The New Yorker Radio Hour - Episode 35: Samantha Bee’s Fury, and Staffing the Supreme Court

Episode Date: June 17, 2016

Could Citizens United be overturned? Jeffrey Toobin and Pamela Karlan, a Stanford law professor, discuss what a Supreme Court dominated by Democratic appointees might do. Samantha Bee talks about how comedy hosts deal with tragedies like mass shootings. And the digital pioneer Jaron Lanier looks at how a utopian vision for the Internet went wrong. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

Hey, hey, how are you? Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. We're here in an office. We're at your office. It's kind of a corporate-looking office. Gosh, kind of corporate-looking. It is.

I was being polite. I'm a visitor. It's a cubicle matrix. This is a... It's not that I don't like this color paint, by the way. That's nice. Well, it's so flattering. And that's why we've chosen these drop ceilings and the fluorescent ceiling.

Late this week, I went to see Samantha B at her office. For years, she's... She was a star cast member on John Stewart's The Daily Show, and a few months ago she struck out on her own with full frontal on TBS, making her, in the realm of late-night TV anyway, amidst all those white guys at their desks, a kind of solitary woman. There was never any doubt that she'd be a unique comic voice.

We just had no idea of the degree until this week. On Sunday morning, after hearing the awful news from Orlando, Samantha B and her staff channeled, their grief and their sense of political outrage, particularly at the NRA and its congressional lackeys. And they formed an opening monologue unlike any other. Samantha, Monday night, you had a decision to make, a creative decision, an emotional decision, how to handle this horrific incident in Orlando, Florida. And you'd been at the Daily Show for years, and unfortunately, God knows, with 9-11 and then onward

there were any number of disasters to confront. What was the discussion like here about how to approach it? Well, I mean, the discussion about how to approach it really began first thing Sunday morning. You know, are we going in on it? Are we just throwing out, or not throwing out the first act, but basically putting it aside to face the event head on? And that was really a no-brainer for our show. everybody got behind that immediately. We all wanted to do that.

But you did something different than usual, and something different than all other shows really before or that night. Let's listen to the way you approach this horrendous incident in Orlando, Florida. Now, after a massacre, the standard operating procedure is that you stand on stage and deliver some well-meaning words about how we will get through this together, how love wins, how love conquers hate. And that is great. That is beautiful.

You know what? F*** it. I am too angry for that. Love does not win unless we start loving each other enough to fix our fucking problems. And that's the first time I've heard it back. And it was as if you were leaping through the screen physically, you looked furious. I, we all, I mean, obviously, and I hope that the fury continues unabated until we actually put our actions behind our words and our thoughts and our barriers, for sure. it was very difficult to do.

I wrestled with it a lot. We all did. We sat with it. You wrestled with what? Because there's a standard way of doing this, a kind of emotional We Are One, and you had had it. When I say we wrestled with it, it wasn't wrestling with the decision to actually engage with it for the entire first act. The wrestling was the tone, you know, my tone, my personal tone. So I guess I should say I wrestled with my performance a tremendous amount.

I really didn't want to cry. I really didn't want to cry. You didn't completely succeed, did you, and not cry? I didn't, I think I did the best job that I could possibly have done. And it took a long day of cry. I actually, I'm a big, because I'm a real baby. I mean, I do cry a lot. And I think that's really healthy, and I do do that, but I really didn't want to do it in this performance.

And so, you know, it's a struggle. Of course, we're all struggling. We were all crying the whole country. Mass shootings have become so frequent in this country. seems like the only thing that will stop a bad guy with a gun is another bad guy with a gun who coincidentally came to shoot up the same place. Our mass shooter du jour was Omar Mateen, born in New York. He'd beat his ex-wife. He'd been reported multiple times to his employer as homophobic and unhinged, and the FBI had twice questioned him for ties to terrorism. But none of

these things disqualified him from legally buying a gun that shoots 45 rounds a minute. Not even his terrible mirror selfies. I think we can all agree that if you don't have one friend to hold the phone for you, your lone wolf ass doesn't get a gun. How do you figure it out? I'm moved just and laughing at the same time, listening to it now a few days later. How do you figure out this very uncanny balance of rage and anger and at the same time making some pretty amazing jokes? I think that we, the team that we have built here, you know, from our showrunner, Joe Miller, to the writers, to the researchers.

I mean, we just have, it's very instinctive. Even in the face of tragedy, we do recognize that we're a comedy show. You know, we do recognize that. And a new one. I mean, you're an episode. 15, 16, somewhere in there. I mean, it's very pledged. Really new.

But we've always delivered this show. And we always knew that we wanted to deliver this show from our gut. And our gut, it tells us that we can make a joke. It tells us when we can make a joke. You had been at the John Stewart show for years and years, and he had, unfortunately, had to react to 9-11 and any number of incidents thereafter. What were you learning from that? How did you want to approach it the same or different?

I didn't live in New York when 9-11 happened. I came shortly thereafter. But I watched the show in Canada, and his reaction was monumental for me. I thought it was amazing. I mean, it just truly was. And then I do think that there was a bit of a John Stewart effect from that. You know, the ripple effect of that is now when you have a show like this, you do have to address it. You know, it's become part of the norm.

