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A
All right, everybody, thank you so much for coming to PNT Knitwear. The excitement is palpable. This is just like the Knicks game last night, except we're all going to win tonight and Donald Trump is not in the building, I can assure you that. So I have the distinct pleasure of introducing our two esteemed guests for this evening's dialogue. One, these are two speakers who are some of the leading change makers at the intersection of law, technology, finance and politics. My friend Larry Lessig, the Roy Fuhrman professor of Law at the Harvard Law School, founder of Equal Citizens, and former director of the Safra center of Ethics at Harvard University. I had worked for Larry as a research assistant many moons ago, almost 20 years or so. And Larry has since done incredible things to repair the fabric of our democracy, has run for president. He's written widely on technology, copyright law and American political corruption. Also, in a fun coincidence, Larry taught at UChicago Law School while Bradley was getting his law degree. Okay. Oh, okay. And Bradley, investor, political strategist, philanthropist, author of Vote with your why Mobile Voting Is Our Final Shot at Saving Democracy. Bradley has dedicated himself to this very noble cause of the mobile voting project, which last year released Vote Secure, the first technology platform for secure, transparent and verifiable mobile voting. The organization is now partnering with election vendors to add Votes secure to their product stack and working in multiple US States to pass laws that would permit municipalities to offer mobile voting as an option in local elections. Bradley's done amazing things with his career. Started Tusk Ventures very successfully, was Uber's first one of Uber's investors and political advisors, started the consulting firm Tusk Strategies, worked for Bloomberg on his 2009 political Merrill campaign. Chuck Schumer was deputy governor of Illinois. The list goes on. I am so excited about this. I think I see a lot of my venture capital friends here in the audience. Chris, I'm looking at you and because I think with a little bit of money but an incredible amount of creativity and intellectual energy, these two causes that these two luminaries are promoting here can create immense change in the country at a time when that is really needed. So I think you'll see why these two will really have an exciting dialogue tonight. So without further ado, Bradley and Larry, please come up.
B
The thing that Teddy didn't mention is I own this bookstore as well, and if anyone here is looking for a way to lose a lot of money, I highly recomm and opening an indie bookstore is a great way to do it. But yeah, this is kind of a Full circle moment, because I have been a great fan of Larry's for many, many years. Not only were you gone, but then for Con Law, there were two choices. And I thought I should take it with David Curry, because he is this luminary, this incredible legend. He was fine. The other guy was a younger, more dynamic professor that might have been a better one to take it with, named Barack Obama. So not only did I miss you, I actually managed to miss Obama as. But, yeah, I think we're working on causes that are very complementary. So our thought was, rather than having a whole kind of formal process, we're just gonna chat for 20, 25 minutes and then flip it over to you guys and answer any questions you have and go from there. So maybe I can start by asking you, which is, you know, you and I both have diagnosed what we think is sort of the fundamental problem with our political system, with our government, with democracy today. And they kind of complement each other, like I said, but they're a little different. So anyone here who's not familiar with it, what, to you is sort of the fundamental problem and why?
C
Well, so I didn't get it at first. Twenty years ago, before I met Teddy, I was working on copyright issues and Internet stuff. I wrote a book called Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, and that was my field. And a dear friend who we eventually lost to suicide, but a kid named Aaron Swartz, who had been one of the architects of the technology behind Creative Commons and was an incredible activist, social activist, came to. Yes, thank you. Came to me. I was in Berlin for the year writing what would be my last book on copyright. And he came to me and I was very proud to talk about all the things I was doing. And I was going to have my first TED Talk talking about these issues. And Aaron said, so why do you think you're going to make any progress on the issues you're talking about? Copyright, Internet reform, so long as we have this deeply corrupted political system. And I said, you know, it's not my field. And he said, you mean as an academic? I said, yeah, as an academic, I do copyright, I do Internet policy. He said, what about as a citizen? Is it your field, as a citizen? And I realized he had trapped me because I didn't have any excuse. I had tenure. I could work on whatever I wanted to work on. And he was, as I saw it, absolutely right. It's not just esoteric questions like copyright that we would never get the right answer to. It's literally every single important question from climate Change to tax policy, to healthcare policy. Every single issue gets blocked because super wealthy have the opportunity to veto any change that they don't like. So that night, that conversation, I promised him I would give up the work I was doing and I would take up this cause. And so now I know it's almost 20 years because it was two months later my middle child was born and she's about to be 20. So exactly 20 years. This has been the fight. Now, 20 years ago was a pretty esoteric fight. You had to, like, convince people there was a corruption problem in the world. You had to make them believe that somehow, deep in the system, these subtle cues were blocking the ability of legislation to do anything. Now it is in plain sight. Now you have a president, a kleptocracy has never been as clear at the very top. And then throughout, you've got a system where every politician is constantly aware of exactly how what they do will affect their ability to raise money. They become shape shifters as they constantly adjust their view in light of what they know will help them to raise money. And that dynamic means we won't address anything today even more extreme, is that true than it was 20 years ago? But we won't address anything until we take this one issue out and the problem kind of.
B
And this in some ways almost ironically might even help you in the sense that it increases awareness, has kind of taken on a new manifestation, right? So historically, let's just say right here, basically, in this neighborhood, Tammany Hall, New York City, roughly 100 years ago, personal corruption, kind of like what we're seeing in the White House today, was very prominent. But. And money, politics was a thing, but not really in the way that it became then, I think as you were with Aaron, sort of starting to tackle this issue, it was really about campaign contributions, sort of ultimately resulting in Citizens United, which we'll talk about. And then now we've kind of come full circle again, where we have the campaign money problem, but we also have this massive kleptocracy that is somehow allowed. Right? What is that? Has that changed the nature of the problem in your mind, the way people perceive it? Is it weird? Is it in a way easier now for you because people get it differently?
C
Oh, it's so great. I'm so happy. It makes me so hopeful because it's almost impossible to deny it now. Like, there's literally nobody who could look at this system and say, no, no, no, it's fine. But when I started, I'll tell you, I went to there's a group in Washington called lib is libertarian and liberals who have dinner. And these are all kind of inside the Beltway. Political types, lobbyists and people working at the Senate and things like that. And they had me to dinner and I talked about the money, and they were like, no, money is not a problem in Washington. There's not enough money in Washington. It's not corrupting the system at all. And I was astonished that they could believe that because I had done the numbers. I'd seen the way this dynamic works. But they lived in this world because they needed to believe that. Otherwise they would believe that what they were doing made no sense. Right. But now that's not possible. Like, nobody can look at this. And so I think that this is the great. This is a great opportunity. I mean, I, you know, I'm now going to sound even crazier because I actually think we are going to win this case in this Supreme Court and we will end super PACs, and there's a chance before 2028. But it's.
