Would you mind for our audience just saying a bit about the love story, about what it was you saw at Chicago in those days before we dive into the more conceptual questions?

Sure.

So as a young Harvard grad, I went to Chicago and there was Richard Posner, who was awe-inspiring and definitely right of center.

and a law and economics kind of guy who was skeptical about rent control and maximum hour laws and didn't much like an active Supreme Court.

And left of center shibboleths were to him, you know, embarrassing and kind of...

Then there was Richard Epstein, who was like a volcano, and he was a libertarian.

He was as quick of mind as I had ever encountered.

What's the role for administrators in all of this?

So what would escaping the product trap actually look like in the case of social media? Is it design changes, regulatory changes, or just good old self-discipline?

Self-discipline's tough, isn't it? So if everyone in your group has a party, let's say on a Thursday night, and you think, "I wish there weren't a party, but if there's gonna be a party, I don't wanna look to my friends like someone who doesn't like them or don't like parties." And it's really hard for individuals to solve this.

Um, what has been done in Australia is there's a law, and the law was responsive in part to the data showing that young people would like to get off.

And if there's a law that says you're not supposed to be on, the hope is that people will just get off.

Or you can try s- self-help, where it's groups rather than individuals.

So parents can say, "We're going to be a group.

Let's say we're the, uh, Only 16 Club," and that means people who are under the 16, our kids aren't going to get cell phones, or they're gonna have time limits, or they're not gonna be on.

Mm.

You can either choose one that exists or describe one that has not yet been written.

Uh, it's Possession by A.S. Byatt, which is my favorite novel e-ever, and I've read it six times, but I'd love to read it a seventh time.

It has all the world in it, heightened, the best romance you could imagine, a lot about aspirations and connections and missed connections and reconnections and what matters most in human life.

Mm.

Um, Possession creates a fever, I think, for those who are receptive to it.

And I think something, The Time Traveler's Wife is more like a book I was waiting for, and I really love it, and I'm thrilled it, by its existence.

Forgive me, uh, Andre Nickenburger, your book is fantastic, but Possession is the one I choose.

But was Cass' hypothesis right? Well, researchers recruited a new group of participants and asked them a different willingness to pay question.

How much would you demand to be off contingent on everyone in your community being off? That's the product trap question, and what they found was if you ask people how much would you demand to be off, you got the standard answers, as in my study.

So people say, "I will require you to pay a lot to be off these platforms," in this case TikTok and Instagram.

$50, $60, $70, $100.

People are gonna demand real money to be off.

But then if people, and these are college students, are asked how much would you demand to be off contingent on everyone in your community being off, then they say, "If everyone in the community is off, then I will pay you.

You don't have to pay me a nickel." That's the dominant sentiment.

So given that most people aren't leaving these platforms anytime soon, how do we break free? Cass says that behavioral science suggests at least three different paths forward.

What are the kind of things that would go on in the head of an average individual while making a choice? Okay,

it's useful to think, and this is an idea that's been pioneered in social science and publicized by Daniel Kahneman and Dick Thaler and I do a lot with it.

It's useful to think that there are two families of thinking in the human mind.

Let's call them system one and system two.

And system one is intuitive and automatic, sometimes emotional and really rapid.

System two is more deliberative and reflective.

It assesses things in a more conscientious way, and it's slower.

So first, tell me about the idea of nudge and how that influences decision making overall.

In plain terms, what does separation of power actually mean, and what does it do for ordinary people?

Let's get at the six, shall we? Courts can't make law, and that, for ordinary people, means that we get to govern ourselves, and that people with life tenure and guarantees of independence, they don't tell us what the law is.

So courts can't make law.

That ensures a kind of capacity for self-government.

Second, courts can't execute the laws.

That's extremely important because we have an executor of the laws, that is the executive branch, which has incentives and safeguards if things are working well, and independence, which means if the judge is mad at you, the judge can't go putting you in jail.

There's a separation between lawmaking and execution of the laws.

If separation of powers slows things down, what's the danger of speeding things up?

[laughing]

-do that, but it is my book, so I ought to.

Uh, courts can't exercise legislative authority, no lawmaking, and that's associated, let's say, with elections, and that's really fundamental.

We don't want our judges-- Some people like powerful judges, some people less so, but whatever you like, you ought not to want them to be able to execute the laws or to make the laws.

So that's two.

The Congress can't execute the laws, and that's really fundamental because Congress might make a law, and then the executive might say, "Okay, people who violated or arguably violated aren't going to be arrested." And that's a safeguard of freedom, that we need two branches to get together to decide that people will be arrested.

The legislature can't interpret the law, or at least it's not the fundamental authority on the meaning of law.

Right.

So if I ask myself, "How brutal does immigration policy have to get in the bulldozer kind of sense to stop that from happening?" what is your answer?

I worked with Republicans a bit in Washington and the sentence that we agreed was the right one was "lawful pathways." So that has one implication, which is if people wanna come in and do work, and let's s- start with waiters, seafood processing in Alaska, various forms of-...

construction work and they wanna come in and there aren't American workers there who will do the jobs, this is a fantastic thing.

It's a fantastic thing for America and it's a fantastic thing for those people.

We actually have a program called H-2B, which both the right and the left have been enthusiastic about.

Maybe more the right than the left.

But the Biden administration went big on H-2B.

How is it you think about or characterize the liberalism of Bob Dylan?

What will all of that additional data enable AI to do?

Well, we should note that there's a good side of this.

So if AI knows that what you're really interested in are books about behavioral economics and Labrador retrievers, and you're not really interested in books about particle physics or about Chihuahuas, then you can get information that is relevant to your interests or maybe offerings that are connected with your......

both side life.

So there's a, a good side to it.

If AI knows that certain people, let's say, have self-control problems, that they are addictive personalities, or that they are reckless purchasers, then AI can really get resources from them and maybe put their economic situation into a very bad state.

If AI knows that certain people are very parsimonious and they don't really wanna spend much money and they are very careful, AI might know that people like that are vulnerable only to this, and then it can work on you.

Can you give some examples?

Do you think there are values that underpin illiberal thinking in, in some of these authoritarian societies? Like, what is the philosophical basis for illiberalism or autocracy or, or whatever you wanna call it?

That's such a great question.

So for many, there's one word, and it's order.

Um, Roosevelt said during World War and Hitler's rise, he said, "They call it a new order.

It is not new, and it is not order." But there's in every human soul, I think, an appreciation at least of the value of order in the face of fear.1984 Orwell's, uh, great novel of-- great liberal novel of liberalism.

I reread it recently, and what makes it so powerful is that Orwell was actually in his soul ambivalent.

It, uh, he ultimately came out, of course, on the liberal side, but the appeal of Big Brother, it's manifest on the page, and it's order and submission.

How much of the rise of, of post liberalism do you prescribe to the rise of social media and our... or in just in general, beyond that, just our shifting media and information environment? Like, has, has the-- Is the way that we interact with one an-another and get information, has that highlighted a specific illiberal impulse that was always there, or did it perhaps destroy something or weaken something that was holding up our liberal democracy? What, what do you think about that?

Why do you think that that doesn't cut the mustard? In what ways is that blaming, uh, you know, any worrying aspect of our society for liberalism, um, without liberalism actually being the cause of it?

Yeah.

Th- thank you.

That was beautifully put, and that I think is a worthy, uh, set of objections to something, whether it's a set of objections to liberalism is a different point, but let's, let's talk about it.

So I think it has two forms.

One is, let's say secularism as a thing, where if there's, you know, uh, contempt for or a lack of, uh, respect for religious activity and religious persons, um...That's occasionally real in Western nations, and it's horrible and illiberal.

So the objection to, uh, shutting down religious, uh, practices in the midst of COVID or to singling out religious practices for, uh, regulation that similar, uh, gatherings were facing, that's a liberal objection.

But, but to start more broadly, you know, now that we've defined the negative space, now we've seen, uh, what liberalism isn't and where some of the boundaries are, why some of it's, the critiques of liberalism are wrong, uh, what is the affirmative sort of description of what this tradition actually consists of?

A certain kind of classical liberal doesn't want to include FDR.

Yeah, that's helpful, so thank you for that.

So there are people on the left who associate liberalism with progressivism, and there's nothing wrong with that.

That's just a, a definition.

So we might say that there's American liberalism, which Barack Obama was part of, and then there's American conservatism, which Ronald Reagan is part of, and that's not exactly wrong.

That's one way to see the world.

Or you could think that there are, uh, people who are liberal in the historical sense who like free markets and who are, uh, classical liberals, as you say, like Friedrich Hayek, who won a Nobel Prize, and they think government regulation is terrible, terrible, terrible, and so are high taxes, and that's liberalism, and progressives are, on that, uh, definition, illiberal.

How, how easy is it to say, "Okay, we can disagree about all these things, but we can still agree that we should live in a liberal democratic society"?

Anyway, I'm sorry, go on.

Yeah, no, completely right.

But it's important to see that notions of liberality...

George Washington used that word in a way that connected with the old tradition.

And you can almost get it even now in 2025, almost 2026, the notion of being... having a liberal disposition.

You can kind of politicize that in a way, but it might mean, you know, you're committed to your community and, uh, you know, you might think Christ was a liberal God or son of God or whatever your preferred formulation.

And that was used by preachers about Christianity.

Mm-hmm.