Did it become a kind of cliche for late-night television? No, I don't think it is. I don't think it's a cliche. I don't know how you could possibly avoid it. You're doing a topical show. You're in the moment and you just can't. You just cannot open a show and do like, Isn't this election bananas, guys?

Like, you cannot ignore. It's more than an elephant in the room. It's just you do have to react. You know, I didn't think too much about what everybody else was doing, but we did know on a very visceral level what we needed to do and what we needed and how we react to things. And we are just angry, and I am just angry. And I felt like it was the correct point of view

and the correct tone for our show. What are your ambitions for the show? It's pretty new. There's got to be for everybody of this generation of late night, a little bit of kind of the anxiety of influence with, you know, John Stewart living out there in Jersey, taking care of animals and all that stuff. I mean, he's the, everybody comes from something. Stewart is related to a lot of the shows and a lot of the people performers that we see now. What are your ambitions for it? What do you want it to be? How do you want it to be distinctive other than it's just like? coming through your voice. What's the plan? My ambition for the show at the moment is to keep this feeling of pure enjoyment. Like, I'm just not that person who goes for the glory of it. I really, really try to keep it really focused on the experience of doing the show

and how much pleasure it gives me to work here with these people. and how much pleasure it gives me to do the show. And I think that's true of, I think that's true of a lot of us. What I can't understand about you is that apparently you were, as a kid, very shy. Very. I mean, still very shy. So you pick this to do? It's so common, though.

I mean, that's the, I mean, that's the psychology of any performer. How did you leap into that? How did you leap out of your shyness? What stage did you come, come to? Well, again, I'm still quite shy. I'm just excellent at masking that now. Is it psychoanalysis? Yeah, I think so. You know, it's not something that it doesn't torture me, but I am terrible at parties.

I'm just the worst, the world's worst mingler. So if you're shy, when you get out in front of an audience here, with the knowledge that many Yankee Stadium's fulls of people are going to watch you. I don't think about it. I think about the audience. I definitely think about the audience, but I consider it to be a kind of a, I'm such a hippie. Oh, my God. I do consider it to be a bit of a communal experience with the audience. Their energy and their desire to be there is something that feeds my tender ego.

But it does. You know, there is a back and forth. There's a give and take in that room. You've been covering elections since I think 2004. Yes. How much more, how I put this, insane is this one for the obvious reason? They're all, I'm not going to say that the Sarah Palin year wasn't. That was good.

But that didn't get that way until the summer. nomination. This has been good from the get-go. This has been good from the get. This has been a really... I mean, if you like authoritarian demagogues, it's... And I do. Who doesn't? We know this. But do you ever get the complaints that we do in the, you know, the news business? That somehow by covering Trump and by covering him a lot, that we're somehow also responsible

for the rise of Trump and the success of Trump. How are you going to... I don't understand. I mean, you cannot... Many unsurious people have run for president, and you have to cover them. They are running for president. Whoa, whoa, whoa, who's been remotely as unserious as this? No one has been remotely as unsurious. Okay. But, you know.

Fact-checking department. Yeah, no, I'm not saying there's no real, there's no real equivalent here, but you have to cover them. Does comedy have to be fair? Sometimes you'll go and you'll interview a person, and that person is gamely sitting there, and they're kind of excited to be on TV, let's face it. And you go to a black, gay Trump supporter, and you interview him. And the standards, the goal is different from straight up journalism. Let's listen.

We've had these disasters in neoconservatism and neoliberalism. And I think that he is an alternative to both of those paths and sort of like a return to not old style, like ethnic nationalism, but like a civic nationalism where it's not like racist or anything like that. What he says is not racist? You don't think you separate. Okay. You did a beat. You did a big sigh. All right.

It's not racist. He's not... He's... He speaks in an old way. He speaks in an old way. Like an old racist. Well, I mean, in the definition of, you know, where we have like microaggressions in safe spaces,

probably, yes. But is that okay for you that he's representing the country in an old-timey racist way? If it is a negative, I would say it's like a minor negative. I'm so confused by you. Watching someone choke down a piece of their soul just to belong broke my fact checker. Is he in on the joke? Does he know what's going on?

Of course he knows what, oh my God, he completely knows what's going on. But there's no, I mean, there's no joke. We're just having a conversation. We're not putting anything over on him. That was a natural conversation that we had together. You know, one of the best things that we're doing at our show that we are doing differently. You know, when I worked at the Daily Show, we had, there was such a structure to the field pieces. And there was such an act that you.

would put on that you were a fake reporter. And we've just completely lost that artifice here. Now it's much more about me just having conversations. I don't. Is that liberating? It's completely liberating. I don't hide my point of view at all. We go into these conversations. We make agreements to talk to each other. And we really have conversations. I do not hide my point of view from people at all. I am completely free to speak my mind. And that conversation is a great example of that. Let me ask you this. I think we both know or we feel it in our hearts that this is not the last mass shooting that we're going to experience.

Well, we know. I'm sure. No, of course not. And we're going to be here, God willing, it'll be a long time, but it probably won't. I mean, when we did. In our original first draft of the show for Monday, we definitely were like, this is the only mass shooting that we, you know, we tape our show at 5 o'clock. So who knows what has happened in the interim. Between 5 o'clock and 11 o'clock.