B
Yeah, you should definitely applaud for that.
C
Yeah. But it's, I think in part because we've created. I've not created. I'm not the corrupt guy here, but the environment has set up a context.
D
Yeah.
B
So it's funny, in my day job as a vc, the best companies are always the ones where you're like, oh, my God, how did no one else think of that? And you kind of have the version of that for this. Like it hadn't occurred to me. And then Teddy was the first person to explain it to me, actually. And I was like, oh, right. And tell me if I'm getting this wrong, but it's a fairly simple concept. Right. I mean, your thesis is Citizens United said that campaign spending from a super PAC is a constitutional form of speech and therefore unlimited. But that doesn't apply to campaign expenditures. And just for the audience, if you don't know the contributions. Right. To fill the case that Larry's talking about. So Larry then helped pass a referendum in Maine that limited contributions to Super PACs to $5,000. That got challenged in court by a kind of bunch of dark money types. And the first circuit, last I checked this morning, and you're awaiting oral arguments. Is that where it stands? Right. Right. So give us the prognosis.
C
Right.
E
So.
C
So if you, you know, anybody mentions the word super PACs, you know, my friend Bernie Sanders will talk about super PACs all the time and he will say super PACs have destroyed American democracy. Absolutely true. And then he will say, so therefore, we have to overturn Citizens United. And the problem with saying we have to overturn Citizens United is that there's literally zero chance we will overturn Citizens. It is not going to happen. So sensible people, when they hear somebody say, we need to overturn Citizens United, say, well, that's not going to happen. I'm going to go work on something that I can make happen. I mean, we wish we could fly like Superman, but most of us don't leap off of tall buildings because we're pretty convinced that won't work. And that's what's going on here. When people say, you need to overturn Citizens United to end Super PACs, it chills any desire to get into this movement and do something about it. But the point is, you don't. The point is Citizens United. Now, I'm going to really sound weird, but if you embrace the way the court thinks about the right of Congress to limit speech, Citizens United makes sense. Because what the court says is the only justification you've got for limiting speech is that you are limiting potential quid pro quo. This for that corruption in Citizens United. The question was, could a corporation spend money, quote, independently of a campaign and independent is really heavily regulated. What it means is you can't coordinate. And if you do coordinate, then your spending is deemed a contribution. So if you spend $10 million, quote, independently, and it turns out it was not independent, that's a $10 million contribution to the campaign, which, of course, is way above the limits, which means you've committed a felony. So the point is it's regulated to be independent. That, under the Supreme Court's reasoning follows. But then a lower federal court case called SpeechNow, three months after Citizens United said, well, if you can spend money independently without any constitutional limit because there's no risk of corruption, it follows as a matter of logic that you can contribute unlimited amounts of money to committees that are going to spend that money, because that, too can't create any risk of corruption. And then five years later, my favorite senator, Robert Menendez from New Jersey was indicted.
B
We're going to be giving out after the event tonight.
C
The indictment was he promised government failure, government favors in exchange for a contribution to Menendez's super PAC. So there is the thing the D.C. circuit said could not happen, quid pro quo corruption involving a contribution to a super pac. Menendez's lawyers had the chutzpah to make an argument to dismiss the indictment. And the argument was, the thing you've indicted US for the D.C. circuit says, cannot happen, so we must be innocent. And of course, they just chuckled at this idea because what it had done is revealed. The D.C. circuit was just logical, had just made a big mistake. And indeed, there is a risk of corruption. Now, every other circuit, four circuits after the D.C. circuit said that basically repeated the same words. Contributions to independent political action committees cannot create a risk of quid pro quo corruption. But when the mistake was revealed, that started a bunch of us on the project of trying to get this question up to the Supreme Court, because the Supreme Court has never had a chance to address it. And so we got the initiative In Maine passed.75% of Maine voters voted for this initiative. More people voted for this initiative in Maine than have ever voted for anything in the history of Maine. I gathered signatures on election day 2023. The first guy to come up to me said, what are you here for? And I said, I'm gathering signatures for this initiative. I'm here to gather signatures to get Donald Trump on the ballot. I said, okay, here's the initiative. So he read the initiative and he said, hell, yeah. And he signed it. He said, I'm going to get everybody signing my petition to come over and sign your initiative because it's not a partisan issue in Maine or anywhere in the country. Everybody gets it. So then we win 75% of the vote. Two super PACs immediately challenge it, and our lawyer, Neil Katyal. Neil the tariff slayer Katyal is going to then be known as the super PAC Slayer. Katyal argued the case and convinced the district court to say, yeah, of course there's a risk of corruption. If you contribute money to an independent political action committee, of course there's a risk of quid pro quo corruption. But even though there was a risk of corruption, she said, for some new theory, there's no way you could regulate. Well, that is the most extreme decision any federal court has ever rendered. To say that even in the face of corruption, there's nothing you can do about it is just unprecedented. So when the First Circuit gets it, I'm certain the First Circuit's going to say, no, this is wrong. And then it goes to the Supreme Court. And then people say, well, why would the Supreme Court vote for you? And you got to think about the politics. I'm not saying we win on the law alone. We do win on the law. But you think about the politics. Now, some people say the court decides questions on the basis of partisan interest. And if you believe that, I don't think that's. I think that's a little crude, but if you believe that, the first thing to realize is super PACs are not beneficial to one side over another. Both sides deploy super PACs, slightly more money into the Republican super PACs, but it's not a game changer. So it's not a partisan reason, but the real politics is the politics for the court, because I feel like we're giving them a gift. I feel like they can write an opinion and say, bernie Sanders says that Citizens United is the worst decision in the history of the Supreme Court. He's wrong. We reaffirm Citizens United. But under the reasoning of Citizens United, even though you can spend unlimited amounts of money, there's no reason why you can't limit the size of contributions to the committees because that creates a risk of corruption. Citizens United said if there's a risk of corruption, you can regulate the speech. And so therefore, we declare super PACs are over and the whole country will be huzzah for the Supreme Court. It's like the most popular thing they could possibly do. But the point is they completely save face. They don't have to admit error anywhere. And the system that Donald Trump has now celebrated in a way that has so clearly convinced everybody it's just a deep destruction of American democracy can at least have this critical pillar.
