we'll have more live coverage of the 2024 miami book fair after a short. walk us through how executive agencies of the federal government grew so big and became involved, such seemingly trivial things such as magic acts and orchid growth. yeah, well, you know, maybe when this started coming to my mind. i'm sitting on the 10th circuit in a federal court of case comes before from new mexico and my. seventh grader is training burps for laughs. now, you might have been guilty of that too. i probably was. and instead of to the principal's office, his parents being called. he was arrested and handcuffed. that's how we're dealing with these things today. and and get into why.

but what is the scope of the problem it's part of its administrative actions for sure. but it's on all levels. we're all guilty. it all right 100 years ago, the entire code could fit into one slim volume. today it occupies a whole wall in my office. all right. it's doubled in size since the 1980s. all right? that's my lifetime. many of you in this room, how many criminal laws are there on the books? nobody knows in the administration somebody sat down, try and read them all and count them, and they're just scattered throughout. they gave gave up, get estimated. 3000. right. today, it's probably double that. it's at least 5000. the criminal laws today on the federal level. what about regulatory output because really statutory is just

the tip of the iceberg using and busy did you know that on average they they they enact laws amounting to 2 to 3 million new words every year. okay federal regulatory output, many many times that 100 years ago the federal register, which is where they write their rules and publish them, was 16 pages long in year. it started recently. averages 60 to 70000 pages every single year. how many crimes are those regulations? truly, nobody the answer to that. but there are at least 300,000 of them. so that's of the scope of the growth of law in just really my lifetime since about 1970. there are more people serving a life sentences today in our prisons than there were serving any sentence in 1970. so one out of 47 americans is to

some form of correctional supervision. that's all new. that's not the new deal. that's our lifetimes. so that's what i wanted to really explore and write about and how it impacts our liberties, our institutions, and maybe even our respect for the law itself. right? what respect you have for something that you can't understand, that you can't comply with, that you didn't know about, is that different than respecting rules that you know intuitively are right? and yeah, and you lay a lot of this at the feet of woodrow wilson why well woodrow wilson did many great wonderful things but he also had great scepter system for our three branches of government government. he believed that kind of the matters ionian structure of our government you know, separation of powers. we have three branches supposed

be three third of americans can't name. 60% of americans are estimated that they would fail the citizenship exam that my wife took. it's not hard now filling out the paperwork to become a citizen is very hard. i know. i tried and it got sent back. all right, think about that. i'll never live that one down at home either. well at any rate, you know, woodrow wilson believed that ideal thing we should do is allow experts to govern us instead of right. and he his ideal was the prussian bureaucracy. now think, about that prussian bureaucracy as your model government. all right. and i don't doubt experts have, a very important role to play in

an increasingly complex world. they do. but one thing our founders knew is that no men are angels. none of is perfect. we all have our flaws and the way to deal with that is to counterbalance power against power. as madison it balance power against power and bring to bear all ideas. and in debate and discussion. and that there is more wisdom in this than in any single head. right might call it the wisdom of the masses we call it today. francis, who was a cousin of charles darwin, put it this way. he went to a county fair in england and there was a guess the weight of the ox contest, and he looked at all the guesses by the experts. and then he averaged up all guesses by the ordinary people and he found that the average of the guesses by the ordinary people was closer than any guess

the experts. and that's how our system of government was designed right was that we make our laws in the legislature where our representatives come together and they debate they disagree, hash it out and the best we trust will emerge from that process and. that's something that i think that woodrow wilson didn't value enough. he didn't to democracy and said we need a fourth branch of government or really in his mind, maybe one superior, your branch of government. and i again, i'm not here to second guess that we need expertise in our world, but there is another kind of wisdom that we can forget about to. and i think daniel halberstam put it maybe a way that we can all relate to is relating a story of lyndon johnson talking to sam rayburn, speaker of the house, the beginning of the kennedy administration and johnson's bragging on all of kennedy's appointees. they all went to harvard.