And that's, or 1030. Which is a horrifyingly real joke, but we'll be back. What do you do then? I mean, I hope that we do not have to cross that bridge ever again. I really do. I think we probably will. And that is the saddest thing that anyone could say. So I don't know.

I guess we'll deal with it when we deal with it. But it's really not fun to try to put a comedy show together after something like that has happened. And we really deserve better. We really deserve better. Samantha, thank you. Thank you so much. Samantha B. The host of Full Frontal on TBS.

I'm David Remnick. Coming up this hour, we'll tell you about a great job opportunity in Washington at the Supreme Court. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. You're listening to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm Paul Rudnick. Application to be a Supreme Court Justice.

1. Why do you want to be a Supreme Court justice? A. Job security. B. It will look good on Tinder, especially the photo in which I'm flirtatiously unzipping my robe just a bit. C. I enjoy riding jet skis, taking long walks, and telling women what they can and can't do with their bodies. Two, true or false. It's inappropriate for the personal, religious, beliefs of a justice to inform his or her legal decisions. Unless God tells that justice in a dream, you're the only smart one. I mean, look around. Three, in cases involving powerful business interests, how will you balance the rights of an individual against the economic heft of a corporate giant? A, I'll think, well, when was the last time an individual,

offered me free 24-hour delivery. B, I'll ask the attorneys representing the corporate interests if Time Warner is really offering cocaine and prostitutes to try to lure customers back. C. I'll ask Justice Ginsburg. Ruth, is it worth getting Netflix when all I want to watch is Kimmy Schmidt and all the episodes of Friends? 4. Who or what is Merrick Garland?

A. an exit on the Long Island Expressway. B, not a Mexican. C, the best name for a riverboat gambler since Gaylord Ravennail. 5. If you're confirmed as a Supreme Court justice, what would you like your legacy to be? A, he or she bravely remained on the court for three years after being declared legally dead.

B, he or she. she was the first justice to sit on one of those inflatable exercise balls instead of a chair. C, he or she introduced a more egalitarian system of jurisprudence to the nation by concluding every decision with the words, or maybe not. Application to be a Supreme Court justice by Paul Rudnick, playwright, novelist, and New Yorker contributor for over 20 years. I'm David Remnick. Now let's stay with the Supreme Court for just a minute. Right now, there are eight justices.

One of the arguments for the establishment Republicans who have gotten behind Donald Trump is that a Trump presidency would at least, if it does nothing else for the Republican Party, keep Hillary Clinton from getting to appoint one or two or even more justices. So what would a President Clinton mean for the Supreme Court? Jeffrey Tubin put the question to Pamela Carlin.

She's a law professor at Stanford University. and a Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Justice Department. Merrick Garland's been nominating to the Supreme Court, as you know. Do you think he's going to be confirmed? I think at some point he may well be confirmed. I'd be surprised if it happens before the election, though. Meaning how would he be confirmed? Well, the nomination, as I understand it, remains in force until this session of Congress goes out,

and that won't be until January 3rd of 2017. And so there's a period of time between the election and the start of the new Congress when the old Congress is still in session. And several people have suggested that that might be a time when the Senate might confirm him even if they don't confirm him before the election. Let's take the 63-year-old white guy, cut our losses and don't let Hillary Clinton fill the seat. I think that's some of the assumption, yeah. Let's operate on the assumption for this conversation that either Merrick Garland or a Hillary Clinton nominee fills the Scalia spot, meaning there would be a democratically appointed majority on the Supreme Court for the first time in a very long time. Let's talk about what that Supreme Court might look like. One of the big cases that has been talked a lot about during the campaign, including by Hillary Clinton, is Citizens United and how she would like to see Citizens United overturned.

If there's a Democratic majority on the Supreme Court, do you think Citizens United would be overturned? I would actually be surprised if Citizens United got overturned expressly. I think it's far more likely that what would happen is Citizens United would be a kind of outlier case and that the court, might move back towards approving more regulations based on ideas that equality is a value that campaign finance regulation can serve. I'd be surprised if the court, as I said before, just outright said citizens united itself was wrong and wrongly decided and we overrule it. Because it's kind of rare for the Supreme Court to outright overrule prior cases. And the current rule is that the campaign finance regulation, can only eliminate corruption, right? That's what the Supreme Court has said. Well, a corruption or the appearance of corruption. But the court has said that equalizing the

strength of various voices in the process is not a legitimate reason for restricting the speech of some. So what would that mean in practical terms? What kind of laws do you think a democratically controlled Supreme Court might approve that the current Supreme Court wouldn't approve? Well, one area where I think there'd be a pretty clear difference is that I think a different Supreme Court than the one we had in the past is much more likely to uphold various kinds of public financing regimes. You may remember, Jeff, that a couple of years back, the Supreme Court struck down parts of the Arizona clean elections law because it gave more money to publicly financed candidates if their opponents were raising and spending more money. That kind of law, I think, would be upheld. because Citizens United is often used as a shorthand, I think, for the more general idea that campaign finance regulations are permissible. That general idea, I think, could change quite dramatically.

