On with Kara Swisher - How to Knock Out Super PACs with Lawrence Lessig

Episode Date: February 5, 2026

Kara talks to Lawrence Lessig about his fight to end Super PACs — without passing a constitutional amendment or overturning Citizens United.  The Harvard law professor and Equal Citizens founder was once the internet’s open-access evangelist. 19 years ago, he shifted his focus from intellectual property to institutional corruption, and since then, he’s become one of the country’s sharpest critics of money-driven politics.  Kara and Lessig break down how so many of the tech industries leaders evolved from a generally benign, libertarian-light stance into active Trump enablers; whether Democrats can capitalize on the Epstein controversy to persuade Trump's voters that he’s not the outsider he claims to be; how engagement-driven AI is tearing democracy apart; and why citizen assemblies are the way to repair it. Questions? Comments? Email us at [e-mail] or find us on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and Bluesky @onwithkaraswisher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's on. Hi, everyone. From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is on with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. My guest today is Lawrence Lessig. He's a Harvard law professor,

a legal activist, the founder of equal citizens, a non-profit advocacy organization focused on fighting corruption, gerrymandering, and voter suppression, and a former presidential candidate. Lessig is currently spearheading

a fight to get rid of super PACs. These political action committees can spend unlimited amounts of money and raise unlimited amounts of dark money. But Lessig and equal citizens are working on a case that would allow limits on contributions to super PACs. It hasn't gotten a lot of attention yet, but if they win, it would drastically change how elections get funded in this country, which is sorely needed. And interestingly enough, before Lessig focused on getting money out of politics, he was famous for his legal

activism around tech. His work on net neutrality and open access made him a darling at the early internet age. But in the years since, he's become somewhat of an AI skeptic and not Not surprisingly, that evolution has not endeared him to the tech industry. Of course, that's why I'm interested in talking to Larry Lessig. I've always thought he was brilliant. He used to do these amazing presentations that would just be riveting about where everything was going. I learned a lot from him. And I just think he is a big thinker around these issues and understands the links between tech, power, money, and our democracy.

Our expert question comes from Ellie Honig, CNN's senior legal analysts, who was also a student of Larry Lessig. This is a wide-ranging conversation, and Lessig has thoughtful opinions in just about everything under the sun. So, stick around. The secret to Charlotte Cardin's captivating eyes? Panorama Mascara by L'Oreal Paris. The multi-level bristle brush catches every lash from inner to outer corner. For panoramic volume with lashes that are so fanned out, eyes appear one point four times bigger. See life in panorama because you're worth it.

Shop L'Oreal-Paris Panorama Mascara on Amazon. now. At Desjardin Insurance, we know that when you own a nail salon, everything needs to be perfect from tip to toe. That's why our agents go the extra mile to understand your business and provide tailored solutions for all its unique needs. You put your heart into your company, so we put our heart into making sure it's protected. Get insurance that's really big on care. Find an agent today at Dejardin.com slash business coverage. When McDonald's partnered with Frank's Redhot, they said they could put that shit on everything.

So that's exactly what McDonald's did. They put it on your McChrispy. They put it in your hot honey macnuggets dip. They even put it in the creamy garlic sauce on your McMuffin. The McDonald's Frank's Red Hot menu. They put that shit on everything. Breakfast available until 11 a.m. At participating in Canadian restaurants for a limited time.

Frank's Red Hot is a registered trademark of the French's Food Company LLC. Larry, thank you for coming on on. I appreciate it. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. So let's start by taking the 30,000-foot view. In the 90s, your work focused on the internet, and that's where I ran into an intellectual property. And then by the mid-2000s, it shifted to institutional corruption and democracy. That experience in both tech and politics gives you unique perspective on how so many tech leaders went from a mostly benign,

libertarian light political stance being active Trump enablers. Talk a little bit about that, because you're kind of in that bucket with Yuval Harari and Sam Harris, who have much more jaded view now for both of them, who have interviewed recently. So talk a little bit about your evolution. Well, it happened at a very particular moment. It was around Christmas 2006, a mutual friend of ours, Aaron Schwartz, came to visit. at me in Berlin, and I was bragging to him about my latest copyright book, and I was going to make my first TED talk about copyright. And he said, so why do you think you're ever going to make any progress on copyright or internet policy so long as we have this deeply corrupted form of

government? And I said to him, you know, it's not my field, Aaron. And he said, do you mean as an academic? I said, yeah, as an academic. I do copyright policy and internet policy. And he said, well, what about as a citizen. This is your field as a citizen. And I realized he had trapped me because I had no good reason. You know, I had tenure. I could work on whatever I wanted, and he was right. There was no way to think about sensible policy here as long as money was so central.

And, of course, it's almost quaint to think of how insignificant was relative to where we are today. But so long as money was so central, you weren't going to get sensible policy on those issues and not just those issues. you know, climate change, health care policy, tax policy, none of them. So that night, I promised him I was going to give it up, and I announced I was going to take up this project of institutional corruption. And that's basically been my work the last 19 years. Why did that convince you?

Because money is not a new thing to politics, but something supercharge it, and especially in the last 10 years, especially with tech, which is someone, a group of people you and I are both very familiar with. Yeah, I mean, I think the critical change, you know, that we've seen today kind of obscures what the problem looked like back then. You know, because I don't think at that time anybody was really thinking that major policy was driven by bribery. You know, it wasn't a kind of quit pro quo that like stepped in and blocked people from doing the right thing. Instead, what was driving policy was this dependence. Like if you spend 30 to 70 percent of your time raising money, what that means is you become dependent on that tiny, tiny few who are giving you money. And indeed, when we look at Congress today and we see how weak and pathetic the institution

is, is it any surprise that if you spend your whole career sucking up to people with power, you develop a kind of sycophancy. You develop the inability to act on the indefinitely. integrity of your views. And it was that dependence corruption that I thought was the most important thing to find a way to address. Because if we didn't find a way to address that, then none of the major policies any of us care about could Congress address sensibly. So that was the original focus. It's not illegal corruption that is the problem. It's legal corruption. It's the influences that affect the independence or integrity of the institution that you're trying to protect.

tech. Has that become more so with the tech leaders in terms of the, you know, they've turbocharged everything, social media, they've turbocharged political discourse, and certainly money. Obviously, Musk is the biggest example, but all of them really in a lot of ways. And the numbers are quite staggering. Yeah, you know, I mean, I knew these people not well, not as well as you did, but I knew them, you know, 20 years ago. And I think to a person, they would have been repulsed by the current system that we have. Indeed, many of them talked about being able to build a world where they didn't depend on lobbyists. I mean, Microsoft famously, like, refused to have lobbyists because they thought, you know, we were above that. We could just make great products.