the phds, one's brighter than the next, and sam rayburn replies, yeah that's great, but i wish one of them, just one of them, had run for sheriff. so my question is, to what extent do you think that sanctions to what extent what i'm. oh, sorry. to what extent do you sanctions could have an intangible effect as opposed to a tangible either positively or negatively, for example, by undermining public support a regime, by making on the ground conditions a lot worse or on the other side possible, strengthening the regime's cause, a belligerent cause against our own interests and yes, just what are the intangible effects? maybe i'm not sure entirely your question, but i some of the programs we run for example, which seem in a way to me to run somewhat parallel the american foreign policy council, that we

run democracy promotion programs or, programs that encourage looking at broader political questions than ideological questions, these these are all to good. i'll taken but i suppose i'm a bit compromising in i've involved in quite a lot of republican institute projects and some their trips to talk about democracy and elections and all that the of the the the current president dan twining happens to be a good friend of mine and one of the characters i often invite as a guest lecturer by the way and so think there's a role certainly for what you call public which is not based at all on economics but based on trying teach other ways to think about how organize yourself or how you're run up political

party, how you run a campaign how how you do elections. i'm not sure if i touched at all on what you were asking. i yes, i think so. well, you know, so i think there's a very big role for, you know, for places the council to cause you to think more deeply and and and to look at what might be the real factors involved and why things happen the way they do. and there are sometimes there are economic, but sometimes as well. and to that point, you can when you talk about economics, sanctions, right, there is an outcome. iran is a perfect example where sanctions can be an economic success i mean, tactical success, but a strategic failure. right? they can they can draw down resources, but don't necessarily change the law. mark. right. of a country. right. and sort of what we've seen time, as you point out about. yeah, that's exactly right. and it and simply.

giving around $6 billion for five. i mean, some of this just boggles your mind that somehow you're going to change the iranian regime by handing out this chunk of money to them. i mean, is ridiculous. and so i agree. you can certainly generate some suffering in another country. but whether that results in change policies of the regime it seems like the kind of regimes want to punish are the ones least likely to suffer from our sanctions in the sense that the you know kim jong un lives pretty well. he drinks what he wants and eats whatever. obviously too much and and so also the iranian regime under the russian regime, all these regimes who the elites don't really care all that much was what their population slick and therefore it's obligatory on us

as we think about them and what motivates them to try to understand better and again, just at the risk of being a broken record, it's not always about economics. oh, it's it's not so you. thank you. thank you. yeah. just curious in. selecting your four pilots, are those based on life characters? and so how did you do the research them? they're all real life. okay, so it's history. yeah. so every bit of yours is all true story. yeah. yeah, that's so the trick is to take a true and make it sound like it was made up. so in other words, take these people who did such amazing things. amazing things that you and i could not comprehend doing and, then telling the story in such a way that people go, that never happened. you know, that guy never flew head on into a messerschmitt in a plane checking 5000 feet at 300 miles an hour. that never happen. all those things, if can do that and at the same time being true to their own written word, how

their own descriptions about what they did there and their own squadron logs about the events that took place. if you can take that fantasy experience and it something that the reader goes, no, it's all made up. that's that's magic. that's i'm doing my job. and then my last question, i'm sure perhaps a suggestion. have you ever thought about doing a children's series, something that makes it more powerful and all that? because what got you into was when you were a kid and i think that when you discuss boring history can be and how they it's a grind. i think that is true many children and so i've just i thought maybe you and that's no here's i think i, i yeah when i was a kid my dad will tell you i think he feared that i was just going to become one of those kids who never left the house and just read books the time because i was one of those kids you know i did little league and

all that kind of stuff. but that was book kid. but i don't have it. it really is a special skill to write children's, and i'm not saying that to be pandering. it really is you have to know how to tell a very, very broad story in a very limited number of words. but i go back to this this quest i'm on history is not boring, but most history books are boring history. the way history is taught in the school. it's history should be taught as if it was you know it was a big story. yeah. great. you know like something that people should go to history class saying what's going to happen today, you know, and they should leave. like i never believe that that's what real history is like and. i'm trying to write my books. i love when people say, oh, your book read like a movie. and and i will say i feel still some elements of a screenplay with with just with a with a kind of the opening of each chapter and stuff like that. but i want people to feel like

they're watching a visual even as they're reading about an actual in a physical experience while attending a recent judicial conference. supreme court justice elena kagan was asked about the books reading this summer here is a response. what are you reading these? you know, i came prepared because you asked that last year. you know, it'll be a tradition now. okay, cool. and i remember last year i gave you a couple fun books and then i gave you a law book. is that right? so i guess because i did that year, that's what i came prepared to do. so my fun books are if people are ann patchett fans, i just loved tom lake and and it's and you shouldn't read it you should listen to it like i never listen to fiction. i have this rule where i listen to non fiction and i read fiction just because i like sort of reading the words when i read fiction.

