The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Ilya Shapiro and Richard Hanania

Episode Date: March 3, 2023

Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute. He is the author of multiple books and is a frequent contributor to numerous publications including the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Journal of Law & many more. Richard Hanania is the author of Public Choice and the Illusion of Grand Strategy. and a forthcoming book on the connection between wokeness and civil rights law. run a think tank called the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology.    

This is Live from the Table, a Comedy Cellar-affiliated podcast coming at you on SiriusXM 99 Raw Dog and on the Left Button Podcast Network. Dan Aderman here. I was not here last week. I was doing something somewhere. Also with us is Noam Dwarman, the owner of the world-famous Comedy Cellar, arguably the greatest comedy club in the history of the sport. Perrie Lashenbrand is with us. She is the producer, for want of a better word.

We also have Nicole Lyons, who comes to us from Binghamton, New York. She is our audio expert, and she is behind the scenes. She says little and does much. Anyhow, I haven't been here in studio for a couple of weeks i was in vegas i was uh and then last week i was busy but um in any case um we have had some news in the comedy world uh the death of rick newman founder of catch a Rising Star. I don't know, Noam, if you have any familiarity with him. When did that happen?

I didn't know that. He died, I think, last week, something like that, at the age of, I believe it was 81. But he was the original owner of Catch a Rising Star on the Upper East Side, which was supposed to be the first club that I ever performed at. I signed up for their open mic, and then when I got there the day of my performance, it had closed down. But they reopened it using, Rick reopened it with some partners on 28th Street a couple of years later, but it didn't last very long.

But that was the kind of second version of Catch in New York. And it was right near FIT. And all the waitresses worked at FIT, so they were all gorgeous. So there was no audience, but it was still a pleasant place to go because of that. And Richard Belzer also died.

He was a regular there. Yeah, that's who I thought you were going to say. But the thing that amazes me... That's all right, thank you. Can you run through the room, make it sound like a group? Thank you. The thing about Elvis that amazes me, that's all right, thank you. Can you run through the room, make it sound like a group? Thank you. The thing about Elvis that amazes me is that

Elvis in 1956 was drafted into the army, as you recall, if you're an Elvis fan. And when he was in the army, he met a 13 year old girl in West Germany and he convinced her father to let him take this 13 year old girl back to Graceland with him. Only Elvis could do that. I mean, cause her father was a Colonel in the Air Force.

You imagine that phone call, hello Colonel, this is Elvis Presley. Yeah, I met your daughter. She's a very lovely, very sweet, very beautiful little girl. I know she's only 13 years old, but I want to bring her back to Graceland. Yeah, I got a chaperone there.

My daddy will be there. I want to lay a hand on her. I want to marry her when she's 21 years old. And I took the liberty of putting $50 million in your bank account. Thank you very much. And, of course, the rest is history. But can you imagine another guy trying to do that?

Some other guy? Hello, Mrs. Schleiman, this is Murray Hechman. I saw your daughter Shelly's bas mitzvah. Thanks a lot. Have a good night. He never worked here, I don't think. No, he didn't work here. And Rick Newman, you know, he was highly regarded. Catch was a great place.

It was the best of all that generation of clubs, in my opinion. Had you ever been there? Yeah. I was there once, actually, as a customer. And I saw Attell and Rogel that night. And this is going back a long time ago. I was in law school at the time. I'm still not clear as to why they went out of business.

Yeah, I mean, that's an interesting question. I mean, it was a hot spot, you know, but maybe it wasn't a hot spot at some point because everything that goes up must come down. I know that's something that you fear, being now the top dog, wondering when the inevitable will happen. But I suspect it won't be for at least another decade. Why do you say that?

I think the momentum is just much too strong at this point. I'm less – I'm worried about everything, but I'm less worried about somebody doing it better than I am people just becoming less interested in comedy. Well, that's a possibility, but that really hasn't happened in 40 years. I mean there's always been a – at this level of interest, that could wane somewhat. But it's hard to imagine there will be a complete collapse in the comedy market because... It happened once before. Well, it wasn't a complete collapse. No, but it was significant.

When was that? The 90s. Well, was it a collapse or just that the comedy seller wasn't bringing him in? No, everybody talks about how the comedy kind of died in the 90s. This was a common subject to talk about in the industry. Well, just because people are talking about it doesn't mean it's true. No, it was true. It was true.

And a lot of the boom that we're seeing now, is it a comedy boom or is it a comedy seller boom? To what extent can you attribute the success of this club to a general increase in the interest in stand-up comedy or is it just an entry in the seller is just, it's created it.