I had a dinner with that bunch with Gates, or I don't even know where our lobbyist is. I think that was. Yeah, exactly. And so I think that what they saw was that there was an enormous opportunity to profit from basically giving in to the system as it's evolved. So, you know, I, naively, like a year and a half ago, if you had asked me, like if you had some kind of authoritarian come in and make demands, these kind of extortion demands of people, like, who would be the first people to give in? And I would have said, well, if you're a billionaire, you've got money to burn. Like, why would you give in? Why not stand for what you believe in? Or the same thing with universities or the same thing with law firms. But what so is.

astonishing is how easily all of these people give in. And, you know, they give in and they rationalize it because they say, this is what my business needs, like we have to give in. But of course, what they're building is a much weaker economy, a much more vulnerable economy. And they should know that. They do know that. 20 years ago, they knew that. But now they just see in the short term, this is the way to get along. It's the fastest way. And they were sort of burned by Biden. and they felt burned by Biden's either personally or otherwise. Some of it was emotional in Muskscape. That's certainly the case.

So let's get to the lawsuit that could reshape how American elections get funded. Dinner Table Action et al versus William Schneider. Walk us through the case and how it could lead to the end of super PACs, because I think Citizens United, of course, everyone sort of points to that as the real moment. You know, we should recognize that we are extremely vulnerable to these tech, super PACs right now. I mean, we saw in the last election that in one election, one super PAC was able to flip crypto policy from being, you know, it's not like it was great policy. It's not like the SEC's a great policy making body. But from sensible policy to crazy policy in one election because they were

able to... And got rid of a U.S. Senator, Sherrod Brown. They got rid of a U.S. senator. They scared a bunch of people. They brought other people in. And they took a president who went from calling it a scam to like investing in his own like meme coin. Yeah. Can I just note something for people to understand the Wall Street Journal of his story? The Trump and his family has pulled in about $4 billion linked to his presidency and much of it comes from crypto and foreign deals that leverage his presidential status. And an investment firm from the UAE bought nearly half of the Trump family's crypto company making the two business partners in a deal. And we've given a way chips to do so. But go ahead. I just want to have people to have that content.

Yeah. And of course, that ties to all sorts of pardon packs, its grossest kind of corruption. Yeah. Like way below the kind of corruption that I was really worried about 20 years ago. But the point to recognize is we will see the same super PACs stood up to address AI policy. Now, you know, AI is extremely complicated. I think it's the best of technology and the worst of technology or the most dangerous and the most potent. And so I think the one thing we should be able to agree on is we need the capacity to have sensible AI policy. But they're going to buy a Congress that basically is incapable of regulating if super PACs survive. So that's why I think this case is so critical. So in 2024, my group Equal Citizens was able to get a ballot initiative on the main ballot

that basically said there would be no super PACs in Maine. Now, people say, how is that possible? Didn't the Supreme Court create super PACs in Citizens United? And that's the first. big mistake. Citizens United has nothing to do with Super PACs. Citizens United was about the freedom to spend money independently of a campaign. Super PACs are the ability to contribute unlimited contributions to the committees that will then spend the money. And they were created months after Citizens United by a lower federal court decision called Speech Now versus FEC. And it was a kind of logical mistake that it's hard to see at the time, but easy to see in retrospect. The logical mistake was Judge Centell said, if spending money independently creates no risk of corruption,

then contributing money to a committee that will spend money independently also can't create a risk of corruption. Now, that theory was proven false five years after that by my favorite Senator Robert Menendez from New Jersey, who was indicted, and the indictment was he promised favors in exchange for a contribution to his super PAC. So there was quid pro quo corruption involving a super PAC. The very thing the D.C. Circuit said could not happen. And indeed, his lawyers had the chutzpah to file a motion to dismiss the indictment saying the thing you've accused us of, the D.C. Circuit says can't happen. So we must be innocent. And of course, the court ignored it. But the point was, that revealed the mistake.

And since about that time, a bunch of people have been trying to find a way to get the court to consider this, because speech now, the case that created super PACs, was not appealed to the Supreme Court. So the court has never... So there's an opening here. There's a huge opening. Okay. So explain the case. And then I want to talk about the legal reasoning grounded in originalism. Even liberal justices Elena Kagan and Judge Jackson both have agreed that, quote, we are all originalists.

So explain what the case. cases in the originalist legal theory you're putting forth? Right. So the case basically is testing whether Maine has the ability to limit the size of contributions, not the spending, but the size of contributions to independent political action committees. And that's been attacked by two super PACs, backed by Leonard Leo, the most important super PAC mocker on the right. And so we intervened, equal citizens to intervene, and the state of Maine is defending the initiative as well. Our lawyer, Neil Katte, y'all, has taken on the case because he's convinced we have a clear shot at winning,

and we have a clear shot at winning under two separate theories. So one theory is the theory of Citizens United, which says you can regulate, but if and only of, there's a risk of quid pro quo corruption. And in our case, what the district court said, unlike every other lower court before, our district court said, hey, look, there's a risk of quid pro quo corruption. corruption, but nonetheless, she crafted some whole new theory of the First Amendment that said, even though there's a risk of corruption, you still can't regulate contributions to super PACs. So that's the most extreme opinion ever in the history of the federal courts, because never

