0:04 There's a mahogany podium
0:07 at the Supreme Court
0:08 of the United One person
0:12 died there mid-argument the stroke.
0:16 Another collapsed there dying
0:19 soon That's the podium.
0:23 It also happens to be where I practice
0:25 law, the most powerful court on Earth.
0:29 Nine minds ready to attack.
0:33 And you stand 10 ft away from them.
0:35 There are no prepared
0:36 speeches in this court.
0:38 Instead, 50 questions thrown at you in 30 minutes.
0:42 I'm making hundreds of decisions in real time.
0:46 Every argument I choose to make
0:49 or not make every word,
0:52 every pause, every tone.
0:55 There are no rewinds.
0:57 Flinch and the justices pounce.
1:00 That's my courtroom, but each of you
1:03 has something like that.
1:05 A place in which words matter.
1:08 The right words can win
1:10 and the wrong words, a huge difference.
1:13 Five months ago, I stood before that podium
1:16 asking the Supreme Court to do something
1:19 it had never done in its history.
1:21 Declare a president's $4 signature initiative unconstitutional.
1:34 >> And I had a secret.
1:37 April 2nd, 2025, the president
1:39 dusts off a 1977
1:42 law and imposes tariffs
1:45 on virtually every country on Earth. No congressional vote.
1:49 Nothing like that whatsoever. Just his word.
1:52 And here's what's at stake.
1:54 If the president can command
1:56 the global economy by yelling emergency,
2:00 what can't he do?
2:01 Checks and balances don't just bend, they break.
2:06 I was hired to kill it.
2:09 Legal scholars, commentators, my own colleagues
2:13 said it was impossible.
2:15 They said the president
2:17 has nominated three of the justices
2:19 on the court and three others
2:21 were appointed by Republican presidents.
2:23 They're not going to go against their president,
2:26 they I thought that was wrong,
2:29 but the real problem
2:30 was that the Supreme Court never
2:32 in its history in 237
2:35 years has declared a signature
2:37 edition of the president
2:41 I was hired to do what no lawyer had done in 237
2:47 My first thought, hell yes.
2:51 My second thought, what in the world is wrong with me?
2:55 People have died at that podium
2:57 and I'm about to tell
2:58 the world's most powerful man he can't do
3:01 what he just did.
3:04 I had the self-preservation
3:05 instincts of a moth
3:06 near a bug zapper.
3:12 So, for months I prepared
3:14 for the argument of my life.
3:16 Three weeks before that argument,
3:18 one of my own teammates
3:21 decided to try and take me down
3:23 so that he could argue the case.
3:25 He campaigned, he lobbied,
3:28 he made Just a few days before the argument,
3:34 about two weeks, the Washington Post
3:36 runs an editorial and I'm going to read this to you word for word, strategic mistake.
3:45 I read it over breakfast.
3:47 Look, I I don't begrudge the guy.
3:50 I >> I had more important things to do
3:57 because I wasn't replaced.
3:59 Up I walked to that mahogany
4:00 podium, and I won.
4:03 The president's tariffs declared >> Okay, look.
4:11 I I know how this sounds.
4:13 Lawyer wins big case,
4:15 gets a fancy TED Talk invitation,
4:18 talks for 14 minutes about how great he is.
4:20 I've seen that guy at dinner parties.
4:22 Nobody stays for dessert.
4:24 So, that's not what this is.
4:27 This is the behind-the-scenes
4:28 story of four teachers
4:31 that helped me connect.
4:33 And it's also about one secret
4:35 that I've never told anyone about
4:38 when I walked out of that courtroom.
4:40 First connection I needed was with
4:43 I was terrified of blowing the case,
4:45 and that Washington Post editorial didn't help matters.
4:49 A month before the argument, I met Ben.
4:52 Ben coaches sports legends,
4:54 Andre Agassi, Olympians, and the like.
4:57 His whole thing is about game day,
4:59 that moment when everything
5:01 you've been preparing for
5:02 either shows up or it doesn't.
5:05 Ben's first question to me,
5:08 "What are you afraid of?" Now, look.
5:10 At that point, I'd already argued 52 cases.
5:12 I'd saved the Voting Rights Act.
5:13 I'd struck down the Guantanamo military tribunals.
5:16 But Ben forced me
5:18 to admit a truth
5:19 I'd buried from myself.
5:22 Every time I walked into the court,
5:24 I looked at those portraits
5:26 on the walls and thought,
5:28 "They don't look like me.
5:30 I don't belong here."
5:32 Imposter syndrome doesn't care about how many cases you won.
5:35 It cares about only your doubts.
5:38 Ben didn't dismiss this.
5:40 He worked with it.
5:41 He had me write down five adjectives
5:44 and visualize them every day before a pretend court.
5:48 About 18 hours before the argument,
5:51 Ben says to me, he calls and says, "How are you feeling?"
5:54 And I say, "Honestly, I'm terrified.
5:57 I got to do a great job.
6:00 I've got to remember 500 things.
6:04 I've got to deliver
6:05 an argument for history."
6:07 Ben says, "You know, change the vowel.
6:10 Use an E instead of an O."