I don't know. I don't know. I can't believe the seller created it. I don't know. It's busy and Billy busy in LA too. Right. I don't, I'm never in LA. I think the comedy store is busy.

I think it's busy. Yeah. I don't know if the other clubs are busy. I understand. It's busy in LA. Yeah. The comp, the. I was just in Vegas and we had pretty... This was the

busiest week. I've been to Vegas about six or seven times. And it was the busiest week that I've had. Yeah, Vegas is doing pretty well. And maybe just in time for them to cut us loose, but Vegas is doing pretty well. I mean, comedians sell out Madison Square Garden.

That was, I mean, it happens pretty regularly now. That was something that was not even seen possible until like a national phenom like Steve Martin was at the time to do that. I guess so. And music is, new music, current acts is much less of a thing. Going out to see music is much less of a thing.

Going out to see music as much as of a thing now. So comedy has replaced a lot of live performance energy. Even Broadway is apparently not doing well. Well, comedy is also a, um, a relatively cheap alternative. So I, I mean,

to what extent that plays in, I don't know. Yeah. Um, you know, if, if it, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, what extent that plays in, I don't know. Comics are expensive. And nothing – and like $26 is more than we charge on a Saturday night to see five comics at the Comedy Cellar. $26.

I'll have another one. That's crazy. No, I'm already talking about inflation. $26 inflation? But have you raised prices at all? No, I haven't, Dan. Okay. Well, that might be an inevitability at some point yeah i mean the thing is that

yes but at the same time i feel like people have less money than ever now because of inflation so i don't want to press my luck in competing for their fewer dollars. Does that make sense? So I'm kind of just content to make a little less money and stay and not risk being less busy. Is that a smart business? I don't know. Well,

it's hard to say what, you don't know how, what the elasticity is of, of demand. Oh, I, I know what the, I do know what the elasticity is. Comedy is not

medicine or food or transportation. No, but I think if you tacked on a couple more dollars, you wouldn't see any difference. But everybody's tacking on extra dollars, is what I'm saying. So, math is math. I mean, unless people are just, you know, racking up credit,

people generally in New York... I mean, the idea of inflation is that your salary goes up too. Well, eventually, eventually wages have to catch up with inflation. So – and eventually we will raise our prices, of course. We don't start – And then there's the inevitable grumblings of the comedians for more money. But that's another issue.

Yeah, well, we're still paying more than other clubs. But you're right. Yeah, I mean, at some point the inevitable will happen. But right now I feel like I'm worried to raise prices. Although the comedian pay is probably the last, that's probably the last thing that will go up because comedians view this place as a workout room. And, and, and, and if comedians want to make money, they do it elsewhere.

Well, we usually raise a comedian pay sometime around the time we raise our prices. I'm usually, you know, it looks bad to raise our prices significantly anyway and not raise – I don't even notice because I don't even notice what you're charging anyway. So I wouldn't notice, but somebody might. Anyway. And also, ironically, I don't think it's good to be charging too much less than the other clubs either. We are cheaper than the other clubs now, cheaper on paper and also cheaper because we don't have those ticket fees that the other clubs have.

But at some point, if you become too much less than the other clubs, people think it's second rate. Second rate. Yeah. You want the $1,000 hooker? Right. Right, Perrielle?

$1,000 hooker. If you're going to go to a hooker. You want the $1,000 one. Right? Don't you? Of course. But whater. You want the $1,000 one. Yeah. Right? Don't you? Of course. But what if you don't have $1,000, but you still really want to see it? Well, but you see the hooker online, and she looks great, but if she's only $200, I guess you're going to assume that it's inferior. Oh, that it's a bait and switch?

Or that it's a bait and switch, or that she might have some sort of STD or something. But in any case. I don't think they discount for of STD or something. But in any case – No, I don't think they discount for an STD. That's not a bad idea though. No, it doesn't work that way. Well, at that point, hopefully they don't put her on the lot. But – All right.

We've really taken a left turn. So let's get back on the subject. What else is in the news today? Before we have an important guest coming today, but what else? Well, you sent me an article about – I guess that's to do with what Ilya wants to talk about? That's what I want to talk to Ilya about because I'm fascinated by this. Well, just give me a brief thumbnail so I don't go into this. I didn't read the article in other words.

Well, that's your fault. I even tried to read it well but it's possible that the uh the audience didn't read it either so maybe i'm not gonna let's talk about something else what else is there to talk about well we could talk about but i don't want to bring it up did you know belzer i i know i met him once because he was when i did last Standing, he was one of the judges. The second time, when I foolishly went back for more, he was one of the judges at Gotham. And he said, you know, I did my joke about, you know, when people lie about their age online, on the internet, on like Match.com. Is that even still a thing, Match.com? Or has it been completely upended by Tinder and Bumble and Hinge and all that shit?

