The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Fred Kaplan and Eleanor Randolph

Episode Date: February 28, 2020

Fred Kaplan and Eleanor Randolph

You're listening to The Comedy Cellar, live from the table, on the Riotcast Network, riotcast.com. Good evening, everybody. Welcome to the Comedy Cellar Show here on Sirius XM Channel 99, the comedy channel. My name is Norm Dorman. I'm at the back table of the Comedy Cellar. I'm here. This is a short, this is a small cast today. I'm here just with our producer, and she's also a comedian, Periel Ashenbrand. Hi.

Hi, Periel. How are you? I'm well, thank you. I missed you last week. Oh, we missed you too. And we're here with the great Fred Kaplan, War Stories columnist for Slate. Also does jazz reviews. Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author of six books including his new one, The Bomb. Presidents, Generals, and the Secret

History of Nuclear War. Welcome my friend Fred Kaplan. It's good to be here now as always. And he did Sam Harris' podcast a week or so ago. And Sam Harris was so moved by this podcast that he

chose not to keep it behind his paywall and released it to the world for free because he thought... You do that all the time. No, I was going to say I'm going to do the opposite. Now I'm going to keep it behind the paywall. Maybe that'll make it more intriguing. Who knows? He released it for free because he felt it was a public good for people to hear the message of Fred's book. So let's get right into it.

So there's a few things that are just like, for storytelling reasons, are just unbelievably compelling and grab you, which are the various close calls that we've had to nuclear war. And I want you to tell us about some of them. But before you tell us, were you aware of them all prior to doing the research for this book, or were any of them little known? Most of them I knew a little bit about it, but I didn't know how extensive things had become. Do you mean things like the Berlin crisis or the Cuban Missile Crisis?

Or do you mean the ones where, on a radar screen, it looked like missiles were coming our way? The ones where, just by pure dumb luck, we didn't end civilization. Well, pure dumb luck. The one that's most notable is that there was, in 1983, there was a Lieutenant Colonel Petrov, who was on duty as the chief air defense officer that night, and he looks at the radar screen, and it looks like about a half a dozen American ICBMs are coming their way.

Now, if he'd gone according to procedure, he should have called upstairs and told them. And the next layer up was a pretty trigger-happy bunch, having, you know, shot down Korean Airlines Flight 7 not that long. But he decided, no, this can't be real, and so I'm not going to tell the people upstairs. As a result of which, when they did find out about it, he got canned. He got canned. He got canned. He got canned. And only later, after the end of the Cold War and all this,

was it revealed that this is the man who might have saved us from World War III. So this is 83, this is Reagan. This is Reagan, and this is a very, very tense year. I mean, a lot of things were going on in 1983. The KAL shoot down, the end of all negotiations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. But there were some other things, too. This is the year that that movie, The Day After, was on. I remember that. Which scared the daylights out of everybody. And there was another, NATO was having a very, very big war game to simulate

the transition from a conventional war to a nuclear war. And it was extremely realistic, so realistic that the Soviets thought it was real and started taking steps to respond. And there was an American lieutenant general, who is the chief of intelligence in Europe, who thought this war game was a little too provocative. What does a war game actually mean? This was troops in motion. I mean, it wasn't on a tabletop.

This was dozens and dozens of airplanes carrying troops, radio silence. It was going through the motions of what we would do if we really were preparing for a war. And they wouldn't warn the Soviet Union? Well, they knew what was going on, and that's why they were responding. Now, this lieutenant general, he saw the Soviets making moves, and his guidebook said, if they start doing this, you do this to escalate things. But he decided, now, I've never liked this war game.

It's way too provocative. What the Russians are doing is a rational reaction to what we're doing. And so he did nothing to escalate the situation. So there's another situation where someone kind of in the medium level might have prevented war from breaking out. But there are upper level things too. The Cuban Missile Crisis Wasn't there another one I read I should have researched it, but I read

it in the New York Magazine or in the New Yorker about something with Carter and President Volkanov and they thought they were incoming. There were three incidents in a matter of three months where the radar screen showed Soviet missiles coming our way. It was discovered later that this was due to a software error.

In other words, the software just started. It was like the movie War Games. It started playing the rehearsal. And one of them, Brzezinski, the national security advisor, came this far away from calling Carter on the phone. It was like the proverbial three o'clock in the morning. Then they realized it wasn't real. But no, these kinds of things. But imagine, I'll see in those instances, nothing right then was going on. But let's say it had been in the middle of something like a Cuban Missile Crisis.

All of a sudden you see a false warning of missiles coming our way and it's quite plausible that this is for real and you might respond accordingly. Fred, before I get to the Cuban Missile Crisis, what happens psychologically? Like from our point of view, I think we all agree,

we would never order a first strike against Russia. Well, see, this is a good, I'm glad you brought that up. But they think we possibly might. Well, here's the thing. The United States always has had, and still does have, an explicit, express, public, and classified policy of reserving the right to go first with nuclear weapons. But not unprovoked. No, no. But, you know, it's for example if the Russians invaded Western Europe

and we can't respond with conventional, we would do this. But, you know, they don't know that. I mean, in fact, there have been, under Obama, there was a serious discussion. Should we declare a no first use policy? They decided against it, even though Obama thought and said privately, this is a crazy that an American president would actually do this. But in the 1950s and early 60s, the American policy, and it was the only policy, was that if the Soviets invaded Western Europe or, say, grabbed West Berlin, not with nuclear weapons, just using

conventional weapons, it was U.S. policy to unleash the entire atomic arsenal against every target in the Soviet Union, the satellite nations of Eastern Europe, and even China. Even if China had no participation in the war, and it was estimated that this would kill 285 million people. Jesus Christ. And it wasn't just crazy people at the Strategic Air Command. The Joint Chiefs of Staff approved this. Their doctrine said in the event of an armed conflict between the United States and Soviet Union, nuclear weapons will be used at the onset, regardless of how it was initiated.

And Eisenhower approved this as well. It says something to me about the very thin layer of morality. We pretend that there's this real moral layer to war but it will be discarded at the drop of a hat and coming after World War II when they were essentially by the end it was open season on civilians

the atom bomb was on bomb everything so in that context shortly after that to have a doctrine which said if we have to do what we have to do if we take out China that's just the way it goes. But then what happened in the early 60s, the Soviets started developing their own arsenal.

And so some people said, oh, wait a minute, this is kind of crazy. If they invade West Germany and we respond by bombing them, they're going to respond by bombing us. And so then some people started coming up with ideas for what they called limited nuclear options. The idea, we'll just throw out a few, maybe they won't respond, or maybe if they will, it will be. And the thing is, this all sounds very bloodthirsty and nutty now, but in fact, this was a more quote-unquote humane alternative to the bomb everything. The interesting thing that

I just found out with this book's research is that, you know, like Kennedy's Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, he came up with a half a dozen different limited options, and he put this in guidance and sent it to the Strategic Air Command. What I found out with the research with this book is Strategic Air Command just ignored it. Really, until the very end of the Cold War, if the President of the United States had gotten into a situation where he thought nuclear weapons should be used and gave the orders to sack, what would really happen would be an all-out nuclear attack, even if he wanted to keep it limited.

The way that they had the command control and the caveats, that was it. I mean, it's an insane thing, but that's what we were on the brink of for, you know, 40 years. How many megatons of bombs can be exploded before basically everything is uninhabitable? Well, see, one thing that we only recently discovered with nuclear winter, which has never been taken into account in the calculations of nuclear effects. You know, all the smoke stuff that's kicked up by nuclear explosions.

I've seen calculations recently that as few as 80 nuclear bombs would set off the kind of effects like, you know, the comet that killed the dinosaurs. And 80 nuclear bombs, I mean, that's kind of the size of the nuclear option we have against North Korea. It's been the scheme of things that is a very small nuclear. We have way, way, way, way fewer nuclear weapons than we used to, but we still have a couple thousand. Does it matter that we have fewer weapons?

Is anything really safer because we have fewer weapons? It depends where they are and what they're doing. I mean, we used to have a lot of weapons in Western Europe, and we have like 100 now, and 50 of those are in Turkey, and I think some people are wishing that we'd gotten rid of those. But it depends how... If something happens by accident, yeah, it probably does. It is important how many or how few we have.