6:12 He says, "What do you get to do?"
6:14 And instantly it pours out of me, "I get to defend the Constitution
6:17 of the United States.
6:18 I get to, the son of immigrants,
6:20 remind the country of what it's about.
6:23 I get to defend
6:24 my parents' vision of America."
6:33 >> One letter, the terror
6:35 didn't disappear, but it transformed into joy.
6:40 Well, so was Ben the secret?
6:42 An elite sports coach who teaches people about
6:47 but he got me ready.
6:49 The second thing I needed was connection
6:50 to information at scale.
6:53 I assembled the most relentless
6:54 legal team in the country.
6:56 They stress tested every argument
6:59 until only the best one survived.
7:02 But I needed more.
7:03 I needed someone who was absolutely relentless. I found Harvey.
7:09 Harvey reads the 200th
7:10 tariff case the same way as he reads the Shoot.
7:16 Um honestly, this is my first time using PowerPoint.
7:20 I've given hundreds of speeches,
7:21 but I I I didn't want to use it, but they told me to.
7:26 So, anyway, the picture
7:28 picture's not coming up, but that's fine.
7:30 Don't worry about it. Okay. So, let's see. Okay, fine. Okay, good. We're good.
7:38 You know, a month before the argument,
7:40 Harvey told me that
7:42 I should expect a question from Justice Barrett about license fees, and the yellow
7:46 is what Harvey told me to predict,
7:48 and blue is what Justice Barrett actually said at the argument. It's almost verbatim.
7:53 So, Harvey taught me peripheral vision.
7:55 The idea of if you read a lot,
7:57 you can see patterns
7:58 and come up with stuff
8:00 and anticipate the angles of attack before it arrived.
8:03 So, was this secret
8:05 a team of relentless
8:06 lawyers who never slept,
8:08 who pressure tested everything?
8:10 Closer, but that's not it, either.
8:12 The third thing I needed was the hardest,
8:14 and it's something we've been talking about today, connection.
8:18 Here, I needed to connect
8:19 with nine very skeptical
8:21 legal minds, and to do so in real time.
8:25 Enter Liz, my improv coach.
8:29 What does improv have to do with the Supreme
8:33 Court of the United States?
8:37 Liz's secret, Neil, you need to actually listen. Actually listen.
8:45 She taught me to quiet my own thoughts and to trust myself
8:48 to come up with the words
8:50 after the other person had spoken.
8:52 That's the essence of yes, and.
8:55 Absorb the question and then build on it.
8:58 When the justices attacked,
8:59 I validated their concerns
9:01 and then bridge back.
9:03 The interrogation became a dialogue.
9:05 The room's energy flipped.
9:08 This power, as Justice Gorsuch said, as Justice Barrett said,
9:12 is going to be stuck with us forever.
9:15 Yeah, Justice Alito, I think you've said many times the purpose
9:17 isn't what you look at, you look to actually what the government
9:20 is Thank you, Justice Kavanaugh.
9:22 So, five answers on the Nixon precedent.
9:25 Tariffs are constitutionally special
9:27 because our co-founders feared revenue raising, unlike embargoes.
9:31 There was no Boston
9:33 Embargo Party, but there was certainly a Boston Tea Party.
9:37 Oh, Justice Sotomayor, I wish I had an hour to talk about this with
9:39 you because this argument by the government
9:41 is wrong every which way.
9:44 I wonder if you ever thought that your
9:46 legacy as a constitutional
9:48 advocate would be the man
9:51 who revived the non-delegation >> Yes, Justice Alito.
9:55 So, was the secret
9:58 an improv coach who taught a lawyer to yes and the justices?
10:02 That would be a hell of a TED Talk. But, no.
10:05 That's not it, either.
10:08 Liz taught me the power of connection.
10:12 And the fourth teacher,
10:14 the fourth teacher, the one who taught me the most important
10:17 thing, the thing we forget,
10:19 to connect with yourself.
10:21 Enter Bob, my meditation coach.
10:24 Now, I am just about the last person to meditate.
10:28 I thought meditation was for people who own crystals.
10:32 I do not own
10:38 way before way before the tariffs argument, I started working with Bob, and he
10:43 had me 20 minutes a day
10:45 focus on a single word.
10:47 He didn't send an app.
10:48 He actually rented an apartment a block from the court,
10:51 and we worked together
10:53 every day focusing on that word.
10:56 Bob didn't just give me a mantra,
10:58 he gave me a weapon.
11:01 When I walked into court that day,
11:03 the static was cleared,
11:05 I was calm, I was
11:08 Was Bob the secret, the crystal-free meditation coach? But, close.
11:16 Because Bob, like Ben,
11:20 like Liz, are human.
11:24 That fourth teacher is not.
11:29 Harvey is an AI.
11:32 A bespoke system I've been building
11:36 with a legal AI company
11:37 for the last year.
11:39 And I trained it
11:41 on every question asked by a Supreme Court Justice in the last 25
11:45 years and everything they've written,
11:47 every opinion, every concurrence,
11:49 every every dissent, every separate opinion.
11:52 And in that, patterns emerged.
11:56 It predicted the contours
11:58 of the very argument I would face.