I mean, you're asking the wrong person. Maybe Match has... Nicole, you're not single either. But you're young at least. So, no offense, Perry. She's on Ashley Madison. Go ahead. Yeah, so my joke was, you know, send me a picture of you holding today's paper. You know, to verify that it was

a recent picture. Anyhow, which got big laughs, you know, at the time. you holding today's paper you know to verify that it was a recent picture anyhow so which got big laughs you know at the time it still gets me i still do it but but but yeah if it ain't broke you know but but belzer said you should do that joke holding today's paper then go ahead belzer said you shouldn't be talking about internet this was already like over 10 years ago and he said it's it's to talk about internet dating is automatically hack hack he didn't use the word hack but he but he said it's just everybody is talking about it. So you shouldn't talk about it. So, you know, anyway. So you don't like Belzer?

No, I don't dislike Belzer, but that was my only interaction with the guy. Well, okay. So I... By the way, I don't subscribe to that point of view. You may or may not like that particular joke about internet dating, but... Of course.

I thought he was a really good figure for acting. He's a unique-looking guy, unique-sounding guy. He looks kind of like Rick Ocasek. Yeah, he had charisma, but I saw him perform live once, and he didn't do well at all. Did you ever see him do stand-up? No. If I did,

I don't recall it. This is like the last thing you want somebody saying about you if you're a comic when you die. But he was also an actor. I am aware recall it. This is like the last thing you want somebody saying about you if you're a comic when you die. But he was also an actor. I am aware of that. I thought he was a great figure on TV. Yeah, he was incredible. Law and Order, SVU, he was great.

But apparently stand-up was really good. No, I don't know how he would want to be remembered. I think at one time he was a big fan of comedy. Yeah, but that was like his great love. He was big enough as a stand-up to get acting work. I mean, I think that – He was big at one time. But I'm saying I saw him one time and he didn't do well.

What do you want from me? I don't want to come in here and lie. That's what I said. Now, are there topics, Noam, that you feel – and I know what you're going to answer. Comics might – are there topics that are simply no-go topics in your your opinion, that are so overdone, so beaten? Absolutely not. Do you think I would say yes? No, I thought that's what you would say.

No, why would there be topics overdone? It's like saying a love song is overdone. You think that people would have had enough of silly love songs? It's not about the topic. It's about you, the performer, your take on it, your charisma to it. Comedians, that's not what people care about. I know that's not what people care about. That is what some comedians might care about. Yeah, but they're not paying the cover charge. They're not the ones going to make you famous. I would prefer not like, look, my red line is I don't

do airline jokes in New York. I'll do them anywhere else. I don't do it in New York. But I know people do. Will Simmons does his airline bit about his seat up. I'm telling you no matter what's going on, I will stay and watch it because it's so fucking funny and the audience loves it. And like,

who cares that other people have done airline jokes? It's hysterical. I understand that and you're right, except that I do have that one thing. I do feel, you know, that is my one rule in terms of that. And the thing that kills me about the people who are criticizing things like that, they all do dick jokes. Yeah, no, everybody does jokes about their kids. Everybody does jokes about a lot of things.

So, you know, it's... Here's Ilya. Ilya Shapiro is a senior fellow and director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute. Previously, he was executive director and senior lecturer at the Georgetown Center for the Constitution. He's the author of multiple books and has contributed to a variety of academic, popular, and professional publications, including the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Journal of Law, and many more. And I would just like to say that it was not easy to track you down because all of your old contact information is no longer. Is no longer what?

Well, that's the definition of old, right? You want the new. So I'm very happy to have you. I mean, I'm still filing lots of briefs. You can look up any of my briefs, and my new contact information is right there. Well, I called you. I went old school. All right.

This is why I want to talk to you because I'm fascinated. First of all, you would call yourself a civil libertarian? Sure. Yeah. It's not what I lead with but sure but it's but it's but you know you're right you're you're right for a reason magazine often and you're and i've always taken you to be someone who you know thinks that way and um i'm a constitutionalist you know i just kind of feel like civil libertarian is is is – I like all of the Constitution, the Commerce Clause, the Dormant Commerce Clause.