but the term like is the spoke about. it's a sort of summerstage of our town and the act. the young women and men actors in that production and what happens to them later in. it's a it's a terrific story but the the reason you should to it is because on audible version meryl streep it and it's it's stunningly good and it makes you realize like how good and audio of a book can be so that's one of the fun books that i've been reading at the start of the summer is there are these books called the thursday club, which about these octogenarians, a kind of elders community who solve murders their free time and and they're really fun and they're really very and in the books i think there are four of them. i know there are four of them,

and they're very human. human. one of them even made me cry, notwithstanding the fact that i told you it wasn't a crier. and and they're really okay. so here's my law book. last year i you to read this biography of felix frankfurter. and in this one, felix frankfurter plays a cameo role. but it's a book called the descent. and it's about how oliver wendell holmes that think this is the subtitle of the books like how one justice, which is oliver wendell holmes, changed his mind about speech. and it it it's basically a sort of history of how it is that oliver wendell holmes came to write great free speech dissent in v united states, which is the dissent that creates the whole marketplace ideas metaphor and which is the dissent that

becomes in the course of decades really truly the the basis of this the supreme court's first amendment jurisprudence. so one of those dissents that you can look at and say he was ahead of his time. but it but we understand that that's the basis of our first amendment law notwithstanding. it was a dissent. and it's a remarkable book. i mean, it's about a really interesting subject. know, thinking about free speech is pretty interesting, but but it's also about how justices change their mind. and oliver wendell holmes was 78 at the time. he about ready. he was thinking about leaving the court, although he had another 12 years to go, he had already been a judge for a long period of time. you would have thought like he kind of knew what he knew and thought what he thought and there wouldn't be all this room intellectual growth and. it's about how judges can find this room for, intellectual

growth and how they can their minds and and felix frankfurter, who was much than oliver wendell holmes and learned hand also much younger and and a non-lawyer a harvard politics professor named harold laski also much younger i mean 40 years younger then play important roles in bringing holmes the conclusion that he's gotten this fundamentally wrong, that he's going to sort of redo his thinking in this area and the it's just sort of like a fascinating history. and then, of course, the opinion and that holmes produces along with brandeis, is opinion. and there's a big cameo for brandeis here, you know, are such of judicial as well as judicial thought that the whole

is just fantastic. the great dissent book tv covered the great dissent in 2013, and you can watch on our video archive along with all our previous book events at book tv dot org. here's a portion of a recent program on book tv. in the 1960s, students began against the war, began by protesting on campus. but they very quickly understood that they needed to direct their energies towards the real sources of power power behind the vietnam war. and that was not the university. and so they protested front of corporations. they tried to stop dow chemical from producing napalm. they shut down wall street. one day they went to the state department, the white house, congress the media. those are the sources of power. and on top of that, the students in the sixties were there were

arrests as a badge of honor. they wanted to go to jail. that was the whole point. you know, i got a lot of friends in their seventies will bore me with their stories that night. you know, they spent on rikers island after smoking all the cigars, the president of columbia university, it's like they're playing with just the cigars. yeah, they had it's you know, it's like staying in your own and playing wiffle ball instead of going out and. so this i do not understand to begin with, given the structure of investment funds, it's impossible to divest from all the people want to divest from. it's just the nature the beast then then it seems to me the only thing that you can really do is cut off ties to israel. and if that's the case, you should be upfront about that saying what you want. but that's a question. how do two other old people read

this? well, well, i it's a difference in the attitudes. the generation, i think students look to us to solve problems in ways we did look to administrators to solve problems. i mean, they us and their parents as friends, as people who help them solve problems. so it doesn't surprise me that that's that focusing in on the administration and the most immediate people who are sort of parent like to them is what they do opposed to going outside of it. we just didn't we didn't expect administrator to be to solve our problems. we were antagonistic towards them. they're much i think much less really antagonistic to authority figures than than we were. so i think it's first of all, i think we if next year, if we have this panel on this subject, we should have someone younger than the three of us panel

because haven't seen of a generational view, but, you know, i don't actually blame the students for protesting. they're protesting. that's where they are that's you know, they're in school. that's where their friends are, you know, it's ultimately about performance and about raising as much as it is about anything else. and so it doesn't matter. and it's also not exclusive i mean, there have been many protests on streets here in new york at the same time as there were protests at nyu and at columbia and various other campuses. so i you know, you see atrocities going on and you stand up and you make your voice heard and you hope that that will bring some attention, some concern to the to the problem. i so i wouldn't criticize the students for where they're where their processes. i you know i do i do continue to study. you know david they're talking about gaza where people are