But the question whether you would have to overrule Citizens United to get there or simply say, well, citizens United was about this kind of law and the law we have in front of us now is quite different, allows you to kind of what you might say underrule or circumrule. rather than overruling citizens united. Okay, fair enough. So let's move on to a different area, which is abortion rights. After 2010, when the Republicans won control of many states, they have passed a series of laws restricting abortion rights, like requiring doctors to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals, by creating burdensome new regulations on how clinics should be constructed,

What do you think a Democratic majority would mean for those laws in the Supreme Court? My guess is that most of those laws would be struck down. The reason for that is that the standard that the Supreme Court now has is a standard called the Undue Burden Standard. And what does that mean? Well, that's exactly the right question to ask, which is in whose eyes is the burden undue. In the eyes of people who generally support women's right to choose, a lot more. things are going to be viewed as undue burdens than in the eyes of people who are skeptical about women's ability to decide whether to terminate a pregnancy. But I think the undue burden

standard will be applied with a good deal more rigor by a court in which Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is making the assigning decisions than in a court in which she's not making those decisions. Now, you referred to the opinion assignment process. What is the opinion assignment process at the Supreme Court? So after the Supreme Court hears oral argument in a case, the nine justices go into a room where it's just the nine of them and they vote on whether to affirm the decision below, the judgment below, or to reverse it. And then once they've had the vote, the chief justice, if he's in the majority or the senior associate justice, if the chief justice is in the minority, decides which justice will take. take a crack at writing an opinion for the court. And other justices will decide, do they want to join on to that? Do they want to write a concurring opinion? That is an opinion that reaches the

same bottom line but by a different route. Or do they want to write a dissent, an opinion that comes to a different bottom line conclusion or to join a dissent? The reason the assigning power matters is that there are often a lot of different ways to reach a bottom line. The court can write a broad opinion that will have impact on a lot of other pending cases or it can write a narrow opinion. It can decide to rule on a constitutional aspect of the case or a statutory aspect. If it rules on a statutory aspect, Congress can essentially come back and tell the Supreme Court they got it wrong by amending the statute. Whereas if the court issues a constitutional decision, then it's much harder. You need a constitutional amendment or a change in the court's

personnel to really cut back on a constitutional decision. So it matters who writes the opinion because who writes the opinion determines in some sense the rationale and therefore the analysis that's often going to play out in future cases. So you are a particular expert on voting rights and you recently worked in the Obama Justice Department on voting rights issues. There are a lot of laws in the red-leaning states at the moment that are either attempts to restrict voter fraud in the eyes of Republicans or in the eyes of Democrats to limit voting rights, establishing photo ID requirements, limiting early voting. Where do those cases go? What happens to those challenges with a Democratic majority Supreme Court, if that's what we have? So under the Voting Rights Act, as it

existed from really 1965 until 2013, there were parts of the country which had had a history of racial discrimination in voting that were required before they put any new voting law into effect to get federal approval for the law. And in order to get that approval, which was referred to as preclearance, they had to show that the law would have neither a racially discriminatory purpose nor a racially discriminatory effect. And under that law, the Department of justice or federal courts had blocked several voter ID laws and had required other voter ID laws to be modified to make it easier for voters to satisfy the ID requirement. Immediately upon the Supreme Court's deciding the Shelby County case in 2013, which eliminated

for practical purposes the preclearance requirement, jurisdictions started putting into effect or enacting new restrictions on the right to vote. cutbacks in early voting, voter ID laws, and the like. So you think there's a better chance that these laws will be struck down with a Democratic majority Supreme Court? Absolutely. Pam, I know it's far-fetched, but it was far-fetched in 2000 that the presidential election wound up in the Supreme Court. Do you see a possibility that the 2016 election could wind up in the Supreme Court? I don't really see a possibility that something like Florida 2000 will get there, but I see a definite possibility that the Supreme Court is going to face over the next, say, six months, a series of cases involving various aspects of the 2016 election.

How so? Well, it's going to see requests from various folks to enjoin new election practices that are being put into place. The current eight justice Supreme Court seems to have moved from being baseball umpires to being football punters. They have been sending an awful lot of cases back to the lower courts with kind of vague instructions. You know, you can kind of predict that in cases involving voter ID that are working their way through the courts, the court is going to get confronted with what do we do about these ID requirements for this election? And when you have a 4-4 court, it's entirely possible that you'll end up with inconsistent rules across the country about whether or not particular kinds of election practices can go into effect. And that's an area where having eight justices and not being able to decide the rule nationwide actually is a problem because people should have the same ability to vote whether they live in Ohio or Virginia or Colorado or Arizona. And if the Ninth Circuit and the Tenth Circuit and the Fourth Circuit and the Sixth Circuit are deciding these issues in different ways, that's a problem.

Pamela Carlin of Stanford University and the U.S. Justice Department. She spoke with the New Yorker's Jeffrey Tubin. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come. Welcome back to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remney. There are just a few people around who can claim to have created the digital world that we live in. Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist, is in that small club. He was an early pioneer of virtual reality, and he's an architect of what's called Web 2.0.