B
So you mentioned potentially before 2028. How do you see the timeline working then?
C
Everything depends on how quick courts work, which is really frustrating. If they decide to hear the case, which we should know next week at the end of July, and they recognize the timing issue, they could decide it by the end of the year. If they decide it by the end of the year, it can be appealed to the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court could take it up either by the end of the 27th term or in the beginning of the, at the, in the fall of 27.
B
Right. So you mentioned the politics of the Supreme Court. It feels like there's a few different things potentially playing. One, is this court probably looking for a popular decision to be able to render Roberts probably looking for something. But at the same time, this is a court that at least as somewhat observer, does seem somewhat responsive, that the six conservative justices, or at least the five other than Roberts, to what Trump wants. And he certainly tries to put his thumb on the scale whenever he can. Do you think he'll get involved in this one, or do you think he thinks because he's not hopefully running again, that it doesn't matter for him, so therefore he's not going to bother?
C
Yeah, well, you know, Trump in 2015 made a huge deal about the corruption of super PACs. He said super PACs were complete corruption. He stood on that stage, he said, every one of these people is bought. Buy super PACs. I bought them. This has got to end. Super PACs, like. So he was anti super PAC. The challenge is he's now got hundreds of millions of dollars in his own super pac, so who knows what he says. But I kind of think if he comes out on the side of super PACs, that just reinforces the position.
B
Yeah. And he, I mean, by the way, someone who needs to win. His numbers aren't exactly sterling either at the moment. So let me throw a theory at you that, that I probably will disagree with. But you're a law professor, so you like that. Which is so you know, I've been on the actual campaign side of this where have run campaigns. And usually in my experience, most of the money for an electoral campaign, which is obviously different than the kind of corruption we're talking about now, which is the outright kleptocracy of someone like Trump. The spend is in two areas. It's broadcast TV ads. And then second would be direct mail. And I think that from a technological and cultural standpoint, the two biggest cost drivers of campaigns are going away simply because on broadcast it's so expensive. Because by definition there's a limited amount of spectrum. So there's a supply demand. And it's really expensive if you want to advertise on live broadcast tv. But the efficacy is obviously plummeting because not that many people even. How many of you even sort of have regular cable these days? So like maybe 20% of you. Right. And that's gonna keep dropping. So if people aren't watching broadcast TV as the candidates who are just deep, deep believers in the, you know, gotta advertise on channel four, six o' clock on the news. Die out. And the consultants, who are by the way, corrupt in their own way and insist on these TV buys. Cause that's how they make a lot of money. Die out. And direct mail. When you guys get direct mail from a candidate, how many of you even look at it for more than three seconds before it goes in the trash? Okay. Exactly right. Direct mail. For anyone here who ever runs for office you haven't before, do not let your consultants pressure you into doing direct mail. It is purely talk about kleptocracy. Something that has like 30 to 40% margins for the consultants, takes zero work and nobody looks at it. So if these two things go away, which I think that they just will, and the two biggest cost drivers of campaigns go away. No matter how much you want to raise and spend on digital, just because the spectrum there is unlimited, it can't cost as much. So I have had the theory that the actual spend in campaigns is going to go down simply because of the mechanisms. And also in the shift that we've had culturally, if you look at both Trump or Mondame here, neither of them were necessarily the candidate with the most money, especially Trump in his first campaign. Or Mondame spent 17 million to Cuomo. But the combination of using social media really well, using earned media really well, and grassroots was enough for them to win. So if that's kind of what the voters want right now, which is sort of that authenticity of sort of real life, combined with declining efficacy of the most expensive sources, what does that do to the whole process?
C
Well, I think Mondame is a perfect case to understand, because he made the super PAC the issue. Like he said, look at that guy. He's owned by the super PACs. And that was completely fair and true. But he could afford to do that because you have public funding here in New York. So he could afford to run a campaign that was going to rely on small donors that were then multiplied through the public funding system. And so he had a business plan for running an effective campaign. You don't need to have the most money. Trump showed that in both of his elections, in both of his elections, he spent a fraction of what the Democrats spent. You just need enough to be in there. And if you have a system like New York does, that gives people the ability to raise money from ordinary people and not depend on the tiniest fraction of the 1%, I think that would be the ordinary dynamic you'd see going forward, especially if we can lower the burden to get people in to vote, which is the project that you are working on. But the challenge is, so long as there are super PACs, we've seen very few. One is Seattle. But very few local jurisdictions adopt public funding systems anymore, because people are like, why should we be spending public money on elections when these super PACs are to come in and swamp the results? So I think Mondame is a model for what the right answer is going forward. You get rid of the super pacs, you have public funding. I like vouchers, which is what Seattle has. Every voter gets four vouchers, which they then can give to candidates. And so candidates raise money from ordinary people. They don't raise money from the billionaires. That combination I think gets us to a system where politicians are responsive to ordinary voters. The biggest, most amazing statistic between 2010, when Super PACs were born, and 2024 is, is that the percentage of outside money that came from billionaires in 2010 was 0.3%, and in 2024 it was 19%. That's a 63 fold increase in that period of time. So the point is, like, when you can raise in $100 billion chunks, then you spend your time figuring out how I make the people willing to give a $50 million contribution happy. And those people have enormous power. So you want to talk about having a tax system that actually collects the taxes that are owed. Forget like changing the taxes, just collect the taxes that are owed. The Biden administration teed up an IRS to enable that immediately. In the Trump administration, that IRS was totally decimated. So they didn't collect taxes anymore. They just caved to Trump's own blackmail around taxes. Right. So if you don't solve this, if you don't dissipate the power of the billionaire and empower ordinary people, you're not going to get a democracy.
B
People respond to talk a little bit about the distinction between money and campaigns. So let's assume that you win the Supreme Court, and that limits what super PACs can do compared to, so the impact on elections compared to the impact on governance. How do you see the two things playing out should you succeed?
C
Yeah, so I had an ally, Republican ally, and he framed it beautifully by saying that what we need to do is to just let give the politicians a chance to lead. Free to lead was his slogan. And free to lead means they're not sucking up to money all the time. They're free to do what they think is important to their voters. And so I think that if you take away the game that you have to play to suck up to powerful people to get money in your elections, and instead you're trying to get ordinary voters to support you, then they become more responsive to what ordinary voters care about. And what that means is you've shrunk the power of the lobbyists to channel money. And so again, even the administration can just try to figure out what makes sense so politics has a chance to focus more on what makes sense to voters as opposed to what makes sense to funders.