If you're trying to give an impression of whether nuclear weapons are actually usable things, yeah, it has an effect. Now, what is, in your estimation, the counterfactual? Is it a coincidence that it seems to me that far fewer people have been dying since the invention of the atom bomb? Well, that's an interesting point. I mean, I do think, and even someone like Daniel Ellsberg, who's sort of a nuclear abolitionist, would agree that there are a few wars that probably would have happened that didn't because of nuclear weapons, because deterrence. You can think maybe a couple of major wars between India and Pakistan, for example. But, you know, that can only go on for so long. I think one thing that I discovered in this book, and this is kind of a running theme through the book,

is that almost all of our presidents in the atomic age have faced crises in which the use of nuclear weapons has been seriously contemplated. And the documentation shows that all of these presidents up until now have immersed themselves very deeply into the logic, the strategy, the scenarios, the consequences, often guided by briefers who were discussing this in very calm and in some cases advocate terms. And in each case, they decided, no, this is catastrophic. I've got to get myself out of this rabbit hole and resolve this crisis peacefully through some diplomatic means.

Well, I mean... But wait, so... Sorry. But we don't know that about Trump. We don't know that he digs deeply into anything, right? And so I think there are three things. I think if you had gone back to 1947 and asked somebody, what do you think the chances are that somebody will use a nuclear bomb by the year 2020? I think almost everybody would say, oh, close to 100%.

The fact that we haven't, I think, is due to three things. One, you know, deterrence. It works to some degree. Two, we've had these shrewd leaders who, when facing the abyss, have decided that it's not worth going there. And three, you know, blind luck. You know, the fact that when Kennedy was contemplating the Cuban Missile Crisis and what to do and going against every single one of his advisors who wanted to start bombing the missiles in Cuba, and he decided not to, what if

there had been a false warning of an actual Russian attack? He would have felt very... So what happens if we have a mix of a slow-witted leader and a bad bit of luck? You told some story about some little-known tapes of Kennedy. Well, here's the... I don't understand historians. These tapes have been out there

for a couple of decades now. There is this myth still there that was the myth that was put out at the time for political reasons, that we went eyeball to eyeball with the Russians and they blinked. Or, you know, Khrushchev came up with this proposal on Friday to, I'll take out my missiles if you promise not to invade Cuba. And then on Saturday he did say, well, I'll take them out if you take out your missiles in Turkey.

And the myth is, Kennedy took the Friday deal and ignored the Saturday deal. When in fact, no, he took the Saturday deal. He said at the meeting, and it's on tape, he said, well, this seems like a pretty fair trade. And everybody around the table, not just the military, but Bobby Kennedy, Robert McNamara, all these guys, they feverishly opposed it. And he took it while only telling about a half a dozen of them. And here's the thing, Noam. If anybody else around that table had been president, there would have been war. Because we've learned much later that some of those Russian missiles had nuclear warheads on them.

We also learned pretty recently that the Russians had secretly deployed 42,000 troops on the island of Cuba, some armed with tactical nukeses to ward off an American invasion. So if we'd gone, the plan was air attacks on the missiles, followed by an invasion. If Kennedy had said, yeah, you're right, this is a bad proposal, let's go ahead with the plan, there would have been World War III. There is so often to me a gap in the sobriety or the soberness of the person who actually has to make a decision to the people around him sparking out suggestions and orders, whatever it is. And I think that's... So far.

Yeah. So far. And I think that's part of the reason so many of these people, when they're actually presented with these scenarios, backed off. That's right. That's right. That's right. And so, I only say that to mean that maybe if those people around Kennedy had actually been president, they might have actually come to the same conclusion as Kennedy. But you don't know.

You don't know. Well, they were, I mean, listen to the, like McGeorge Bundy, the paragon of rationality, is practically in tears arguing against this deal that Khrushchev has put forth. Okay, so what's their psychology? I mean, the... Oh site oh NATO will be wrecked the Turks will be undermined our credibility will be shot and even afterwards the politics were such that Kennedy lied he told everybody he told six people what he was doing one of whom was not Lyndon Johnson by the way and he said okay but you are never to tell anybody, ever. And he told the Russians, we're taking this deal, but if you reveal it, it's off. Because he would be seen as appeasement, you know, caving in to the Russians.

You know, it was a crazy time. But the logic, the psychology of mutual assured destruction is valid such that you wouldn't think anybody would actually give the order if they knew that they're going to, it's suicide. But what if there's a perception, true or not, that the other side is about to attack us? Then the temptation is we have to attack them before they attack us. The worrisome thing about India-Pakistan, like U.S.-Russia, there's a half-hour warning time. India-Pakistan, it's like three minutes. What if there's a false warning there?

The pressure for preemption could be enormous. But couldn't you give an order to the submarines saying, listen, we have missiles coming in, we're not sure, but if they turn out to be real, we may not be here, but we want you to shoot. Well, but they're down in the submarine. They don't know what the hell's going on. We can't communicate with submarines?

Yeah, you can, but you give an order, and that's kind of it. What I'm saying is that if I would think... But you're right in the sense that, you know, some people say, let's get rid of land-based missiles. That's the lure. Let's do a jujitsu move, deprive them of their targets, and just keep them in submarines. But what I'm saying is that if I thought there was a chance that this, well, the question would, what's the point of even responding? But we're presuming you can respond.

Well, that's an issue too. But presuming you just would, just because you're not going to let them get away with it. See, here's where deterrence becomes, you have to convince them and maybe therefore yourself that you would. Otherwise, it all falls apart. So you give the standing order, say, well, this could be a false alarm, but if it's not, you're hereby authorized

to retaliate. No, you don't want to do that. You mean give them pre-delegated authority? Like, if you don't hear from me in 20 minutes, launch? Yeah. What if the communication just went down? But that seems to be safer than just launching. In other words, you have two options. We have five minutes to decide. I can either launch

now and find that it was actually a glitch, it was a bug. I say, you know what, I'm just going to wait to see if they hit. And if they vaporize Washington, I'm already going to get orders. Until very recently, the standing assumption at Strategic Air Command was that we would launch on warning. The idea that we would ride out an attack. The option for riding out an attack wasn't even worked into the war plan until about 1990. And even then it was just one option out of several. But I think my logic is correct that if you can still respond, you should wait.

But see, then they'd say, Mr. President, we have no idea whether the communications will still be in motion. This may be our only chance to respond. No, you don't need the communications. You say... No, you need to order it. You say, look, we see 10 ICBMs coming in. We're not sure they're real. If they hit, and you don't hear from us, and you can verify that they hit, you are hereby ordered.

This is your order? I'll tell you something more frightening. The Russians put... When we put in what was called the Persian II missile, which was in Europe but was very accurate, it could hit... The Russians took that as a decapitation weapon to knock out the Russian leadership.

They therefore created something called the Dead Hand, which was like the doomsday machine in Dr. Strangelove. If sensors detected a nuclear explosion on Russian soil, a certain number of missiles would be launched automatically. And I am told that this system is still in place. Oh my God.

Dr. Strangelove is a documentary. He really is. And what about, what's this hypersonic missile that... It'sersonic missile it's bullshit it's just bluffing well I don't think it exists and if it does exist all ICBMs are hypersonic and if the idea is that they'll evade our missile defenses

our missile defenses suck anyway so it doesn't matter and missile defenses are destabilizing well it can be or it depends but we spend 10 billion dollars a year on this stuff, and the tests are... We're never getting rid of these. Is that one of the conclusions? I think, you know, short of some transformation in world politics that can hardly be imagined,

I don't think... I mean, look at Kim Jong-un. If you or I were the leader of North Korea, and we had the same goals as Kim Jong-un, you know, perpetuation of the regimes and so forth, the last thing we would want to do is to get rid of nuclear weapons. Of course. This is what saves us. This is our only point of leverage. And nobody's going to get rid of all of their nuclear...

And again, unless, you know, aliens come from outer space or something, or there is a nuclear war, a small one, and people say, oh, Jesus, we've got to do something about this. No, I just don't see it. So I have two more points I want to cover that I want to bring Eleanor. So with everything that you've learned and all the deep thinking you've done about this, where are you on what the effects would be if Iran actually went nuclear? Is that something we can tolerate or something we cannot tolerate?

