such a life of its own. And I really think Twitter's interesting that they kind of gave you like the gasoline for the fire to be able to really exemplify and show a case study of what you're talking about. And I think it exemplifies that. And I've heard amazing things from students and faculty. about your work and about how you look at things and how you think about things. And I think you're just an admirable person.

So it was just a pleasure to sit down. Well, I think you're an admirable person too. And I very much enjoyed this interview. Awesome. So thank you. Well, thank you.