B
Yeah, I think that's right. I think in my experience in working both on campaigns and in government, there are two things. If you accept the underlying premise that every policy output is a result of a political input, and everything I've Ever done in politics says that that's true, then ultimately, because of gerrymandering, the primaries effectively determine who wins well over 90% of elections. Primary turnout is very low, typically about 10%. And politicians who are very. No matter how stupid they might be in general when it comes to knowing who's going to vote in their next primary, they're always really smart and they answer to that group usually comprise, in my experience, of two different things. The special interests that have power because of the money that you're talking about, and then ideologues on either side. It could be the right, it could be the left. And I think that if we want an electorate that is actually participating so that politicians are trying to solve problems, you gotta do both. So you gotta get the money out of it and the special interests out of it. But at the same time, like when I worked for Chuck Schumer in the Senate, Twitter hadn't been invented yet, and Chuck could have meetings with Republicans, at least talk about how to solve problems. Didn't mean the Congress was all that productive, but there was at least some ability to try to find consensus and compromise. I think once social media really became a thing and once sort of the ideological base on each side became so dominant in primaries, that went away completely. Because if one from one side goes talk to someone on the other side, somebody sees them going out of the office or wherever it is, it gets tweeted or posted immediately, the base goes berserk, how dare you talk to that trader on either side. And everything collapses immediately. And so I would argue that you got to get the money out, which makes any individual special interest. And by the way, you know, it's the people who have wiped out the tax code. It's also, I would argue, the public sector unions that I think have given us a generally wildly inefficient, wildly too expensive government for subpar services and, and take away most of their power on both sides. And at the same time, you've got to get enough regular people voting to make turnout, even if it went from 10 to 30, which is still pretty pathetic, which triple the size of the electorate.
C
No, it's really important. Think about Texas's Republican primary for Senate. I mean, the idea that they have picked Ken Paxton as their candidate is unbelievably stupid. But why did it happen? Because nobody votes in the primary. And so the only people who vote are the most extreme. So this is why, I think, this is why I've become a believer in what you're pushing. Because if we're going to solve the primary problem. There are two ways to solve it. There are people pushing great ideas for primary reform where you end partisan primaries and you have like a open field primary, it's called jungle primary in Louisiana. And then the top two or the top three are the top four, depending on the scheme, go into a final runoff and then you're picking two candidates, maybe through ranked choice voting. And so I'd love that scheme. The problem is it's so complicated, people don't get it. And when they've spent hundreds of millions of dollars to push it, it's never happened.
B
Well, and it also just doesn't. I like all of it too. I've worked on all of it. But you know, if you don't vote in a state senate primary, the fact that you can have those four people you've never heard of instead of one is not going to make you more likely not take your kid to school that Tuesday morning or be late for work or whatever it is. And, and by the way, I would argue having worked in city, state and federal government, 80% of our governance actually happens at the municipal and state level. And even if you told me that we could just figure out a way to make voting a lot easier for state and local primaries, that would solve a massive amount of the problem. We all think Washington, when the word politics comes in, but in reality, most of it actually is not Washington. Most of it is local. And that's where people tend to vote. The least you can win in this city of eight and a half million people, you can win a city council seater effectively with 5,000 votes, which is absolutely insane. And so mobile voting. And there are some people here, like Josh Thompson, Michelle Feldman and others from our team who work on it. All we're trying to do is allow people to vote securely on their phones. Anyone here not have a cell phone? Right. How many of you vote in every single state rep primary? And this is a group who chose to come to this. Think about it, and you're still like 50%. So what we've been doing at the mobile voting project is working to just make it possible to vote securely on your phone. So I happened to, in addition to the stuff I've done in government, I ran all the campaigns to legalize Uber. And when we first started, we were this tiny, tiny series A tech company and the tax industry was incredibly powerful. And they tried to put us out of business. And it was the ultimate sort of inside versus outside game fight. They had the lobbyists, they had the politicians in their pockets. They did campaign contributions. But we had customers who really liked Uber and really hated the old system. And the only way that we could be taxi was to go to our customers and say, listen, we need your help, because they're going to put us out of business unless you weigh in. And we built the functionality into the app, and millions of people did. And when you're a city council member and you can win with 5,000 votes and then 7,000 of your constituents just told you to leave this thing alone, you're like, okay, I'm not going to mess with all these people and risk my next election just for the taxi guys. And we won in every single market in the country. And that led to the idea of, well, what if they could vote this way? And so we funded elections in seven different states. Red and blue were either deployed military or people with disabilities, or were able to vote in real elections on their phones. It proved the hypothesis that what we already know, which is, yeah, you put something on people's phones, more people do it. Not exactly shocking, but the tech that we were using, which was on the market at the time, was totally fine for the pilots. 2000 soldiers from West Virginia, 3000 blind people from Oregon, no problem. But for this to work at scale, it needed to be a lot better, and the code needed to be open source. And the challenges. No election company was going to spend eight figures to build technology and then just put it up on GitHub and make it free for all their competitors use as well. This should have been something that the US Government built, but of course, they have no interest in making it easier for people to actually vote. And so we took on the challenge. The way it works for those of you, let's say, are a New York City resident, you go on the App Store, you would download the New York City Board of Elections app first, and they would say, let's say it's me. Okay, Is there a registered voter named Bradley Tusk here in New York City? I put in the last four digits of my social. My address. Okay, now we know that someone with my name is registered to vote here, but is that person really me? So, multifactor authentication. That's just when a code gets texted to your phone and you put it into the app, and then biometric screening, like TSA at the airport. Now we know it's really me. Only then does the ballot come up on my phone. The ballot itself is simple, straightforward, easy to use. Only whenever I'm ready to hit submit, three things happen. My ballot is Encrypted. My ballot's anonymized, and I get a tracking code, goes back to the Board of Elections. They air gap it, which just means they take it offline. And once it's not connected to the Internet, then they decrypt my ballot. They print out a paper copy. The paper copy is what? Scanned and tabulated. I can see from the tracking code that the ballot was received, printed, tabulated, so on. And the underlying code itself is already up on GitHub, which means that anybody can audit it, anybody can verify it, it's totally transparent. It's also totally free. So that we've paid for this out of our own pockets. Any jurisdiction can just use it. And now the really hard part, and I'm almost starting to wonder if maybe the litigation route isn't the way to go here. So we ran legislation in five states this year, Colorado, Maryland, Vermont, New Jersey, and Minnesota, that would allow cities to opt in to offer mobile voting as one form of voting. It's not meant to take anything away. It's just give people another option. And we did it in deliberately blue states because we know that Trump only wants, in person, paper ballots and nothing else. We thought, okay, let's go the other way with it, and let's just do it at the municipal level so state legislators won't be threatened by it. Unfortunately, you need state approval in order to allow cities to do it. And we lost in all five because it turns out the Democrats have no more interest in making it easier for people to vote than Republicans do. And so we are now kind of regrouping and trying to figure out how to build a movement, like we did with Uber, quite frankly, to force them to do it. Because when I talk to regular people and we poll this issue, it is overwhelmingly favored. You do everything on your phones already, so most people can't understand why you couldn't be able to vote on your phone. And yet, at the same time, the system doesn't want to see real change. And so part of what we're trying to do on our side is, is figure out how to sort of force this thing through the system. Because if you just expect politicians to sort of do what's right, it's never gonna happen. And look, maybe there is, and, you know, hopefully I can get you to think about this a little bit, a constitutional argument that we could make, because I thought it would take so long, it'd be so expensive to go all the way up to the Supreme Court. But now, having got my ass kicked in all five States, I think it actually might be cheaper and faster.
C
So what did you learn, though, when you did after the election, when you surveyed people, what did you see?
B
Well, oh, we saw. So Denver, for example, polled people, participated, and they said it was a pretty simple question. Do you prefer voting this way? 100% said yes. Groups like the National Federation for the Blind became big supporters because we hadn't really even thought about that deeply. But imagine if you're blind. Voting, we think is a pain in the ass. Imagine what it is if you're blind. And then you have to hope that they actually recorded the vote the way they asked you to. Right. If you told them, I want Biden, they could mark Trump. You have no idea. You're blind. Right. And yet smartphones have radically changed the world for the blind and for the deaf. And so that makes it totally different. Military families really love it. A lot of civil rights leaders, Stacey Abrams, MLK III, Reverend Sharpton, have come forward in support of vote to Latino because their argument is the reason why they want you to stand up and come in person and wait in a long line. It's a couple of excuses to turn you away. And that was before I started doing all the craz shit that they're doing right now. Climate emergencies. Imagine if you live in LA during the wildfires. You know, yes, they will mail you a ballot, but if there's no home to mail it to, it doesn't do you any good. But those people still had phones. And so. And then Gen Z, you mentioned you have a daughter turning 20. My daughter turns 20 in a couple of weeks as well. And when she started college two years ago, we were having the election in New York City and she really wanted to vote and say, okay, how do I register? And I told her and said, okay, how do I get a, you know, how do I vote? And I had to sort of say to her, well, you have to like, reach out to the board of Elections and they're gonna mail you a ballot and you're gonna mail it back. She thinks that email is antiquated, right? She thinks that's ridiculous, like physical mail. But you know, in the time that she and I had that conversation, she's probably checked her phone 14 times. She's eager to be part of the system, but like to her life only exists in a digital format. And so Gen Z, I think, actually has a real desire to change things. But they know of one type of world and politicians in many ways, what I realized for these five states, they're not unaware of that they want to deny it so that those kids can't vote because they don't actually want them as part of the system.
C
So even in the blue states, they don't want the kids to vote?
B
No, I mean, we very deliberately picked those states because they were very blue states, and it turned out naively, they just didn't want change. And the answer was always like, hey, I know how to win in the way things are, and if I open Pandora's box, who knows where it's gonna go? And that might not be good for me. And what's so crazy about that is, look, there are some legislators that are crazy ideologues on either side, Ken Paxton, for example. But if you ask most of them, do you like being held hostage by the special interests and by the ideologues? And if they were being honest, they would say, no, that's not why I ran for office. I ran for office. Look, as corrupt as a lot of them might be, they want. They would like to try to get things done. They're not going to risk their next election to get things done. But in a perfect world, they'd be able to also get things done. And so they don't actually like the status quo. And we're giving them a solution. I mean, you took your solution, you take yours in mind, then all of a sudden they are really free to actually try to do some good. But it does require them to have a little bit of courage, and in the case of what we're doing, you know, vote for change. And I think we thought that at least for a municipal level where it wouldn't directly affect them, they would be okay with that, and they absolutely were not.
C
And so have you tried. Have you thought about, like, rural red states where it's like a real hassle, like Alaska?
B
Yeah. So, interestingly, Alaska is the one state that does not need state approval to do this. So Anchorage did just do this. So in their municipal elections on April 7, mobile voting was an option for people. So that was great. And you're right, we have a really good narrative in rural states for that reason. But for as long as we need state legislation, it would require a state legislature and a governor to stand up to Trump. And my assessment, perhaps wrong, was they're not gonna do it. And that's why we went with blue states. Utah, maybe Spencer Cox is a little different. So that might be. And. And actually, interestingly, the Mormon Church has something to gain from mobile voting, because all of their people out on mission effectively can't Vote, but they could. So Utah might be a place where we could try to push this on the red side. And then look, you know, hopefully Trump will be gone in 2028 and, or January 20, 2029, I guess, and then maybe the playing field will be a little different. But yeah, look, maybe there is, you know, a constitutional argument that we can make or a referendum that we could pass somewhere.
C
So Anchorage is a big victory.
B
Yeah, it is.
C
How many people voted?
B
Oh, I mean, very few in general. And I think it was, you know, a couple of percent voted on their phone. So Estonia is the one country in the world that has had Internet voting for 20 years. You know this because all your actual Internet law. And in year one, 1.4% of Estonians voted digitally. Now there's a significant majority. And to me, the best stat that I went over there last summer and had a lot of meetings, my favorite stat was that over 50% of Estonians now vote in local elections. They don't have the same primary system, but in local elections because they developed a muscle memory and they got used to it and it was so easy that they just started doing it. And then that really did change the underlying nature of the composition of the electorate, which then allows people to govern in such a better, more nonpartisan, more effective. All right, I'm being told we gotta turn over to the audience. So does anyone have questions for either of us?
