YouSaid · the spoken record

Lawrence Lessig

lines on the record: 61
first: 2026-02-05
most recent: 2026-02-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“United. And that's the first big mistake. Citizens United has nothing to do with Super PACs. Citizens United was about the freedom to spend money independently of a campaign. Super PACs are the ability to contribute unlimited contributions to the committees that will then spend the money. And they were created months after Citizens United by a lower federal court decision called Speech Now versus FEC. And it was a kind of logical mistake that it's hard to see at the time, but easy to see in retrospect. The logical mistake was Judge Centel said if spending money independently creates no risk of corruption, then contributing money to a committee that will spend money independently also can't create a risk of corruption. Now that theory was proven false five years after that by my favorite Senator Robert Minister.”
2026-02-05 · On with Kara Swisher · How to Knock Out Super PACs with Lawrence Lessig · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and of course, that ties to all sorts of pardon pacts, its grossest kind of corruption, like way below the kind of corruption that I was really worried about 20 years ago. But the point to recognize is we will see the same super PAC stood up to address AI policy. Now, you know, AI is extremely complicated. I think it's the best of technology and the worst of technology or the most dangerous and the most potent. And so I think the one thing we should be able to agree on is we need the capacity to have sensible AI policy. But they're going to buy a Congress that basically is incapable of regulating if superbacs survive. So that's why I think this case is so critical. So in 2024, my group Equals Citizens was able to get a ballot initiative on the main ballot that basically said there would be no super PACs in Maine. Now people say, how is that possible? Didn't the Supreme Court create super PACs in citizens?”
2026-02-05 · On with Kara Swisher · How to Knock Out Super PACs with Lawrence Lessig · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Got rid of a US senator. They scared a bunch of people. They brought other people in, and they took a president who went from calling it a scam to like investing in his own meme coin”
2026-02-05 · On with Kara Swisher · How to Knock Out Super PACs with Lawrence Lessig · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We should recognize that we are extremely vulnerable to these tech super packs right now. I mean, we saw in the last election that in one election one super PAC was able to flip crypto policy from being, you know, it's not like it was great policy. It's not like the SEC is a great policy-making body, but from sensible policy to crazy policy in one election because they were able to...”
2026-02-05 · On with Kara Swisher · How to Knock Out Super PACs with Lawrence Lessig · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly. And so I think that what they saw was that there was an enormous opportunity to profit from basically giving in to the system as it's evolved. So I naively, like a year and a half ago, if you would ask me, like if you had some kind of authoritarian come in and make demands, these kinds of”
2026-02-05 · On with Kara Swisher · How to Knock Out Super PACs with Lawrence Lessig · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you know, I mean, I knew these people not well, not as well as you did, but I knew them 20 years ago. And I think to a person, they would have been repulsed by the current system that we have. Indeed, many of them talked about being able to build a world where they didn't depend on lobbyists. I mean, Microsoft famously. Refuse to have lobbyists because they thought this was, you know, we were above that. We could just make great”
2026-02-05 · On with Kara Swisher · How to Knock Out Super PACs with Lawrence Lessig · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On the integrity of your views. And it was that dependence corruption that I thought was the most important thing to find a way to address. Because if we didn't find a way to address that, then none of the major policies any of us care about could Congress address sensibly. So that was the original focus. It's not illegal corruption that is the problem. It's legal corruption.”
2026-02-05 · On with Kara Swisher · How to Knock Out Super PACs with Lawrence Lessig · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think the critical change, you know, that we've seen today kind of obscures what the problem looked like back then. Because I don't think at that time anybody was really thinking that major policy was driven by bribery. You know, it wasn't to kind of quid pro quo that stepped in and blocked people from doing the right thing. Instead, what was driving policy was this dependence. Like if you spend 30 to 70 percent of your time raising money, what that means is you become dependent on that tiny, tiny few who are giving you money. And indeed, when we look at Congress today and we see how weak and pathetic the institution is, is it any surprise that if you spend your whole career sucking up to people with power, you develop a kind of sycophancy. You develop the inability to act.”
2026-02-05 · On with Kara Swisher · How to Knock Out Super PACs with Lawrence Lessig · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Promised him I was going to give it up. And I announced I was going to take up this project of institutional corruption. And that's basically been my work the last 19 years.”
2026-02-05 · On with Kara Swisher · How to Knock Out Super PACs with Lawrence Lessig · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is it your field as a citizen? And I realized he had trapped me because I had no good reason. You know, I had tenure. I could work on whatever I wanted. And he was right. There was no way to think about sensible policy here as long as money was so central. And of course, it's almost quaint to think of how insignificant was relative to where we are today. But so long as money was so central, we weren't going to get sensible policy on those issues and not just those issues, you know, climate change, healthcare policy, tax policy, none of them. So that night, I...”
2026-02-05 · On with Kara Swisher · How to Knock Out Super PACs with Lawrence Lessig · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it happened at a very particular moment. It was around Christmas 2006, a mutual friend of ours, Aaron Schwartz, came to visit me in Berlin, and I was bragging to him about my latest copyright book, and I was going to make my first TED talk about copyright. And he said, so why do you think you're ever going to make any progress on copyright or internet policy so long as we have this deeply corrupted form of government? And I said to him, You know, it's not my field, Aaron. And he said, you mean as an academic? I said, yeah, as an academic. I do copyright policy and internet policy. And he said, well, what about as a citizen?”
2026-02-05 · On with Kara Swisher · How to Knock Out Super PACs with Lawrence Lessig · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT