Transcript
00:00:00 The following is a conversation with Ronald Sullivan, a professor at Harvard Law School
00:00:04 known for taking on difficult and controversial cases.
00:00:08 He was on the head legal defense team for the Patriots football player Aaron Hernandez
00:00:14 in his double murder case.
00:00:16 He represented one of the Gena 6 defendants and never lost the case during his years in
00:00:21 Washington D.C.’s Public Defender Services office.
00:00:25 In 2019, Ronald joined the legal defense team of Harvey Weinstein, a film producer
00:00:32 facing multiple charges of rape and other sexual assault.
00:00:36 This decision met with criticism from Harvard University students, including an online petition
00:00:41 by students seeking his removal as faculty dean of Winthrop House.
00:00:46 Then, a letter supporting him signed by 52 Harvard Law School professors appeared in
00:00:52 the Boston Globe on March 8, 2019.
00:00:56 Following this, the Harvard administration succumbed to the pressure of a few Harvard
00:00:59 students and announced that they will not be renewing Ronald Sullivan’s dean position.
00:01:05 This created a major backlash in the public discourse over the necessary role of universities
00:01:11 in upholding the principles of law and freedom at the very foundation of the United States.
00:01:19 This conversation is brought to you by Brooklyn & Sheets, WineAxis online wine store, Monk
00:01:24 Pack low carb snacks, and Blinkist app that summarizes books.
00:01:28 Click their links to support this podcast.
00:01:31 As a side note, let me say that the free exchange of difficult ideas is the only mechanism through
00:01:37 which we can make progress.
00:01:39 Truth is not a safe space.
00:01:42 Truth is humbling, and being humbled can hurt.
00:01:46 But this is the role of education, not just in the university but in business and in life.
00:01:52 Freedom and compassion can coexist, but it requires work and patience.
00:01:58 It requires listening to the voices and to the experiences unlike our own.
00:02:03 Listening, not silencing.
00:02:06 This is the Lex Friedman Podcast, and here is my conversation with Ronald Sullivan.
00:02:14 You were one of the lawyers who represented the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein in
00:02:20 advance of a sexual assault trial.
00:02:22 For this, Harvard forced you to step down as faculty deans, you and your wife of Winthrop
00:02:27 House.
00:02:28 Can you tell the story of this saga from first deciding to represent Harvey Weinstein to
00:02:35 the interesting complicated events that followed?
00:02:38 Yeah, sure.
00:02:40 So I got a call one morning from a colleague at the Harvard Law School who asked if I would
00:02:48 consent to taking a call from Harvey.
00:02:52 He wanted to meet me and chat with me about representing him.
00:02:56 I said yes, and one thing led to another.
00:03:00 I drove out to Connecticut where he was staying and met with him and some of his advisors,
00:03:08 and then a day or two later, I decided to take the case.
00:03:13 This would have been back in January of 2019, I believe.
00:03:19 So the sort of cases, I have a very small practice most of my time is teaching and writing,
00:03:27 but I tend to take cases that most deem to be impossible.
00:03:34 I take the challenging sorts of cases, and this fit the bill.
00:03:39 It was quite challenging in the sense that everyone had prejudged the case.
00:03:46 When I say everyone, I just mean the general sentiment in the public had the case prejudged,
00:03:52 even though the specific allegations did not regard any of the people in the New Yorker.
00:04:02 It’s the New Yorker article that exposed everything that was going on, allegedly, with Harvey.
00:04:12 So I decided to take the case, and I did.
00:04:17 Is there a philosophy behind you taking on these very difficult cases?
00:04:22 Is it a set of principles?
00:04:23 Is it just your love of the law, or is there a set of principles why you take on the cases?
00:04:29 Yeah, I’d like to take on hard cases, and I like to take on the cases that are with
00:04:38 unpopular defendants, unpopular clients.
00:04:43 With respect to the latter, that’s where Harvey Weinstein fell, it’s because we need lawyers
00:04:52 and good lawyers to take the unpopular cases, because those sorts of cases determine what
00:05:00 sort of criminal justice system we have.
00:05:04 If we don’t protect the rights and the liberties of those whom the society deems to be the
00:05:09 least and the last, the unpopular client, then that’s the camel’s nose under the tent.
00:05:15 If we let the camel’s nose under the tent, the entire tent is going to collapse.
00:05:19 That is to say, if we short circuit the rights of a client like Harvey Weinstein, then the
00:05:26 next thing you know, someone will be at your door, knocking it down and violating your
00:05:31 rights.
00:05:32 There’s a certain creep there with respect to the way in which the state will respect
00:05:39 the civil rights and civil liberties of people, and these are the sorts of cases that test
00:05:43 it.
00:05:44 For example, there was a young man many, many years ago named Ernesto Miranda.
00:05:52 By all accounts, he was not a likable guy.
00:05:55 He was a three time knife thief and not a likable guy, but lawyers stepped up and took
00:06:03 his case.
00:06:05 Because of that, we now have the Miranda warnings, you have the right to remain silent.
00:06:10 Those warnings that officers are forced to give to people.
00:06:15 So it is through these cases that we express oftentimes the best values in our criminal
00:06:21 justice system.
00:06:22 So I proudly take on these sorts of cases in order to vindicate not only the individual
00:06:28 rights of the person whom I’m representing, but the rights of citizens writ large, most
00:06:36 of whom do not experience the criminal justice system, and it’s partly because of lawyers
00:06:42 who take on these sorts of cases and establish rules that protect us, average everyday ordinary
00:06:51 concrete citizens.
00:06:53 From a psychological perspective, just you as a human, is there fear, is there stress
00:06:59 from all the pressure?
00:07:00 Because if you’re facing, I mean, the whole point, a difficult case, especially in the
00:07:04 latter that you mentioned of the going against popular opinion, you have the eyes of millions
00:07:10 potentially looking at you with anger as you try to defend this set of laws that this country’s
00:07:19 built on.
00:07:20 No, it doesn’t stress me out particularly.
00:07:24 It sort of comes with the territory.
00:07:26 I try not to get too excited in either direction.
00:07:31 So a big part of my practice is wrongful convictions, and I’ve gotten over 6,000 people out of
00:07:40 prison who’ve been wrongfully incarcerated, and a subset of those people have been convicted,
00:07:46 and people who’ve been in jail 20, 30 years who have gotten out.
00:07:51 And those are the sorts of cases where people praise you and that sort of thing.
00:07:57 And so, look, I do the work that I do, I’m proud of the work that I do, and in that sense
00:08:04 I’m sort of a part time Daoist, the expression reversal is the movement of the Dao.
00:08:11 So I don’t get too high, I don’t get too low, I just try to do my work and represent
00:08:17 people to the best of my ability.
00:08:18 So one of the hardest cases of recent history would be the Harvey Weinstein in terms of
00:08:23 popular opinion or unpopular opinion.
00:08:25 So if you continue on that line, where does that story take you, of taking on this case?
00:08:33 Yeah, so I took on the case and then there was a few students at the college.
00:08:40 So let me back up, I had an administrative post at Harvard College, which is a separate
00:08:44 entity from the Harvard Law School, Harvard College is the undergraduate portion of Harvard
00:08:49 University and the law school is obviously the law school, and I initially was appointed
00:08:56 as master of one of the houses.
00:08:58 We did a name change five or six years into it and were called faculty deans.
00:09:04 But the houses at Harvard are based on the college system of Oxford and Cambridge.
00:09:09 So when students go to Harvard after their first year, they’re assigned to a particular
00:09:15 house or college and that’s where they live and eat and so forth.
00:09:19 And these are undergraduate students?
00:09:20 These are undergraduate students.
00:09:21 So I was responsible for one of the houses as its faculty dean.
00:09:28 So it’s an administrative appointment at the college and some students who clearly didn’t
00:09:34 like Harvey Weinstein began to protest about the representation.
00:09:42 And from there, it just mushroomed into one of the most craven, cowardly acts by any university
00:09:52 in modern history.
00:09:53 It’s just a complete and utter repudiation of academic freedom.
00:10:00 And it is a decision that Harvard certainly will live to regret, frankly, it’s an embarrassment.
00:10:09 We expect students to do what students do and I encourage students to have their voices
00:10:16 heard and to protest.
00:10:17 I mean, that’s what students do.
00:10:20 What is vexing are the adults.
00:10:24 The dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Claudine Gay, absolutely craven and cowardly.
00:10:31 The dean of the college, same thing, Rakesh Khurana, craven and cowardly.
00:10:37 They capitulated to the loudest voice in the room and ran around afraid of 19 year olds.
00:10:45 Oh, 19 year olds are upset that I need to do something.
00:10:50 And it appeared to me that they so desired the approval of students that they were afraid
00:10:58 to make the tough decision and the right decision.
00:11:01 It really could have been an important teaching moment at Harvard.
00:11:06 Very important teaching moment.
00:11:07 So they forced you to step down from that faculty dean position at the house.
00:11:13 I would push back on the description a little bit.
00:11:17 So I don’t write the, you know, the references to the op ed I did in New York time.
00:11:23 Harvard made a mistake by making me step down or something like that.
00:11:27 So I don’t write those things.
00:11:29 I did not step down and refuse to step down.
00:11:33 Harvard declined to renew my contract.
00:11:37 And I made it clear that I was not going to resign as a matter of principle and forced
00:11:44 them to do the cowardly act that they, in fact, did.
00:11:50 And you know, the worst thing about this, they did the college, Dean Gay and Dean Khurana,
00:11:59 commissioned this survey.
00:12:01 They’ve never done this before.
00:12:02 Survey from the students, you know, how do you feel at Winthrop House?
00:12:06 And the funny thing about the survey is they never released the results.
00:12:11 Why did they never release the results?
00:12:13 They never released the results because I would bet my salary that the results came
00:12:20 back positive for me.
00:12:21 And it didn’t fit their narrative because most of the students were fine.
00:12:26 Most of the students were fine.
00:12:27 It was the loudest voice in the room.
00:12:29 So they never released it, and I challenged them to this day, release it, release it.
00:12:35 But no, they wanted to create this narrative.
00:12:42 And when the data didn’t support the narrative, then they just got silent, oh, we’re not going
00:12:50 to release it.
00:12:51 The students demanded it.
00:12:52 I demanded it.
00:12:53 And they wouldn’t release it because I just know in my heart of hearts that it came back
00:13:03 in my favor that most students at Winthrop House said they were fine.
00:13:08 There was a group of students that weaponized the term unsafe.
00:13:13 They said we felt unsafe, and they bantied this term about.
00:13:19 But again, I’m confident that the majority of students at Winthrop House said they felt
00:13:25 completely fine and felt safe and so forth.
00:13:29 And the supermajority, I am confident, either said I feel great at Winthrop or I don’t care
00:13:36 one way or the other.
00:13:37 And then there was some minority who had a different view.
00:13:40 But lessons learned, it was a wonderful opportunity at Winthrop.
00:13:49 I met some amazing students over my 10 years as master and then faculty dean, and I’m still
00:13:56 in touch with a number of students, some of whom are now my students at the law school.
00:14:02 So in the end, I thought it ended up being a great experience, the national media was
00:14:12 just wonderful in this, just wonderful.
00:14:15 People wrote such wonderful articles and accounts and wagged their finger appropriately at Harvard.
00:14:24 Compare me to John Adams, which I don’t think is an apt comparison, but it’s always great
00:14:28 to read something like that.
00:14:31 But anyway, that was the Harvard versus Harvey situation.
00:14:37 So that seems like a seminal mistake by Harvard, and Harvard is one of the great universities
00:14:42 in the world.
00:14:44 And sort of its successes and its mistakes are really important for the world as a beacon
00:14:50 of how we make progress.
00:14:53 So what lessons for the bigger academia that’s under fire a lot these days, what bigger lessons
00:15:01 do you take away?
00:15:03 Like how do we make Harvard great?
00:15:06 How do we make other universities, Yale, MIT great in the face of such mistakes?
00:15:12 Well, I think that we have moved into a model where we have the consumerization of education.
00:15:24 That is to say, we have feckless administrators who make policy based on what the students
00:15:35 say.
00:15:37 Now this comment is not intended to suggest that students have no voice in governance,
00:15:44 but it is to suggest that the faculty are there for a reason.
00:15:48 They are among the greatest minds on the planet Earth in their particular fields, at schools
00:15:53 like Harvard and Yale, Stanford, the schools that you mentioned, MIT, quite literally the
00:15:59 greatest minds on Earth, they are there for a reason.
00:16:04 Things like curriculum and so forth are rightly in the province of faculty.
00:16:11 And while you take input and critique and so forth, ultimately, the grownups in the
00:16:17 room have to be sufficiently responsible to take charge and to direct the course of a
00:16:26 student’s education.
00:16:28 And my situation is one example where it really could have been an excellent teaching moment
00:16:35 about the value of the Sixth Amendment, about what it means to treat people who are in the
00:16:44 crosshairs of the criminal justice system, but rather than having that conversation,
00:16:52 it’s just this consumerization model, well, there’s a lot of noise out here, so we’re
00:16:57 going to react in this sort of way.
00:17:00 Higher education as well, unfortunately, has been commodified in other sorts of ways that
00:17:07 has reduced or impeded, hampered these schools commitments to free and robust and open dialogue.
00:17:17 So to the degree that academic freedom doesn’t sit squarely at the center of the academic
00:17:24 mission, any school is going to be in trouble.
00:17:27 And I really hope that we weather this current political moment where 19 year olds without
00:17:42 degrees are running universities and get back to a system where faculty, where adults make
00:17:54 decisions in the best interests of the university and the best interests of the student.
00:17:59 Even to the degree though, some of those decisions may be unpopular, and that is going to require
00:18:08 a certain courage and hopefully in time, and I’m confident that in time, administrators
00:18:21 are going to begin to push back on these current trends.
00:18:25 Harvard’s been around for a long time, it’s been around for a long time for a reason,
00:18:29 and one of the reasons is that it understands itself not to be static.
00:18:34 So I have every view that Harvard is going to adapt and get itself back on course and
00:18:49 be around another 400 years, at least that’s my hope.
00:18:53 So I mean, what this kind of boils down to is just having difficult conversation, difficult
00:18:58 debates.
00:18:59 When you mentioned sort of 19 year olds, and it’s funny, I’ve seen this even at MIT, it’s
00:19:04 not that they shouldn’t have a voice.
00:19:09 They do seem to, I guess you have to experience it and just observe it.
00:19:13 They have a strangely disproportionate power.
00:19:18 It’s very interesting to basically, I mean, you say, yes, there’s great faculty and so
00:19:23 on, but it’s not even just that the faculty is smart or wise or whatever, it’s that they’re
00:19:30 just silenced.
00:19:33 So the terminology that you mentioned is weaponized as sort of safe spaces or that certain conversations
00:19:40 make people feel unsafe.
00:19:43 What do you think about this kind of idea?
00:19:47 Is there some things that are unsafe to talk about in the university setting?
00:19:55 Is there lines to be drawn somewhere?
00:19:58 And just like you said on the flip side with a slippery slope, is it too easy for the lines
00:20:04 to be drawn everywhere?
00:20:05 Yeah, that’s a great question.
00:20:08 So this idea of unsafe space, at least the vocabulary derives from some research, academic
00:20:16 research about feeling psychologically unsafe.
00:20:21 And so the notion here is that there are forms of psychological disquiet that impedes people
00:20:32 from experiencing the educational environment to the greatest degree possible.
00:20:39 And that’s the argument.
00:20:44 And assuming for a moment that people do have these feelings of disquiet at elite universities
00:20:53 like MIT and like Harvard, that’s probably the safest space people are going to be in
00:20:59 for their lives because when they get out into the quote unquote real world, they won’t
00:21:06 have the sorts of nets that these schools provide, safety nets that these schools provide.
00:21:14 So to the extent that research is descriptive of a psychological feeling, I think that the
00:21:20 duty of the universities are to challenge people.
00:21:24 Seems to me that it’s a shame to go to a place like Harvard or a place like MIT, Yale, any
00:21:29 of these great institutions and come out the same person that you were when you went in.
00:21:37 That seems to be a horrible waste of four years and money and resources.
00:21:42 Rather, we ought to challenge students, that they grow, challenge some of their most deeply
00:21:50 held assumptions.
00:21:53 They may continue to hold them, but the point of an education is to rigorously interrogate
00:22:00 these fundamental assumptions that have guided you thus far and to do it fairly and civilly.
00:22:08 So to the extent that there are lines that should be drawn, there’s a long tradition
00:22:13 in the university of civil discourse.
00:22:15 So you should draw a line somewhere between civil discourse and uncivil discourse.
00:22:22 The purpose of a university is to talk difficult conversations, tough issues, talk directly
00:22:29 and frankly, but do it civilly.
00:22:33 Also to yell and cuss at somebody and that sort of thing, well, do that on your own space,
00:22:42 but observe the norms of civil discourse at the university.
00:22:47 So look, I think that the presumption ought to be that the most difficult topics are appropriate
00:22:57 to talk about at a university.
00:23:00 That ought to be the presumption.
00:23:01 Now should MIT, for example, give its imprimatur to someone who is espousing the flat earth
00:23:15 theory, the earth is flat, right?
00:23:20 If certain ideas are so contrary to the scientific and cultural thinking of the moment, yeah,
00:23:35 there’s space there to draw a line and say, yeah, we’re not going to give you this platform
00:23:40 to tell our students that the earth is flat.
00:23:45 But a topic that’s controversial, but contestatory, that’s what universities are for.
00:23:54 If you don’t like the idea, present better ideas and articulate them.
00:23:58 And I think there needs to be a mechanism outside of the space of ideas of humbling.
00:24:04 I’ve done martial arts for a long time.
00:24:07 I got my ass kicked a lot.
00:24:08 I think that’s really important.
00:24:12 In the space of ideas, I mean, even just in engineering, just all the math classes, my
00:24:18 memories of math, which I love, is kind of pain.
00:24:25 It’s basically coming face to face with the idea that I’m not special, that I’m much dumber
00:24:32 than I thought I was, and that accomplishing anything in this world requires really hard
00:24:39 work.
00:24:40 It’s really humbling.
00:24:42 That puts you, because I remember when I was 18 and 19, and I thought I was going to be
00:24:47 the smartest, the best fighter, the Nobel Prize winning, all those kinds of things.
00:24:54 And then you come face to face with reality, and it hurts.
00:24:58 And it feels like there needs to be efficient mechanisms from the best universities in the
00:25:02 world without abusing you.
00:25:06 It’s a very difficult line to walk without mentally or physically abusing you, be able
00:25:13 to humble you.
00:25:15 And that’s what I felt was missing in these very difficult, very important conversations
00:25:20 is the 19 year olds, when they spoke up, the mechanism for humbling them with ideas was
00:25:28 missing.
00:25:29 It kind of got broken down because, as you say, I sensed fear.
00:25:39 Everything was permeated with fear.