has the Supreme Court or any lower court said, if there's a risk of corruption, there's nothing you can do about it. So on the core theory, the core theory for analyzing this, we think we win. But the second theory that we've been pushing is the idea that if these originalists on the court, primarily the conservatives, really want to be serious about their originalism, that under the original meaning of the First Amendment, there should be no doubt that a state or Congress has the power to control the size of contributions to a committee. That's plainly the sort of thing that the framers would never have imagined courts stepping in to regulate, especially when it's targeting a kind of corruption the framers were really focused on, which is this what I've called dependence corruption, this creating these improper dependencies inside of the court. So that means you've got, I think, an opportunity to get a significant number of these justices on our side. If we win in the First Circuit, we will definitely be in the Supreme Court. And in the Supreme Court, I feel like this is almost a gift to the Supreme Court because we're able to say to the Supreme Court, look, you don't have to reverse Citizens United. In fact, you can say Citizens United is correct. And it's under the logic of Citizens United. Right. It's a way to knock its knees out, essentially. Yeah. Well, get rid of the super PACs, which still leaves the ability of a corporation to spend money or Elon Musk, you know, under Buckley v. Vallejo, which turned 50 last Friday. Elon Musk has the ability to spend his money independently.

but it would stop 80% of this money because most people don't want to be out there on their own. They want to do it through a contribution to a political action. It wouldn't be dark money. It would be very light money. You could see it. You'd know who gave the money. Listeners might wrap successfully the idea that Roberts Court is going to make a good

fated effort to reach a decision based on legal principles and set of political expediency given recent history. But you think Justice Amy Coney Barrett or maybe Justice Neil Gorsuch might be willing to do that? How come? What's in it for them? Because if they were to go against us, they would have to change the law to even further reduce the ability to police a thing which everybody must recognize is now a huge problem within our government.

I mean, you know, our initiative was passed with 75% of the vote in Maine, you know, a very purple state. So people get it. People get it. On the right and the left, they get it. And I think that the point is like if it's recognized as not a partisan issue, but just a thing where people are just so disgusted with this money. What's in it for the court? And on the other hand, if the court ruled in our favor, you know, the country would be like, whoa, this is amazing. They are coming down with a decision that 80% of us agree with, and they can do it without ever

confessing any error in their earlier decision. So I just don't think what, see what the upside for them is. Whereas the downside, like that they would be seen as just furthering what everybody now perceives as this grotesque system of corruption would just be catastrophic, I think, for that institution. I mean, they have made it harder to prosecute corruption before. They're not bothered by precedent. So. Well, it's not clear that they were changing precedent in the kind of weird ways they've developed

the interpretation of corruption statutes. But the point is, they would have to change precedent if they were to say that a state cannot regulate where everybody's acknowledging there's a risk of corruption. I mean, that's been the basic principle for 50 years when Buckley said you can regulate contributions because we can see the risk of corruption there. But you can't regulate independent spending because that is not coordinated. And that non-coordinated speech, therefore, has no interest in regulation because if it's not coordinated, there can't be any quid pro quo. And quid pro quo is the only basis this court is recognized for limiting that speech. Right. So every episode we get an expert to send our guests

a question. Yours is about this campaign finance system as it is. Let's hear it. Hey, Professor Lessig, this is Ellie Honig. I'm currently CNN's senior legal analyst, but much more importantly than that, almost 30 years ago, I was a first year student in your contracts class at Harvard Law School. And now I get to ask you a question for Kara's podcast. Okay, is it a good idea to just scrap this whole system? It's a mess. There's loopholes every, It's Byzantine. There's no transparency. No one can tell who's donating what to what candidate. Let's get rid of all of that. And let's just go to a completely open system. No artificial caps, no limits. Let the First Amendment breathe, but full immediate online transparency. So we will all know exactly who's giving what to who. Is this a crazy idea? Could this work? And thank you for being a great professor many years ago. Yeah, it's great to see you again. Yeah, no, that would be a disaster. A total. disaster. Because first of all, people imagine that transparency solves everything. Transparency solves nothing. Nothing. What it does is convince people that it is a corrupt system. I mean, look,

we don't know precisely who the dark money comes from, but we know that dark money is in the system in order to buy results, which it does. So the point is that transparency would convince us of the problem. And what we know when we eliminate caps on contributions is that the number of relevant contributors increasingly shrinks. So you have a smaller, smaller number of people who are calling the shots. Right now, I think it's like 300 families to basically control what happens in our government. I mean, it's a banana republic design. And so that's certainly not what the framers intended. Jet Madison promised us a house of representatives at least that would be, quote, dependent on the people alone. And he went on to say, by the people he met, not certain people.

Yeah, not the rich more than the poor, explicitly, not the rich more than the poor. Well, we've created a system where it's the rich more than the poor that our politicians are dependent on. And so is it surprising that they are just unable to do anything that addresses problems the vast majority of Americans want to see addressed? So when, how is this different than what you're saying of anybody can give anything? How does it change the super PAC status versus what he's talking about? Well, I mean, super PACs effectively now are the system that he's talking about. I mean, now he says, well, the advantage of just getting rid of everything and requiring transparency is we at least know who it is. And again, I'm saying, I don't think we're getting anything from that.

That's not going to shame most of them. So the point is we'd still have a system where it's a tiny few who are able to leverage their power to control federal legislation. I would love a system where we have many, many more people who are contributing and we're part of getting money. inside of the system? Because then, if money matters, it's mattering in a democratic way, small D democratic way. It's what we all want. The problem right now is that when it's the super PAC money, it's what the tiniest fraction of a 1% want. And it turns out the richest, whether they're Democrats or Republicans, don't want what average Americans want. Right, which is typically to protect their own fortunes. So where does it go from here? Where does the super PAC case go from here now?

So we just filed the last briefs in the First Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday. And so now the court will decide when it will hear arguments. Hopefully they'll hear arguments this spring. If they hear arguments this spring and decide the case by the summer, that means we could be in the Supreme Court in the next term, which would be critically important. Because if we're in the spring court the next term and the court goes with us, depending on how they write that opinion,

that could end super PACs by 2028, which means the next presidential election won't be with a last where super PACs were dominating what both parties were able to talk about. You know, many people look at Kamala Harris, and they say Kamala Harris failed to address issues

that ordinary people cared about. But I feel kind of sorry for her because the reason she couldn't is that her campaign was so tied down with the extraordinary amount of money it was taking from these super PACs or getting from these super PACs. But if you could eliminate that from the system, you would give them the freedom to be able to be who

they actually want to be as opposed to who the money says they must be. And so there's a chance if we get this right and get this through the First Circuit quick enough that we could fix this problem by the next presidential election, but not by 2026. Not by 2026. So be clear, Elon Musk or any other billionaires who've been very active lately could still spend hundreds of millions of dollars on electing whoever he wants. So since Buckley, 50 years ago, Elon Musk has been free to take his money and spend it independently of campaigns. Buckley created that power, not Citizens United. Citizens United extended it to corporations and labor units.

But that was a kind of one small step from the idea that individuals could do it. So that still is going to exist until the Constitution is amended and Citizens United and Buckley have been overturned. But the point is that's not. the big problem. I mean, it's our focus because we look at Elon Musk, but the reality is Elon Musk's money is not terribly effective anymore, because when P comes into a district and he spends his money, like what happened in Wisconsin, the very fact that he's spending that money becomes an argument against it. So it's not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is the ability for people to be sucked into this system in a way that is hidden and makes it so the

influence that they are exercising is not an influence that anybody needs to be accountable for. That's super PACs. And if we can end super PACs, we don't have a perfect system, but we can begin to move on to the kind of changes to the system that would actually make it an even better system. Right. One last thing, what is their best case against your case from your perspective? You've got to be sussing that out? Yeah, I think the strongest case that they've got is kind of, you know, like the question I just addressed. Why don't we just wipe all this away and let transparency rule?

And the argument, you know, so that's the argument that just let's step back and just have no regulation here at all. But the reason that's really troubling is that, you know, the whole idea of democracy is that the Democratic representatives get to enact laws

unless the Constitution clearly says they can't. And when you say that the Democratic legislatures are not allowed to address corruption, you've got to answer the question, when in our past did we the people, in some supermajority ways, say, yes, we do not allow corruption to be addressed. Corruption must be constitutionally protected inside of our democracy. And the answer is never, never. That was never the resolution of we the people in 1787, in 1867, in 1866. there was never a point where we said that.

And so the real question for these activist judges is who the hell are you to be blocking democratic legislatures and, you know, in Maine's case, the largest number of Maine voters to vote for anything in the history of Maine, more than any candidate, more than any initiative. Who the hell are you?

To tell them. To be saying no to them when you're not actually standing on anything that the Constitution ever articulated. It's just your own made-up theory about money is, speech and blah, blah, blah, that turns out to produce this zone where there can't be regulation. That's the argument against them.

We'll be back in a minute. Support for On with Kara Swisher comes from Grooons. If you're looking for a health goal that you can actually stick to, you might want to check out Grooons. Grooons is a simple daily habit that deliver real benefits with minimal effort. They're convenient, comprehensive formula packed into a snack pack of gummies a day. This isn't a multivitamin, a greens gummy, or a pre-bibank. It's all of those things and then some at a fraction of the price, and bonus, it tastes great.

Groon's ingredients are backed by over 35,000 research publications, while generic multivitamins contain only seven to nine vitamins, croons, have more than 20 vitamins and minerals and 60 ingredients, which include nutrient dense and whole foods. That includes six grams of prebiotic fiber, which is three times the amount of dietary fiber compared to the leading greens powders and more than two cups of broccoli. It's a daily snack pack because you can't fit the amount of nutrients Grooms does into just one gummy. Plus, that makes it a fun treat to look forward to every day. Kick off the new year right and save up to 52% off with the code Kara at grooms.com.

That's code Kara K-A-R-U-N-S dot CO. Welcome aboard via rail. Please sit and enjoy. Please sit and stretch. Steep, flip, or that, and enjoy. Via Rail, love the way. A lot of us have spent a lot of the last week watching videos of what's happening on the streets of Minneapolis

and understanding what it is that we're seeing, but also what's real and what isn't and what's AI, and who is taking these videos and how we're supposed to understand the source feels harder than ever. So this week on The Vergecast, we're talking about what's happening in Minneapolis how information moves in an AI age and what it means to make sense of it all.

All that, plus what's new with the new TikTok, why everything feels like it's falling apart on TikTok, and more on the Vergecast wherever you get podcasts. So there's a lot of other cases in news-related to election law. I want to ask you about a couple more. The Supreme Court is considering whether Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act is constitutional without its states could dilute minority voting pattern, potentially flip dozens of seats from Democrat to Republican. You ran for president, 2015.

I don't think you'll remember that. I do. And one of your main platforms was strengthening the Voting Rights Act. Talk about the long-term consequences of gutting section two. Yeah, I mean, this is a disaster that is, again, without any basis in the Constitution.

Because we have an express constitutional amendment that is giving to Congress the power to address this problem, both in the voting context and in the 14th Amendment equality context. And instead of yielding, to the decision of our framers to say Congress gets to make these laws, you have a court that increasingly arrogates to itself the power to second guess Congress's judgment. And again, by what right? Why do they get to do that? So it is an incredible step backwards, not justified by anything other than

a political preference of those who happen to be in the majority right now. And I would think at a certain point, they would have humility to recognize that whether they agree with the objective of equal freedom to vote or not, they don't have a constitution that gives them the power, legitimate power to block it. So the court is also concerning a case brought by California Republicans against Gavin Newsom. They're trying to block the state from redistricting in response to the new Texas map. You oppose gerrymandering, but you posted this on Twitter. Quote, every Democrat in the 117th Congress voted for the bill that would have ended partisan gerrymander. and every republic voted against the GOP didn't want to disarm.

This is a consequence of their decision. Looking ahead, what's the most feasible solution to undoing all the extreme gerrymanders we're going to end up with? Well, you know, Congress can address federal gerrymanders. So the bill that almost passed, the part of the For the People Act, would have ended fairimandering. There wouldn't have been any of this game at the federal level. There still would be state gerrymandering because the Supreme Court has said that the

Constitution does not block partisan gerrymandering. And, you know, the real question is whether the next Congress will be kind of exhausted by the games that went on in this election cycle and pull back from it. And I think that what we need is people on both sides to begin to stake the principled position, gerrymandering is terrible and we should end it. Now, I think that given that principle, it doesn't follow that you can't play the game so long as the rules are the way the rules are. Just like, you know, I set up a super pack a decade ago to try to end super PACs. You know, and the point was, we're going to do what we can under the existing rules to change the rules. So we'll play by your shitty rules, yeah.