I'm fascinated by this Fox News lawsuit because – and I guess I should preface it because that Fox was sort of duplicitous or not sort of Fox was duplicitous in the at least in the difference between the vibe you would get by watching Fox. And then you'd be surprised to know the vibe of that they think Fox is likely to lose this case. And I'll just sum it up by saying that Fox was putting on Sidney Powell and these other Trump representatives who were accusing Dominion of having fixed the election in some way. And behind the scenes, people were saying, people like Tucker Carlson were saying, this woman Sidney Powell's a nut and blah, blah, blah. And Lou Dobbs seemed to believe it. And not Roger,

Rupert Murdoch seemed to be expressing worry that if they offended the audience too much, that people might go to Newsmax, blah, blah, blah. But- Look, I'm- fan of Fox News. I go on there fairly frequently or the Fox networks in general. I was just on Fox Business, I guess, two days ago or something. But I think to state what's going on, to try going to try to do it in a neutral way. So, you know, you were alluding to various emails. So this is in the context of, let's back up.

Dominion Voting Systems makes devices, voting mechanisms. We go into a booth and you digitally press some buttons and try to vote. And they make some of those systems, some of those boxes, some of those devices for voting. or refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election involved allegations that Dominion was changing votes, throwing out votes, doing all sorts of fraudulent, nefarious things. And obviously, if that's not true and people are saying it, that hurts Dominion's business. That's where the claim of defamation goes. Now, where does Fox come in? Because Fox isn't saying these things. Sidney Powell is saying these things. Rudy Giuliani is saying these things, whatever. Is it illegal for Fox to put on people who they think who they're executives and leading talent on air think are lying or crazy or deceiving. No, that's not illegal. It might be unethical. It

might not be good journalism practice. That's a separate discussion. That's not what the legal case is. The legal case of Dominion versus Fox is saying that Fox is acting in such a way as to facilitate and publish these lies, these defamatory statements against Dominion, when they knew or should have known that they were A, defamatory, and B, not true. So that is the case. And so the reason we're talking about it now is because in the last couple of weeks, we've seen filings in this case. It's still early days and motion practice, motion. There hasn't been a trial, anything like this. The lawyers for Dominion, who, by the way, are friends of mine. I should disclose that.

I think I know lawyers on both sides, frankly. I know enough lawyers that I'm typically on both sides. So Claire Locke is this law firm. It's a boutique in Alexandria, Virginia that specializes in their conservatives, but their First Amendment plaintiff side. So if they, for example, their big victory was against Rolling Stone magazine when they fabricated a story or printed a story accusing some UVA fraternity brothers and things like this. Oh, yeah. So think of them as conservative, plaintiff-side, First Amendment lawyers. And so here they're taking Dominion's case, saying, look, it's not about who won the election.

It's not about Trump versus someone else. Our client, Dominion, has been accused by lots of people of doing all these bad things. That looks bad. That harms them business-wise. And Fox, they're saying, is complicit in harming them in this libel. And as you were sort of implying, Fox's defense was, well, go ahead and sue Sidney Powell if you want. We're not the ones who are saying this stuff. We're an entertainment company, and we put stuff up on the air because we think that'll gain viewership. And again, the issue of whether, you know, we

don't have backbones because we won't stand up to our audience and we're only giving them stuff that they want so they won't leave to watch Newsmax, that's salacious and interesting and good political, cultural news analysis, what have you, but that's not the legal case. I think I've tried to state things fairly neutrally there. This is why I think it would be terrible if Fox lost based on what I know now. And I have the analogy of the Hunter Biden laptop case. I am sure that the behind the scenes communications at MSNBC would be very similar to the ones that were going on about Fox vis-a-vis the Hunter Biden laptop. Rudy Giuliani is a crazy person. This is bullshit.

All the intelligence community knows that this is a lie, blah, blah, blah. They believe fervently that this laptop is bullshit and a plant. But they don't know that. And now we're going to tell them, well, if you believe that based on what you're hearing or whatever thing, now you put it on the air at your own risk of defamation, Hunter Biden can sue you

if it turns out it was a plant. So you can't put Rudy Giuliani on the air or you can't even express that you believe the laptop might be real because we're going to Monday morning quarterback you on what you report. And if it turns out that it turns out not to be true, then you're going to get sued. And, of course, that would be a tremendous disincentive for journalism. I think that there is a huge difference between knowing something, which is you have a factual basis for knowing this isn't true, or you avert your eyes. Some say, listen, read this. This will show it's not true. And you recklessly disregard the truth as opposed to saying, yeah, we all thought he was full of shit, but or she was full of shit.

But it's the president's attorney. And who knows? Maybe it is true. It seems from the record that Lou Dobbs actually believed it. Maybe he believed it because he believes Sidney Powell. So he said, I, I believe it. He didn't report it as factual, but he he seemed clearly that he believed her. How can that be actionable? I don't understand. Well, the point is that this is a defamation case. It's not a are they reporting bad news case? Because in what you're talking about, Hunter Biden would sue for defamation. Well, but Hunter Biden, it turned out to be true. And I mean, that's the kind of the Hunter Biden case is like the reverse. All of the mainstream media was not publishing and censoring that news. You know, no, I was giving a hypothetical where it turned out not to be true.