Lanier, for much of his career, was an idealist, almost a utopian about the promise of technology to improve our lives. He talked with Nick Thompson, the digital editor of the New Yorker, about how he actually lost some of that belief. We believed that if you had a universal open information system. We didn't have the name internet yet, but we believe that something like that would further the cause of rational fact-based human discourse and would reduce non-factual

fear-based fads that are used to manipulate people with climate change denialism being a specific one. And the reason it came up is one of the major figures back then was a senator from Tennessee named Al Gore, who really did play a pivotal role in bringing about a single information service to be called the Internet rather than having a bunch of incompatible ones. And at the time, he was also an early, probably the earliest political voice expressing concern for climate change. And I remember at a meeting saying, you know, these two things go together. If we can have the Universal Information Service, people will approach these huge questions,

these long-term questions like climate change more realistically. You know, that didn't happen. That's an example of me being wrong. And it doesn't happen often that I'm wrong, but here is an example. And I think it really speaks to the way utopianism can make you a little blind, although I'm not willing to give up my utopianism completely. But, I mean, the question for me is, was it completely wrong

or did it turn out to be wrong because we made some wrong steps after that? And I currently kind of tend to believe that latter thing, that we ended up turning the Internet into this giant sort of manipulation service where people pay us for what's called advertising, but it's more like behavioral manipulation. And that fork in the road is, I think, what kind of ruined it. The fork in the road where Google started attaching advertising to search results is what made false information spread more easily? Well, what it did is it created a perverse incentive for people to manipulate the population instead of present things more neutrally. Given that advertising essentially is the only source of revenue for companies like Google and Facebook at this point, obviously there's a lot of room for manipulation there. And we're proud of it. I mean, like we routinely, we speaking for Silicon Valley, you know, we publish sociology papers showing.

knowing that we can affect people's emotions without them realizing it and that sort of thing. I think that that was a wrong turn taken around the turn of the century. And it would be interesting to someday try doing the Internet over with a different approach and see if that has a different result. So where there's no advertising attached to search results, no advertising attached to the major social networks, you think that we would have ended up with an Internet that instead of sending people to misinformation reduced misinformation? Well, I mean, here, I was wrong once, right?

So why are you asking me now? Do I have any credibility with you at all? The theory, and I'm really not sure if this would work out, but the theory is that if you made it more of a network of equals, instead of the central company having more information about you than you have about that company, instead of it being an imbalance system, if it was a balanced system,

and if the economics of it was balanced, which would mean people would get paid for whatever they contribute to it, so that you had a more spread out economic benefit instead of such a concentrated one. If those two things were true, then in theory there'd at least be a chance that there'd be more motivation for service and less motivation for manipulation online. I want to ask you about the subject you're often asked about, which is, of course, virtual reality. We're in a moment of incredible boom in virtual reality, and you're all. often called the founder or one of the founders of virtual reality. Well, you take us through your early contributions, your early work and your current work.

Okay, sure. In my teens, in the 70s, I got the bug, and I was just enthralled with this notion. Enthrobbed with what notion? The notion, well, of what I came to call virtual reality, but at that time, we called them virtual worlds, and that came from Ivan Sutherland, who built the first headset for VR, which was in, in the 60s. What I did is I started the first commercial company. I made the first multi-user stuff. I made the first versions of a lot of the major applications in collaboration with people from those fields, including surgical simulation and kitchen design and, well, all kinds of things over a

fairly long period. And we ceded industrial and scientific labs all over the world with the initial equipment in the 80s that they were able to use to make virtual reality experiments and improve the field. I made the first avatars, I suppose. So 30 years ago, as you start working on this, what was drawing you in? It wasn't, it seems like, to make money. What was it? Well, I was very intensely starry-eyed back then, and I still am. So what I believed is that virtual reality represented a new frontier of human creativity and a way for people to connect with each other in new ways.

And virtual reality lets you tap into parts of your brain that are otherwise hard to access. Like you might turn your avatar into a mathematical expression and then dance it through all the different phases it can take on. And I know that sounds just crazy and utopian. And yet someday, I'm sure it'll sound ordinary and it'll be like this ordinary pleasure as ordinary as reading and writing are today. It's also beautiful. I mean, it's possible to create extraordinary beauty in virtual reality.

And at the same time, let us not forget that in order to make virtuality work at all, you have to measure what people are doing in great detail to make the illusion work. And that measurement gives you the opportunity to put a person in a skinner box and manipulate them to a vastly greater degree of accuracy than you could imagine using something like Facebook today. So it has the potential for apocalyptic creepiness too, but so does any powerful technology. and we really have to go into it eyes open, virtual reality more so than most. So we're now at this really interesting moment where virtual reality is taking off, and the biggest tech companies in the world are investing heavily in it, very attached to it. What are the crucial decisions that need to be made now so that virtual reality ends up serving the common good, ends up improving us as a species?

That's a great question. And I think the number one answer is people have to own their own data. We have to get away from this regime where you're given a all or nothing choice where you click this one thing and then all of your data is just taking you don't even know what the data is. You don't know what happens to it.

And the data is how we move our heads, what we look at, how we react inside of the system. As an example, it might be as you're walking down the street, who are you really attracted to, what really scares you, like all kinds of little things that you might not even be fully aware of.