We'll play by your rules, right. But, you know, you can still be arguing, and you should be arguing, to change the rules to the right rules, and the right rules would end this gerrymandering. The biggest reason for that is, you know, the political system is supposed to be responsive to what the people care about. But even if there's a overwhelming victory for the Democrats, it won't actually be that significant, because so many of these districts have been drawn in a way that make it so that nothing really matters. People go to the polls, they know that my vote doesn't matter because it's been crafted in a way so the politicians are picking the voters rather than the voters picking the politicians. And so I think that we've got

to recognize that we need to make democracy responsive to the people. And gerrymandering is one way in which it isn't. Money in politics is another way in which it isn't. Suppressing of the freedom of votes is another way in which it isn't. We need partisans on both sides. to begin to take a principal position about the need to end this partisan pollution of our democracy. Well, it hasn't, though. The FBI raided Fulton County's election talking about devaluing votes, headquarters and cased all the ballots cast in the county in 2020, along with registration rules and other records. So what's the best strategy for maintaining a functioning democracy when Trump and the Republican Party seems committed to doing everything to ensure this one-party rule? Talk about this raid for people to understand what's happening.

I mean, the strategy is to terrify these local jurisdictions. And they're election officials. Yeah, they're election officials so that he can effectively exercise control over the election process. And that's wrong on two fronts. Number one, the presumption of our Constitution is that election systems are run locally. And the only exception to that is if Congress passes a law to make exceptions to that. And that law only governs federal elections. It doesn't govern state elections.

And so Trump is, number one, believing that he has the right to control how states run their election systems and that he has that right, even if Congress has enacted. So, for example, in Colorado, he punished the state of Colorado by saying, I'm going to take the Space Force headquarters and move it to Alabama. Why? Because you have mail-in voting. Now, first of all, the idiocy of criticizing mail-in voting as a form of corruption is just beyond measure. But the point is, he has no power as the president to second-guess Colorado's decision to have mail-in ballots. But he does have the ability to hurt them. He has a practical ability to hurt them. And this is the pattern we've seen with him again and again.

It's this extortionist kind of mod-boss-like pattern. It's like he knows if he sets the price of extortion, you know, low enough, you know, enough to hurt, but not too much to make it so nobody would give into it. he can always win. That's what he did with nine law firms who caved to him, even though the legal basis he was asserting had zero basis in the law. That's what he did to media organizations, CBS, ABC, Amazon, meta, all of these companies that basically realized, even though he had no basis for his claims, we're going to cave into him because it's cheaper than fighting. That attitude encourages the extortionist, and we see the consequence of it. And so, you know, when you ask, what's ultimately going to stop it?

Yeah, what's the best strategy? Well, you know, ultimately, all we've got left right now on the field is the court's willingness to step up. I mean, you know, the framers never thought that would be the solution. The framers thought separated powers would mean Congress would be the first line of defense against authoritarian precedent. Well, of course, our Congress is pathetic. You know, it's not doing anything. So then the second line of defense would be the people. But again, gerrymandering basically means that even the people don't have power.

enough to address this kind of threat. So the third line of defense, all that we've got left are the courts. And the problem is this court has so far been hesitant to draw clear lines that force him to behave to live up to the legal standards. Now, you know, I have a bet with my colleague Jack Goldsmith, who, you know, he and I spend enormous amount of times talking through this. He thinks they're about to do something, a series of cases that will eventually draw sand in the line and forced Trump to abide by the Constitution and that they've been waiting

until he's weak enough to be able to do that. And I hope he's right. I don't see the evidence yet that that's what they're going to do. But if they do that, then that might be enough to staunch this effort in the states to basically terrify them into yielding power to the president so he can muck up the 2026 in midterm elections. What if they don't? I mean, what are we willing to do? You know, I'll sign up for anything. What do you know, I mean, this is a constitutional crisis.

And, you know, we're so used to being able to engage in politics sort of, you know, sitting on our couch and, like, tweeting. Yeah. You know, it might be that we need to get off our couch and, like, get into a context where we can begin to engage with other Americans. Now, I think the critical thing, from my perspective, is to find a way to talk a question. cross to other people. I did something before the last election I've never done, which is I went to a high school reunion. I grew up in the kind of Kentucky part of Pennsylvania. So I knew that most of my friends, you know, were going to vote for Trump. And I couldn't understand it. That's where my family's from, but go ahead. Is that right? Yeah. So I went, I went back there to kind of talk to them.

Because I said, you know, the values I feel like we grew up with, I don't understand how you can support this man. And one of my friends, he was a kind of high school sports star, so way above my, you know, coolness level. He and I started a podcast where we were trying to engage to kind of find, see why we don't agree or don't see the things in the same way. And it's been enormously enlightening. I mean, my favorite moment was like when he said, you know, we were talking about the J6 pardons, and he said, well, Larry, you know, at least he didn't pardon everybody.

He only pardon the nonviolent people. And I said, Ben, what are you talking about? He pardoned everybody. And it was clear to both of us that we all were living in our own little bubbles. Absolutely. And the only way to solve that is to a launch of practice. I mean, it's not necessarily starting a podcast, but launch a practice of reaching across and trying to find a way to rebuild something of a common ground

when the business model of media is committed to finding a way to break that common ground, to turn us into ignorant people who hate each other. Let's talk about the deleterious effect, because I do think it is linked to tech AI and tech billionaires. This is my area. And a lot of tech billionaires, as you know, turned up in the recent Epstein files. And I think for people who haven't been part of that don't understand how quickly, like you can have Steve Bannon hanging out with a Democrat and stuff like that and like all the different interactions between these people, including Elon Musk who emailed Epstein to ask about, quote, the wildest party on your island. Now, you made news a few years ago when you wrote an essay explaining why you signed a petition supporting Joey Ito. I wrote a very negative column about him in the New York Times. As you know, he was a former director of the MIT Media Lab. He resigned after the news that he'd solicited and accepted donations, the lab from Epstein.