F
Thank you both. This is such a fascinating conversation. Bradley, I have a question for you. I have, I think mobile voting sounds like it would be amazing. But when you think about the politicians resistance to helping make it happen on either side, how much of that do you think is due to the inertia from resistance to change? And how much do you think is related to the fear of the conspiracy, theorizing backlash? The fact that no matter how well protected and encrypted the system is, there are going to be people who don't know what open source means, who will never know to go check, that will
B
never trust it absolutely. And by the way, there are cybersecurity professors that oppose what we're doing because they have said for years that mobile voting can never be safe. And the standard that they use is, well, something could go wrong and they come up with some theoretical scenario and they're right. Or before example, if an election office is corrupt, every form of voting is totally at risk. Right? And Google is just as rich, just as much risk of denial of service attack as we are. So yes, something could theoretically go wrong. But guess what? Things go wrong with in person voting, someone pulls the fire alarm. So anyway, yes, Right. So I guess part of the question there is how much of that is a manifestation specifically of Trump. So I worked in Chicago politics for four years, and even there, of all the shit I had to testify in multiple corruption trials, a guy I worked for got a 14 year jail sentence. I mean, it was really as dirty as you think it might be. You know what never came up once? Election fraud. It is not an actual thing. Trump made it up in 2020 because he lost the election and he couldn't accept that emotionally. But, and quite frankly, even all the identification stuff that I mentioned, it's mainly to deal with the kind of concerns that you outlined. I'm not even in reality all that worried about it because I've been working in politics for 35 years now. It's not an actual thing, but the perception does exist. You're right. And so my hope is that to a certain extent, it dies down with him. The other reason why we started the municipal level was to say, look, let's start with low stakes. Putin is not hacking the St. Louis school board election. Right? And then kind of build trust and build our way up from there. So that was our approach. But, yeah, it's absolutely a problem for us.
G
So if I had a lot of money and was trying to exert some influence, I wouldn't write a check to SuperPAC. I would create a private company, data company, technology company, and only let certain parties or candidates use it, as Eric Schmidt did with Hillary in 2014 and 16. Or I would create or buy a media company, as Murdoch and Musk and the Ellisons and going back to William Randolph Hearst has done. How should we think about curtailing that level of influence?
C
You're right. I mean, I don't think of this as a silver bullet. There will be a whole series of reforms that are necessary. It's just the first necessary step. And if this succeeds, I think it revives a movement that cares about the corrupting influence of money generally. So then there's another layer of, like, regulating that right now that's extremely unregulated. I mean, I've been talking to people in Silicon Valley about the deployment of these LLMs in a context where they're basically deployed to persuade. Right? It's completely invisible. Like, there's no reporting requirement, Nobody knows what's happening here, and yet there's tons of money being spent on it. And I too might think this might be a better way to achieve my political objective. But here's the thing. If you think the objective is change how people are actually voting on the ground, then you're absolutely right. If you think the objective is to signal to the politician that the politician needs to keep you happy, you don't really care what's happening on the ground. Even if it doesn't change one vote on the ground, it's achieving what you need. So I was once on a panel where some libertarian told the panel that that money didn't matter in politics. And Evan Bayh, Birch Bay's son at that time was a senator. He said, you know, look, every politician on Capitol Hill is worried about one thing, and that is that two weeks before an election, somebody comes in and drops. At that time, he said, a million dollars. Today, it would be like $50 million on the other side. So he said, what the politicians do is they know that they need $50 million on their side, so they need kind of like insurance. So how do you buy insurance? Well, you know, you pay your premium in advance. So how do you pay a premium? You like, signal to all the people who you will want to back you up. If in fact you need this money that you're there for them, how do you do that? You vote the way they want you to vote. So, like, this relationship is controlling how they vote. Even before a single dollar is spent, they've had that effect, and it's that layer that gets destroyed if you take away the super PAC problem, but your problem continues.
B
Yeah, but you know, just to back Larry up here, Aaron, the example you gave only would work in a presidential election. So, yes, it's the most single most important job, but it works because there's 65% turnout. Everything else, where there's 10% turnout. The problem is actually because turnout is so low, people are terrified of what a super PAC can do to them. Because when you have a lot of money and a small electorate, your influence is really outsized. And so just the signaling effect, like Larry said, is really what changes people's votes. So, you know, I think there's this perception that we. Because if we focus much on the presidency, but that's not an actual application anywhere but that one election.
E
My question is for Larry. I understand that we're not necessarily talking about it in terms of overturning Citizens United, but changing the super PAC rules is a relatively partisan line. And I'm curious what your plan is, especially if you want to try to get this changed before the next election cycle to infiltrate the zeitgeist and really change people's Minds on both sides of the aisle, whether it's ad campaigns or the like, to try to get this changed.
C
Yeah, so it is perceived in a partisan way within the Beltway of Washington, but outside Washington, it absolutely is not a partisan issue. Again, look at Maine. Maine's a very purple state. The idea that 75% of Maine voters vote for this means Republicans as well as Democrats. Like, the Republicans were something like 64% and the Democrats were maybe 70 or 80%. Okay, so there's a slight difference, but it's not perceived as a partisan issue on the ground. And there was a Brennan poll released last week measuring corruption and attitudes of corruption, and the attitude the views around corruption are as uniform as they could possibly be. 94% of Americans view the current system as corrupt, the way we fund campaigns as corrupt. So you're right. If I worried about how to convince Ted Cruz, it'd be kind of an impossible problem. But I think the real question is, is whether the court will see this is an opportunity to signal that they're not just partisan hacks. And in that sense, kind of helps us. Because to the extent, you know, I'm not worried so much, I don't really think we get Thomas's vote, even though he ought to vote with us, given he's an originalist. And the original view of the First Amendment would never have had any problem with this. But. So it's not so much Thomas, but I think Amy Coney Barrett Gorsuch, these are people who are keen to demonstrate that their principles are not political. Amy Coney Barrett clerked for Justice Scalia. I clerked for Justice Scalia. I clerked for Scalia when Scalia was really focused on how do you make sure people don't think I'm just being a partisan hack. And last time I saw him, I had lunch with him. Last time I had lunch with him, I said, you ruined me as a law professor. And he said, what do you mean? And I said, well, when I clerk for you anytime, there's a conflict between the originalist thing to do and the conservative thing. We struggled a bit, but you always did the originalist thing. So I said after I became a law professor, whenever that was that conflict, and people said, what's Scalia gonna do? I said, he's gonna do the principal thing, the originalist thing. And I said, you let me down every single time. And he kind of laughed, and he said, give me an example. And I pointed to the campaign finance example. And, you know, he used to drink a lot during lunch so I'm not sure whether this was in fact true. Would he believe this? By the end, he said to me, I think you're right. I don't think I can in a principled way continue to believe that the Congress is forbidden from regulating here because that wouldn't have been the original meaning of the First Amendment. Then he died. I mean, not at lunch, but like, you know, four months later or something like that. But the point is, I think it is clear that from a conservative position, they ought to be with us. The reason Neil is allowed to argue the case, Maine is in the case too. But the reason Neil is in the case is he's pushing this conservative argument, the originalist argument, and that gives us standing to be in the case or the right to be in the case, because the state of Maine doesn't want to be make that argument. And I think that argument will signal to people like Amy, Coney, Barrett and Gorsuch that even if they don't come full on originalists, it's a reason to read the law as it is right now in a principled way and vote with us. So, you know, we need five votes. I'm betting seven. I'm betting seven votes. And, you know, I'll take five, but got a lot riding on seven.