Or it might be stuff that you do deliberately, whatever it is. Any data that exists because you exist. You have to own it. If you want to have a lot of privacy, just set the price of your information insanely high. If you want to maximize your income, play around with the price to find the right one. And if you really just don't care, make it free. But it's your choice. Another thing it does is it creates a more enforceable ethical regime, because right now, there's no transparency at all. So nobody knew the NSA was collecting data until it was leaked

by somebody. How could you know? You have no way of knowing. But the interesting thing, about money is that it creates this world of people called accountants. So all of a sudden, if there's money on the table, there'll be motivations for people to track it, and it'll actually make the world more transparent, not less transparent. People need to control their data? What else? What are the other principles as we enter the era of virtual reality? Well, I think as we get better and better at creating illusions, there should be a firm ethical and legal requirement that people are honest about when they're creating an illusion versus when they're not.

You shouldn't be able to create a false position of the curb to cause somebody to walk into traffic without their own intention and put themselves at risk or something like that. Like there's a million pranks you can play with mixed reality in particular that really shouldn't be legal. That's an extreme example. You shouldn't be able to make a product look different than it is when you're you're thinking about buying it or something like that. Like, you know, like if you're at the store shopping,

you should see the vegetables as they really are instead of through some filter that makes them look fresher or something. And when you got into virtual reality, as you said, you wanted it to improve our imaginations, improve our cognitive processing. Do you think that's going to happen with the direction the industry is heading right now? I think it could.

Well, I'll give you a little example. I have a nine-year-old daughter, and I asked one of my grad students to make her four-dimensional world a higher kind of dimensional space. It's a little hard to explain quickly and hard to imagine. But if you can have intuition in it, you could be fantastic at all kinds of math that are quite important. So I told my daughter about that, and she was furious. Like, I had a chance to be the first four-dimensional kid, and you didn't do it.

Like, what is wrong with you? Since then, she's been demanding four-dimensional experiences. So I've been giving her them. And, you know, a nine-year-old can learn to navigate in four dimensions, and it's really cool. So it's like a tangible example of something where I think we can increase human range. Now, about the industry direction, there's good news and there's bad news. I think the good news is that it's driven by passion. Like, that's been true for all the commercial interests that I've seen.

People just try it. And I mean, look, if you look at people with their smartphones, they sort of turn into like these stone zombies with little wiggling fingers on the glass. You look at people in VR and they're engaged. They're moving. It's a different type of experience that's just much more physical and joyous and healthy. And, you know, obviously, everybody in the tech world wants things to be more like that. And that's all for the good. What's problematic is that the immediately available customer base is the gamers.

And nothing wrong with games, nothing wrong with gamers overall. However, there is this sort of hardcore gamer culture that's kind of misogynistic and mean-spirited now. which is perhaps best known as the GamerGate phenomenon. And virtuality can inherit some of that. Now, I'm sure the broad market for VR is much bigger, but it's a little bit, if I can make a crazy metaphor, it's a little bit like the Republican primary problem where the immediate market is kind of loony and mean-spirited,

but it's the immediate one that you get through, so it kind of tilts and focuses the whole thing in its own direction. The gamer culture isn't the only one feeding into VR. There's another very interesting one coming from cinema, Personally, a lot of the work from that side of the aisle is a little more interesting to me at this particular moment this year. But there's also some great stuff coming out of the gaming world. There really is. Okay. Tell me a little bit more about how you introduce your daughter technology, what you want her to try and what you want her to stay away from. You ask that as if I have control or sort of...

I mean... I have a seven-year-old, so I'm going through the same thing, too. Yeah. She seems to be using technology in a healthy way. She seems to use it with her friends. She seems to be alive when she uses it. Once in a while, I see her get a little zombie-like watching a video or something, and that's when I sort of intervene. I don't think it's good to have kids fall into that.

I will say that in the technical elite, you do tend to see, I know a lot of people in the industry with kids in Walder schools that are zero technology zones. I think we tend to look at people with Facebook accounts as Trump's. by this point, and we don't want our own kids to fall into it. But the irony, of course, is they will. Jaron, can you quickly explain what the fourth dimension is, as your daughter uses and understands it? Okay. So look, if you imagine in the real world, you can tell where something is with just three numbers.

Well, it's three to the left and four down from the ceiling and five units away from me, whatever those units might be. So just three numbers is enough to position something. So there's a lot of instances in math where you need to have another number to describe where things are, where they poke into this other dimension that we don't experience, where there's just this other number that describes where things are. And we need that in order to describe all of modern physics. And it is a little hard to get it across at first. And it will not be in virtual reality.

If we were in a virtual world, I would just show you and you'd get it just like that. and I think you derive great pleasure from that. And I'm sorry, radio just can't do that. Soon, our radio show will be in the fourth dimension, Jaron. Well, when your radio show moves to VR, invite me back, and then I'll show you. I look forward to it. Thank you, Jaron Lanier for coming on. It was a pleasure to talk with you.