No. I mean, see, that is an ultimate political question. Every president, including Obama, including Clinton, they all said, we will not tolerate an Iran that has gone nuclear. Now, what Obama did, you know, he screwed up their program with the cyber offensive program. And that was one way to do it. Yeah, Stuxnet. I mean, it is still highly classified that we had anything to do with that. I mean, I, you know, I did a book on cyber war, talked with a lot of people about very classified things. I would mention Stuxnet and zip, nothing. You know, I don't know. I mean, it's a good, my view is that, you know, I think they could be deterred. Israel has 200 atomic bombs, which is also secret.

And you and I had this conversation a while ago. When I saw Chernobyl, the documentary, I was very taken with the utter incompetence of dictatorships. Well, look what China's doing with the coronavirus. I was just going to say, and then you see this with China, and I say, well, and you hear all these close calls of America maybe sending off a bomb in Iran. Russia as well. So how can, what, I mean, what kind of safeguards are there going to be in Iran?

I don't know. None. Well, there might be some. But it's funny, you know, when Pakistan started going nuclear, when we were allies, we provided them with some locks on their weapons. But they did not let us do the last step because they assumed correctly that we would install something that would allow us to lock it. And they didn't let us in that far.

But, no, you're right. I mean, this is a much more volatile thing than people like to think about. Yeah, I think we've had this conversation, too. I think that after World War II, our reaction to the Cuban Missile Crisis was, no way, absolutely not, we're not allowing them to have missiles in Cuba. And that, to me, is no different than Iran having an atom bomb. But as we've gotten away from that time in history, we're contemplating, well, maybe it would be okay, maybe we can deter it. But I think the reaction of the people in the 60s was more the correct one, which is we cannot take that risk. Cuba was 90 miles from Florida. Iran, well, but what about the 200 weapons that Israel has from their point of view?

Well, but we had deterrence against Cuba, too. I mean, the time is, you've proven to me, the time really doesn't matter that much. The point is that a tin pot third world regime pointing missiles at us. It's a scary thing. Used to be unacceptable. And now we're kind of, it's kind of becoming normalized. Well, they were Soviet missiles. It's a scary thing. It used to be unacceptable, and now we're kind of becoming normalized. It wasn't controlled by Cuba.

So even that would have been even more reason to not overreact to it. But a third world is even worse. There's also one minute warning time. No, there's a whole other story of that, but we need to get to Elmore. Final question, because I think this will leave us at Trump.

Now, do you think he's insane? Would he want to vaporize himself and his family? Well, look. Or do you think he just bluffs a lot? One thing we've learned recently is that he's not keen to get into a war, but he might be susceptible to being dragged into one. He has a rather cavalier attitude toward nuclear weapons. He doesn't like people who embarrass him or who betray him.

I'm wondering, what if he suddenly realizes that Kim Jong-un has been taking him for a ride with his beautiful letters and his summitry. And all of a sudden, Kim crosses the line, launches an ICBM test, or starts exploding nuclear devices again. Will Trump get so pissed off that he makes a threat and they make a threat? Yes, he'll make the threat. But see, in 2017, we came much closer.

I have a section on this in the book. He wasn't just talking out of his hat. We came very close to triggering something during the Fire and Fury age. A nuclear first strike? Well, not nuclear, but it was known by the military. It could very easily have escalated to that. I read part of this. Conventional first strike. He actually said, we're going to get rid of them. Or if China doesn't take care of it, we that. I read part of this. Conventional first crime.

He actually said we're going to get rid of them. Or if China doesn't take care of it, we're going to take care of it. We're going to do it. No, but there were things behind the scenes. Things we were doing and planning and rehearsing. It got very hairy. Because my worry is that, and I don't discount any of the risks of Trump, although I just kind of think he's, if he has mental illness and he's insane, then he could order it. But I think he's sane enough to understand the game theory that you don't want to make a move to destroy yourself.

But the opposite I worry about is how will a President Sanders be misinterpreted by our enemies throughout the world? If I'm the head of Iran, do I say to myself, this is my window of opportunity. I'm never going to get a better shot to get an atom bomb than right now with President Sanders because we know he won't do a goddamn thing about it. Let's go. And are there three or four other bad actors around the world who might come to the same conclusion with President Sanders? And even if they're wrong, and even if Sanders does stand up, it's too late.

He might overreact. I'm not a weakling. Well, I mean, this is what happened. Saddam Hussein miscalculated about Bush, right? But it doesn't matter. We still ended up with the war. And Khrushchev miscalculated about Kennedy. So Sanders might actually stick up for us.

But I worry about the—I think you discussed the madman theory. We have a madman, and people are cautious. I'm pretty sure Iran's not going to do anything too provocative now until after November, because they'd much rather do provocative things if Sanders were president, because they don't know what Trump's capable of. And they assume Sanders is not capable of much. Now, they could be all wrong. The internal politics of Iran

are all, you know, in the recent parliamentary election, the hardliners quadrupled the number of seats that they hold. And that's because of Trump. Yeah, yeah.

I believe that. Okay. Well, this is, you know, it's scary as hell. I mean, to think... But I should note, the New York Times, in their review, called the book surprisingly entertaining should note, the New York Times in their review

called the book surprisingly entertaining. Oh, he got a rave review from the New York Times. I mean, it's not just, it's not something

just to make your brow furrowed is all I'm saying. And Fred is funny. I know him. And he's also a tremendous storyteller. The only thing that you don't get

in the book is that Fred does very good voices of Kennedy and stuff. He really does. And I didn't do the audio book. You should't do the audio book. You should have done

the audio book. No, it doesn't work that way. Well, maybe we'll take some video of that for social media, Fred doing voices. So, but where's the doomsday clock these days?

That's a publicity scheme. It is. It's like two minutes till it's crazy. You know, it's... Cuban Missile Crisis, it was seven minutes till midnight.

I don't think it should be any less than that. Last question. In the end, which is more likely, an accidental war or a— it's way more accidental, right? Kind of a mixture of threat, counter-threat, accident, I think is probably the way it would go. We're joined by a friend of Fred's, Eleanor Randolph. I just heard her age secondhand. I'm not going to say it.

You don't want to say that. I'm not going to say it, but I can't believe that's actually correct. Yes, that's right. I'm much younger than Fred. And even I'm much younger. Even I'm a lot older than I look. All right, so Eleanor Randolph

is a veteran journalist and author of The Many Lies of Michael Bloomberg. She has covered national politics and media for Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and was a member of the New York Times editorial board. Wow. From 1998 to 2016. Sarah Jong hired to replace you, and that was a little bit later. Right.

She has written for Vogue, Esquire, and New Republic. Let's test your mic. One, two, three. Is that better? Yeah, that's perfect. So, are you a Bloomberg supporter? Well, I'm a journalist, so the book is it tells his flaws. A lot of the stuff that you've been hearing about is in the book, but it also explains a lot of them.

You know, I just want to say that I am really worried about this election, but now that I've heard Fred, I've decided there's nothing we can do anyway. Fred has that effect on people. I know. The end of the world is nigh. And of course, he's talking about nuclear winter, and Michael Bloomberg is talking about climate change and the globe heating up. So we've got some alternative theories about the future. Maybe they'll cancel each other out.

Yeah. Are there any real, like, what are the issues with Bloomberg that I'm hearing, that he told some blue jokes 30 years ago in an office? Like, who cares? I know. Do people really care about that? Well, I don't. Talk closer.

I wouldn't think so. I mean, look, a lot of those jokes came from Wall Street. And when a book came out with all these really stupid jokes that he told, he said they were Catskill jokes. And actually, I went through the book, and that's, I'm not sure he could tell some of those jokes in the Catskills, but most of them were like, they were like kid jokes. I heard him tell a joke. It wasn't racist. It wasn't sexist.

It was just dumb. It was about an outhouse, you know, that kind of humor. I just don't understand that. I just wonder whether anybody really has their vote affected by the revelation that somebody told a kind of dirty joke 30 years ago. It just seems like we have coronavirus coming now. Right. And I look at de Blasio, and I say, God, I wish I'd feel a lot better if Bloomberg were mayor right now. That's right. He's much more competent. Yeah, I mean, he would be on

top of that. That's right. And if he couldn't be, I don't know anybody who could. So what do I care about his jokes? That's crazy. Well, I think the criticism was that he his, that world that they created,

the Wall Street world, demeaned women. And it certainly did. It did. And still continues to this day, I'm sure. Yeah. But Bloomberg has moved on and has changed.

And as the world gets, you know, comes up to his doorstep, he begins to change. And the editor, we both had the same editor, Alice Mayhew, who died a few weeks ago. And the thing she said about my book was that Michael Bloomberg improved with age. And I think that's really right. He's really right. He's gotten better.