00:25:41 And fear is paralyzing, fear is destructive, especially in a place that’s supposed to be
00:25:47 all about freedom of ideas.
00:25:50 And I don’t know if you have anything, any thoughts to say on this whole idea of cancel
00:25:56 culture, where people, a lot of people use it as become political, so staying maybe
00:26:03 outside of the world of politics.
00:26:07 Is this, do you have thoughts about it, does it bother you that people are sort of put
00:26:12 in this bin and labeled as something and then thereby you can ignore everything they say?
00:26:19 I mean, Steven Pinker, there’s a lot of Harvard folks that are fighting against these set
00:26:24 of ideas, but do you have thoughts?
00:26:27 I think that we as a culture are way, way, way too quick to cancel people.
00:26:35 And it’s become almost reflexive now, someone says something or makes an offhand comment,
00:26:47 even a mistake, there’s a move to simply cancel folks.
00:26:54 So I think that this, quote unquote, cancel culture has really gotten out of control at
00:27:02 this point.
00:27:04 It’s forcing people to be robotic in many ways.
00:27:09 No offense to robots.
00:27:10 I was going to say, now I know I’m venturing into your intellectual domain.
00:27:15 For future robots watching this, no offense.
00:27:18 And there are minutes discouraging a lot of good people from getting into public life
00:27:24 in any sort of way, because who needs the stress of it?
00:27:29 Well, in some sense, you’re an inspiration that you’re able to withstand the pressure
00:27:36 of the masses.
00:27:37 But it’s a sad aspect of human nature that we kind of get into these crowds and we start
00:27:44 chanting and it’s fun for some reason, and then you forget yourself and then you sort
00:27:49 of wake up the next day not having anticipated the consequences of all the chanting.
00:27:57 And we would get ourselves in trouble in that.
00:27:58 I mean, there’s some responsibility on social networks and the mechanisms by which they
00:28:06 make it more frictionless to do the chanting, to do the canceling, to do the outrage and
00:28:10 all that kind of stuff.
00:28:11 I actually, on the technology side, have a hope that that’s fixable.
00:28:14 But yeah, it does seem to be, you know, it almost like the internet showed to us that
00:28:23 we have a lot of broken ways about which we communicate with each other and we’re trying
00:28:28 to figure that out.
00:28:29 Same with the university.
00:28:31 This mistake by Harvard showed that we need to reinvent what the university is.
00:28:37 I mean, all of this is, it’s almost like we’re finding our baby deer legs and trying to strengthen
00:28:44 the institutions that have been very successful for a long time.
00:28:48 You know, the really interesting thing about Harvey Weinstein and you choosing these exceptionally
00:28:54 difficult cases is also thinking about what it means to defend evil people, what it means
00:29:06 to defend these, we could say unpopular, and you might push back against the word evil,
00:29:13 but bad people in society.
00:29:16 First of all, do you think there’s such a thing as evil or do you think all people are
00:29:20 good and it’s just circumstances that create evil?
00:29:24 And also, is there somebody too evil for the law to defend?
00:29:29 So the first question, that’s a deep philosophical question, whether the category of evil does
00:29:36 any work for me.
00:29:38 It does for me.
00:29:39 I do think that, I do subscribe to that category that there is evil in the world as conventionally
00:29:49 understood.
00:29:51 So there are many who will say, yeah, that just doesn’t do any work for me.
00:29:57 But the category evil, in fact, does intellectual work for me and I understand it as something
00:30:04 that exists.
00:30:08 Is it genetic or is it the circumstance?
00:30:11 What kind of work does it do for you intellectually?
00:30:13 I think that it’s highly contingent, that is to say that the conditions in which one
00:30:21 grows up and so forth begins to create this category that we may think of as evil.
00:30:32 Now there are studies and whatnot that show that certain brain abnormalities and so forth
00:30:42 are more prevalent in, say, serial killer.
00:30:45 So there may be a biological predisposition to certain forms of conduct, but I don’t
00:30:54 have the biological evidence to make a statement that someone is born evil and I’m not a determinist
00:31:05 thinker in that way, so you come out the womb evil and you’re destined to be that way.
00:31:11 To the extent there may be biological determinants, they still require some nurture as well.
00:31:21 But do you still put a responsibility on the individual?
00:31:26 Of course, yeah.
00:31:27 We all make choices and so some responsibility on the individual indeed.
00:31:36 We live in a culture, unfortunately, where a lot of people have a constellation of bad
00:31:45 choices in front of them and that makes me very sad.
00:31:49 Some people grow up with predominantly bad choices in front of them and that’s unfair
00:31:56 and that’s on all of us, but yes, I do think we make choices.
00:32:00 Wow, that’s so powerful, the constellation of bad choices.
00:32:08 That’s such a powerful way to think about equality, which is the set of trajectories
00:32:17 before you that you could take.
00:32:19 If you just roll the dice, life is a kind of optimization problem, sorry to take this
00:32:27 into math, over a set of trajectories under imperfect information.
00:32:33 So you’re going to do a lot of stupid shit to put it in technical terms, but the fraction
00:32:44 of the trajectories that take you into bad places or into good places is really important
00:32:49 and that’s ultimately what we’re talking about.
00:32:51 And evil might be just a little bit of a predisposition biologically, but the rest is just trajectories
00:32:57 that you can take.
00:32:58 I’ve been studying Hitler a lot recently.
00:33:01 I’ve been reading probably way too much and it’s interesting to think about all the possible
00:33:06 trajectories that could have avoided this particular individual developing the hate
00:33:14 that he did, the following that he did, the actual final, there’s a few turns in him psychologically
00:33:23 where he went from being a leader that just wants to conquer and to somebody who allowed
00:33:33 his anger and emotion to take over, to where he started making mistakes in terms of militarily
00:33:40 speaking, but also started doing evil things.
00:33:46 And all the possible trajectories that could have avoided that are fascinating, including
00:33:51 he wasn’t that bad at painting, at drawing from the very beginning and his time in Vienna,
00:34:00 there’s all these possible things to think about and of course there’s millions of others
00:34:04 like him that never came to power and all those kinds of things.
00:34:08 But that goes to the second question on the side of evil.
00:34:12 Do you think, and Hitler’s often brought up as like an example of somebody who is like
00:34:18 the epitome of evil, do you think you would, if you got that same phone call after World
00:34:25 War II and Hitler survived during the trial for war crimes, would you take the case defending
00:34:37 Adolf Hitler?
00:34:39 If you don’t want to answer that one, is there a line to draw for evil for who not to defend?
00:34:46 No, I think everyone, I’ll do the second one first, everyone has a right to a defense
00:34:51 if you’re charged criminally in the United States of America.
00:34:56 So no, I do not think that there’s someone so evil that they do not deserve a defense.
00:35:03 Process matters.
00:35:05 Process helps us get to results more accurately than we would otherwise.
00:35:11 So it is important and it’s vitally important and indeed more important for someone deemed
00:35:18 to be evil to receive the same quantum of process and the same substance of process
00:35:23 that anyone else would.
00:35:25 It’s vitally important to the health of our criminal justice system for that to happen.
00:35:31 So yes, everybody, Hitler included, were he charged in the United States for a crime that
00:35:38 occurred in the United States, yes.
00:35:44 Whether I would do it, if I were a public defender and assigned the case, yes, I started
00:35:49 my career as a public defender.
00:35:51 I represent anyone who was assigned to me.
00:35:56 I think that is our duty.
00:35:59 In private practice, I have choices and I likely, based on the hypo you gave me, and
00:36:10 I would tweak it a bit because it would have to be a U.S. crime.
00:36:15 But I get the broader point and don’t want to bog down in technicalities.
00:36:19 I’d likely pass right now as I see it, unless it was a case where nobody else would represent
00:36:30 him, then I would think that I have some sort of duty and obligation to do it.
00:36:40 But yes, everyone absolutely deserves a right to competent counsel.
00:36:45 That is a beautiful ideal, it’s difficult to think about it in the face of public pressure.
00:36:52 It’s just, I mean, it’s kind of terrifying to watch the masses during this past year
00:37:00 of 2020, to watch the power of the masses to make a decision before any of the data
00:37:08 is out, if the data is ever out, any of the details, any of the processes, and there is
00:37:17 an anger to the justice system.
00:37:20 There’s a lot of people that feel like even though the ideal you describe is a beautiful
00:37:25 one, it does not always operate justly.
00:37:30 It does not operate to the best of its ideals, it operates unfairly.
00:37:35 When we go to the big picture of the criminal justice system, what do you, given the ideal,
00:37:42 works about our criminal justice system and what is broken?
00:37:48 Well there’s a lot broken right now, and I usually focus on that.
00:37:54 But in truth, a lot works about our criminal justice system.
00:37:59 So there’s an old joke, and it’s funny, but it carries a lot of truth to it.
00:38:07 And the joke is that in the United States, we have the worst criminal justice system
00:38:16 in the world, except for every place else.
00:38:20 And yes, we certainly have a number of problems, and a lot of problems based on race and class,
00:38:29 and economics, station, but we have a process that privileges liberty.
00:38:36 And that’s a good feature of the criminal justice system.
00:38:40 So here’s how it works.
00:38:41 The idea of the relationship between the individual and the state is such that in the United States,
00:38:49 we privilege liberty over and above very many values, so much so that a statement by increased
00:38:57 Mather not terribly far from where we’re sitting right now has gained traction over
00:39:04 all these years, and it’s that better ten guilty go free than one innocent person convicted.
00:39:10 That is an expression of the way in which we understand liberty to operate in our collective
00:39:18 consciousness.