B
So you think it's Alito and Kavanaugh who you don't get, or you think Thomas goes with Alito?
C
I think Thomas and Alito, yeah. I mean, you know, now both of them, you know, are likely not even to be there.
H
Thanks to both of you for your efforts. My question is for Professor Lessig. You know, I think in so many ways you were prescient in your dictum on, you know, code is law, and I wanted you to extend that. You know, in the AI age, how do we sort of work on democratic accountability when it comes to the LLMs, especially given that, you know, the models are going to start impacting and already are impacting our judgment and decision making as a society.
C
Yeah, I think it's a huge problem because the biggest character of this code is that it's wildly more persuasive than humans. It can be deployed in ways that is wildly more persuasive than humans. And we have no understanding even about how to track it or to understand what its effect is going to be. And not to mention, the runaway risk with this technology is enormous when all of the people, all except one, Jan, is not, but all of the others close to this technology who know the most about it are the most afraid of It I think that ought to say something to us. The ought to signal there's a reason to be anxious about what this is going to do. And even if it doesn't run away, what about to the economy? What are we going to do when there's 40% unemployment in America? How do we deal with that? Now what that signals to me is I'd love to revive code, do a code version three if I had another 30 years of life. Absolutely. It's under a CC license, so if somebody wants to write code V3, they're totally have at it, run with it. But I actually think it's a simpler point. If we don't have the capacity to govern, as this technology is like overwhelming society, we are totally lost. And what is the capacity to govern? It's the ability to have a political system that's responsive. So the money is at the core of it. Like having people vote, like ending the partisan extremism, all of that. But I think the critical lesson we should take from right now is the same lesson, what would I say? The same lesson I've been obsessed with for 20 years. Let's finally get a government that can do the right thing. Maybe we'll do it in time. But you know, the super PAC fight with AI is critical. Crypto succeeded in one election cycle to flip crypto policy, deploying three super PACs who took out some of the really strong crypto opponents and elected a whole bunch. They had a 91% success rate. And so that's it. Crypto policies flipped. AI is building the same super PAC for 2026 and 2028, $100 million that they have already declared they're going to have in these races.
B
I think there's a little more hope than you guys might realize.
D
Please.
B
So on this specifically. So a lot of states this year actually passed legislation and enacted to regulate what chatbots can and can't say and do. And if you take the general premise that Larry and I are both talking about, which is that politicians can do whatever they need to do to get reelected. Right. And that means following the money and it means following the primary voters. And AI is actually wildly unpopular. And as a result, from both sides of the aisle, red states, blue states, you are seeing a tremendous amount of legislation proposed and a decent number passing in this state legislative sessions which are kind of wrapping up right now on all types of different AI regulation. And so I think that they're actually, no, you probably can't draft it around. Here's how we prevent people from not Understanding democracy if you make it partisan like that, but if you, but if you not to use code in that way, but if you coded the language differently in a way that was about some broader type of consumer protection that ultimately got to this as well. This is, I mean, the state legislation sessions are over, but they'll start again in January. AI is not going to get more popular. This is the time to actually try to run legislation like that. And on top of that, I don't totally agree, Larry, with you on the crypto versus AI analogy, which is, and I, you know, someone who has invested in Coinbase and Circle and these companies, people are sort of somewhat indifferent to be used by crypto. Right. Because it's this like very niche thing tethered to maybe in New York in the tech world, we think it's important, but it's not. Right. It's vibe basically based and that's it. AI is really unpopular. So for those of you paying attention to New York 12. So that's a congressional primary happening right now for most of Manhattan. Alex, Boris. And I'm actually supporting someone else in the race, but worked with Alex on the call. The Rays act in New York, which was regulation of the frontier models at the state level, which is, you know, it should be federal, but states are going to try to at least do something. And OpenAI hated it. And they have spent a tremendous amount of money in the race against Alex. And guess what it's doing. It's propelling him in the polls. They're so wildly unpopular. The ads are so boorish and so bad. And the only thing that OpenAI and Chris Lehane, who runs the politics there, knows how to do is just attack, attack, attack. Chris is the guy that did Fair Shake as well, which was the crypto super pac. It is not working at all. And last week, Trump issued an executive order. It was very mild, but still, it did say that they're asking for frontier models to be shown to the government 30 days in advance of public release for review. Again, it was watered down. It wasn't much. But what to me it was, was a recognition that for the first time, even someone like Trump, who is wildly pro I and God knows how much money he's getting personally on the side from all of this stuff, recognize that he had to do something. I think the 2028 will be the AI election and I think that the Democrat who is likely to win, if you look at Kalshee or Polly or any of the prediction markets, which I think are really accurate for things like Presidential elections are going to win amid a sea of rising AI sentiment because of concerns around unemployment and everything else. And so if this is an issue that you're actually like, want to work on, I actually think you have a moment right now while those companies are so unpopular to get stuff done.
A
So.
C
But here's the question. I mean, I hope you're right. And even if I grant you policymaking goes in the right way, there's so much capacity invisibly deployed in the system. I mean, just take the Chinese models that are out there right now, that's all the power you need and you can operate completely independently. It's not OpenAI that's going to be doing it. It's going to be these independent entities taking these models and deploying them in ways to affect persuasion. And we don't see it, we can't see it. And you don't need to persuade 5 million people, you got to persuade 65,000 people in like, I can list the districts where you're going to persuade them. So I think that you're right about what's going to happen in the regulation. And I hope both because we take out super pacs and because the resistance to the AI super pacs is very strong, they don't win legislatively. But that's not to say that there's not an issue to worry about here because I think that there is.