Oh, sure. Great. Jaron Lanier, computer scientist and the author of books, including Who Owns the Future? He spoke with the editor of New Yorker.com, Nick Thompson. A few months ago, there was a going away party. for a guy named Bob Bozick and a Manhattan bar where he's worked for decades. Bozik was the kind of

colorful bartender that we sometimes describe as a fixture. He was a former boxer, a former bank robber, and he drew a crowd with an outsized personality and a million stories that he was happy to regale you with. Bozik was 65,

but that's not why he retired. For years, he'd been fighting to reclaim a mansion in Serbia, was on the fanciest street in Belgrade, and his family had lost it 70 years ago. He didn't know anybody there. He didn't speak a word of Serbian. I'm going to let Nick Poundgarten,

a staff writer at the New Yorker, take it from there. So on December 30th, just before New Year's, I got a text from Bob first in a while. It read, since you were in the beginning of this parade, I leave January 11 for four months in Belgrade, moving into my house around January 15,

the f-fucking Balkans. Best to you and yours. How did you get in here? I got waves. Eric, didn't I say goodbye to you already? I was introduced to Bob by a colleague who thought he'd make a good story. Actually, it was Bob who thought

that he, Bob, would make the good story. Here was a New York character who wanted me to write about him. We get a lot of those. Yeah, he looked like a fucking tourist. Anyway, so we met up and went to some Brazilian place and ate and had a couple beers.

And I'm thinking, this guy is full of it. So we're driving through the Kurdish territory. of turkey. So we're eating, but I like to eat. They have kebab, lamb kebabs. Most people eat one, somebody two. All I had three. And then the leader of the whole thing says, he goes, order more. I eat so many goddamn kebabs. Some guy had a couple of kebabs. Just emphasized the point being Bob, I reached over and took his last ones off his plate and stuck him in my mouth. Bob can now talk anyone you've ever met. But the crazy thing is, his stories are actually true. They check out. I thought I was going to die. You ever read? I don't know you. Bob's father,

was an inventor, rich, successful, connected. But after the Second World War, the communists accused him, the father, of collaborating with the Germans. And the Boziks fled to Canada. So Bob was born in Ontario in 1950. But his father split just a few days later. He left the family.

His mother couldn't take care of the baby, so she gave him away to a foster family. And I lived in a foster home until I was nine. Then my mother took me back. I didn't want to be there. So I was furious. So I obviously became who I became. I decided, we're all alone.

From that day on, you couldn't discipline me. Bob ran away from home, or whatever home was, when he was 14. He lived on the streets of Toronto, homeless, stealing bologna and checking pay phones for change. End up in Toronto, a gangster met me. He happened to own a boxing gym. Turns out I could fight, and then I became a fighter. All this checks out, too.

The gangster's name was Bertie Mignaco. and he's the one who found Bob on the street and took him in. Bob started working for the guy, running numbers, collecting debts. He also began boxing and soon was working his way up the ranks. My nickname was the landlord in boxing. Did you know that? I didn't know that. No, my landlord. Eventually, Bob won the Canadian National Amateur Heavyweight Championship.

And then he went pro, and he fought some big bouts. He fought Larry Holmes in Madison Square Garden. When I was fighting Larry Holmes, I realized I'll never be this good. He was beaten, battle. and that was the beginning of the end of his boxing career and the beginning of the next chapter. I looked down the board, Madrid. I'll go to Madrid.

What's the difference? So I went to Spain, started a whole life. So I lived in Europe. I ended up in Istanbul. That's when I started driving trucks to Afghanistan. I met some people who hooked me up with some people. And then... Because you're in the Kurdish tariff.

Remember talking about the kebabs? I once asked Bob if there were any unknown unknowns, things I should know about. Like if he'd ever got in trouble with the law. He hemmed in hot a bit, And then he said that he'd robbing banks. Well, then he said, wait, I robbed one bank, because he'd only been busted robbing one bank. So he was caught robbing one bank.

He was unarmed, but almost an apology he gave the teller a pair of tickets to see Oklahoma on Broadway. This was in the police report. And then, after all that, he lands at Finnelles, a saloon in lower Manhattan. For the next 25 years, he tended bar. Meanwhile, communism fell. Yugoslavia broke up. Serbia became a country, and Bob got an idea. How are you flying over tonight? What airline?

Vienna, and I got extra leg room. I met Bob at Finnelli's one last time. He quit his job, moved out of his apartment in Brooklyn, and he was getting on a plane for Serbia later that night. So, Serbia. Almost 100 years ago, Bob's father invented an airbreak system that revolutionized train travel. The Bozix had a yacht, apartment complexes,

a timber farm, a coal mine, a cook, a nance, a driver, and this house on Khrunska Street, Belgrade's Fifth Avenue. Really, it's more of a palace than a house. Anyway, the communists took it in 1946, and for the last 10 years, Bob has been trying to get it back. Describe the house. Okay, it's four stories high. It's 7,400 square feet.

It's got a beautiful atrium in the back. Got two gates. It's limestone. There's a stairway, two stairways rising to a terrace. There's a big emotional element to all this. It's the house he never had, a connection to the father who abandoned him, to the old country he never really had any connection to, except a name or maybe in his stories. It's a homecoming to a home that never was.

So how is this even possible for a bartender, ex-boxer, a convicted bank robber to lay claim to one of the nicest houses in Belgrade? Politics, global politics. Serbia has been trying to join the European Union. To do so, it has had to follow restitution laws regarding property taken, quote, unquote, illegally by the communists. The courts have given me back the house. The one in charge is called the restitution.