Yeah, I'm saying, well, sure, sure. They have to know the reporter has to know at the time whether he can report it or not. If you're going to tell a reporter you have to know the future, whether it turns out to be true or not. He's going to say, I'm not taking any chances. That's what's going to happen. So if Fox loses, then no one's going to report a Hunter Biden laptop story. No one's going to report anything that people are saying is bullshit because I can't take this chance. And I think that would be terrible. Well, I mean, we have to disaggregate the kind of news media aspect of it from the defamation standard aspect of it. Because if there was no allegation of defamation, let's say it was just, you know, they were just committing journalistic malpractice in how they were reporting on the Ukraine war. And forget about like some outlandish hypothetical with, you know, Zelensky suing them for defamation.

Forget it. Like no American is being harmed by this. They're just completely not... It might affect how policymakers behave, perhaps, but nobody is being defamed. By any definition of the word defamation, there's no defamation. But they all are knowingly publishing, propagating lies. That is a case of journalistic malfeasistic, you know, malfeasance, but there's no legal case there. What's that? But you said knowingly, where's the knowingly here?

Well, that's what the judge and possibly the jury will have to decide, because right now it's on motions for summary judgment, meaning in the light, viewing all the facts presented in the light most favorable to the defendants, so in this case to Fox, can any reasonable juror hold in Fox's favor? That is the standard on the motion now that the judge will be ruling on. And if the judge denies this motion, it could still go to trial. And then a jury will be deciding if there's some objective defamation here. But here, the plaintiffs are asking, as a matter of law, giving all these text messages where, you know, Tucker and Hannity and the executives and Murdoch are all saying,

as you put it, this is bullshit. She doesn't have any evidence. And the thing is, it's not just one time, right? That's the other key thing. It's not just, you know, the day after the election, in the heat the moment, something like that for weeks and months is the allegation. And Dominion is saying, look, there are 3000 emails, texts, admissions against interest or something like that. they kept requesting them to correct the record dominion was it was kind of a dynamic situation and they didn't that is the argument that they're making that because fox knew and was put on notice forget again the first week or whatever they were put on notice that something's not right here are the actual facts and they refuse to do anything about it why for ratings i mean the why doesn't

really matter but the point is they knew or should have known or were reckless about putting out this malicious stuff. That is the way that this is framed. I don't know whether that's rightly a legal question the judge can rule on or whether it should go to a jury. But it is, you know, not the run of the mill case where, oh, you know, the media is all lying all the time. Yeah, I mean, you know, the devil's going to be in the details. At trying to look into this, I have not seen any clear fact that was knowable that Fox either refused to report or or, you know, knowingly said otherwise. It is very comparable to me to the Hunter Biden laptop. If Fox was reporting the Hunter Biden laptop all the time, there was no better evidence that Dominion was lying than, you know, 50 intelligence agencies said the Hunter Biden laptop thing was a plant.

And if Hunter Biden laptop turned out to have been fake, then all of a sudden Fox would get sued because what do you mean you didn't know? If the intelligence agency said this was a plant and you went ahead and say, well, we didn't know. We just they said that just because they say it doesn't mean we knew it. Just because people were saying that Dominion just because Dominion says subjective belief, whether something is an opinion versus a fact, is a defense in a defamation case. So in that Hunter Biden hypothetical, in that Hunter Biden hypothetical, you would also have to have similarly the executives and the and the on air talent saying, yeah, we know this is all bullshit, but we're going to put it on anyway. And, you know, but they can't know. I'm saying is it was there?

How could it be? Is it opinion or is it fact that's a very good point you're making but i'm saying like just you can get just give me the scenario where it could be knowable that this wasn't true the the that dominion like they didn't sure no i'll tell you i'll tell you how how. Because Sidney Powell went on again and again making allegations against Dominion specifically. She never brought any evidence to the table. The Fox people were chatting amongst themselves how like she needs to bring evidence. She never did.

And Dominion, meanwhile, their lawyers were telling Fox, here, correct the record. Here is evidence that we're not owned by Venezuelans. Here is evidence that nothing was tampered by Venezuelans. Here is evidence that nothing was tampered with and our devices cannot delete votes. Yeah, I think they did correct the Venezuelan thing. And Hunter and Tucker Carlson did finally say so. But I have another. OK, let's leave that aside because we only have a short number of minutes left. Leaving that aside, what are the rules about the fact that, well, say what you want, it's the president's attorney and the president is contesting an election. How can you tell us we can't cover that

even if they are lying? Well, I don't know how whether that changes anything. I mean, that goes to whether it's newsworthy to put Sidney Powell on, but there's no sort of executive privilege at play in these cases. Right. But I'm saying like, I don't know, I can see a lot. What's his name? Carter Page, is that his name? The guy that everybody said was a spy? Yep. I mean, this guy, she's got defamation cases all over the place. He should.