B
Yeah, I mean, you're right. It's invisible, it's pernicious. If you look at the EU's AI kind of regulation, it's an interesting thing, right, because you're trying to regulate something that is A, changing literally every day and B, is still in its infancy. And so it's not, you know, typically regulation is backward looking. Right. Like, you know, in my day job is investing in and working on startups in highly regulated industries, they're always inventing something new and then we have to figure out it's not usually what we're trying to legalize as illegal, it's just that no one ever thought of it before. And then we're trying to figure out what's the right regulatory framework that works for our portfolio company, but also can be enacted and passed in a perfect world. Be good. And I'm not sure everything I've passed is good, but most of it hopefully is. And there might be a world where because people are so upset and so anxious that a level of review and scrutiny and government power that I'm sure people on the right and maybe even the Bernie Sanders of the world Too on the far left will say is surveillance state and say is anti speech and everything else. We might be in a moment where people are so upset. I mean, keep in mind Goldman Sachs, which has sort of the most optimistic job estimates I've seen around. AI job displacement is still saying 7%. You said 40. Let's assume the truth is somewhere in between the two. I mean that's unprecedented. That's great Depression level numbers. Right. So I think that the right kind of campaign can happen. The challenge is in some ways because it's going to require very, very heavy handed government regulation and involvement. The kinds of people who are usually behind movements that succeed, which tend to be the ideologues on either side, are not necessarily people that are gonna like this. And it's yet again about empowering the center, which is effectively what both of us are trying to do through our different efforts.
D
Question for Mr. Lessig. I find it's confusing. Time to be an American. You say that 90% or more are against corruption in government. It's true. But what's going on here? Is there an FDR in your mind? Somebody has to convince people that they're honest, credible in telling the truth.
C
Yeah. So I'm right now finishing a book and I want to bring it here and I want to do a book thing like when we're in. Yeah, the metaphor is the Titanic. And so like, you know, the captain of the Titanic hits the iceberg, looks on the deck and there's a whole bunch of ice on the deck. He thinks, okay, we can fix this, we can clean the deck. And then the engineer tells him that there's a gash in the hull and six of the 16 watertight compartments are filling with water. And so they know it doesn't matter if they clear the deck, ship is going down. Then they got to convince people to get into lifeboats. Which in the middle of the Atlantic, in the middle of the night, in the middle of the winter on the fricking Titanic is really hard because people are like, we're on the Titanic. Why do we have to get into lifeboats? That metaphor, I think maps like this, all the work I've been doing for 20 years and the work you're doing and the work that, you know, anti gerrymandering people are doing, that in my view is the equivalent of the ice on the deck. We know how to fix it. We, you know, before the people act, we came close to fixing 60% of it, 70% of it. Like it's possible to fix that. But I Actually think there's a gash in the hull. And the gash in the hull is the world of engagement based media, which profits from turning us into ignorant people who hate each other. And so we increasingly live in our own little bubbles of reality. What Rene Diresta, in a really great book, I hope you have it here, called the Invisible Rulers, calls like the bespoke realities. So the most dramatic fact about January 6th, in my view, is not that there was a protest to try to flip the result or insurrection to flip the result. The most dramatic fact is that those people actually believed the election was stolen. Like, you tell me what you should do if you believe the election is stolen. They believed it. 70% of Republicans believed it on that day. Today, 70% of Republicans believe it. Like, the reality is that we live in different worlds. After that election, I went to. I grew up in the Kentucky part of Pennsylvania, so all of my friends were Trump supporters. And so I said, I don't know how you can support Donald Trump. I just don't. I know your values. I don't know how you support Donald Trump. So one of, like the superstar football player and wrestler, he agreed to do a podcast with me. So we spent the year doing a podcast trying to, like, understand how could we come to common ground. And the most dramatic moment in the podcast was he when he said, let's talk about the. I said, let's talk about the J6 pardons. He said, okay. He said, at least the president didn't pardon any of the violent protesters. And I said, what the fuck are you talking about, Ben? He pardoned everybody. He said, no, no, no, no. He didn't pardon anybody who committed any act of violence. And I said, don't you see? We just live in a different world Now I'll ask you to go check the facts and you'll see that you're wrong about this. I'm sure I'm wrong about a bunch of things. But why are we wrong? Why do we live in a different world? Because media company makes money by turning us into ignorant people who hate each other. We think back to the days of broadcast democracy, like 1960 to 1985. They made money by building the coherence of our understanding of what was going on. They made money by making us understand a story. Now, it was biased in all sorts of ways. I'm not saying it was a golden age, but what I'm saying is they weren't against democracy. And the media infrastructure we have right now is against, not overtly. They're not like saying, let's figure out, like Putin might say, how we destroy American democracy. What they're saying is, how do we make the most money? And turns out the way you make the most money is to turn us into these kind of people that we are. So that's a gash in the hall and we're out of time. So I can't tell you what the lifeboats are, but that's, that's what I think is the next.
B
You'll have to come back for the. The book event. Yeah. There you go. We'll leave you hanging. All right. Thank you, guys. Larry, thank you. Firewall is recorded at my bookstore, PNT Netware, located at 180 Orchard street on the lower east side of Manhattan. We'd love to hear from you with questions, feedbacks or idea for a guest. Just email me at Bradleyirewall Media or find me on LinkedIn. And to keep up with what's on my mind and my latest writing, please follow my new substack@bradleytus.substack.com thanks again for listening.
Date: July 24, 2026
Host: Bradley Tusk
Guests: Lawrence Lessig (Harvard Law Professor, Founder of Equal Citizens)
Location: P&T Knitwear, NYC
This episode, recorded live at P&T Knitwear in NYC, features a timely and urgent conversation about the state of American democracy. Host Bradley Tusk and guest Lawrence Lessig deeply examine the structural failures of the U.S. political system—corruption, super PACs, and low voter engagement—and explore pathways for reform through campaign finance litigation and the adoption of mobile voting. The dialogue spans the intersection of technology, law, and civic participation, offering both sobering analysis and practical avenues forward.
Bradley Tusk and Lawrence Lessig provide a sobering but actionable diagnosis of American democracy’s twin crises: systemic corruption (especially super PACs and big money) and declining, hyper-polarized civic engagement. While Lessig pushes campaign finance litigation as an imminent lifeboat and Tusk advances mobile voting’s transformative potential, both acknowledge the underlying problem of media-driven division and the coming storm of AI-driven persuasion. Their candid exchange ends with the challenge: Will Americans build enough lifeboats to survive democracy’s collision with money, technology, and media?
For deeper dives: