Top Criminal Lawyer: How Much Freedom Should We Sacrifice for Safety?

It's been an interesting, controversial life. I've represented probably 300 people charged with crimes ranging from murder to you name it. Probably more than half of them have been guilty. And any lawyer who tells you that he only represents the innocent is not telling you the truth. Live in a democracy and you're a lawyer, you're gonna end up providing defense help for guilty people. I defend them as they should be defended. Do I feel good when I get somebody off who I know was guilty? No, but occasionally when you lose a case involving somebody who you think is innocent, that's the worst feeling. Our guest today is Alan Dershowitz, a renowned constitutional lawyer and Harvard professor. In his career, Dershowitz has represented some of the most controversial and prominent clients in American legal history, such as OJ Simpson, Julian Assange, Jeffrey Epstein, as well as Mike Tyson, Nelson Mandela, and Donald Trump. He's recognized as one of the top 10 most famous lawyers in the history of the United States. Today we sit down with Alan to talk about his book, The Preventive State, and the wide range of topics, such as speech censorship, the release of Eden Alexander, a lifting of Syria sanctions, Steve Woodcock's negotiating skills, what preventive measures are all about, and how a criminal lawyer balances morality for defending a client. This is Bay Renovators, and I'm your host, Steve Euspas. Mr. Dershowitz, welcome to our program. Thank you for having me. Well, great to have you here. So I want to start, you're probably the best known criminal lawyer in the world. And I've seen some reports and stats that you are ranked seventh lawyer of all time in the U.S. So with that in mind, and with your new book, that it's your most prominent book, Preventive State, I want to start with the age old question about preventing crime before it happens. And what is the cost when we take care of the bad guys? What is the cost for the good guys? How much do we have to infringe of the liberties of the good guys to take care of the bad guys? So give us a sense. Every legal system, every religious system, every cultural system asks the same question. What if we know that somebody is likely to harm somebody else, but we don't know it for sure? What steps can we take? The Bible talks about a child, a recalcitrant child who might commit crimes in the future and take steps to do that. In the Bible, we have people who are contagiously sick and we put them in isolation. That's designed to prevent. So we've always throughout our history tried to balance preventing harms against going after innocent people and confining them or punishing them. The stakes have gotten much higher now because both the harms are greater, nuclear proliferation, environmental harms, medical issues, violence, terrorism, you name it. And so the harms are great, but our ability to predict is also increased. So at the same time that we have greater harms to prevent, we have a greater ability to predict and prevent those harms, but we're still not perfect. So we're always asking the question, how many false positives, that is, how many people who we erroneously identify as people who are going to do terrible things, how many of those are we prepared to tolerate in order to prevent? How many false negatives? That is, failure to prevent. For example, if we could have prevented 9-11 by locking up six people for a few months, probably we would have done it. Or if Israel could have prevented October 7th by bombing a camp that may have had some innocent people, they would probably do it. But take the issue and make it even bigger. If France and England could have prevented the rise of Nazi Germany in 1935 by attacking the beginnings of the Nazi regime, they would have prevented 50 million deaths, but that would have been at a great cost. So balancing the need to prevent based on predictions against the need not to confine innocent people is the thrust of this book and why after 60 years of practicing criminal law, I wrote this book, which I think is the most important one. I've ever written. I try to provide an answer to this age old problem by constructing a jurisprudence. We all know that when it comes to punishing crimes, we say it's better for 10 guilty to go free than for even one innocent to be wrongly confined, but we don't have a similar ratio. Is it better for 10 terrorist acts to not be prevented than for one non-terrorist act to be prevented or based on false information? Those are the ratios that we're thinking about and that's the thrust of my book and it has contemporary relevance. Should the United States, Israel or anybody else bomb Tehran, Iran in order to prevent them from developing nuclear weapons? Should we be deporting people who are criminals in order to prevent them from committing crimes? These are questions that we confront every day. During the COVID crisis, we made people wear masks and stay at home in order to prevent the spread of the disease. Did we overdo it? These are the kinds of questions that I address in my book, The Preventive State and so I think people will find it interesting because it's both historical, philosophical, but also very, very contemporary. Can you give us some examples of some of the answers you came up with? Being terrorist acts, being COVID, being technology, AI and things like that. Sure. One issue that I face is what if we could prevent the terrorist attack by torturing somebody? Started out with torturing a guilty person and getting him to tell us where they planted the nuclear bomb that will kill a thousand people, but what if we couldn't get the information from him and the only way to get the information from the guilty person is to also torture his innocent child? Would we be willing to torture an innocent child in order to prevent the death of so many innocent people? Dostoevsky asks that question in his book, The Brothers Karamazov and it's a question that we've asked from the beginning of time. It's just that in every generation, the problem manifests itself in different ways, nuclear attacks, biological attacks, but the problem is still the same. What are we prepared to do in order to prevent cataclysmic events that might very well endanger the lives of hundreds or even thousands of people? I know you give an example and it's something I run into almost every single time. If you think it's gonna rain and you bring an umbrella, it's most likely not gonna rain and I tested it many times. It doesn't rain when I bring the umbrella or 90% of the time it doesn't. If that one time I don't bring it, then it rains. So it seems that there's something behind the scenes. There's some psychological factor that is involved in this and the more prepared you are, the more the result that doesn't happen, that you wish it doesn't happen. Do you see that? It appears that way. Actually, whether you bring the umbrella or not, empirically, it has nothing to do with whether it will rain or not. It will just appear not to rain if you bring the umbrella because you'll have noticed it. You try to translate that into something a lot more serious. If you arrest this terrorist, maybe it's the wrong person. We now have that going on with the people who are being deported back to El Salvador or to other countries. How many of them would actually commit crimes? We're not sure. If you let them stay in the country and they commit crimes, that's very visible and everybody will say, oh my God, why did you let them stay in the country? And we see this every day because people are being arrested who should have been deported. But what we don't see is how many people who have been deported would never have committed those crimes. So these are real issues that we have to confront every day and the more a country is inclined to a democracy, the more it's willing to make mistakes that don't involve falsely accusing people and the more a country moves toward tyranny, the more it's likely to make mistakes of over-inclusiveness, of arresting people, confining people, even killing people, executing them when they would not have committed the crime. So how a nation deals with the problems of the preventive state and prediction is a good gauge as to how democratic and how much it complies with the rule of law. So these are issues that confront us every day. Until recently, they have been invisible issues. We haven't written about it. The preventive state is really the first book to systematically look at the issue of prevention and prediction and ask the hard questions about whether or not we're going too far or not far enough in preventing these kinds of very serious crimes. I know in the book, you give an example, which I actually really liked, about how Democrats, for example, are very strict with COVID restrictions but not strict with immigration restrictions. Republicans are exactly the opposite. They both have, you know, there's like, this is important to me, but this is not. And the other one has the opposite effect. So I see that point in your book and I think you hit it right on the nail. Any thoughts on that? The problem is we see everything today politically in a partisan way. You know, if Trump's for it, it must be bad. If AOC is for it, it must be bad or the opposite. And this book doesn't mention Democrats or Republicans except in passing or Trump or anything like that. It tries to create a conceptual framework, an analysis of how we can look at this issue objectively, neutrally, and without politics. But you're absolutely right that today we do look at things. We're willing to make more mistakes in certain ways than others, depending on whether you're a liberal or conservative or a Democrat or a Republican, yeah. Tell us a bit about Eden Alexander. I understand you met with his family before his release. Tell us your thoughts about his release and what that means for Israel and for the US. Well, it's just one person. It's every life saved. The Talmud says if you save a single human life, it's as if you've saved the whole world. I know I had people, relatives of mine who were killed in the Holocaust if they had remained alive. Today they might have 100 descendants. I have an aunt today, my aunt Shirley, who's 99 years old. She has 100 descendants. She could easily have been killed in the Holocaust if she had lived in Europe and none of those people would be alive today. So every single life is so precious and so dear and so valuable. And I'm so glad that this young man has been freed, but there are 20 or so others who are equally innocent. They're not Americans, so they don't get as much attention, but they deserve as much attention and everything should be done to free them and release them. And at the same time, we have to make sure that we don't see a repetition of what happened on October 7th. Hamas has said over and over again, we will do it again. Every day is October 7th. We will have more October 7th. So we need to take preventive measures. And what's going on in Gaza today is a preventive measure. These people are not being killed because of what they did in the past. They're being killed because of the fear of what they will do in the future. Now, there's obviously a relationship. People who have done it in the past are more likely to do it in the future. But most wars are fought preventively. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, they claimed they did it to make sure that the United States Army and Air Force didn't attack Tokyo. We see a lot of war efforts and other actions taken in the name of prevention. And we have to make sure that prevention is not abused to achieve other results. So I'm very glad that we saw the release of one hostage, but I won't be satisfied until every hostage is rescued and until steps are taken by the international community never to recognize terrorists and people who kidnap and rape other people as legitimate freedom fighters. They are not. They are murderers, rapists, and people who should be universally condemned, even if their goals are something you might achieve. There's a big difference between goals and the means used to achieve them. Also on current news, Trump, I think today, this morning, talked about lifting sanctions on Syria to give him a chance to become better. Your thoughts on that? I think it's a good idea. I think you give every country an opportunity to turn around. A lot of people thought that when Assad became the head of Syria, he would change, be better than his father, and he wasn't. Now he's living in Russia or somewhere in the East. The Syrian people are wonderful, just like the Iranian people are wonderful, and the Palestinian people are wonderful. The people who live in Gaza, many of them are in the West Bank, are great people. The question is usually their leadership. Hamas is what created the problem in Gaza, and Iran is what created the problem for Hezbollah and the problem with the Houthis, and so it's the mullahs. And I think what's necessary for the world is regime change in Iran. I think we need a new government based on democratic principles, not based on religious compulsion. Are we gonna get that? I don't know. A lot of it will be up to Trump. If Trump disarms Iran and takes away all of their nuclear capacity, then that country becomes a far less dangerous place. But if they can still develop surreptitiously nuclear weapons in the name of developing civilian nuclear reactors, the world's gonna be a far less safe place. What do you think is the best solution for disarming Iran? There's been different ideas being brought up, including an internal movement to topple the government. What are your thoughts on that? Well, I'd love to see the government toppled. I'd love to see democracy prevail in Iran. The vast majority of people in Iran don't support the mullahs and would like to see regime change. But this administration in Washington is very reluctant to bring about regime change. So I think the first step is to make sure that Iran never develops nuclear weapons. There are two ways of doing that. One is to threaten and to say that within six weeks, if you don't dismantle all of your nuclear facilities, civilian and military, every single one of them, we know where they are. Intelligence has discovered where they are. And unless you dismantle every single one of them, the only other option would be for the United States, for Israel, for any other countries to come in and destroy them. I hope it's not necessary to use military action. I hope that Iran would on their own do what Libya did back in 2003 and give up their nuclear program, what South Africa did, what Ukraine did, what other countries in the world have done. But I don't see that happening. So I do think that in the end, military action may be a necessary evil to prevent even more deaths. Speaking of that, Steve Woodcock, the special envoy to the Middle East, he's a negotiator, but his background is not diplomacy. I wonder your thoughts on that. How is that working out? I had breakfast with Steve about a week ago. He's brilliant. He's a terrific negotiator and a very quick learner. So he knows a great deal about what's going on in all of the areas that he's playing a role in. He's playing a role in many areas. He's very trusted by President Trump. He's playing a role in the Iran negotiations, playing a role in the Gaza negotiations, and he's behind the scenes playing other roles as well. So, and he picks good people. He's asked me to advise him on some issues, and I, of course, agreed to do that. And I plan to meet with him in Washington over the next few weeks after he comes back. And I hope he will be able to achieve the goals of this administration, which is an Iran without any nuclear weapons, a return of the hostages, and some kind of peace in Gaza without Hamas in charge. So I have a lot of faith and trust in Steve Whitcock. I wanna go back to your book for a second and your thoughts on, let's take the example of World War II and how you mentioned 1935, France and England could have attacked Germany. But if they did, people might have said, well, you know, Germany was developing great, would have been a great nation. You attacked them, you destroyed everything. We would have never known what would have happened and France and England would have been criticized. So- That's the thesis of my whole book, is that history is blind, deaf, and dumb to the future. It just doesn't know what the future will do. It only knows about the present and about the past. And so we make lots of mistakes because we don't know the future. In the Germany case, if France and England had known that Hitler would develop into a genocidal monster, they would have taken action and they would have destroyed Nazi regime. But instead they thought Germany would be a great country. Look, Harvard welcomed German diplomats and they sent Harvard professors to celebrate the anniversary of the opening of British universities, which had already started to discriminate against Jews. And so there were all kinds of indicia that Germany would develop into a terrible country, but we didn't know for sure. And so if there had been an attack, Britain and France would have been regarded as warmongers because maybe five or 10,000 people would have been killed and nobody would know that 15 million lives would have been saved. And the same thing is true with Iran. If there is to be the bombing of Iran's nuclear reactors, there will probably be some people killed. They're pretty far out of the city, so the casualties would be pretty low. But what we wouldn't know is how many lives we saved because if Iran gets a nuclear weapon, Rafsanjani, the former head of Iran, has already said if they dropped it on Tel Aviv, it would be the end of Israel because Israel is a one-bomb state. One bomb will destroy Israel. And then Israel would retaliate and drop bombs on Tehran. I don't know if they would, but that's what he said, and kill 10 million people. And he said the trade-off would be worth it because it would mean the end of the Jewish state and Islam would still survive. And when you have a president of a country saying things like that, you just can't let them develop nuclear weapons. You have to act preventively, and that's the Begin Doctrine. And in my book, The Preventive State, I have a chapter on the Begin Doctrine. Begin said, look, we can't ever deter Iran from using nuclear weapons. We can only prevent them from getting them. And that's what he did. He went in and he prevented them, and that was very positive. So preventive measures can sometimes be very good. On the other hand, they also have a chapter on freedom of speech. Censorship is often based on prevention. We have to censor this speech because if we don't, it will cause violence. And the First Amendment to the Constitution says, no, you can't do that unless the threat of violence is imminent, unless it's a clear and present danger. And actually, the test now is even tougher than that. It has to be an imminent incitement to violence. So what we do when it comes to free speech, we err on the side of permitting potential violence in order to protect speech. When it comes to other areas, we are on the side of protecting society. And so in every situation, there's a different calculus. And in my book, The Preventive State, I try hard to lay out all the scenarios, all the possible scenarios, ranging from deportation to quarantine medically, to environmental damage, to denying people bail pending trial, to wars and fights against terrorism. I try to cover as many things as possible. And I got a wonderful little preview of the book by the former president of Harvard, Larry Summers. Here's what he said. He said, no one but Alan Dershowitz would seek to bring a common mode of thought to issues as diverse as bail, climate change, and terrorism. And he's right. I do try to bring to bear an analysis that covers all of those issues as disparate as they may seem. They all share the common thread of their based on predictions and efforts to prevent serious harms and making sure that we don't err on the side of too much intervention. Now, you mentioned Harvard, and I wanna ask you about Harvard. Obviously, there's been some friction there. There's funds being canceled and grants. What are your thoughts? What's happening with Harvard and how is this gonna end up, you think? Well, in 1991, I wrote a book called Chutzpah, in which I predicted that we would see increasing antisemitism on college campuses. And we would see college students and faculty moving way, way, way far to the left. And that prediction has come true. And so university campuses have become hotbeds of bigotry, anti-Americanism, anti-Christianity, anti-Judaism, and schools have been too tolerant and too permissive. Now, teachers have academic freedom outside the classroom. They do not have academic freedom inside the classroom. No teacher should be allowed to express personal views on controversial issues in the classroom. I taught at Harvard for 50 years. I had 10,000 students. Never once did I express a political or personal view inside the classroom. If you wanna know what my views are, read my op-eds or come and hear me make a speech. But the classroom is sacred. And that classroom sacredness has been abused largely by the left, which have used the podium that they've been given in order to propagandize students and teach them to be anti-American and anti-Semitic. And we've seen the spread. And if the universities can't deal with that, then the federal government has to come and do something about it. For me, the analogy is to 1955, when I was a college student, and schools in the South were allowing the Ku Klux Klan to come on campus and to wear masks and to terrorize black students. And they were allowing white teachers to teach white supremacy in the classroom. And all of us liberals would have been happy to have the federal government come in and impose restrictions on that kind of misuse of academic freedom. And I think the same rule should apply. You can't have one rule for bias and bigotry against blacks and a different rule for bias and bigotry against Jews. Absolutely. I have to ask you this. You're a criminal lawyer, again, probably the most renowned in the world. How do you deal, you have different cases. I may go to some of your most famous cases. But how do you balance your inside moral values with a case? Because you may deal with someone who is innocent, someone who did not commit a big crime, but someone who may have committed a big crime. And then you have to defend them the same. How do you balance in your mind that what could be a dilemma? It's the hardest moral and emotional question. I've represented probably, I don't know, 300 people charged with crimes ranging from murder to you name it. And probably more than half of them have been guilty. I never know that for sure, but I have my strong suspicions. And I think of myself like a doctor in the emergency ward. Both of my grandchildren are doctors. And when they get a patient wheeled into the ward, they don't ask you if you're guilty or innocent. They just ask you if you're sick or you're not sick. And they treat everybody. They treat terrorists, they treat mafia members, they treat spousal abusers. The same thing would be true of a priest or a rabbi or an imam. When people come to you for religious solace, you treat the guilty as well as the innocent. I'm a criminal lawyer. And for the criminal justice system to work, you have to defend the guilty along with the innocent. That starts in the Bible with Abraham defending the sinners of Saddam. It continues to the pre-revolutionary era in the United States when John Adams defended those who were certainly guilty of being part of the Boston Massacre. Abraham Lincoln defended guilty people. And all great lawyers, I appreciate people ranking me among them, but I'm not making any such claims. But all great lawyers have to defend the guilty along with the innocent. And any lawyer who tells you that he only represents the innocent is not telling you the truth. Our system is important because the vast majority of people who are charged with crime in America are guilty. Thank God for that. Would you wanna live in a country where the majority of people charged with crime were innocent? You know, that's Iran, that's China, but it's not the United States of America or Canada or Israel or England. And if you live in a democracy and you're a lawyer, you're gonna end up providing defense help for guilty people. Now, I would never ever say that a person who I knew was guilty was innocent. That's not the argument I would make. I would argue about the evidence. I would say there wasn't proof beyond a reasonable doubt. I would say the evidence was improperly admitted, that it was tampered with, as it was, for example, in the OJ Simpson case. For example, I never stated publicly, never stated publicly, OJ Simpson is categorically innocent. I never said that. I don't say that about my clients, whether I believe they're innocent or guilty. I defend them as they should be defended, based on the lack of evidence, based on constitutional violations. And so do I feel good when I get somebody off who I know was guilty? No, I have a policy. People usually have victory parties after they've won cases. I never go to a victory party because I know there's somebody dead or somebody hurt. And that person doesn't deserve to have a celebration for the person who might've done it. So, although I might feel professionally accomplished by winning a case of somebody who I believe is guilty, I don't feel great personal satisfaction, but it's much worse when I represent somebody who's innocent and who's convicted, and I've had that. Mike Tyson was innocent and he was convicted, and I lost his appeal on a two to one vote, and then a two to two vote, and then a three to three vote, the closest case ever, but I didn't win. It's one of the few cases of an innocent client where I have lost, and I felt terrible, much worse, much, much worse. I felt terrible that I couldn't win the case. I didn't do the trial, I just did the appeal on behalf of somebody who I knew was innocent and who was found guilty. And I've had that in a number of other cases. Mostly I've won those cases, but occasionally when you lose a case involving somebody who you think is innocent, that's the worst feeling. I remember those cases pretty well. Of course, the O.J. Simpson was a big case. Can you tell us, in your opinion, what is your most important case, so your most prominent or most consequential or whatever you wanna call it? I'll give you a couple. One of them involved a man named Anatoly Sharansky, who was a Soviet dissident during the Soviet period, and he was arrested simply for being a dissident, for wanting to change the government. And I represented