Most of the flaws that we hear about are things that have happened a long time ago. Although, he does have a... I mean, the journalists love this. We called it the blurt factor. And he would just say things that were just dumb. And they would just say things that were just dumb, you know, and they would come out and they would be in the New York Post and the Daily News and they'd be a big deal, at least for a week or so. So a lot of that stuff's coming back. I always had mixed feelings about Bloomberg because of things like, I thought he was tone deaf to the middle class, raising parking fines very high, things like that. That if I were mayor, I'd say I wouldn't have done that.

But it never occurred to me that we weren't very fortunate to have one of the most competent mayors, I think, in history for 12 years in New York City. Is that wrong? No, I think you're absolutely right. I mean, he did things that were wrong, and we've heard a lot about those now that he's been running. And, you know, we haven't really heard about the things he did right. I mean, he came in after 9-11. The city was mourning, and we were worried about a recession. And he sort of brought the city through that recession, and he brought the city through another recession, 2008, 2009. And, you know, he got smoking out of bars. I don't know how you feel

about that, but I'll tell you that it's because it's interesting. Go ahead. Anyway, he got smoking, you know, smokers now are huddled on the sidewalk outside and trans fat was removed from restaurants. He did a lot of public health. You know, he lost one fight that we always hear about. That was the big gulp fight. But he often says that even though they lost that in the courts, they won it because people don't really want a bucket of cola anymore. It seemed just too small for a mayor to be involved with.

I didn't mind. I actually supported the trans fat thing because I saw the trans fat as this kind of evil. There was no benefit to it, and there was no real way to get rid of it. Consumers were not going to be alert enough to it to start demanding to know whether there was trans fats in restaurants, and I didn't see any downside. I was, I'm not a smoker. I was against the smoking, well, I'm going to get it right.

I think it came from Giuliani first? Well, there was a lot of talk about it, but nobody got anything done. Okay. So the first one was very unfair because it allowed the smaller restaurants to have smoking and the bigger ones couldn't. And that was harmful to us. As soon as they made it across the board, I was much happier with it. But I didn't know how it would pan out. But he was a hundred percent right.

I mean, it had no effect on business whatsoever and nobody wants to go back. I mean, this was, this was a, an example of a nanny state move by a government, which really was a hundred percent the right thing to do. Well, he's been big on public health uh for a very long time and he's uh he's this uh doctor this public health doctor down at um johns hopkins convinced him that if if you go to the doctor and the doctor saves your life you're really happy you think oh my god the doctor saved my life and you might give money to the to the doctor but if if if the public health agencies keep you from getting typhoid you never know you know and so he's put a lot of money behind that kind of public health this what you're

describing is a phenomenon like if Clinton had gone into Afghanistan and gotten rid of bin Laden, he could have never proved that he avoided a horrible catastrophe of 9-11. You can never, if you prevent something, you can't ever prove you prevented anything. And it's very hard for people to give you the credit. That's right. So that's a classic thing. I mean, Bloomberg did a lot of other things as mayor. I mean, one of the things that people don't talk about very much is, I mean, we talk about stop and frisk, and that was really— Could we talk about stop and frisk for a second?

I don't want to interrupt your point. All right. Well, let me do my point, and then we'll— Yeah, go ahead i mean one of the things he did in 2008 after layman brothers um collapsed he got um the several people in his administration to figure out to go out to the community and find out how to make new york less dependent on wall street and because if you watched the way the budgets worked if Wall Street gave out big bonuses the city in the state did well if they didn't you know the city suffered so he got these people to decide that what New

York City needed was a tech graduate school and everybody told him that's just not gonna happen you're going to get that done. But he did. He got it done. And it's now on Roosevelt Island and it's becoming... Most of all, the tech companies came here too. That's right. The city's becoming a big tech center

now. And that will help if we're not so dependent on Wall Street. This brings up the insanity of what I would call the left, which is that, of course, they don't want New York to be dependent on Wall Street. And yet they want to make sure that Amazon doesn't have a strong foothold in Queens and usher in that whole new economy, you know. So what do they want? How do they want New York City to survive? Well, it looked to me as though the politicians did not negotiate that Amazon deal very well.

I mean, first of all, everybody gets those kind of write-offs, and they were talking about big bucks coming to Queens. And so suddenly, you know, the left decides that, I mean, Amazon has employees that don't do so well. But that is the kind of thing that a really good mayor and a governor, if they could speak to each other, which they don't do, as you know, they could have negotiated a pretty good deal with Bezos. I would say even the worst deal was better than no deal when it comes to... I mean, if the future... I said it last time. The future is going to happen somewhere. If it doesn't happen in New York, it'll happily happen in Newark.

It was just crazy. There is, you know, to chase that out of an underdeveloped part of New York City. But stop and frisk. Okay. So I actually, I'm pretty right wing about most things, but I was always against stop and frisk. I mean, maybe not always, but as soon as that court case came out and it kind of revealed all the statistics of the number of stops, how they had increased it, and how many fewer people were actually being arrested after tripling or quadrupling. I said, this is crazy.

And I knew a lot of people because I was a musician, and I knew a lot of friends and people who were having horrible experiences being pulled over by the cops and everything. But what came out recently really outraged me, which was that he says, yeah, we're arresting these kids for marijuana, these black kids for marijuana, and that's just the way it's going to be. So essentially that like 10 times as many black kids per capita are getting arrested for marijuana than white kids and getting in trouble with the law and having criminal

records and being enraged and traumatized. And any interaction with the police when they control you and tell you what to do and maybe manhandle you a little bit, that can traumatize you for life. And he said, well, that's just the way it goes. For an infraction nobody actually cares about. He didn't really care. And I thought of a question. I compared in my mind to these kids in cages at the border as a moral comparison.

So the kids in cages. So that's terrible also. But I understand the predicament. You have a border. You're trying to control the border. Families come over with their kids. You don't know. You can't just let them in. The courts have told you you can't incarcerate the families together. So there's no clear answer. Like, I can say, no, kids in cages is no good. But I can't really tell them how to handle that problem. Nobody has a good answer to that. So I have a certain respect for that predicament with an immoral outcome, these kids in cages, as opposed to the Bloomberg situation, which is also absolutely immoral, absolutely traumatizing, and totally unnecessary.

And in a certain way, I could make the argument that what Bloomberg did is even worse and less morally defensible than the predicament of putting kids in cages, which even Obama at times felt he had to do. Any thoughts on that? Is that ridiculous? You don't understand what I'm saying, right? Yes, I understand. Well, you know, stop and frisk is the really downside of the Bloomberg mayoralty. And I tried, in my book, I tried to go back and find out why he did it, because it was so wrong. I mean, I read the court case, and the way the police abused kids was just unconscionable. I mean, kids just walking home from school with a Coke bottle in their pants

and kids soon becoming terrified of the police, and that terror made the police decide that they were suspicious. I mean, it was really, really awful. Now, stop, question and frisk has been around for a very long time. It was part of a court case in the late 60s, Terry versus Ohio. They were called Terry stops. But what happened with the Bloomberg administration was they just sent the police out and said stop anybody who looks like they might have any kind of weapon and they just stopped everybody and it took Bloomberg did not

I don't believe that Bloomberg really realized on a gut level how bad it was until he saw that the number of stop and frisk went down and the crime rate did not go up because he thought that the crime rate was going to go up and that was what they kept saying when you when you pull back on stop and frisk the crime rate's going to go up it did not happen it hasn't happened i i i suspect it will go up at some point because of it, but I don't know that that's the end of the consideration. The police still use that tactic. It's not gone. It didn't disappear. It's just that you have a constitutional way to do it, and you have to follow these specific rules to stop.

I'm going to ask Will's opinion in a second. I just wanted to say that I had always thought that, Bloomberg made the argument that well actually the lives being saved here are black and minority lives overwhelmingly and that was true and I think in his mind

that made it like I'm saving lives. So everything else is secondary. And I understand that logic. But what was always interesting to me is that if you're doing if you're having a policy which is saving thousands or hundreds of black lives and the black people whose lives are being saved find it intolerable. You ought to stop and say, wait a second. You know, maybe there's something here I don't understand. They don't appreciate this. They would rather

some higher level of crime as a trade-off to leaving their lives with more comfort. He just believed the police commissioner and Ray Kelly was the police commissioner and anything the police commissioner wanted, he just

supported him on it. And it it it was wrong and finally we got him to say it was wrong well I should say well as a black man if you might not recognize it from his hello mrs. Randolph mr. Kaplan boys and girls let's not forget that Bloomberg said that all the real crimes happen in the black neighborhoods. Yeah, you guys don't live in the black neighborhoods, obviously. He gave some statistics of the violent crimes being in minority neighborhoods, but the statistics are accurate. I don't know about that. I haven't know about that. Well. You know. I haven't heard.

Think about statistics. I haven't heard of statistics challenge. It's usually. It's not like a bunch of different people doing studies. It's usually one person. You're taking studies from one person. And we don't know if this study covered other neighborhoods. They just.

Look. Listen. Well, you don't think there's a lot of white people mugging each other on the Upper East Side, right? I don't know. I don't know. They're not point is. Well, you don't think there's a lot of white people mugging each other on the Upper East Side, right? I don't know. I don't know. They're doing it with pens and paper with white people. Hey, sign here on the dotted line.

Listen, Will, this is the thing, and I've had this argument or this kind of awkward discussion before, and I always find this predicament. We spend so much time as a nation properly focusing on the plight of the African-American minority communities because of their third-rate way that they're treated and live. Hold on. And yet when you want to focus on crime in that community, there's this kind of pride which comes along.

I say, well, we don't have – But no one's talking about... Why are you saying we have more crime than other people? I say, well, okay, if you don't have more crime than other neighborhoods, then why should you get special attention? Okay, but no one's talking about the seed that caused that. No, that's a whole other matter. Hold on, hold up, Hammer. Let me finish.

Okay. No one's talking about the seed that caused that. Why is there more crime if you say are in black neighborhoods? That's a whole other question. Hold up, hold up. That's a whole other question. Let me finish. No, hold up.

See, that's what I'm saying. Black people, none of the white people. You're changing the subject. I'm not changing the subject. So no one's talking about, for crying out loud, did you guys hear it took 120 years for them to make lynching a crime? 120 years later. And four people voted.

They don't care. Of course, they don't care about. Four people voted against it. I agree with you. It's three Republicans and one independent. No. Will. And I bet you there were some Democrats in there, but Democrats favor themselves.

They're supposed to be the people for the people of color, but they can't publicly say I'm against. Will. Yes. We were talking about Bloomberg and his remarks about Trump. Hold on, they have Comstat? Is that what it is? Comstat? Yes, that's right. And they have some sort of thing there, and they see the dots, like... But it continued, right?

Yeah, yeah. And every police department in the country started under Dinkins and Koch. In the mic, in the mic. Dinkins and Koch used a very similar system. No, but whatever. I'm saying, and he's looking at these stats, and as a mayor, he doesn't look at those. He says, look at all the crimes committed in that zone. I know.

And doesn't say, well, we need to know the root causes why. But no, you have to let me. We have a police force, and a police force job is to prevent those crimes. You have to let me finish my full thing. Bloomberg is trying to fix the problem on the surface level, not going deep into why are these people doing this or what caused this. What can he do about that? You go and you change the laws.

You change the way people treat them. What law? Hold up, Hammer. What law? You said change the laws. What law? Whatever law. Or implement laws. You change the way people treat them. What law? Hold up, Hammer. Let me. What law? You said change the laws. What law? Whatever law. Or implement laws.

Like what? The whole lynching. Why is that lynching law took so long? Why else would someone be lynching? There wasn't lynching in New York City. Are you sure about that? Not now under Bloomberg. Not now.

Not under Bloomberg. I'm on your side about this, but I think one of the lessons of the last 50, 70 years has to have been that nothing seems to work. I mean, it's a very difficult problem that nobody's quite sure what to do. You've had cities like Baltimore with all black government passing whatever laws they thought would work and... But it's still America as a whole, the way they look. But the mayor still has to prevent...

A police force still has to attack crime. Their whole view on black people, the entire view on black people, which I don't care, you could have... Look, you guys know about Black Wall Street? You know about Black Wall Street, why it got shut down? Oh, yes, yes. In Kansas or someplace?

Oklahoma? Oklahoma, yeah. Oklahoma, right. Yeah. Okay, you know the story behind that? Well, it wasn't a race riot. People came in and just murdered people. Murdered, yeah.

Yeah, and you know why? Because they said some black man raped a white woman, and they just went and murdered people. Yeah, and you know why? Because they said some black man raped a white woman, and they just went and murdered all. But it had to do with taking over a financial institution. Yeah, but my point I'm trying to say is, America's view on black people. This is how they see us. But when was that?

1920s. That was the 20s, yeah. I'm sorry I went way off topic, but you had to go deep in the seed of what caused this. But here's the thing. You can't just cover it on the surface level. I was a New York City newspaper reporter. Fred Kaplan's talking. Go ahead.

When crime started going down. What year is this? 92, 93, you know. And everybody I talked with, all the sociologists and this sort of thing, they said, oh, listen, this is bullshit. Crime, police practices can have no impact on the reduction in crime. And Giuliani and Bratton were saying it's because of what we were doing. Not Stop and Frisk, it was the CompStat and stuff like that.

And so many people told me this is impossible and yet you know yes ultimately you need to get to the root causes but of what you're trying to do you know there were 2,500 murders in New York City in 1989 88 something like that now there are 300 not even 300 stunning And we haven't addressed the real root causes of all this shit, but we were able to reduce the level of crime by a staggering percentage. Can I give you guys a little example? So in my neighborhood, there's just a neighborhood where they start putting more police in the streets.

I'm not one of these people that's, you know, the police ain't nothing after police. I believe in good policing. You put good police in the neighborhoods. The thing is, all these guys who sell drugs or whatever, it's like they just don't disappear. This has been their life. You know, they have no other way of life, whether they have a criminal record or because, what are they going to do, go get a 9 to 5? It's not that easy to turn these people's lives that easily around.

And they're like, well, the cops are here. I can't sell drugs. I'm going to go get a job, a 9 to 5. It's like they're going to go somewhere else. It doesn't happen like that overnight. But it's like. Well, yeah, I agree with you. And I don't mean to cut you off.

Finish. Good. You always cut me off. So that's why, you off. Finish. Good. You always cut me off. So, so, but that's why, that's why, you know, things, things turn like, uh,

you know, the Titanic trying to avoid it. They turn very, very slowly and you would not expect crime to, uh, disappear immediately. And I don't think you'd expect it to resurge immediately because we've kind of gotten used to it and people have kind of gotten used to living in a certain way

and it won't happen overnight. But I do think that there is a relationship between the predictability of getting caught and what you're liable to do in terms of being a criminal. I mean, look at the amount of black people in jail for marijuana versus the amount of white people in jail for marijuana versus the amount of white people in jail for marijuana. I said that's horrible.

And how much money does marijuana make a year about, you think? Who make? The marijuana. I don't know. Billions. Billions. You think that's all black people?

Yes. Have you seen the statistics? No, I don't. Maybe if Cuomo lets us legalize it. It'll, you know. Nothing but legalize. I'm more for, by the way, just so you know, I know what it looks like. I don't do any drugs.

Don't smoke. Don't drink. Nothing. He doesn't even have sex. He's celibate. But I do believe marijuana is way better for you than alcohol. It is. It has way more healing things than alcohol, if anything.

So it's like. Will, we're talking about Bloomberg here. I know. I'm going to come back to that. It's like now they want to legalize it, but then what about all the hundreds, the millions of people, black men and women they put in jail. They should let them all out. And they should expunge their rights. They should let all of them out.

Sanders said that. I was like, you know what, good for him. A couple of them said that the other night. Did Bloomberg say that? Yeah, he did. Did he on the stage? I never heard him say that. So what did you think about David Dinkins when he was mayor?

Were you here then? I was here. Yeah, I was born and raised here. David Dinkins, I can't. He just endorsed Bloomberg, by the way. That's what I was going to say. Dinkins did? Yeah.

Dinkins. Let me just say real quick. That was a time when most of us didn't pay attention to politics as we are now. So Dinkins, I don't remember any good things out of him. I just remember he's a weird looking dude and some of his policies was a little racist towards black people.

Dinkins? Oh no, no. I'm thinking Koch. Shoot, sorry. Sorry, Koch. Koch, not Dinkins. I take it back. Koch. Koch is a weird looking dude. Do we agree? He was. You're right. Dinkins, I feel like any politician, no matter what the color, gender, when you're trying to do right, your hands are cuffed with the old system. And it takes so long to change things.