12:01 It knew that Justice Gorsuch
12:04 would ask me about the taxing power.
12:07 It knew Justice Kavanaugh
12:09 was going to grill me on tariffs versus embargoes.
12:13 It nailed Justice Barrett's worry about tariff refunds.
12:18 And the Chief Justice?
12:20 It didn't just predict his question,
12:22 it predicted a possible
12:24 escape route, how the Chief Justice
12:27 could vote for us
12:28 and at the same time
12:30 protect the institution he had spent his entire career defending.
12:35 Harvey glimpsed that narrow
12:38 I held the door open,
12:40 the Chief Justice walked through it
12:42 writing a 6-3 opinion
12:44 striking down the tariffs.
12:46 Harvey even predicted Justice Gorsuch's
12:49 separate opinion striking down the tariffs almost verbatim.
12:53 Now, I want to be precise about something.
12:55 I'm a lawyer, precision really matters.
12:58 What we were doing
12:59 was not some trick.
13:01 We weren't pulling some fast
13:02 one over on the court when we predicted these things.
13:07 Because predictability is what we want, especially in courts.
13:13 A Justice who returns
13:15 to the same principles
13:17 case after case, year after year
13:20 is a Justice with character.
13:22 Predictability is just consistency made visible.
13:26 It is in every sense a compliment.
13:29 What Harvey found in these justices was not weakness. It was integrity.
13:34 But if I had just parroted
13:36 Harvey's I would have lost the case 10-0,
13:40 and there aren't even 10 justices.
13:43 Because AI has a shadow side.
13:46 When a tool is powerful,
13:49 when a tool's powerful, you've all seen it, people stop thinking.
13:52 The computer says so.
13:54 Four words, human judgment
13:56 ends, then people just fold like a cheap lawn chair.
14:00 The machine thinks, the human just nods,
14:03 and in that nod somewhere we disappear.
14:05 My legal team never nodded.
14:07 Harvey was not some god,
14:09 it was our sparring
14:11 partner, brilliant, tireless, occasionally
14:14 insufferable, but not a god.
14:16 Harvey asked the questions,
14:18 we found the answer.
14:20 Now, this is bigger than just law.
14:22 It's about all of us.
14:24 For centuries, the expert
14:26 was the person who read the most,
14:28 who remembered the most, who'd seen the most.
14:30 The seasoned doctor, the experienced
14:32 lawyer, their edge was accumulated knowledge.
14:36 AI is making that edge nearly worthless.
14:41 Not because humans no longer matter,
14:43 but because that particular
14:45 advantage, pattern recognition across vast data
14:48 and breadth of knowledge,
14:49 is now available to anyone. AI can analyze. AI can predict.
14:57 But the one thing AI can't do
14:59 is the thing that actually
15:01 won that argument, That's the last irreplaceable
15:06 human skill, persuade one person
15:09 to change their mind
15:11 by appealing to something beneath the surface.
15:14 Adjust not just the argument,
15:16 but the delivery, the pause, the tone, the look
15:18 that says, "I hear you,
15:20 and here is my answer."
15:23 You know, at one moment in the argument,
15:25 Justice Barrett asked a question that Harvey hadn't predicted.
15:29 And I remember it felt like
15:31 she and I were the only two people in that marble and mahogany room.
15:36 And in the half second
15:38 before I answered, I did something no algorithm can do.
15:43 I looked at her. I really looked.
15:45 I wanted to understand her worry.
15:48 And I answered the worry.
15:51 That lesson is true for all of us.
15:55 You don't just got to do it, you get to do it.
15:57 In an interview, in a negotiation,
16:00 in a conversation that could save a marriage or end one.
16:04 Any place in which you need to reach another human and actually connect.
16:09 The question AI poses
16:11 to every one of us is not,
16:13 will you be replaced?
16:15 The question is, what is the irreducibly
16:18 human thing that you do?
16:21 Go deeper into it.
16:23 Not to survive AI,
16:27 but to come home to yourself.
16:29 That's where your edge lives.
16:33 then taught me to reframe.
16:35 Harvey gave me foresight.
16:37 Liz taught me to listen.
16:39 And Bob taught me stillness.
16:42 Four teachers, four connections, one argument.
16:48 An argument that some have called
16:50 the most important decision
16:52 the Supreme Court has made in a century.
16:55 When I walked into the court that day,
16:58 I never felt more
17:00 like I was exactly
17:01 where I was meant to be.
17:04 I brought to the podium no mountain
17:06 of legal notes, just an email from Liz about the power of connection.
17:10 And on the top of that,
17:12 in my own handwriting
17:13 scrolled, my parents' names,
17:16 my children's names, my wife's name.
17:19 The people I was fighting for.
17:23 My father was my first audience.
17:27 He didn't get to live to see this
17:30 But as I walked out of the courtroom
17:33 past those marble walls,
17:35 past the portraits of people who didn't look like
17:39 I got a text on my phone,
17:41 an email from Ben.
17:44 So happy for you, Neal.
17:46 I think your dad was watching over you,
17:50 The newest technology, the oldest human wisdom,
17:55 the most powerful court. to do