him for eight years and the Soviets wanted him dead. He was arrested in the U.S. or in Russia? Arrested in the Soviet Union and was sent to prison in the Soviet Union. I went to the Soviet Union to defend him there. Wow. And I arranged, ultimately, a spy trade where we got him released in exchange for an East German who had been convicted in the United States. And when I got him free from jail, and I met him, he threw his arms around me and he whispered in my ear, blessed are those who free the imprisoned, and we became good friends. And that was probably the most important case. I mean, another important case was when I represented Donald Trump in his first term when he was impeached. It was an improper impeachment. The Constitution permits impeachment only in cases of treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors, and he wasn't charged with any of those things. So although I did not vote for Trump in 2016 to 2020, I defended him vigorously and we won that case. So I've had a lot of very interesting cases, mostly from people who did things that deserve punishment, won most of them, but I've lost some of them. And I've had an interesting career. I've defended free speech. I've defended protesters, civil rights protesters, civil liberties protesters. I even represented Palestinian protesters as long as they were peaceful. Even if I disagreed with their views, I represented Nazis who wanted to see the end of Jews. As long as their actions were protected by the First Amendment, I'm willing to be their lawyer, even though I disagree fundamentally with what they were arguing. Wow, that is pretty amazing. Well, I still wanna go a few other cases. Maybe we can do a speed round and just, if you can quickly comment on the case and the verdict, and if you think it was a fair verdict or not. We talk about, let's do O.J. Simpson and Mike Tyson again. This Bay Area Innovators episode is sponsored by Peter Cassara Clothiers, an Italian menswear store that brings timeless European style with a modern edge to Sunnyvale and the Bay Area for over 50 years. From top Italian suits and shoes, the exclusive Tami Bahama line, they've got your look covered. Check out their website at petercassaraclothiers.com to find out more. And now, back to our interview. Do you think the verdict was fair? You already mentioned Mike Tyson was not. Wrong verdict. And he was, the judge in the case was corrupt. Was a former prosecutor. She made every ruling against Tyson and was as wrong as anybody could be. She was really guilty of abusing her robes and her role as a judge. That was a horrible, horrible verdict. The O.J. Simpson case was the right verdict. We proved that the police planted evidence, created evidence that didn't exist, poured blood on socks that belonged to O.J. Simpson. And the jury caught them. And the jurors said, look, we're not gonna convict you based on evidence that we believe was tampered with by the government. So I think that was a just verdict. Whether O.J. Simpson was guilty or innocent, he should not have been convicted based on tampered evidence. That was an amazing case. Let's move on to Patty Hearst and Leona Helmsley. Okay, you know, Patty Hearst was a victim. She was kidnapped. She was living a quiet life in Berkeley, California, and she was victim and raped and abused. And then psychologically, she was manipulated. And so in the end, President Carter did the right thing by pardoning her and allowing her to go free. So I think that was the right result in the case. Leona Helmsley, you know, did something that so many people do, you know, cheated on. She did cheat on her taxes. I have absolutely no doubt about that. She, you know, listed things as security when they were really just entertainment. But, you know, they went after her because of who she was. They indicted her on April 15th, Tax Day, in order to send a message. And it was a close case, and it easily could have gone the other way, but it didn't. She spent only a relatively short time in prison, but she was not a nice person, but that's not a crime. Julian Assange. Julian Assange is a hero. You know, people confuse Julian Assange with people who actually steal secrets. I mean, there have been people who've stolen secrets. We know that. People who are in the military who stole secrets, and they should be punished. They are criminals. Assange simply published secrets that others stole, and that should be protected by freedom of speech. And so I'm proud to have represented Julian Assange, and I hope he now can, you know, live out the rest of his life in quiet peace. I got a couple of tough ones. Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein. Well, I consulted on Harvey Weinstein case. I'm still consulting on it, because I believe that the sex in that case was transactional, that it was the casting couch. Historically, producers have said to young starlets, if you want to roll in my film, you have to sleep with me. It's terrible. It's awful. And perhaps that should be made a crime. That's not what they were convicted of. Jeffrey Epstein, we made a deal. There was no trial. He pleaded guilty to what he was guilty of, and he didn't plead guilty to things he was not guilty of. And then, of course, he ended up either committing suicide in prison, or I think that's probably what happened, but I'm still a little uncertain about that. And the final one, Nelson Mandela. You represented him. Well, yeah, what an honor it was to have some role to play in this case. I played a small role. What happened is we were trying to work out a spy exchange, the one with Sharansky. And I went off to Berlin and to Paris to meet with the Soviet Union's spy exchanger. And what we offered was a deal, which would have included freeing Mandela, who was then in Robins Island, and Sharansky, who was then in a Soviet prison. And Mandela ultimately said he didn't want to be part of a spy exchange. He was not a spy. He was the legitimate leader of black South Africa, and he was a man of great principle. And he stayed in Robins Island prison for probably an additional year, having rejected the deal that could have gotten him out because he wanted to come out on his own terms. So it was a great thrill for me to participate in the representation of such a great man. Mr. Dershowitz, you had such an amazing career. Can you share with our audience what is it that drives you every day? What is it that makes you do the work you do and at the level you're doing it? What's the driving factor? Well, I get up every morning and I say a little prayer. In Hebrew, it's called moda ani. It's thank you for reviving me and bringing me alive. And I'm just thankful for every day. And I get up every morning and I say, today's gonna be even more interesting than yesterday because I have so many interesting cases that I'm working on, so many interesting projects. And, you know, at 86 years old, I just thank the good Lord for giving me the strength. And I hope he continues to give me the strength. I just finished writing my 57th book, The Preventive State. And I'm working on my 58th book. I'm hoping to get to 60. I'm not sure I will. I've had a very productive few years. I've published five books in the last, like, two years. Been on a frenzied writing. And just there's so much to write about. And I'm advising on a lot of cases and consulting and, you know, appearing in media like this. So I, and I have a wonderful wife and, you know, three wonderful children and two grandchildren and daughter-in-law and a son-in-law. So, you know, I'm a happy person and I'm frustrated sometimes. I was falsely accused of something I didn't do. And I had to spend a few years of my life defending myself against a false charge made by somebody who I'd never heard of and never met. And finally she admitted that she may have confused me with somebody else and misidentified me. So that's over. But it's been an interesting, controversial life. Many people like me, many people don't like me. I'll tell you who really likes me, people who have been charged with crime and want me to be their lawyer. Those are the people who like me. So I try my best to help as many people as I can. And again, I hope the good Lord gives me the strength to continue to do it for more years. But however many years I've been given, I've used to the maximum. So I appreciate what people say about me and thank you for interviewing me and asking me such good questions. And a final question is, what do you think is most important for society moving forward to get to a better state that we are in right now? The one thing that can make a change. Tolerance. Understanding that just because we have strong views doesn't make it right and doesn't make the others wrong. We live today in an intolerant world. If you don't agree with me, you're wrong and you're despicable. You know, I'll just give you an example from my life. I was a good friend of Larry David, the comedian, and we shared a lot of things together. We had dinner together a lot. He worked out in my gym. We used to tell jokes together. But as soon as I defended Donald Trump, he said I was a despicable person, disgusting person. He would never talk to me again just because of who I represented. And for me, that's the paradigm, what's wrong with the world today. He could have come over to me and say, hey, Alan, you know, we disagree about this. Let's talk about it, but we'll continue to be friends. That's not what's going on in the world today. Today, if you disagree with somebody, you call them names, you despise them. You don't try to reason with them. And I think that's the one thing that we could improve ourselves tremendously in the world. You mentioned comedians. I have to mention Don Rickles because he's one of my favorite all-time comedians. Oh, I met Don Rickles, yes. I met him, interestingly enough, I met him with Larry David. I was having Larry David and his wife in California and Don Rickles came over to the table and Don Rickles, who I was, I guess, a Jewish guy from Brooklyn, Don Rickles. Oh, and so, and we talked and he was really nice. You know, he wasn't the Don Rickles of the show. He was really, really a nice guy. So I like his comedy. I love comedy. I love Woody Allen's comedy. I have dinner with Woody Allen once a month or so, and I really enjoy him and his wife and we're friends. And so I love, I love good comedy. Alan, thank you so much for your time. It's been a pleasure. Appreciate your time. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you for watching another episode of Bay Area Innovators. If you enjoyed this episode and you know someone who should be on our show, please send us an email at sfbay at epochtimes.com. We would love to hear from you. Thank you and see you next week.