It takes forever. So Dinkins maybe wanted to do the right things, but I feel like his hands was... He couldn't do much, you know. No, but other mayors did. He did pretty well. I mean, he started a lot of stuff. He started some of the policing programs. The policing

and he cut back on crime. He was... He did some of the housing. But a lot of people didn't like him, though, right? Well, not my people. Well, you know, Giuliani defeated him when he ran against the second time. What do you think about Giuliani? Giuliani. I mean, Giuliani's nuts. No one loves Giuliani.

I think he's gone nuts. You love Giuliani? Well, no. I have to be honest. I have to tell you something. In 1996, I was a reporter. He was in May. I interviewed him.

It was the Republican Convention was going on in San Diego. And I said, how come you're not there? He goes, no, that kind of thing isn't for me. I'm more for moderate politicians of either party than extremists. I mean, what I'm saying is something has happened. He knew what you wanted to hear. Maybe, but look, he was, to be the mayor of New York, even if you're a Republican, on social issues, you had to be a liberal.

He was crazy, even when he was here. He was a little crazy. Hasn't he really lost his mind, though? I mean, I thought he was well into dimension now. This eye is wide. I think he's changed. I actually think this has always been Giuliani. The real Giuliani is coming out now.

He's always been like this, and he's been disguising this to be for the people. Giuliani has always been crazy, batshit crazy. But also remember, he ran for president. He was kind of a liberal Republican. He got one delegate after spending $50 million. He saw which way the Republican Party was going, and he went that way too. I think there's a lot of opportunism. And then I think, I've talked with people, and you have

too, Eleanor. You've talked with people who kind of know him. I don't know. They tell me... I mean, we all interviewed him. But, yeah, Interbell, I mean, people who are close to him. They say this is a different guy now. There's something wacky going on. Well, yeah, so I... Oh, wait a minute. I mean, he's the guy who came out and announced his divorce to the press.

His wife had to watch it on television. Right. I mean, he's always been nuts, I think. And this is the person that Noam loves. Well, you know, I didn't get to comment on that. I don't like him now. I think he's farcical now. You know, and even when he smiles, he looks like a jack-o'-lantern.

The guy's crazy. But I'm not going to lie and pretend that when he was mayor, I didn't at the time think he was the most important leader I had ever witnessed in my lifetime. There had never been a correlation. We still don't know what's causation, what's correlation, but there had never been a correlation in my lifetime between a leader and a change in the reality as there was when Giuliani took over New York City. Giuliani took over when it was chaos, and he left New York City, well, prior to 9-11, it was already unbelievably improved. And then during 9-11, he was masterful. Nobody could take that away from him.

That was his minute. He rose to the occasion. I mean, you've got to give him that. Hold on. Let's rewind for a second. What else can you do? No, no. Many people would not rise to the occasion.

No, he knew every subway route. He knew the direction. I remember seeing him. He did put the emergency center on the, what was it, the 27th floor of one of the towers that got blown up. He was worried about floods. Yes. He wasn't worried about the right things. But look, you have to give him what.

Maybe we should take a magnifying glass to Abraham Lincoln's conduct mistakes in the Civil War, too. I mean, there's mistakes. I'm sorry. I got to go, guys. Go. Okay. Mr. Kaplan, boys and girls. Sorry.

He left New York much, much better than he found it. And he didn't... He wasn't the one who quadrupled stop and frisks. And whatever he is personally, creep or not, he was a good mayor. I would not... In retrospect, I would not

prefer that Dinkins had won and not Giuliani. That's just my take. And he wasn't very friendly to nightlife, by the way. He brought the people coming in with sound meters and whatever, so it wasn't like he served my interests. But there was... So what did you like about him?

Listen, you have to understand, New York at that time, we thought it was done. We thought New York was done. After 9-11, you mean? No, no, no.

In the 80s. Oh, in the 80s. In the late 80s and early 90s. At like two in the morning here, we used to call it Night of the Living Dead.

It was just, we were just crack addicts and needles and every waitress was mugged and I mean, it just couldn't't my stepmother Ava was doing a bank deposit and got her head smashed into the pavement and had a concussion my father was robbed at gunpoint I mean it was this was this was the reality of New York and nobody thought it was

ever going to they were making movies like Escape from New York you know, and then by the time Giuliani left, that was done. Yeah. But I mean, it's problematic, though. I mean, my father grew up in the East Village and my grandparents lived there my whole life. So I remember going there and seeing all that shit as a kid. So I am sympathetic to that. And I like that I was able to ride the subway and not get like gang raped you know but one could

argue that his tactics were questionable where did all those people go it takes a 10 what is it takes a tough man to make a tender chicken like alright you know whatever where did those people go I'm not just being facetious where did he just ship them to like Florida listen there is

something trying Rikers Try Rikers. Jersey, Rikers, yeah. There is a sliding scale in real life, which is that when you have an urgent situation, which I think New York qualified as an urgent situation, an existential threat, basically, to New York City, certain actions, strong-arm actions, seem more defensible. When Bloomberg took over and things were calm, and then he tripled down to try to squeeze the last bit of, you know,

statistical moisture out of that sponge, didn't care. That's a totally different calculation to me. You know, Fred said, and the experts in crime often say this, nobody knows the real reason why crime went down across the country, except maybe for Chicago and New Orleans. Some say lead paint. I mean, it's incredible. People think the lead paint had something to do with it. Well, they think the crack epidemic really— Fewer people were born to crack. Yeah, there's this notion, what's his name?

Freakonomics. Fewer people were born with crack in their brains and didn't grow up to become criminals. I think that's kind of... One thing about the rest of the country, almost every major city police department adopted the CompStat. What CompStat was, keep in mind, before CompStat was computer statistics, doing daily summaries of where the crimes were happening in New York. If there was a concentration of crime in this block, you send more cops there. Until then, there were quarterly crime statistics in New York.

How were you going to react to that? This was a guy named Jack Maple, who shortly after he instituted it, died of cancer. He was a New York reporter at the time. Well, that's an unusual one. Often I don't. I could forget your name

on certain nights. He instituted this. Nobody had done it before. And then suddenly, every police department in the country in a big city did this and was having similar effects. I think that was

a big part of it. And Baltimore, Camden, Chicago, there are... Well, yeah, Comstead was really important. Yeah. But I'm just saying there were a lot of things

that were happening. Oh, yeah, lots of things going on. And, you know, the crack epidemic was shutting down the sorry for who knows what epidemic was shutting down and um and police departments were beginning to send people out and do more and more community policing there were about five different things like that that made a lot of difference. Comstat was really important because it did give

police departments a clue when there were these clusters of crimes, and they very often were caused by the same two or three people. So, I'm sorry to say, but there are some cities where crime has, like right now, Baltimore has tremendous violent crime.

So it's not, you know, it's not as if. So obviously there are there are still scenarios where if you don't do certain things right, you can have a total conflagration of conflagration of crime. Now, I used to drive home late at night in those days. And my father used to tell me, just run the red lights. Because if you stopped at a red light, especially around going on the east side. This was like at 1 or 2 o'clock in the morning. Yeah, or even later. Between the squeegee people and the people that...

And it was strict orders from my father. He said, you run the red lights, and if a cop pulls you over, you tell him why you ran the red lights. If you get a ticket, you get a ticket. And as we would later learn, the squeegee people were criminals. Oh, absolutely. These were heroin addicts who were robbing people. What did you think they were before that? No, but my point is...

The ACLU defended them as... And Giuliani got rid of them. And if there was not a single life saved by that, it was still a tremendous change in... It was like 20 people. That's all that he had to do. It was the a tremendous change It was like 20 people That's all that he had to do It was the same 20 people Guys

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A lot of it's just in theory, you know, like Trump is president now. Trump's a disaster. If I didn't know he was president, would I actually detect anything different in my life? Could I point to something that's changed since he's president? No, I can't. But with Giuliani, things really began to change for me, significant things in my day-to-day life. Again, maybe it's correlation and not causation. Well, you know, when Bloomberg took over in 2002, the one thing he did say about Giuliani, he didn't hire many of Giuliani's people.

He didn't really agree with them. But he did say that because Giuliani had calmed the city, the crime rate had gone down so drastically that that was one thing he thought he wasn't going to have to do. And it wasn't until much later that he decided that he needed to go after the illegal guns on the street and to go after the NRA. He was one of the, you know, when he went after the NRA in 2005, nobody was doing that. It was considered a political suicide to go after the NRA. But he began to focus on the illegal gun trade and all the illegal guns that were coming from Virginia and North Carolina and Georgia and places like that and so they had all these campaigns to get these guns off the streets of New York but Giuliani had made that it possible in a way because he had dealt with it with the overall

problem and brought the crime rate down so dramatically. Isn't this the way it is? And then I guess we've got to wrap it up. I've made this analogy before that kind of like you look through a microscope at no magnification, your first takeover, horrible New York City, and you see all these terrible things. You can see them with the naked eye, and you clean them all up, and everything's clean.

And then you double the magnification of the microphone. Oh, my God, look at that. They're all back, whatever it is. And before you know it, you've doubled it to 128 times magnification, but it still looks just as big and ugly as it ever did, and you forget that you're looking at 120. And this is what happened with these politicians.

So Giuliani starts off by saving 2,500 lives, and now Bloomberg keeps turning to magnification. He says, they're drinking sweet sodas by buckets. We need pedestrian walkways. We need bike lanes. You know what Bloomberg says?

He says to New Yorkers, he says, just before you die, remember, you've got three extra years. And I'm not sure that. Because he improved the life. That's right. Your life expectancy went up by three years. Is that because of the murder, John?

Are they healthier? I'll tell you what it really was. It was that a lot of young immigrants came in and skewed the numbers. Skewed the statistics. But, you know, people weren't smoking as much. They weren't eating these horrible fatty, you know. The only person eating the trans fat is Trump, and he loves it. Would you vote for Bloomberg? Oh yeah. You would?

I would. You don't have to say if you don't want to. No, I would vote for any Democrat. You would vote for Sanders? I wouldn't be happy about it but yeah. I don't think I would. Would you vote for Trump over Sanders?

Or is your cop out that you live in New York and it wouldn't matter? That is his cop-out. No, no. I would not say it doesn't. I don't vote. Which is criminal. You don't vote, period? I haven't voted for president in a long time.

Jesus Christ, no. Why are you even talking about anything? I know. It's insane. You have no right to talk about anything. You're right, because I don't want to get called for jury duty and my vote doesn't count. But I'm not using that as a cop-out because I will still— Why don't you want to get called for jury duty and my vote doesn't count. But I'm not using that as a cop-out because I will still— Why don't you want to get called for jury duty?

I will still use the word vote figuratively as supporting a candidate. You know, years ago, I wouldn't even interview anybody. I can't imagine President Sanders. Did you hear what Eleanor said? I was a political reporter for years and years, and I wouldn't even interview people when they didn't vote. I'd just say, oh, you didn't vote, and I'd go interview somebody else. It's my right as an American not to vote. It's criminal.

She might have dissed you at some point. Yeah, it's criminal. You look a little familiar. Especially with somebody who has such strong political opinions. Presuming that I did vote normally, I don't think, if it's Trump-Sanders, I don't think I would vote, even if I had voted for the last 20 elections in a row. Or however many I've been alive for.

You are voting. You're voting for Trump. That's right. Not in New York. Sanders is going to win New York. If everybody said that, okay, I'm not going to get into this. If everybody doesn't say it, that's the beauty of it. That's not true, actually. A lot of people say it, and it's incredibly problematic.

There were people in 2016 who said, the polls show Hillary way ahead. This is a perfect time to vote for a third-party candidate. I always vote. I just want to say, rather than talk about me voting or not, all I'm trying to bring out is that I find when you measure the dangers of Trump and the dangers of Sanders, they're significant.

I don't agree, and here's why. Okay. I don't agree either. The future of democracy is different from some shitty economics for a few years. Second, most of what Sanders wants to do has to be passed by Congress. It will not be passed by Congress. The things that Trump is threatening to do, a lot of it's executive order. I know that too, Fred.

Judge appointments. Sanders too. No, no, not true. Well, a socialist... No, Medicare for all things like this has to be passed by Congress. Well, you're assuming that's my fear about Sanders. My fear about Sanders is more about international affairs. I think...

But we have no idea what he's going to do. No, we don't. And you don't know what Trump is going to do either. Listen, I have a brother-in-law who voted for Bush instead of Kerry because he said Kerry would never bomb Iran. Well, neither did Bush, turns out. But that's what I'm saying.

I think that there's risks. There's significant risks from either candidate. Well, then go with what you can actually see and measure and detect and observe. What you need to realize is that as much as you worry about Sanders, he is not going to put some of these crow magnets on the Supreme Court. I don't find these people to be crow magnets. Oh, boy. You haven't looked at their ruling.

It was a hair different in his decisions from Gorsuch. From Garland. From Garland. Not from Garland. Yes, from Garland. You can look it up. I mean, he's a mainstream moderate. There's the district courts and things like that.

You might be right about that. They told me that Justice Roberts was going to be so horrible and a crow magnet, and he voted to uphold Obamacare. You know, I don't, I think. Well, he sees himself now as a balancer. It's a whole different thing. Okay, we have two very important things to discuss. Would you agree that, and this always worries me.

I mean, they always oversell. On both sides. This is not a left-right thing. The opposition always oversells. So that, like, if you look back at the things they said about Romney wanting to put people back in chains and all this stuff, there's so much hyperbole when they start opposing somebody

that we really usually get a distorted opinion. The thing about Trump, it's all out there in the open. You don't have to say, what is he really going to do? He's telling you. Do you think he's riskier for the next four years because he's lame duck? Or do you feel like the last four years have shown us that he wasn't as risky?

Well, lame duck, let's change the perspective on that. He's unaccountable. That's what I mean, yeah. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So you think the next four years are riskier? Yes. But would you agree that most of the risks that people claimed for the first four years didn't pan out? No, quite a lot of them did.

Well, the end of democracy was Andrew Sullivan. It's happening. It is happening. How is it happening? I mean, look at everything he's doing. He's completely unhinged. If it weren't for the press. Fair enough.

If it weren't for the press. I'll answer that. I'll leave it at that. I'll leave it with the final word. I mean, I worry that he's going to go after look at what he's done at the Justice Department, they are turning that into a political army to go after any of the people that Trump doesn't like. No, you're a lawyer. This intimidation of jurors by name.

No, that's terrible. Putting them under the gun, you know. Wait, so you're talking about this juror who was his aunt? Yeah. Like I said, totally unhinged. Well, no, actually. You're right. That person's in danger.

That person's in danger now. Yeah, that's, listen, I don't, don't put him in a position of having to. And also, you don't want to be on a jury anyway. You'd have good reason, a better reason for not wanting to be on a jury. Do not put me in a position of having to defend him, especially defend him for his over-the-top, vulgar, disgusting behavior, because I always felt that way about him, you know, 10 years before he ran for president. I was always clear.

It's all out there. It's all out there. But the... But if you don't vote for the Democrat, you really are supporting him. But the most refined, amiable president that we can be very proud of, like Barack Obama, can pull out of Syria and 500,000 people can die. And what I'm saying is that... There's not necessarily a link to that, but...

I think you think that. You agree. There's some link. Most people... The people around Obama think... The danger might have been drawing the red line to begin with. I know a lot of people, even people who were with him, who said probably should have done something. But my point being that I'm trying to analyze what will happen in the world with a Trump presidency as opposed to what might happen with Sanders.

And I'm quite worried about the we've never had a president who was taken as a pacifist. I don't think he's a pacifist. How do you feel about Biden in case he pulls it out? I like Biden. I mean, I trust, I think he's a little feeble, but I trust him to be a steady hand. Right? Yeah, he's a moderate, you know.

But, I mean, I think the weird thing is, we talk about this, if you were to plot everybody ideologically and then zoom out from it, Biden, Hillary, and Trump actually are much closer together as dots on a spectrum than Sanders. Well, only if you're talking about economic policy. Can I ask you guys a real question? Trump is to the left on a lot of foreign policy.

A real question. I don't know what that means. Well, he was against the foreign wars, you know, as opposed to Hillary. Hillary probably more of a hawk. He's put more people in Afghanistan and in Syria for that matter. More than Syria, than Hillary would have?