They're fighting everybody. Now, Bob is a tenacious dude. That's what made him a good fighter and what has made him so dogged at pressing his case with the Serbians, who haven't exactly been eager to say, here, take it, it's yours. They've had to deal with me. I've been at them every few years.

Everybody, why do you keep doing this? You know? because this is what I do. You know, as Larry said, I broke my nose, knocked my teeth, I kept coming, because that's what I do. I keep coming, you know.

Everything was just a preparation for the final fucking fight, and this is my final fight. But what do you know? He's done it. In the last few months, he's gotten almost all the necessary approvals

from the various levels of government. Almost all. The Serbs seem to come up with new hurdles every day. So you're going to go over there. You're going to land at the airport. What's the first thing you're going to do? Go to my...

small hotel. Then the first thing I'm going to do is meet my lawyers. They're Serbian lawyers. They're both Serbian lawyers. I hired the new lawyer whose mother was the mayor of Belgrade a few years ago with the Democratic Party, the ones who are in the house who are leaving by today. Today they're supposed to be out by. That's my agreement. For a while, the house on Kronzka Street was the Iraqi embassy. Starting the late 90s and until the end of last year, it was the headquarters for the Democratic Party,

the center-left faction in Serbia that plotted the defeat of Milosevic. For a time, the Bozik House was the seat. of power in Belgrade. So there's a lot of public sentiment surrounding it. It's more than just a nice house. And here's Bob, an American, essentially kicking the Democratic Party out. So the idea is you're going to get there, and supposedly

there's going to be a ceremony or something where they're going to turn it over to you. Yes. You saw the key, right? No, I haven't seen the key. You want to see the key? Yeah, let's see. Here's the key of the house. They're going to present with me, and I'll tell you what I'm going to do.

Is it the actual key, or is it like a ceremonial key? Wait a second. See, Nick, here's this, you know. There is what they're presenting me with. That key. That key ain't going to open the door. It looks like confectionery chocolate coated with candy. Like a tennis racket.

They're going to give me this key to my house. I mean, let's say they let you in the house. You're going to move in? Yeah. Let's say. Yeah, I'm going to buy a bit. Bed, lamp, chair, pillows, and everything, or a tent. Where are you going to be?

Oh, I'm going to be on the front floor right at the front door. Because you know what I bought? I bought first time for years. I bought pajamas. Wait a second. Vesta. Vesta? Vesta?

What is it? Back here. Alex. What are you doing? Get over here. Vesna, Bob's daughter and Alex, Bob's ex-wife, come to say goodbye. Vesna has everything to Bob. He tears up just saying her name.

Hi. Alex is Vesna's mother. Alex was also Barack Obama's first serious girlfriend in college. The Serbians, not surprisingly, have made a big deal out of this. But anyway, miraculously, Alex and Bob are still close. What do you think of his going away to do this? I think it's something Bob felt that he has always wanted to do and had to do.

Are you worried for him? I mean, I am a little bit. I don't think it's the safest place. And then the idea of Bob in a big house with no furniture, but a mattress and some sheets and a lamp and his books and pajamas. Bob had said he would say he would. wanted me to stay in touch with him in case something were to happen. I'd be the one to bear witness. You have with imagined scenarios. You've even told me how it would go down if it were to go

down. He's got the story. You must be nervous too because you gave me an envelope to not be opened. Best, don't look like that. Nothing's going to happen. What's in the envelope? I don't know. It's addressed to you, but it's not to be opened. In case, and what's what? You die? No, not die? In case I insult some people. You know, and I hurt their feelings. Bessie, you'll be fine. Go ahead. You grew up. Okay. This is the first I'm hearing of it. I have no idea what it is. Just a lot of things. I'll tell you where the diamonds are. And then you say, don't let your mummy hear this. Yeah, that's what's in the envelope. It's a big pile of diamond.

Bob may joke about the diamonds, but the real treasure is that house, if in when he gets it. And while his pursuit of it has been about his heritage, his journey, closure, and all that kind of stuff, the house is also a heck of a piece of real estate. He may just turn around and sell it. He's not a big money guy. He's never really owned anything, except for his life stories, if anything. But he'd like to leave something for Vesna. And here's the house where his story began, or maybe even where he'd like it to end.

He's already started talking about other places. He has this fantasy, this image of himself, sailing off into the sunset, on a boat full of books. I'm leaning toward Nova Scotia, also between northern Morocco, get a boat, get all my books, just tons of books. I want to live some place

where I can finish up making some kind of sense. I can't make sense of this life, so I like to send somebody's interpretation. Once you're out of New York, we'll never be the same. Sire relief. Where are we going for breakfast, lunch?

Do you want to go to an egg shop or do you want to go to them some? Egg shops are nice to take place. Bob Bowie. speaking with the New Yorker's Nick Poundgarten. That was six months ago. On the very next day, almost as soon as Bozik landed in Serbia,

he started sending voice memos. So, I went out for dinner tonight. Took myself for a nice dinner, a little wine, sat there, a nice cafe, was going to go home and read my books, and, hmm, they've turned off the electricity and the heat. Ah, so it begins. Bozik's story continues next week. Also on the program next week, Evan Osnows talks with a prominent gun blogger

about how the modern gun rights movement took off. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Thanks so much for joining us and have a great week. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music this week from Alexis Quadrado. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.