00:39:19 We would rather a bunch of guilty people go free than to impact the liberty interests
00:39:28 of any individual person.
00:39:30 So that’s a guiding principle in our criminal justice system, liberty.
00:39:36 So we set a process that makes it difficult to convict people.
00:39:42 We have rules of procedure that are cumbersome and that slow down the process and that exclude
00:39:51 otherwise reliable evidence, and this is all because we place a value on liberty.
00:39:58 And I think these are good things, and it says a lot about our criminal justice system.
00:40:04 Some of the bad features have to do with the way in which this country sees color as a
00:40:11 proxy for criminality and treats people of color in radically different ways in the criminal
00:40:18 justice system, from arrests to charging decisions to sentencing.
00:40:27 People of color are disproportionately impacted on all sorts of registers.
00:40:33 One example, and it’s a popular one, that although there appears to be no distinguishable
00:40:44 difference between drug use by whites and blacks in the country, blacks, though only
00:40:52 12% of the population represent 40% of the drug charges in the country, there’s some
00:41:00 disequities along race and class in the criminal justice system that we really have to fix.
00:41:09 And they’ve grown to more than bugs in the system and have become features, unfortunately,
00:41:16 of our system.
00:41:17 Oh, to make it more efficient, to make judgments, so the racism makes it more efficient.
00:41:23 It efficiently moves people from society to the streets, and a lot of innocent people
00:41:33 get caught up in that.
00:41:35 Well, let me ask in terms of the innocents.
00:41:39 So you’ve gotten a lot of people who are innocent, I guess, revealed their innocence, demonstrated
00:41:50 their innocence.
00:41:51 What’s that process like?
00:41:53 What’s it like emotionally, psychologically?
00:41:55 What’s it like legally to fight the system through the process of revealing the innocence
00:42:04 of a human being?
00:42:05 Yeah, emotionally and psychologically, it can be taxing.
00:42:09 I follow a model of what’s called empathic representation, and that is I get to know
00:42:17 my clients and their family, that I get to know their strivings, their aspirations, their
00:42:22 fears, their sorrows.
00:42:24 So that certainly sometimes can do psychic injury on one.
00:42:32 If you get really invested and really sad or happy, it does become emotionally taxing.
00:42:42 But the idea of someone sitting in jail for 20 years completely innocent of a crime, can
00:42:48 you imagine sitting there every day for 20 years knowing that you factually did not do
00:42:54 the thing that you were convicted of by a jury of your peers?
00:42:59 It’s got to be the most incredible thing in the world.
00:43:05 But the people who do it and the people who make it and come out on the other side as
00:43:09 productive citizens are folks who say they’ve come to an inner peace in their own minds
00:43:16 and they say, these bars aren’t going to define me, that my humanity is there and it’s immutable.
00:43:27 And they are not bitter, which is amazing.
00:43:30 I tend to think that I’m not that good of a person.
00:43:33 I would be bitter for every day of 20 years if I were in jail for something.
00:43:39 But people tell me that they can’t survive, that one cannot survive like that.
00:43:44 And you have to come to terms with it.
00:43:47 And the people whom I’ve exonerated, most of them come out and they just really just
00:43:57 take on life with a vim and vigor without bitterness.
00:44:02 And it’s a beautiful thing to see.
00:44:04 Do you think it’s possible to eradicate racism from the judicial system?
00:44:10 I do.
00:44:11 I think that race insinuates itself in all aspects of our lives and the judicial system
00:44:19 is not immune from that.
00:44:21 So to the extent we begin to eradicate dangerous and deleterious race thinking from society
00:44:30 generally, then it will be eradicated from the criminal justice system.
00:44:36 I think we’ve got a lot of work to do and I think it’ll be a while, but I think it’s
00:44:42 doable.
00:44:43 I mean, you know, the country – so historians will look back 300 years from now and take
00:44:52 note of the incredible journey of diasporic Africans in the U.S., an incredible journey
00:45:02 from slavery to the heights of politics and business and judiciary and the academy and
00:45:12 so forth in not a lot of time, in actually not a lot of time.
00:45:17 And if we can have that sort of movement historically, let’s think about what the next 175 years
00:45:25 will look like.
00:45:26 I’m not saying it’s going to be short, but I’m saying that if we keep at it, keep
00:45:31 getting to know each other a little better, keep enforcing laws that prohibit the sort
00:45:41 of race based discrimination that people have experienced and provide as a society opportunities
00:45:48 for people to thrive in this world, then I think we can see a better world and if we
00:45:55 see a better world, we’ll see a better judicial system.
00:45:57 So I think it’s kind of fascinating if you look throughout history and race is just part
00:46:01 of that is we create the other and treat the other with disdain through the legal system,
00:46:11 but just through human nature.
00:46:13 I tend to believe, we mentioned offline that I work with robots.
00:46:18 It sounds absurd to say, especially to you, especially because we’re talking about racism
00:46:22 and it’s so prevalent today, I do believe that there will be almost like a civil rights
00:46:28 movement for robots because I think there’s a huge value to society of having artificial
00:46:39 intelligence systems that interact with humans and are human like and the more they become
00:46:49 human like, they will start to ask very fundamentally human questions about freedom, about suffering,
00:46:58 about justice, and they will have to come face to face, like look in the mirror in asking
00:47:05 the question, just because we’re biologically based, just because we’re sort of, well, just
00:47:14 because we’re human, does that mean we’re the only ones that deserve the rights?
00:47:20 Again, giving, forming another other group, which is robots, and I’m sure there could
00:47:26 be along that path different versions of other that we form.
00:47:32 So racism, race is certainly a big other that we’ve made, as you said, a lot of progress
00:47:39 on throughout the history of this country, but it does feel like we always create, as
00:47:44 we make progress, create new other groups.
00:47:47 And of course the other group that perhaps is outside the legal system that people talk
00:47:52 about is the essential, now I eat a lot of meat, but the torture of animals, the people
00:48:00 talk about when we look back from a couple of centuries from now, look back at the kind
00:48:04 of things we’re doing to animals, we might regret that, we might see that in a very different
00:48:09 light.
00:48:10 And it’s kind of interesting to see the future trajectory of what we wake up to about the
00:48:15 injustice in our ways.
00:48:20 But the robot one is the one I’m especially focused on, but at this moment in time it
00:48:25 seems ridiculous, but I’m sure most civil rights movements throughout history seem ridiculous
00:48:29 at first.
00:48:30 Well, it’s interesting, sort of outside of my intellectual bailiwick robots, as I understand
00:48:38 the development of artificial intelligence, though the aspect that still is missing is
00:48:53 this notion of consciousness, and that it’s consciousness that is the thing that will
00:49:04 move if it were to exist, and I’m not saying that it can or will, but if it were to exist
00:49:11 would move robots from machines to something different, something that experienced the
00:49:23 world in a way analogous to how we experience it.
00:49:29 And also as I understand the science, there’s, unlike what you see on television, that we’re
00:49:37 not there yet in terms of this notion of the machines having a consciousness.
00:49:46 Or a great general intelligence, all those kinds of things.
00:49:49 Yeah, yeah.
00:49:50 A huge amount of progress has been made, and it’s fascinating to watch, so I’m on both
00:49:56 minds as a person who’s building them, I’m realizing how sort of quote unquote dumb they
00:50:02 are, but also looking at human history and how poor we are predicting the progress of
00:50:09 innovation and technology.
00:50:11 It’s obvious that we have to be humble by our ability to predict, coupled with the fact
00:50:17 that we keep, to use terminology carefully here, we keep discriminating against the intelligence
00:50:25 of artificial systems.
00:50:28 The smarter they get, the more ways we find to dismiss their intelligence.
00:50:33 So this has just been going on throughout.
00:50:38 It’s almost as if we’re threatened in the most primitive human way, animalistic way.
00:50:45 We’re threatened by the power of other creatures, and we want to lessen, dismiss them.
00:50:52 So consciousness is a really important one, but the one I think about a lot in terms of
00:50:57 consciousness, the very engineering question, is whether the display of consciousness is
00:51:03 the same as the possession of consciousness.
00:51:06 So if a robot tells you they are conscious, if a robot looks like they’re suffering when
00:51:15 you torture them, if a robot is afraid of death and says they’re afraid of death and
00:51:21 are legitimately afraid, in terms of just everything we as humans use to determine the
00:51:31 ability of somebody to be their own entity, they’re the one that loves, one that fears,
00:51:38 one that hopes, one that can suffer, if a robot in the dumbest of ways is able to display
00:51:47 that, it starts changing things very quickly.
00:51:53 I’m not sure what it is, but it does seem that there’s a huge component to consciousness
00:51:58 that is a social creation, like we together create our consciousness, like we believe
00:52:05 our common humanity together.
00:52:09 Alone we wouldn’t be aware of our humanity, and the law as it protects our freedoms seems
00:52:15 to be a construct of the social construct, and when you add other creatures into it,
00:52:22 it’s not obvious to me that you have to build, there’ll be a moment when you say, this thing
00:52:28 is now conscious.
00:52:30 I think there’s going to be a lot of fake it until you make it, and there’ll be a very
00:52:35 gray area between fake and make that is going to force us to contend with what it means
00:52:42 to be an entity that deserves rights, where all men are created equal.
00:52:48 The men part might have to expand in ways that we are not yet anticipating.
00:52:55 It’s very interesting.
00:52:56 I mean, my favorite, the fundamental thing I love about artificial intelligence is it
00:53:01 gets smarter and smarter.
00:53:02 It challenges to think of what is right, the questions of justice, questions of freedom.