The fact that- He should. I mean, the problem is the defamation standards. It's not that it's a news entity or that there's some newsworthy thing that they're discussing. The defamation standards. It's not that it's a news entity or that there's some newsworthy thing that they're discussing. The defamation standards, particularly when you become a public figure, and you can be a temporary public figure, and Dominion effectively was for these purposes, it's very high. You have to show actual malice. Now, was Fox acting with malice? That's the high bar. That's if they lose.

I mean, that's the first thing you point to for for Dominion losing. Yeah, that's that's what I say. Like if the Hunter Biden thing turned out to be actually a plant, they would say Fox had actual malice about that because they ignored all this overwhelming evidence that it wasn't true. And I feel like that's that's well, the malice has to be directed. The malice has to be directed to the target of the operation. I mean, Fox doesn't care about Hunter Biden. They don't care about Dominion. They care about their ratings and their money. Right. They well, Fox would have malice.

People don't come up with malice. Anyway, I think it's really interesting. I want to say again, I think that. Fox is horrible. I mean, I know you I know you I know you you want Fox. I used to be a fan of Fox when everybody said Fox is horrible. I mean, I know you, I know you, I know you, you want Fox. I used to be a fan of Fox when everybody said Fox was horrible. I used to defend Fox with Charles Krauthammer, even Bill O'Reilly show, whatever it is,

the text messages that are coming out about the way they handle this Sidney Powell thing. It is disturbing. And I spoke to, um, I don't want to say her name, but someone used to work on Fox over the weekend. And she said, and she left on a harassment thing. But she said, one thing I'll say is that Roger Ailes was not afraid of his audience. Roger Ailes insisted on leading his audience and even fired Glenn Beck at the time, though he was making a fortune as a conspiracy theorist. And she said, the current Fox fears its audience. And I do get that feeling. Now that I know

that you go on Fox, I'm sorry to even bring it up. I didn't realize that when you had you on. Well, no, I'm not paid by them or anything. It's, you know, I don't have any conflict in that regard. I'm telling you, look, no one's ever, you know, people have called me crazy and dumb and radical and whatnot, but nobody's ever impugned my sincerity.

So I'm not blown, I'm not carrying water for anyone in, in, in what I just told you. No, I, I just don't want to, I don't want to put you in a spot where gratuitously to do our dumb

podcast. You have to say something. Somebody, Fox, somebody Fox hears you. They don't book this guy. He keeps, well,

so I'm just trying not to, I'm not trying to extract. No, I'm trying to protect you. That's all. I don't want to put you on the spot. I appreciate it. But like, like I said, you know, uh i i don't know where i come down on this i think it's a i think it's a strong case i think it's different than the typical you know lawsuit against

media what what i do sense is that the media is so rooting against fox i mean so rooting against fox that you're not seeing well that's disingenuous yeah yeah that you're not seeing. Well, that's disingenuous. Yeah. Yeah, that you're not seeing the pretty compelling arguments as to why Fox, despite the fact that Tucker Carlson may have thought Sidney Powell was full of shit, that's not enough to prove defamation.

Anyway, Ilya, I'm really happy you joined us. This was planned to be a short spot. But, you know, I'm really happy you joined us. This was planned to be a short spot. But, you know, I'm a big fan of yours, and I hope maybe you'll do other short spots with us in the future as legal issues come up, maybe not during dinner time. I don't know how you feel about it. That's all right. We'll figure it out.

I'm learning, you know, with four kids now, we're starting with taekwondo and baseball and swimming and all this stuff so at least i work from home i i like to say i'm i'm at the manhattan institute's elite falls church office so all right and maybe after some sort of resolution of this case as you can do a post-mortem anyway thank you very much for joining us take care i don't know okay uh that was ilia shapiro now we have joining us. Take care. I don't know. Okay. That was Ilya Shapiro. Now we have joining us what's that? There's a sort of a noise that sounds like

a rustling noise. Anyway, Richard Hanania, is that the pronunciation? Yeah, that's close enough. Okay. How do you say it? I say Hanania. But I defer to whatever people want to say. Richard Hanania. He's the author of Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy. And of course,

coming book on the connection between wokeness and civil rights law. He runs a think tank called the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology. Welcome, Richard Hanania. And Hanania. You wrote an article. What was the name of the article? Apparently, you said about essentially defending the media. The media gets a bum rap. They're actually quite good. And it dovetails with what we just spoke about about Fox.