They're pretty close. I don't know. They're probably pretty similar is what I'm saying. Both of them, they're closer together than either of them would be to Sanders. That's my point. Go ahead. Is it a huge failure on the part of the Democrats

that they could not pull it together to find somebody who seems like he can really get his shit or her shit together and beat Donald Trump? I think initially Biden was seen as the guy. And then in the first couple of debates, it was like, oh, my God, he's really feeble. And then Bloomberg, who I think I'm i'm right about this eleanor you can correct me he was going to run if biden didn't run and then when biden ran he goes well i guess i don't need to and then when biden looked like he was going down he said well i better step in and then biden starts getting better but it's but no it is kind of pathetic that um that well i would say this let's say you were a politician.

You're in the city council or the U.S. Senate or whatever. Who would want to be what person in his right mind would want to be president? I would want to be. Your hair is going to go gray. It's going to be no fun at all. You're just going to catch

shit every minute of your life. Fred, what are you talking about? Every single city council person wants to be president. You remember Mo Udall? Remember Mo Udall? But that was 1976.

That's right, but he defined it. He said there is a disease that affects all politicians. It's called presidentialitis. And you can't get away from it. You think that's still a contagion? I do. I absolutely do. You know why?

I mean, you look at that field the other night, and at least three, maybe four of them should drop out. Oh, they might after California. It might be too late then. So why didn't a smarter, better Democrat emerge in this election year? That is, I mean, it is just inexplicable.

Let me ask you, who would it have been? Who do you wish would have run? Well, I like this guy out in Montana. Okay, but would it he had the same... Everybody liked Michael Bennett, too. Complete washout.

Why? I don't know. You have to be dramatic? What happened to Cory Booker? How come nobody likes him? I liked him. He just couldn't get the money, and he couldn't get the traction. I heard the people who heard his whole half hour spiel

that you'd listen to that. You said, yeah, he's good, but he couldn't find a way to compress it down to two minutes. I think there's way more energy and numbers on the far woke left than people realized and gave credit for.

That doesn't explain Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar. You add those three people together, they're beating Sanders and Warren. Oprah could probably win. Oprah could probably win. The guy from Montana was like a moderate governor, right?

In a different era, he might have been Clinton. Michael Bennett could have been too. Now, I don't think there is energy, like a potential energy around that type of the best moderate candidate that might reverberate with the three of us. I don't think is capable of exciting voters right now. Part of the problem is, you know, there used not to be very many primaries. Now I don't like the idea of open primaries. I mean, there are going to be Republicans voting for Sanders in South Carolina.

There's a movement. There's a hashtag. Rush Limbaugh always tries to get people to do things like that. They're all doing that right now. And there's no winner-take-all states, and superdelegates aren't going to have any role on the first ballot. So, yeah, the party structure is such that there is no parties. Somebody said, oh, the Democratic elders will never allow this to happen. What Democratic elders are you talking about?

What Republican party are you talking about? So when money becomes the big thing and it's not funneled through the parties and you don't even have closed primaries, people with a lot of money and a lot of charisma and populist appeal start winning primaries. And then you have to kind of go in that direction, at least rhetorically

or dramatically, to do it. And so, yeah, kind of a soft-spoken, mild, smart person. I don't think... Jimmy Carter was kind of an unusual guy to begin with. But that was right after Nixon. Right after Nixon. I will't think, I don't think, well, Jimmy Carter was kind of an unusual guy

to begin with. But that was right after Nixon too. Right after Nixon. I will never tell a lie. Yeah, yeah. That really worked.

This was Bloomberg's big mistake. Like, when Bloomberg was commenting on the Democratic field that he was making fun of Beto O'Rourke for apologizing

or apologizing for being born, I was like, this is brilliant. And then when he actually is running, he loses his nerve to actually speak that way. And he should have learned a lesson from Trump

that don't listen to what they tell you you can't say. The voters don't care. They want to hear you say it. I think with O'Rourke, he was uncovered to be an empty suit. No, but I say Bloomberg was just like, was hitting hard at that time. As soon as he got on the debate stage, he's not hitting

hard. And we need him to go full sister soldier. He needs to take down the woke with everything he's got. He needs to say, yeah, I made a dirty joke. If one of you haven't made a dirty joke, then don't vote for me. He did say that. He didn't say the second sentence, which is what

Noam wants him to say. He didn't say it with... It's like, yeah, so what? He didn't do it like that. If you spoke to him, if he wasn't running, he'd say, yeah, I made a dirty joke. It was the 90s. What do you want from me? What does that have to do with me running for president? But now he's like, yeah, I shouldn't have said that. Why did he do so badly in the first debate?

Was it because he hadn't been rehearsed? No, I think he'd gotten a lot of different instructions. And I think one of the things they told him was not to go after any of the women. And then when Elizabeth Warren went after him tooth and nail, he really couldn't go back at her. And, you know, what they should have done in that first debate, and they didn't do enough in the second debate, was to go after Sanders. Sanders, the weak link. And it took them forever to do that. It was debate was to go after Sanders. Sanders, the weak link. And it took them forever to do that.

It was a terrible debate. Terrible. Shocking, right? Who somebody should be fired at CBS? The worst questions. The worst questions. No moderation at all. Well, you know what?

I think they need to have plugs or, you know, a way to turn off the microphones. Yeah. And, you know, somebody goes on, you know, and they've gone after a minute and 15 seconds. Look, Eleanor, you know this. These things used to be run by the League of Women Voters, who picked the moderators, set the rules, not the parties, they did it, and to the extent there was an audience at all, maybe if they didn't be able to invite a few people, they instructed them. The moderator would say, you will keep completely silent. You will be kicked out of here if you make any noise.

Now here come the candidates. You can applaud now. But they were dead silent. There was no throwing meat to the masses kind of shit. And they were reasonably okay debates. They were debates for one thing. When they asked what's your motto? What's your motto?

Do you think that this is racist? What do you not like about Bernie Sanders socialism? Why does somebody have to have a motto? I don't have a motto. Trump has a motto. It was such a stupid question. But these questions are designed to raise hell.

It's like, what do you think is so terrible about your opponent's policies? What's the worst thing about Sanders in your mind? I would like to hear if they're going to ask an open-ended question. And by the way, what's the biggest misconception about you? At least it was a chance to humanize him in some way. A lot of them fell flat. But I would like to hear, especially among these kind of very left-wing people, what do you feel about America?

How do you feel about your country? Because there's a suspiciousness that the further left you go, the more they're holding their nose about the country entirely. Sanders certainly is charmed by everybody.

You know what? Bernie everybody's just said I love America but I've got to change this this this this this you know and he'd link that back to our true traditions and so I just don't like questions that that are designed to arouse cliche or just good for ratings I'm not sure debates really tell you that much they don't even if you're a good debater so what I don't tell you and I wouldn't be surprised if Trump decides he's not gonna he's not gonna yeah everybody said I'd be so I am looking forward to getting on the debate stage with Donald Trump I will whip him well what if Trump just says I'm too busy to getting on the debate stage with Donald Trump. I will whip him. Well, what if Trump just says, I'm too busy?

There's no constitutional requirement that you have to do a debate. I'm too busy. I got this crisis. I got that crisis. I got my golf game. He's way too big of a narcissist. I'll give odds that that will not happen. Yeah, I mean, his ego is way too big.

Or maybe just one debate, and he demands. Or he has said, they have the the debate and the rules are unfair. I'm not going to go. He said that. But he said everything he says is for leverage and bluffing and attention. That's a lot of and trolling. He does a lot of. All right.

This has been a pleasure. And no, really. And I really hope so. Let's get the titles of both books correctly. Go out and buy the following two, where is it here? The following two books. Fred Kaplan's book is called The Bomb, Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War. And Eleanor Randolph's book is The Many Lives of Michael Bloomberg, which must be selling, it's not a new book, right?

It's a couple years old? No, it came out in September. No, it came out in September. Oh, it came out in September. So you must, were you kicking your heels when he decided to run for office? Yes, I did. Somebody called and said, go out and buy a lottery ticket. Oh my God. Because it was really good for the book.

I'm so happy for you. You know, I knew a little bit somehow those guys who did that documentary about Koch, and right when it came out, Koch dropped dead. Right. And they were trying to pretend that they were really sorry about it. But at least he didn't die. But I'm so happy for you that it breathed life into book sales, as it must have. Okay.

Thank you very much, everybody. Good night. Thank you. Thank you. A podcast at ComedyCell.com. Oh, yeah. And at Live from the table