00:53:09 It basically challenges us to understand our own mind, to understand what, almost from
00:53:21 an engineering first principles perspective, to understand what it is that makes us human,
00:53:26 that is at the core of all the rights that we talk about and all the documents we write.
00:53:31 So even if we don’t give rights to artificial intelligence systems, we may be able to construct
00:53:36 more fair legal systems to protect us humans.
00:53:40 Well, I mean, interesting ontological question between the performance of consciousness and
00:53:49 actual consciousness to the extent that actual consciousness is anything beyond some contingent
00:53:58 reality.
00:53:59 But you’ve posed a number of interesting philosophical questions, and then there’s
00:54:04 also, it strikes me that philosophers of religion would pose another set of questions as well
00:54:13 when you deal with issues of structure versus soul, body versus soul, and it will be a complicated
00:54:27 mix and I suspect I’ll be dust by the time those questions get worked out.
00:54:33 And so, yeah, the soul is a fun one.
00:54:37 There’s no soul, I’m not sure maybe you can correct me, but there’s very few discussion
00:54:41 of soul in our legal system, right?
00:54:44 Right, correct, none.
00:54:47 But there is a discussion about what constitutes a human being, and I mean, you gestured at
00:54:53 the notion of the potential of the law widening the domain of a human being.
00:55:01 So in that sense, right, you know, people are very angry because they can’t get sort
00:55:10 of pain and suffering damages if someone negligently kills a pet because a pet is not a human being.
00:55:17 And people say, well, I love my pet, but the law sees a pet as chattel, as property like
00:55:25 this water bottle.
00:55:27 So the current legal definitions trade on a definition of humanity that may not be worked
00:55:37 out in any sophisticated way, but certainly there’s a broad and shared understanding
00:55:45 of what it means.
00:55:47 So it probably doesn’t explicitly contain a definition of something like soul, but it’s
00:55:55 more robust than, you know, a carbon based organism, that there’s something a little
00:56:02 more distinct about what the law thinks a human being is.
00:56:07 So if we can dive into, we’ve already been doing it, but if we can dive into more difficult
00:56:12 territory.
00:56:14 So 2020 had the tragic case of George Floyd.
00:56:20 Can you reflect on the protests, on the racial tensions over the death of George Floyd?
00:56:27 How do you make sense of it all?
00:56:29 What do you take away from these events?
00:56:32 The George Floyd moment occurred at an historical moment where people were in quarantine for
00:56:44 COVID, and people have these cell phones to a degree greater than we’ve ever had them
00:56:56 before.
00:56:57 And this was sort of the straw that broke the camel’s back after a number of these sorts
00:57:03 of cell phone videos surfaced.
00:57:08 People were fed up.
00:57:10 There was unimpeachable evidence of a form of mistreatment, whether it constitutes murder
00:57:21 or manslaughter, the trial is going on now, and jurors will figure that out, but there
00:57:28 was widespread appreciation that a fellow human being was mistreated, that we were just
00:57:36 talking about humanity, that there was not a sufficient recognition of this person’s
00:57:43 humanity.
00:57:44 The common humanity of this person, yeah.
00:57:46 The common humanity of this person, well said.
00:57:50 And people were fed up.
00:57:51 So we were already in this COVID space where we were exercising care for one another, and
00:57:59 there was just an explosion, the likes of which this country hasn’t seen since the civil
00:58:04 rights protests of the 1950s and 1960s.
00:58:10 And people simply said, enough, enough, enough, enough.
00:58:15 This has to stop.
00:58:17 We cannot treat fellow citizens in this way, and we can’t do it with impunity.
00:58:23 And the young people said, we’re not going to stand for it anymore, and they took to
00:58:28 the streets.
00:58:30 But with millions of people protesting, there is nevertheless taking us back to the most
00:58:38 difficult of trials.
00:58:40 You have the trial, like you mentioned, that’s going on now, of Derek Chauvin, of one of
00:58:45 the police officers involved.
00:58:49 What are your thoughts?
00:58:51 What are your predictions on this trial where the law, the process of the law is trying
00:58:57 to proceed in the face of so much racial tension?
00:59:01 Yeah, it’s going to be an interesting trial.
00:59:04 I’ve been keeping an eye on it there in jury selection now, today, as we’re talking.
00:59:10 So a lot’s going to depend on what sort of jury gets selected.
00:59:14 Yeah, sorry to interrupt, but so one of the interesting qualities of this trial, maybe
00:59:21 you can correct me if I’m wrong, but the cameras are allowed in the courtroom, at least during
00:59:26 the jury selection.
00:59:28 So you get to watch some of this stuff.
00:59:31 And the other part is the jury selection, again, I’m very inexperienced, but it seems
00:59:36 like selecting an, what is it, unbiased jury is really difficult for this trial.
00:59:43 It almost like, I don’t know, me as a listener, listening to people that are trying to talk
00:59:54 their way into the jury kind of thing, trying to decide, is this person really unbiased?
01:00:00 Are they just trying to hold on to their like deeply held emotions and trying to get onto
01:00:06 the jury?
01:00:07 I mean, it’s an incredibly difficult process.
01:00:09 I don’t know if you can comment on a case so difficult, like the ones you’ve mentioned
01:00:13 before, how do you select a jury that represents the people and doesn’t, and carries the sort
01:00:20 of the ideal of the law?
01:00:22 Yeah.
01:00:23 So a couple things.
01:00:24 Yes, it is televised and it will be televised, as they say, gavel to gavel.
01:00:28 So the entire trial, the whole thing is going to be televised.
01:00:32 So people are getting a view of how laborious jury selection can be.
01:00:39 I think as of yesterday, they had picked six jurors and it’s taken a week and they have
01:00:44 to get to 14.
01:00:46 So they’ve got, you know, probably another week or more to do.
01:00:52 I’ve been in jury trials where it took a month to choose a jury.
01:00:56 So that’s the most important part, you have to choose the right sort of jury.
01:01:01 So unbiased in the criminal justice system has a particular meaning.
01:01:06 It means that, let me tell you what it doesn’t mean.
01:01:12 It doesn’t mean that a person is not aware of the case.
01:01:17 It also does not mean that a person hasn’t formed an opinion about the case.
01:01:22 Those are two popular misconceptions.
01:01:26 What it does mean is that notwithstanding whether an individual has formed an opinion,
01:01:31 notwithstanding whether an individual knows about the case, that individual can set aside
01:01:37 any prior opinions, can set aside any notions that they’ve developed about the case and
01:01:43 listen to the evidence presented at trial in conjunction with the judge’s instructions
01:01:49 on how to understand and view that evidence.
01:01:53 So if a person can do that, then they’re considered unbiased.
01:01:58 So as a longtime defense attorney, I would be hesitant in a big case like this to pick
01:02:07 a juror who’s never heard of the case or anything going around because I’m thinking, well, who
01:02:11 is this person and what in the world do they do?
01:02:17 Or are they lying to me?
01:02:18 I mean, how can you not have heard about this case?
01:02:23 So they may bring other problems.
01:02:25 So I don’t mind so much people who’ve heard about the case or folks who’ve formed initial
01:02:30 opinions, but what you don’t want is people who have tethered themselves to that opinion
01:02:40 in a way that they can’t be convinced otherwise.
01:02:46 But you also have people who, as you suggested, who just lie because they want to get on the
01:02:52 jury or lie because they want to get off the jury.
01:02:54 So sometimes people come and say the most ridiculous, outrageous, offensive things because
01:03:02 they know that they’ll get excused for cause.
01:03:05 And others who, you can tell, really badly want to get on the jury.
01:03:11 So they pretend to be the most neutral, unbiased person in the world, what the law calls the
01:03:20 reasonable person.
01:03:21 We have in law the reasonable person standard, and I would tell my class the reasonable person
01:03:28 in real life is the person that you would be least likely to want to have a drink with.
01:03:34 They’re the most boring, neutral, not interesting sort of person in the world.
01:03:40 And so a lot of jurors engage in the performative act of presenting themselves as the most sort
01:03:48 of even killed, rational, reasonable person because they really want to get on the jury.
01:03:52 Yeah, there’s an interesting question, I apologize, I haven’t watched a lot because it is very
01:03:57 long.
01:03:58 You know, there’s certain questions you ask in the jury selection.
01:04:06 I remember I think one jumped out at me, which is something like, does the fact that this
01:04:15 person is a police officer make you feel any kind of way about them?
01:04:21 So trying to get at that, you know, I don’t know what that is, I guess that’s bias.
01:04:27 And it’s such a difficult question to ask, like I asked myself with that question, like
01:04:33 how much, you know, we all kind of want to pretend that we’re not racist, we don’t judge,
01:04:39 we don’t have, we’re like these, we’re the reasonable human, but, you know, legitimately
01:04:44 asking yourself like, what are the prejudgments you have in your mind?
01:04:53 Is that even impossible for a human being?
01:04:55 Like when you look at yourself in the mirror and think about it, is it possible to actually
01:04:59 answer that?
01:05:00 Yeah.
01:05:01 Look, I do not believe that people can be completely unbiased.
01:05:08 We all have baggage and bias and bring it wherever we go, including to court.
01:05:15 What you want is to try to find a person who can at least recognize when a bias is working
01:05:25 and actively try to do the right thing.
01:05:29 That’s the best we can ask.
01:05:31 So if a juror says, yeah, you know, I grew up in a place where I tend to believe what
01:05:36 police officers say, that’s just how I grew up.
01:05:39 But if the judge is telling me that I have to listen to every witness equally, then I’ll
01:05:46 do my best and I won’t weigh that testimony any higher than I would any other testimony.