I want to give you a chance. It's a very interesting article. Where was it again? Where can people read it? It was on my sub stack. I was wondering which one you guys wanted to talk about. It was very interesting. You want to talk about that one. Maybe it got picked up by Real Clear Politics or something. I don't know where it was, but it was very good. And so why don't you give us an overview?

Why do you defend the corrupt, biased media? What's going on with you? So I don't know if this is – you look at trust in the media. It's going down. You look at people on Twitter, you know, nobody likes the media. I mean, this was, you know, probably like, you know, one of my pieces that made people angrier than just about anything else. And I think that, you know, as I've got through the years and I've, you know, just looked away a little bit from the biases of the media and I've looked at sort of what the alternatives to

the media are. I look at what some of the people who get angriest about the media and the kinds of things they believe in. I don't think the media is that bad by world historical standards. Now, you realize that they produce millions of pieces of journalism a year, literally millions. If you take the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, I mean, they produce massive and massive amounts of content. And it's very easy to go on Twitter and take the dumbest things, the things that they're most wrong about, take a screenshot of it, put it on Twitter, laugh at it. That's fine. But, you know, for the vast majority of things, the vast majority of the time, they are, you know, they're going to be biased, like any human institution is going to be. But I read something in the New York Times,

in general, I know that they're not just making things up, usually, usually. I mean, there's some, you know, I do in the piece talk about some issue areas where they're particularly bad. And I would advise anyone not to trust them. And I would say their worst critics are on to something. And just a few of those issues, one of those issues, race, gender, sexual orientation. I mean, you'll see stuff like, oh, police in this city, you know, stop black people more often than white people. And like they won't even tell you, you know, what the crime rate is in the city, right? It'll be, it'll be exactly perfect based on the crime rate or the evidence will be that they, you know, the crime rate is higher among blacks than the actual, the stops. So this is just, yeah, right. Right. So the, yeah, so these, these, these kinds

of issues there, they tend to be particularly bad on the gender transition for children. They're, they're coming around on it. Actually, there was a revolt in the newsroom you probably heard about where a lot of the journalists said, no, we're going to tell the truth that there's actually a controversy here. But they were pretty bad on that up until recently. How were they bad on that? What's that? How were they bad on the transitioning for minors? Well, they basically acted like it wasn't even an issue, like this was just something that all good people who listen to science and logic would think is naturally the right thing to do as soon as a child comes to you and says they feel like they're of the wrong gender.

There's nothing to be suspicious about the increasing numbers of gender dysphoria over the last decade or decade, decade and a half. And so, yeah, there are issue areas you can pull up. But look, if I want to know about what's going on in Russia and Ukraine, for example, or if I want to know what's going on in Malaysia, I pick up the New York Times and I'm getting something close to truth. And, you know, that's not, I mean, that's not like something you could take for granted. Like a lot of countries, and I think right-wing media to a large extent in America is like this. News is just basically propaganda. You take the shrillest people on Twitter, the most shrillest partisan people, and that's basically the newspapers in a lot of third-world countries. You know, if you look at the – we can talk about the critics of Twitter – we can talk about the critics of the media on Twitter here.

They tend to believe a lot of crazy things. So, you know, don't hold the media to impossibly high standards. Know where their flaws are. Call them out on those flaws. Criticize them. That's fine. But this kind of, you know, the media is evil and whatever reduces their prestige and power and influence. And we're just going to sort of be nihilistic and tear this whole thing down. That's the attitude I'm that's the attitude I'm fighting against. Can I just interrupt quickly and say we had to say goodbye to Perry. She has to relieve

the babysitter. So we will see her next time. Well, so so I agree with you that on 97 percent of factual issues where agendas are not normally brought to bear. The media is truthful. But I don't know that that 97% is as important to the national dialogue as the 3%, or I think it's more than 3%, as the 5% that is clearly, or in my opinion, clearly corrupted by the points of view and the agendas of the reporters.

That's what concerns me. Any kind of legislative fight that goes on is always cast. You know who the good guys are and the bad guys are before you even read it. As you say, anything with race, gender, Michael Brown, the Russiagate stuff, the Hunter Biden laptop, the Fox News thing we were just discussing. You don't even need to read these stories to predict what the spin is going to be in the cliche mainstream media.

But these are the issues that people care about. DeSantis versus Disney. That don't say gay bill. And I'm not saying I support DeSantis on Disney. Actually, I don't. But I'm just saying I know that these things are always, always spun. Even COVID, they would give you absolute statistics if it was appropriate. If that sounded good, they'll give you percentage statistics if that sounds good.