dying this is not time to go through a student ritual of protesting in the back yard and make sure making sure that your record is clean before you leave and can go on the investment job. if gaza really is the and not your and becoming yourself or performing or anything like that risks something i don't think that going out there are risks i think i mean they're boss i don't think fair i mean you know you you know so so you know what the students risk in during the vietnam they risked you know, being arrested for for engaging in civil disobedience. what did the students today risk? they risk getting arrested for civil disobedience, not a big risk. and point, but that's basically people risk. now, there were people like the underground who risked by murdering people and up bombs and things like that. but i don't think that's what you're suggesting. mark so, you know, i think i

think you're being a little harsh on the students. well, the other thing they risk to other thing that seems different then i keep my focus is not the sixties and the eighties is that, you know, people lost jobs. there are people who people wanted the names of law firms reject offers back. i mean you have people on the outside who are playing real hardball in a way that i if it happened i don't know i just don't know how many wall street how many firms and other places rescinded job offers from people had been parts of organizations may some organizations signed something or made some statement if you were just in it you could possibly lose your job. so these are people who are, you know, carrying huge amounts of debt for law school, two or $300,000, and then all of a sudden your job that was going to help you pay that back disappears. so i, i do they risk some things

you can watch the rest of this program and all of our book programs any time online at book tv dot org. here's a portion of a recent program booktv. they, by and large, are people who have encounters and then just go on with their lives and it's a much more to me phenomenon on because of them have no reason to report the encounter that they have. and actually a lot of reason that you would not want to report the encounters these people have and some of them are abductions. but then you also have there's there's one sort of particularly to me credible witness that i talk about in the book who who's a policeman in socorro, new

mexico, in 1964. his name is lonnie. and he's a small town cop chasing a speeder in the desert on the road, out into the desert. he knows who the speeder is, you know, a good small town cop. so he knows it's like the kid that he normally has lot of trouble with. he hears an explosion in the desert and sees what he thinks is a ouverture turned white car off the desert. so he abandons his pursuit. he knows he can show up at that house later and get him and. and he sort of turns his pontiac cruiser off and is like bumping up and down through the gullies towards overturned car. there are two figures standing outside of it. and as he gets closer, they get into the craft. he describes a sort of football

shaped as he gets closer and the craft takes off and something to lonnie zamora in, that desert. there is a new mexico trooper who shows up on the scene within a couple of minutes. see lonnie zamora sort of shaken, upset by whatever this encounter is that he has had. there's some circumstantial evidence that the military and the fbi response and to the scene at and find marks in the desert where the craft aid craft sat or appeared to have sat where lonnie zamora said that it was and that he is considered be by the government investigators sort of one of the most credible witnesses that we have in part because he has reason to make up this story and then just goes on

with the rest of his life and never another, you encounter or experience to report. you can watch rest of this program and all of our book programs any time online book tv dot org. here's a portion of a recent program on booktv. we were trying to do something full face mask that moved that you could stand up here on the stage and i could brief you and you would not know that i had on a mask. now i know you're thinking she's going take it off now, right? she's. and i wish that were true, but my mask was in a cardboard box in the archives, the basement of cia headquarters. it's turning green. it's of no use to anyone. so it also had to be fast on and fast off. you had to be able put it on in the dark in a in a a parking lot with no lights and no mirror. and then somebody was you you

had to be able to take it off. squish it down into nothing. and put it in your armpit. these were the design. it took us almost ten years to come up with the first one. the first one turned me into an african-american man. i looked pretty good. i gloves. i had a suit and tie. i mean, i looked all right. so i went into my office. director to him, and he said, oh, my. this is just so good. so good, so good. so we went and showed it to the director of the cia. he liked it. and he said, we're going to take you to the white house? and i said, hold. whoa, whoa. i can't walk into the white house pretending to be a man. i mean, this looks great. yes, but but secret service, give 30 seconds with me and they're going to arrest me. so i said, let's let's just make me another woman. and that's what we ended up doing and we did take it to the

white house, took it to white house when george h.w. bush was the president. i wore the mask, his office. the names that's judge webster on the far right. the beige coat is sununu. the next one is bob gates. the next one is brant scowcroft. and, of course, george h.w. i talked to the president folder of pictures of him in disguise because we had done stuff with him. he had been the director of the cia. i said, but oh, wait till you see what we've got now. and he's looking around. chair like for a bag. i said, i'm wearing it. so i'm just to just take it off and show it to you. and he said, don't take it off yet. and he got up. he came over, he walked around. he's looking. he didn't even know what he was looking for. he was just looking hard. couldn't see anything. said back down. he. okay, take it off. so i did that