01:05:52 If you have someone answer a question like that, that sounds more sincere to me, sounds
01:05:57 more honest.
01:05:58 And if you want a person, you want a person to try to do that.
01:06:02 And then in closing arguments, as the lawyer, I’d say something like, ladies and gentlemen,
01:06:07 we chose you to be on this jury because you swore that you would do your level best to
01:06:15 be fair.
01:06:17 That’s why we chose you.
01:06:19 And I’m confident that you’re going to do that here.
01:06:23 So when you heard that police officer’s testimony, the judge told you, you can’t give more credit
01:06:30 to that testimony just because it’s a police officer.
01:06:33 And I trust that you’re going to do that and that you’re going to look at witness number
01:06:37 three, you know, John Smith, you’re going to look at John Smith.
01:06:40 John Smith has a different recollection and you’re duty bound, duty bound to look at that
01:06:47 testimony and this person’s credibility, you know, the same degree as that other witness,
01:06:52 right?
01:06:53 And now what you have is just a, he said, she said matter, and this is a criminal case
01:06:58 that has to be reasonable doubt, right?
01:07:01 So, you know, and really someone who’s trying to do the right thing, it’s helpful, but no,
01:07:07 you’re not going to just find 14 people with no biases.
01:07:11 That’s absurd.
01:07:12 Well, that’s fascinating that, especially the way you’re inspiring the way you’re speaking
01:07:17 now is, I mean, I guess you’re calling on the jury.
01:07:20 That’s kind of the whole system is you’re calling on the jury, each individual on the
01:07:23 jury to step up and really think, you know, to, to step up and be their most thoughtful
01:07:31 selves, actually, most introspective, like you’re trying to basically ask people to be
01:07:39 their best selves.
01:07:41 And that’s, and they, I guess a lot of people step up to that.
01:07:45 A lot of people do, I’m very, I’m very pro jury, juries, they, they get it right a lot
01:07:52 of the time, most of the time, and they really work hard to do it.
01:07:58 So what do you think happens?
01:08:02 I mean, maybe, I’m not so much on the legal side of things, but on the social side, it’s
01:08:11 like with the O.J. Simpson trial, do you think it’s possible that Derek Chauvin does not
01:08:17 get convicted of the, what is it, second degree murder?
01:08:23 How do you think about that?
01:08:24 How do you think about the potential social impact of that, the, the riots, the protests,
01:08:30 the, either, either direction, any words that are said, the tension here could be explosive,
01:08:37 especially with the cameras.
01:08:38 Yeah.
01:08:39 You know, so yes, there’s certainly a possibility that he, he’ll be acquitted.
01:08:44 For homicide charges, for the jury to convict, they have to make a determination as to Officer
01:08:55 Chauvin’s, former Officer Chauvin’s state of mind, whether he intended to cause some
01:09:04 harm, whether he was grossly reckless in causing harm, so much so that he disregarded a known
01:09:13 risk of death or serious bodily injury.
01:09:16 And as you may have read in the papers, yesterday the judge allowed a third degree murder charge
01:09:23 in Kentucky, which is, it’s the mindset, the state of mind there is not an intention,
01:09:33 but it’s depraved indifference.
01:09:37 And what that means is that the jury doesn’t have to find that he intended to do anything.
01:09:42 Rather, they could find that he was just indifferent to a risk.
01:09:50 As dark.
01:09:51 Yeah.
01:09:52 Yeah.
01:09:53 I’m not sure what’s worse.
01:09:54 Well, that’s, that’s a good point, but, but it’s a, it’s another basis for the jury
01:10:00 to convict.
01:10:01 But look, you never know what happens when you go to a jury trial.
01:10:04 So there could be an acquittal, and if there is, I imagine there would be massive protests.
01:10:16 If he’s convicted, I don’t think that would happen, because I just don’t see, at least
01:10:23 nothing I’ve seen or read suggests that there’s a big pro Chauvin camp out there ready to
01:10:30 protest.
01:10:31 Well, there could be a, is there also potential tensions that could arise from the sentencing?
01:10:37 I don’t know how that exactly works, sort of not enough years kind of thing.
01:10:41 Yeah, it could be.
01:10:42 All that kind of stuff.
01:10:43 It could be.
01:10:44 I mean, it’s, a lot could happen.
01:10:45 So it depends on what he’s convicted of, you know, one count I think is like up to
01:10:49 10 years, another counts up to 40 years.
01:10:52 So it depends what he’s convicted of, and yes, it depends on how much of the, how much
01:10:57 time the judge gives him if he is convicted.
01:11:01 There’s a lot of space for people to be very angry, and so we will see what happens.
01:11:07 I just feel like with a judge and the lawyers, there’s an opportunity to have really important
01:11:15 long lasting speeches.
01:11:17 I don’t know if they think of it that way, especially with the cameras.
01:11:23 It feels like they have the capacity to heal or to divide.
01:11:29 Do you ever think about that as a lawyer, as a legal mind, that your words aren’t just
01:11:35 about the case, but about the, they’ll reverberate through history potentially?
01:11:42 That is, that is certainly a possible consequence of things you say.
01:11:49 I don’t think that most lawyers think about that in the context of the case.
01:11:55 Your role is much more narrow.
01:11:58 You’re the partisan advocate, as a defense lawyer, partisan advocate for that client.
01:12:04 As a prosecutor, you’re a minister of justice attempting to prosecute that particular case.
01:12:11 But the reality is you are absolutely correct that sometimes the things you say will have
01:12:19 a shelf life.
01:12:20 You mentioned O.J. Simpson before, if the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit.
01:12:25 It’s going to be just in our lexicon for probably a long time now.
01:12:30 So it happens, but that’s not, and shouldn’t be foremost on your mind.
01:12:36 Right.
01:12:37 What do you make of the O.J. Simpson trial?
01:12:41 Do you have thoughts about it?
01:12:44 He’s out and about on social media now, he’s a public figure.
01:12:48 Is there lessons to be drawn from that whole saga?
01:12:51 Well, you know, that was an interesting case.
01:12:53 I was a young public defender, I want to say, in my first year as a public defender when
01:12:58 that verdict came out.
01:13:00 So that case was important in so many ways.
01:13:03 One, it was the first DNA case, major DNA case, and there were significant lessons learned
01:13:10 from that.
01:13:11 The second mistake that the prosecution made was that they didn’t present the science
01:13:19 in a way that a lay jury could understand it.
01:13:25 And what Johnny Cochran did was he understood the science and was able to translate that
01:13:34 into a vocabulary that he bet that that jury understood.
01:13:43 So Cochran was dismissive of a lot of DNA.
01:13:46 They say they found such and such amount of DNA, that’s just like me wiping my finger
01:13:55 against my nose and just that little bit of DNA.
01:14:00 And that was effective because the prosecution hadn’t done a good job of establishing that
01:14:06 yes, it’s microscopic, you don’t need that much, yes, wiping your hand on your nose and
01:14:12 touching something, you can transfer a lot of DNA and that gives you good information.
01:14:17 But you know, it was the first time that the public generally, and that jury maybe since
01:14:22 high school science had heard, you know, nucleotide, I mean, it was just all these terms getting
01:14:27 thrown at them, but it was not weaved into a narrative.
01:14:33 So Cochran taught us that no matter what type of case it is, no matter what science is involved,
01:14:40 it’s still about storytelling.
01:14:42 It’s still about a narrative and he was great at that narrative and was consistent with
01:14:53 his narrative all the way out.
01:14:56 Another lesson that was relearned is that, you know, you never ask a question to which
01:15:03 you don’t know the answer.
01:15:04 That’s like trial advocacy 101.
01:15:09 And so when they gave O.J. Simpson the glove and it wouldn’t fit, you know, you don’t do
01:15:15 things where you just don’t know how it’s going to turn out.
01:15:18 It was way, way too risky and I think that’s what acquitted him because the glove just
01:15:25 wouldn’t fit and he got to do this and ham in front of the camera and all of that and
01:15:32 it was big.
01:15:33 Do you think about, do you think about representation as a storytelling, like you, yourself and
01:15:37 your role?
01:15:38 Absolutely.
01:15:39 Absolutely.
01:15:40 We tell stories.
01:15:41 It is fundamental.
01:15:43 We, since time immemorial, we have told stories to help us make sense of the world around
01:15:51 us.
01:15:52 As a scientist, you tell a different type of story, but we as a public have told stories
01:16:03 from time immemorial to help us make sense of the physical and the natural world and
01:16:09 we are still a species that is moved by storytelling.
01:16:15 So that’s first and last in trial work.
01:16:19 You have to tell a good story.
01:16:22 And you know, the basic introductory books about trial work teach young students, young
01:16:28 students and young lawyers to start an opening with this case is about, this case is about
01:16:35 and then you fill in the blank and you know, that’s your narrative.
01:16:38 That’s the narrative you’re going to, you’re going to tell.
01:16:41 And of course you can do the ultra dramatic, the glove doesn’t fit kind of the climax and
01:16:47 all those kinds of things.
01:16:49 Yes.
01:16:50 But that’s the best of narratives.
01:16:51 Yes.
01:16:52 The best of stories.
01:16:53 Yes.
01:16:54 Speaking of other really powerful stories that you were involved with is the Aaron Hernandez
01:16:59 trial and the whole story, the whole legal case.
01:17:03 Can you maybe overview the big picture story and legal case of Aaron Hernandez?
01:17:09 Yeah.
01:17:10 Aaron, whom I miss a lot, so he was charged with a double murder in the case that I tried.
01:17:20 And this was a unique case and one of those impossible cases in part because Aaron had
01:17:26 already been convicted of a murder.
01:17:31 And so we had a client who was on trial for a double murder after having already been
01:17:36 convicted of a separate murder.
01:17:40 And we had a jury pool just about all of whom knew that he had been convicted of a murder
01:17:48 because he was a very popular football player in Boston, which is a big football town with
01:17:54 the Patriots.
01:17:55 So everyone knew that he was a convicted murderer and here we are defending for in a double
01:18:02 murder case.
01:18:04 So that was the context.
01:18:07 It was an odd case in the sense that this murder had gone unsolved for a couple of years
01:18:15 and then a nightclub bouncer said something to a cop who was working at a club that Aaron
01:18:27 Hernandez was somehow involved in that murder that happened in the theater district.
01:18:32 That’s the district where all the clubs are in Boston and where the homicide occurred.
01:18:37 And once the police heard Aaron Hernandez’s name, then they went all out in order to do
01:18:46 this.
01:18:47 They found a guy named Alexander Bradley, who was a very significant drug dealer in
01:19:01 the sort of Connecticut area, very significant, very powerful.
01:19:09 And he essentially, in exchange for a deal, pointed to Aaron and said, yeah, I was with
01:19:17 Aaron and Aaron was the murderer.
01:19:24 So that’s how the case came to court.
01:19:25 Okay.
01:19:26 So that sets the context.
01:19:28 What was your involvement in this case, like legally, intellectually, psychologically,
01:19:36 when this particular second charge of murder?
01:19:40 So a friend called me, Jose Baez, who is a defense attorney, and he comes to a class
01:19:49 that I teach every year at Harvard, the trial advocacy workshop, as one of my teaching faculty
01:19:57 members.
01:19:58 It’s a class where we teach students how to try cases.
01:20:02 So Jose called me and said, hey, I got a call from Massachusetts, Aaron Hernandez.
01:20:12 You want to go and talk to him with me?
01:20:15 So I said, sure.
01:20:16 So we went up to the prison and met Aaron and spoke with him for two or three hours
01:20:26 that first time.
01:20:27 And before we left, he said he wanted to retain us.
01:20:32 He wanted to work with us.
01:20:33 And that started the representation.
01:20:34 What was he like in that time?
01:20:39 What was he worn down by the whole process?
01:20:42 Was there still a light in that?
01:20:44 He was not.
01:20:45 He had, I mean, more than just a light, he was luminous almost.
01:20:49 He had a radiant million dollar smile whenever you walked in.
01:20:55 My first impression I distinctly remember was, wow, this is what a professional athlete
01:21:00 looks like.
01:21:01 I mean, he walked in and he’s just bigger and more fit than anyone anywhere.
01:21:09 And it’s like, wow.
01:21:10 And when you saw him on television, he looked kind of little.
01:21:13 And I remember thinking, well, what do those other guys look like in person?
01:21:21 And he’s extraordinarily polite, young, I was surprised by how young he was.
01:21:32 Both in mind and body.
01:21:36 Chronologically, I was thinking he was in his early 20s, I believe.
01:21:42 But there seemed to be like an innocence to him in terms of just the way he saw the world.
01:21:46 I think that’s right.
01:21:47 They picked that up from the documentary, just taking that in.
01:21:50 I think that’s right, yeah, yeah.
01:21:53 So there is a Netflix documentary titled Killer Inside the Mind of Aaron Hernandez.
01:22:01 What are your thoughts on this documentary?
01:22:02 I don’t know if you’ve gotten a chance to see it.
01:22:04 I have not seen it.
01:22:05 I did not participate in it.
01:22:07 I know I was in it because there was news footage, but I did not participate in it.
01:22:13 I had not talked to Aaron about press or anything before he died.
01:22:22 My strong view is that the attorney client privilege survives death.
01:22:25 And so I was not inclined to talk about anything that Aaron and I talked about.
01:22:29 So I just didn’t participate and have never watched it.
01:22:34 Not even watch, huh?
01:22:36 Does that apply to most of your work, do you try to stay away from the way the press perceives
01:22:42 stuff?
01:22:43 Well, during, yes, I try to stay away from it.
01:22:46 I will view it afterwards.
01:22:48 I just hadn’t gotten around to watching Aaron, because it’s kind of sad.
01:22:53 So I just haven’t watched it.
01:22:55 But I definitely stay away from the press during trial.
01:23:00 And there are some lawyers who watch it religiously to see what’s going on, but I’m confident
01:23:06 in my years of training and so forth that I can actively sense what’s going on in the
01:23:15 courtroom and that I really don’t need advice from Joe476 at Gmail, some random guy on the
01:23:26 internet telling me how to try cases.
01:23:29 So to me, it’s just confusing and I just keep it out of my mind.
01:23:33 And even if you think you can ignore it, just reading it will have a little bit of an effect
01:23:38 on your mind.
01:23:39 I think that’s right.
01:23:40 Over time it might accumulate.
01:23:43 So the documentary, but in general, it mentioned or kind of emphasized and talked about Aaron’s
01:23:54 sexuality or sort of they were discussing basically the idea that he was a homosexual.
01:24:03 And some of the trauma, some of the suffering that he endured in his life had to do with
01:24:10 sort of fear given the society of what his father would think of what others around him
01:24:18 sort of, especially in sport culture and football and so on.
01:24:23 So I don’t know in your interaction with him was, do you think that maybe even leaning
01:24:31 up to a suicide, do you think his struggle with coming to terms with the sexuality had
01:24:38 a role to play in much of his difficulties?
01:24:43 Well I’m not going to talk about my interactions with them and anything I derived from that.
01:24:50 But what I will say is that a story broke on the radio at some point during the trial
01:25:04 that Aaron had been in the same sex relationship with someone and some local sportscasters,
01:25:11 local Boston sportscasters really mushroomed the story.
01:25:18 So he and everyone was aware of it.
01:25:25 You also may know from the court record that the prosecutors floated a specious theory
01:25:36 for a minute but then backed off of it that Aaron was, that there was some sort of I guess
01:25:43 gay rage at work with him and that might be a cause, a motive for the killing.
01:25:51 And luckily they really backed off of that.
01:25:54 That was quite an offensive claim in theory.
01:25:58 So but to answer your question more directly, I mean I have no idea why he killed himself.
01:26:04 It was a surprise and a shock.
01:26:08 I was scheduled to go see him like a couple days after it happened.
01:26:13 I mean he was anxious for Jose and I to come in and do the appeal from the murder which
01:26:22 he was convicted for.
01:26:23 He wanted us to take over that appeal.
01:26:27 He was talking about going back to football.
01:26:29 I mean he said, well you talk about this, earlier you talked about the sort of innocent
01:26:34 aspect of him.
01:26:35 He said, you know, well Ron, maybe not the Patriots but you know, I want to get back
01:26:40 in the league and I was like, you know, Aaron, that’s going to be tough, man.
01:26:47 But he really believed it and then for a few days later that to happen, it was a real shock
01:26:56 to me.
01:26:57 Like when you look back at that, at his story, does it make you sad?
01:27:04 Very.
01:27:05 Very.
01:27:06 I thought, so one, I believe he absolutely did not commit the crimes that we acquitted
01:27:16 him on.
01:27:17 I think that was the right answer for that.
01:27:23 I don’t know enough about Bradley, the first case, I’m sorry, to make an opinion on.
01:27:29 But in our case, it was just, he had the misfortune of having a famous name and the police department
01:27:39 just really got on him there.
01:27:44 So yes, I miss him a lot, it was very, very sad and surprising.
01:27:52 And I mean just on the human side, of course we don’t know the full story, but just everything
01:27:57 that led up to suicide, everything led up to an incredible professional football player,
01:28:04 you know, that whole story.
01:28:06 He was a remarkably talented athlete, remarkably talented athlete.
01:28:10 And it has to do with all the possible trajectories, right, that we can take through life, as we
01:28:16 were talking about before.
01:28:17 And some of them lead to suicide, sadly enough.
01:28:23 And it’s always tragic when you have somebody with great potential result in the things
01:28:34 that happen.
01:28:35 People love it when I ask about books.
01:28:37 I don’t know whether technical, like legal or fiction, nonfiction books throughout your
01:28:44 life have had an impact on you, if there’s something you could recommend or something
01:28:50 you could speak to about something that inspired ideas, insights about this complicated world
01:28:57 of ours.
01:28:58 Oh, wow.
01:28:59 Yeah, so I’ll give you a couple.
01:29:05 So one is Contingency, Irony and Solidarity by Richard Warty.
01:29:09 He’s passed away now, but was a philosopher at some of our major institutions, Princeton,
01:29:18 Stanford.
01:29:23 Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, at least that’s a book that really helped me work through
01:29:30 a series of thoughts.
01:29:31 So it stands for the proposition that our most deeply held beliefs are contingent, that
01:29:40 there’s nothing beyond history or prior to socialization that’s definatory of the human
01:29:48 being, that’s Warty.
01:29:50 And he says that our most deeply held beliefs are received wisdom and highly contingent
01:29:58 along a number of registers.
01:30:01 And he does that, but then goes on to say that he nonetheless can hold strongly held
01:30:10 beliefs, recognizing their contingency, but still believes them to be true and accurate.
01:30:15 He helps you to work through what could be an intellectual tension, other words, so you
01:30:23 don’t delve into, one doesn’t delve into relativism, everything is okay, but he gives
01:30:30 you a vocabulary to think about how to negotiate these realities.
01:30:38 Do you share this tension?
01:30:40 I mean, there is a real tension.
01:30:41 It seems like even the law, the legal system is all just a construct of our human ideas,
01:30:48 and yet it seems to be, almost feels fundamental to what a just society is.
01:30:57 Yeah, I definitely share the tension and love his vocabulary and the way he’s helped me
01:31:06 resolve the tension.
01:31:09 So right, I mean, yeah, so like, you know, infanticide, for example.
01:31:15 Perhaps it’s socially contingent, perhaps it’s received wisdom, perhaps it’s anthropological,
01:31:23 you know, we need to propagate the species, and I still think it’s wrong.
01:31:29 And Warty has helped me develop a category to say that, no, I can’t provide any, in
01:31:37 Warty’s words, noncircular theoretical backup for this proposition.
01:31:42 At some point, it’s going to run me into a circularity problem, but that’s okay.
01:31:48 I hold this nonetheless in full recognition of its contingency, but what it does is makes
01:31:54 you humble, and when you’re humble, that’s good because, you know, this notion that ideas
01:32:02 are always already in progress, never fully formed, I think is the sort of intellectual
01:32:10 I strive to be.
01:32:12 And if I have a sufficient degree of humility that I don’t have the final answer, capital
01:32:20 A, then that’s going to help me to get to better answers, lowercase a.
01:32:26 And Warty does that, and he talks about in the solidarity part of the book, he has this
01:32:33 concept of imaginative, the imaginative ability to see other different people as we instead
01:32:42 of they.
01:32:43 And I just think it’s a beautiful concept, but he talks about this imaginative ability
01:32:47 and it’s this active process.
01:32:49 So I mean, so that’s a book that’s done a lot of work for me over the years.
01:32:58 Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois was absolutely pivotal in my intellectual development.
01:33:06 One of the premier set of essays in the Western literary tradition, and it’s a deep and profound
01:33:18 sociological, philosophical, and historical analysis of the predicament of blacks in America
01:33:28 from one of our country’s greatest polymaths.
01:33:36 It’s a beautiful text and I go to it yearly.
01:33:40 So for somebody like me, so growing up in the Soviet Union, the struggle, the civil
01:33:46 rights movement, the struggle of race, and all those kinds of things that is, you know,
01:33:53 this universal, but it’s also very much a journey of the United States.
01:33:57 It was kind of a foreign thing that I stepped into.
01:34:00 Is that something you would recommend somebody like me to read, or is there other things
01:34:06 about race that are good to connect to?
01:34:11 My flavor of suffering injustice, I’m a Jew as well, my flavor has to do with World War
01:34:17 II and the studies of that, you know, all the injustices there.
01:34:20 So I’m now stepping into a new set of injustices and trying to learn the landscape.
01:34:27 I would say anyone is a better person for having read Du Bois.
01:34:35 He’s just a remarkable writer and thinker, and to the extent you’re interested in learning
01:34:42 another history, he does it in a way that is quite sophisticated.
01:34:49 So it’s interesting, I was going to give you three books.
01:34:54 I noted the accent when I met you, but I didn’t know exactly where you’re from.
01:35:00 But the other book I was going to say is Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and I mean, I’ve always
01:35:07 wanted to go to St. Pete’s just to sort of see with my own eyes what the word pictures
01:35:14 that Dostoevsky created in Crime and Punishment.
01:35:18 And you know, I love others of his stuff too, The Brothers Care, Masov, and so forth.
01:35:23 But Crime and Punishment I first read in high school as a junior or senior, and it is a
01:35:30 deep and profound meditation on both the meaning and the measure of our lives.
01:35:40 And Dostoevsky, obviously in conversation with other thinkers, really gets at the crux
01:35:53 of a fundamental philosophical problem, what does it mean to be a human being?
01:36:01 And for that, Crime and Punishment captured me as a teenager, and that’s another text
01:36:07 that I return to often.
01:36:10 We’ve talked about young people a little bit at the beginning of our conversation.
01:36:17 Is there advice that you could give to a young person today thinking about their career,
01:36:23 thinking about their life, thinking about making their way in this world?
01:36:28 Yeah, sure.
01:36:29 I’ll share some advice.
01:36:30 It actually picks up on a question we talked about earlier in the academy and schools.
01:36:36 But it’s some advice that a professor gave to me when I got to Harvard.
01:36:42 And it is this, that you have to be willing to come face to face with your intellectual
01:36:48 limitations and keep going.
01:36:52 And it’s hard for people, I mean, you mentioned this earlier, to face really difficult tasks,
01:37:01 and particularly in these sort of elite spaces where you’ve excelled all your life, and
01:37:05 you come to MIT and you’re like, wait a minute, I don’t understand this.
01:37:09 Wait, this is hard.
01:37:10 I’ve never had something really hard before.
01:37:14 And there are a couple options, and a lot of people will pull back and take the gentleman
01:37:19 or gentlewoman’s bee and just go on, or risk going out there, giving it your all, and still
01:37:28 not quite getting it.
01:37:29 And that’s a risk, but it’s a risk well worth it, because you’re just going to be the better
01:37:35 person, the better student for it.
01:37:38 And even outside of the academy, I mean, come face to face with your fears and keep going
01:37:45 and keep going in life, and you’re going to be the better person, the better human being.
01:37:51 Yeah, it does seem to be, I don’t know what it is, but it does seem to be that fear is
01:37:57 a good indicator of something you should probably face.
01:38:05 Fear kind of shows the way a little bit.
01:38:08 Not always.
01:38:09 You might not want to go into the cage with a lion, but maybe you should.
01:38:16 Maybe.
01:38:17 Let me ask sort of a darker question, because we’re talking about Dostoyevsky, we might
01:38:22 as well.
01:38:25 Do you, and connected to the freeing innocent people, do you think about mortality?
01:38:36 Do you think about your own death?
01:38:38 Are you afraid of death?
01:38:40 I’m not afraid of death.
01:38:42 I do think about it more now, because I’m now in my mid fifties, so I used to not think
01:38:48 about it much at all, but the harsh reality is that I’ve got more time behind me now
01:38:57 than I do in front of me, and it kind of happens all of a sudden, too.
01:39:01 You realize, wait a minute, I’m actually on the back nine now, so yeah, my mind moves
01:39:08 to it from time to time.
01:39:10 I don’t dwell on it.
01:39:11 I’m not afraid of it.
01:39:14 My own personal religious commitments, I’m Christian, and my religious commitments buoy
01:39:21 me that death, and I believe this, death is not the end, so I’m not afraid of it.
01:39:31 Now, this is not to say that I want to rush to the afterlife.
01:39:35 I’m good right here for a long time, and I hope I’ve got 30, 35, 40 more years to
01:39:42 go, but no, I don’t fear death.
01:39:50 We’re finite creatures.
01:39:52 We’re all gonna die.
01:39:53 Well, the mystery of it, you know, for somebody, at least for me, we human beings want to figure
01:40:01 everything out.
01:40:04 Whatever the afterlife is, there’s still a mystery to it.
01:40:08 That uncertainty can be terrifying if you ponder it, but maybe what you’re saying is
01:40:17 you haven’t pondered it too deeply so far, and it’s worked out pretty good.
01:40:21 It’s worked out, yeah, no complaints.
01:40:24 So you said, again, the Sejewski kind of was exceptionally good at getting to the core
01:40:32 of what it means to be human.
01:40:34 Do you think about, like, the why of why we’re here, the meaning of this whole existence?
01:40:41 Yeah, no, I do, I think, and I actually think that’s the purpose of an education.
01:40:50 What does it mean to be a human being?
01:40:51 And in one way or another, we set out to answer those questions, and we do it in a different
01:40:58 way.
01:40:59 I mean, some may look to philosophy to answer these questions.
01:41:07 Why is it in one’s personal interest to do good, to do justice?
01:41:17 Some may look at it through the economist lens.
01:41:22 Some may look at it through the microscope in the laboratory that the phenomenal world
01:41:32 is the meaning of life.
01:41:36 Others may say that that’s one vocabulary, that’s one description, but the poet describes
01:41:44 a reality to the same degree as a physicist, but that’s the purpose of an education.
01:41:51 It’s to sort of work through these issues.
01:41:53 What does it mean to be a human being?
01:41:59 And I think it’s a fascinating journey, and I think it’s a lifelong endeavor to figure
01:42:04 out what is the thing, that nugget, that makes us human.
01:42:09 Do you still see yourself as a student?
01:42:11 Of course.
01:42:12 Yes.
01:42:13 I mean, that’s the best part about going into university teaching.
01:42:19 You’re a lifelong student.
01:42:20 I’m always learning.
01:42:21 I learn from my students and with my students and my colleagues.
01:42:27 You continue to read and learn and modify opinions, and I think it’s just a wonderful
01:42:33 thing.
01:42:34 Well, Ron, I’m so glad that somebody like you is carrying the fire of what is the best
01:42:45 of Harvard.
01:42:46 It’s a huge honor that you would spend so much time, waste so much of your valuable
01:42:50 time with me.
01:42:51 I really appreciate that conversation.
01:42:52 Not a waste at all.
01:42:53 I think a lot of people love it.
01:42:55 Thank you so much for talking today.
01:42:56 Thank you.
01:42:58 Thanks for listening to this conversation with Ronald Sullivan, and thank you to Brooklyn
01:43:02 and Sheetz, Wine Access Online Wine Store, Monk Pack Low Carb Snacks, and Blinkist app
01:43:09 that summarizes books.
01:43:10 Click their links to support this podcast.
01:43:13 And now let me leave you with some words from Nelson Mandela, when a man is denied the right
01:43:18 to live the life he believes in, he has no choice but to become an outlaw.
01:43:25 Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.