I know Eto has spoken to you privately about the donations and you didn't tell him not to take the money. In an essay, in fact, you said Edo shouldn't have taken the money and that you wish you'd counsel them not to. But you say if institutions accept money from people like Epstein, and he's the worst of them, but there's lots of gradations of this, they should do it anonymously to avoid laundering the reputations of these unsavory characters. And I want to understand how you think about this, because part of it is they also invade institutions, these tech billionaires and others, not just them, but they try to overtake these places that are supposed to be, as you say, fair, and try to find common, ground. Yeah, I mean, I wrote that essay because I was furious about the scapegoating that was going on. I mean, I also wrote an essay attacking Harvard because Harvard, you know, scapegoated Martin Novak, who's not a friend. I mean, I've never met Martin before by writing a report that makes it seem like he did everything. And the actual man behind the scenes, Larry Summers, never appeared anywhere in that account. And so I wrote that in 2021. I wrote

That's out now, but go ahead. Yeah, that's all no. Right. But the point is, in my view, the real problem are these institutions, like, put these people into a position where they do this, and then they hide and they say that we have nothing to do with that. Very much like Congress is what you're saying. Yeah, exactly right.

But I want to be very clear about something because you came close to saying it exactly right, but I want to make sure that it's perfectly clear. I mean, what I said in that essay was that if you take money from a person like Epstein, you know, I can quote it exactly, it was a mistake to take. this money, Epstein's money, even if it was anonymous. Now, that's different, I think, from, for example, taking money from a tax cheat. So if a tax cheat, you know, gets out of jail and he says, I want to give $50 million to MIT, MIT can take that money, just shouldn't wander the reputation of the tax cheat. But what I said in the essay was a case like this.

Milken's a good example, right? Yeah, Milken's a good example. But Epstein is different, because if you are a victim of sex abuse, you know, and as a... I said in that essay, I averted to a John Heilman article about me talking about the fact that I spent three years in a school being abused when I was 12, 11, 12, and 13 abused in a school as a child. So I feel this viscerally. This issue is visceral for me. And so what I said was in the context of that, even if it's anonymous, even if anonymous, you should not take money from somebody like that. because, you know, if you're somebody who has been abused like this and you discover that the building you're in is funded by an abuser, that is a wrong, that is a harm that nobody should minimize. And so it was kind of bizarre to me how hard it was to kind of make that distinction because I earlier in the essay was describing the conversations Joey and I had.

And what I was saying was, you know, suffering abuse, obviously, it fundamentally affects your judgment on everything. And I at that stage, it was coming to the place where I was thinking I was overdoing it. Like, I was seeing abusers everywhere. I was completely condemning all sorts of things I didn't really have sure. It wasn't really sure. And so when Joey asked me this, and I said to him, like, are you sure that he is not, you know, what people worry about? whether, you know, are you sure that he is not perpetrating this kind of abuse with minors? And Joey said, from what I can see, that's true. You know, the stupidity was,

I thought to myself, okay, you're going to react against this, and that's just your abuse speaking. So I backed off. I said, okay, if you're confident about that, that makes sense. So when you are thinking like that, because you were talking about the larger institutional problem of having to take money, because then on the flip side, you have someone like Bill Lackman boss and everybody around, right, with his own whatever strange set of mentality he has. But taking money is an institutional problem over a Joey Ito problem, whatever. They, as you say, force them into doing this. It's a complex issue.

But explain why, you know, so say if dark money is bad in politics, and other hand, institutions are going to have to take money from some people who aren't pure as the driven snow. How can you do that with these institutions? for example. Yeah, it's really hard. I mean, you know, the first point is it's a terrible thing that we depend in all sorts of contexts. On the kindness of billionaires. Yeah. The kindness of billionaires. They're not kind. Not just because they're not kind, right. They also steer research in ways that have no necessary relationship to what's the direction it should go. I mean, so I think we've lost an

enormous amount because we've handed over those decisions to, you know, smaller groups of people who can make them for reasons that are unrelated to what actually best. benefits. But I think that the point of the institution needs to think about is how do we preserve a reason for people to trust us? And if people think that the reason you're doing what you're doing is you're trying to suck up to your donor, they won't trust you. They won't trust what you say. And I don't blame them. I was once testifying in the days when I was doing work around the internet testifying about network neutrality. And I got a text from Senator Sununu. who said to me, I can't believe you're up here shilling for Google.

And I thought, holy shit, he thinks that I'm being paid by Google. And then I thought, well, of course he thinks I'm being paid by Google. Because most of my colleagues who would be coming to testify are actually testifying because they're being paid. Some of them acknowledge that, but not everybody acknowledges that. And that's part of the work that we were doing in the lab, was to say, this is wrong. Like, if you're going to be giving, and I have a disclosure statement on my website to say this, If you're going to be giving advice about policy, you cannot be taking money from the people

who are interested in that policy. You cannot be in a position where you depend on them. And if you are, you shouldn't be talking about it. Like that we should be able to craft policy recommendations that are distinct from private dependence. I get it. But you know how insidious it is, like Google News, giving money to public. I mean, I got attacked. We didn't take the money.

But you could see how easy it would be to do so. So I never particularly judged people for it. But it was so, you know, they'd invite you to like, let's talk about where news is going. I'm like, no, not with you. Like, you know what I mean? Like, you know that. You and I have been sort of privy that. I mean, we first have to admit it's really complicated, especially if we're going to depend on private support.

But I think we should not turn away from it just because it's complicated. Yes, we need to draw complicated lines. And that's what my essay was trying to do. Now, I wasn't rewarded for that essay because it created all that trouble. But the point is, you know, we can say that certain kinds of contributors should be treated differently. So Taylor Swift wants to give money to university, celebrate it. Like that money is pure. Like, it's wonderful.

And if Google wants to give money, you know, I get that people are, like, conflicted about Google. But I also think that it would be clear Google's giving the money. Right. But once you cross the criminal line, then there are two categories. Those you can do anonymously and those you cannot take at all, Epstein, given who he turned out, to be, at least as people saw it, people came to see, should never have accepted any of that money at all. He was everywhere. I don't think people understand. What I think was surprising for those emails was how he was everywhere, and I remember him being everywhere, you know, all the events

and showing up with lots of money and dinners and stuff like that. He was trying very hard to launder himself, and people allowed him to do it. You characterized the 2024 election as a populace against insiders by voters who feel like outsiders. Obviously, what was gross about the Epstein notes was how they co-eased it and chatted up with him. Can Democrats use those to show that Trump and his tech CEO friends are real elites and untrustworthy? Because I think right now, tech people are starting to go through the real ringer in terms of their reputation, whether it was through Doge and Musk is in the center of a lot of it, but it's all of them. Does that help or hurt as people begin to not like billionaires quite so much?

Yeah, I think, you know, it really depends on whether there's a Democrat who can credibly articulate the other side. And the other side is not anti-populist, it's pro-populist. It's a side that says, look, you were right. We do have a system that sucks up to the elite. And look, you know, the Epstein files are just one dimension of it. You can see it everywhere. And we have got to change that corruption. But you thought Donald Trump was going to change that corruption for you. Look what happened. The guy's four billion. dollars richer because of that corruption, because of that elite. Those tech firms are sucking up to him and giving him everything he wants. Amazon pays $40 million for a documentary about his wife. That is not what you were angry about. That is not what you were fighting for. And so is there a Democrat who can credibly say to that populist base, you pick the wrong horse to fight your fight, but there is a side that would fight your fight. Right. Would implement policies that would address this kind of elite corruption. And, you know, I mean, one of the big problems, though, is whether that message gets out, whether that message is reached. I don't remember the great television series scandal.

And there's one episode just in 2016 before Trump became Trump, where there's a Trump-like character. There is. And he's like a big populist. And then Kerry Washington catches him on tape, like admitting that all of his. Deis is just, you know, basically hillbillies and he hates all of them. And that leaks. And once that leaks, his support disappears. Well, that's just liberal fantasy.

Yes, it is. It's like dreaming that just get the facts out there. There was a Catherine Hepburn movie, Man of the People back then. Exactly right. Yeah. Same thing. But, you know, we don't have that media ecosystem anymore. Well, it depends on the person because when Mitt Romney did it, it worked, right?

It was a different, even that was a different media ecosystem. He's a different person, too. Yeah, that's right. We'll be back in a minute. I was guilty of multiple skin care crimes. Two counts of sleeping in makeup. One count of using disposable wipes. I knew my routine had to change.

So I switched to Garnier-Missler water. It gently cleanses, perfectly removes makeup, and provides 24-hour hydration. Clear away the evidence with the number one Missler Water worldwide by Garnier. With MX Platinum, UFX, to over 1,400 airport lounges worldwide. So your experience before takeoff is a taste of what's to come.

That's the powerful backing of Amex. Conditions apply. Local news is in decline across Canada, and this is bad news for all of us. With less local news, noise, rumors, and misinformation fill the void, and it gets harder to separate truth from fiction. That's why CBC News is putting more journalists in more places across Canada. reporting on the ground from where you live, telling the stories that matter to all of us, because local news is big news.

Choose news, not noise. CBC News. So let's end by talking about artificial intelligence. You've written that, quote, observing that AI could be used for good, it's like observing that bulldozers could be used to help build affordable public housing. It is possible, of course, but is it likely it is not. Talk a little bit about the ways to regulate it. Well, I mean, you know, everybody's focused on the next AI, the future AI, and like, scary fears about, you know, runaway AI.

If we build it, if anybody builds it, everybody dies. And I think those are important problems to focus on. But we need to recognize old AI, the AI that drives social media, is the present threat. And that present threat has turned us into people that can't even hear each other, ignorant people who hate each other. And that that will continue to be deployed and perfected as the AI's algorithms driving your media, your consumption of engagement-based media, become ever better at figuring out how to trigger you and get you to do what they want you to do, which is to spend more time focus on the device. The only way to fix that is to blow it up, literally blow it up, well, figuratively literally blow it up. And, you know, we could do it legally. So, for example, imagine Congress passed an engagement tax that basically taxed a quadratic engagement tax.

So taxed on the basis of engagement. So one unit, it's $1, $2, unit, it's four, three units, it's nine. At a certain point, the platform, you'd be like, hey, Lessa, go take a walk. Like, you're costing us too much money to be on that platform. My point is, that's totally constitutional. And if you did it, you would blow up the business model. And they would have to figure a different way to try to make money, one that wasn't focused on constantly getting us to

enraged to spend our time enraged based on what we're being fed. But to get something like

that requires a functioning from question one. Yeah. We don't have a functioning Congress, right. So I think

this is like the problem of the age. I'm just finishing a book where, you know, the first, it's the metaphor

is the Titanic and it's like, you know, you hit the iceberg and you see the ice on the deck and you're like, okay,

we can fix that. But then you have the gash in the hall and it's like, It doesn't matter if we fix that. We're going down. Well, the equivalent is like the democracy reform stuff I've been doing for 20 years.

We came close to fixing that. We know how to fix it. We could fix all of that stuff. But this engagement-based media is the gash in the hall. And you can't sue them. You can't sue them. Right. So you were, let me just be clear, you were once a beloved figure within the tech world

for being an open source champion and pushing back against regulation. And they don't like you so much more. They don't like me anymore at all. So they don't like Yval Harari. They don't like Sam Harris, who have been outspoken. But you've spoken out against open source AI models, too, and you're a vocal supporter of California AI safety bill. Has the reality of generative AI undone some of the original assumptions?

Well, look, I think, you know, 1047, the California regulations were important just to make sure that we knew what was going on inside those companies. I mean, I defended some of the whistleblowers, Daniel Kokatelo, who came out and was willing to give up two million of his own dollars in order to have the freedom to speak. That open AI. He didn't have to do that yet open AI. And one of the purposes of that bill was to make it so whistleblowers could know and identify problems with what was going on inside those companies.

That has nothing to do with open source. What I wrote in economists about open source was open source is extremely valuable. I think it's become even more important, especially to assure access across the world. But I said that there's going to be a point at which, the models become sufficiently powerful, that we need to make sure that we can assure that they are not deployed in ways that are catastrophic to humanity. And I don't think we're there yet. We're not at that point. But it's just about a point about you can't think in binary ways about this. Like there's a risk at a certain point at which the risk becomes overwhelming, even if we're nowhere

close to it now. And we have to begin to think about what do we need to make it possible to regulate in that context. You've spoken out about the AI's potential to destroy democracy. As you said, will supercharge the media business models that rely on engagement, which leads to enraignment, increase polarization, and shatters the shared reality that's necessary for democracy. And your solution has been the citizen assemblies. Talk as you're thinking, given the scale of the problem you described, citizen assemblies can sound quayton and polyanist as a solution, but then you see Minneapolis. You see it. Like, you could start to see it. You believe technology could decentralize power and strengthen democracy, but the opposite.

is true. So talk a little bit about that. Well, what we know about people who've seen and experienced citizen assemblies is that they trigger in those people this kind of aha moment. Like, it's the first time they're doing anything related to government or politics, and they feel like this is something powerful and different. And what it's able to do is to take people who have very different views about the world, and get them to come to an understanding and propose solutions that are meaningful, real solutions. And that experience is something that when people see it or have it, they begin to recognize that the world of professional politicians is not the only world we could have.

Indeed, one of my favorite books here is a book called Against Elections by Van Raybrook. And he starts the book by saying, you know, we've had thousands of years of history of democracy, but only a couple hundred years where elections have been the sole way in which we pick our leaders. And indeed, Aristotle and Montesquieu both said if you have elections, you will tend towards aristocracy. But if you pick leaders in a random – it was the Jefferson fight with Hamilton. Yeah. You pick them in a more random – in a random representative way, then you'll tend towards democracy. And citizen assemblies, if done right, random representative groups of people who are brought together.

It's a big jury. It's a statistically significant jury. Given information, given a chance to deliberate, can produce solutions that our government can't. I mean, sometimes I think we should just have, call like the government games where we impanel a series of citizen assemblies to address the problems Congress is supposed to address, and we give them two years. And at the end of two years, we say, which of these two institutions actually came up with real solutions to these problems? And I guarantee you, I would have to pay them a lot, right, given. for their time, right? Turns out, I mean, maybe you do, but, you know, turns out the ones that have succeeded, you don't have to pay them a terribly large amount. I'm a strong believer that we've got to support them to make sure everybody can participate and they don't lose anything from participating, not like jury pay, but like real pay. But regardless, whatever we have to pay them, if you could begin to address problems like climate change or inequality or tax policy or whatever, that would be worth it.

And these bodies surprisingly turn out to be able to do much more, much more effectively than ordinary government. I mean, it feels like a kind of rocky moment when, you know, Rocky, like, surprises the world that he can at least stay in the ring with Apollo Creed. And then Rocky, too, he's able to defeat Apollo Creed. And we are rocky in this story, like a random representative body of citizens sitting down and addressing COVID policy or addressing climate change policy, turn out to be. be more effective at getting real solutions. Have you seen an inflection point? Yeah. So this is happening everywhere around the world and increasingly in the United States. I mean, I don't want to oversell the possibility. It's not something that in the next year or next five years is going to be present enough so people can imagine it or see it. You know, many people, you know, polling,

they'll say, yeah, I would think a random group of Americans would be better than Congress and maybe they believe that. But I think people can be easily frightened. by the idea of random representatives because when I think of any random, it's like that guy, right. And of course, there will be idiots, but they'll only be 5% idiots. Like 95% will be like decent, normal people, 10% idiots, whatever. But the point is, like, we need to demonstrate it. And if we demonstrated it more and more and more people began to see this can actually solve the problem that government can't, I think you're going to see more power being given to them to at least constrain or put guardrails on what our government can do. Yeah, you see people

reacting to it. So my last question, if we don't meaningfully rein in these super PACs, getting back to your first part, we were talked about, strength and voting rights, address the national populist backlash against elites and regulate AI. What happens to American democracy? What does it look like 10 years, 20 years, if we keep heading down the path, and what could it look like? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, people thought American democracy. America's empire or America as an ideal would never end. I think if we don't fix these problems, it ends. I think, you know, it's ugly.

I mean, how does it end? Like, was there a division? Is it, like, who do we become? But I think that the world that we imagine ourselves contributing to, like the values that I think we imagined standing for have begun to collapse. And we don't have a mechanism to pull it back together. if we don't solve these core corruptions.

Now, I think we should be simple about it. Let's start with the money. Like, that is the core. That is the foundational. For every thousand hacking at the branches of evil, there's one striking at the root. This is the root. And if you don't find a way to address this,

none of the other changes, voting rights, none of those things are going to matter. But if we solve this problem, if we can take down the super PACs and at least open up the opportunity for other influences to matter, then we have something to fight for. Whether you think we'll succeed or not, I think you should fight for it. And, you know,

I understand the argument that there's no hope, there's no reason to be fighting because we can't succeed. But I don't think you're allowed to take that position. If you love your country, like if you love your child, you will do anything you can regardless of the odds. And that's what we should be doing right now. Whatever it takes, we've got to find a way to restore or establish a democracy that speaks for the people, not for the tiniest fraction of the 1% who can buy elections or can corrupt the system so that it responds to them, whether through threats or through incentive. Yeah, something I always say to people when they say, we can't do anything.

I said, they're so poor, all they have is money. Like, you don't understand. I'm telling you, they're beatable. Please borrow it and put it around. Anyway, Larry, as usual, what a fascinating discussion, and we really appreciate it. Thank you so much. Okay, thanks. Today's show was produced by Christian Castor Rassell, Michelle Alloy, Megan Bernie, and Kalin Lynch.

Nishot Kerwah is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Aymn Waylon. Our engineers are Fernando Aruta and Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, the Roberts Court will stick to its originalist principles. If not, hello, unlimited, dark money, forever. Go wherever you listen to a podcast,

search for On with Kara Swisher, and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media podcast network, us. We'll be back on Monday with more.