What's interesting about the DeSantis thing, I mean, you bring that up, that's very interesting. Because the best just factual layout of what's happening with DeSantis in Florida that I've seen have come from the New York Times and the Washington Post. Yes, they're biased and all of that. But with the conservative conservatives have never they should be ashamed of this. They've never built institutions that just can go to places and tell you the facts of what's going on. I mean, you look at a lot of the conservative websites. It's just basically Biden stuttered over his word. You know, Biden farted, Buttigieg, you know, traveled first class. I mean, it's the news and informational value of this stuff is zero. So you're absolutely right on a lot of issues.

Sometimes these are the issues that people care about. Sometimes the things that people care about aren't necessarily the most important things. People complain about these things because they're the things they care about the most. Some of these things are, I think, important. There's a lot of things that are important that people don't care about that are boring, like permitting reform, environmental review, like this stuff, a lot of people, a lot of smart people think is very important, but it doesn't actually, you know, capture people's passions. And the media tends to be pretty good on the debates

surrounding these things. And so, yeah, I mean, you know, you're absolutely right. I mean, the question is, you know, do you, you know, the media, you know, the question is acknowledging the flaws of the media. And I think I would probably agree with you on, on most criticisms. What is the right attitude to take, right? Is it that these people are evil? And like, if the New York Times, like the building collapsed tomorrow, should we all throw a party in the streets? Should we hope we'd be working towards it, hoping that its stock, you know, plummets and, youets and they're all out of the streets. Or should we take a sort of more nuanced view and say, yes, they have really, really big problems, but the New York Times is a valuable institution and we should be glad it's here and we should just want it to be better? and more true than ever that there's not even a conservative outlet, maybe the National Review, that we even waste time expecting to give us the facts in a straight way.

That wasn't always the case. I think there was maybe the Wall Street Journal. No, the Wall Street Journal is very reliable. I don't know if the Wall Street Journal news division is considered liberal. I think the Wall Street Journal may be the straightest news outlet there is. I notice, I know I'm jumping around, but I noticed sometimes I'll read the same story in the journal as in The Times. And the journal's account is generally straighter. It has fewer opinion ish adjectives attached to it. It's just you can see that there's a stronger hand of the editors kind of paring it down to just

the facts. I don't know how you feel about the Journal versus the Times. Yeah. Yeah. The Journal, I mean, the Journal is a good paper. It's an exception. The news part of the Journal is actually considered, you know, not as right wing as the op-ed. It's the op-ed section. And there's a lot of actually good conservative sites for the stuff that they cover so like for example the washington free beacon i have a friend who works there named aaron sabaria who does a lot of reporting on sort of this wokeness of the government bureaucracy things like that you know reporting on college campuses and what's going on there like the manhattan institute they do some good stuff um even those though they tend to be sort of very narrow in their focus. Like they're not

sending correspondence to China and telling you what's going on with the lockdowns and what's going on in the post-lockdown world, right? So conservative media has focused on a few issues that it really cares about and can do some decent work on that, some decent work, even on those issues. I think the liberal media is still a better source of information despite its biases. But there's just entire areas of human existence outside of like direct political stuff that the conservative media doesn't even try to cover. And, you know, there's no like, it's like the universities, you could say they've taken over by somebody. There's no, you know, there's no like licensing bureau you have to go to to start a newspaper or to start a magazine or to start a you know conservatives have built institutions like but they tend to be like talk radio they

built two new tv stations recently i made one american news and newsmax in addition to you know in addition to fox which is uh already there um and so the barriers to entry are not high um and there's something you know there's something what do you need to put on a conservative network you need some hot some hot women and a loud background. Red and blue in the background. Yeah, that's all you need. They've done that. They have the hot women.

They don't have the writers who can do actual journalism in the audience that wants to read it. Now, do you agree that Fox used to be much better, right? Ten years ago, Fox was way more reliable, way more interesting to a thinking person than it is now. Yeah, I think so. You know, I think that a lot of the, sort of the gatekeeping that has gone away, I think a lot of people with, you know,

crazy ideas have been able to get on. And yeah, they've, you know, they called Arizona right on election day and their audience, you know, never forgave them for it. So that's not a healthy situation. Although they were wrong, from what I understand, from like Steyer-W's not a healthy situation although they were wrong they were from what i understand from like styrewalt and people like that they were

wrong to call arizona like they did call it but but they got lucky that the call turned out right yeah these are judgment calls i mean they're not you know you know but they were right in the i mean in the end and like who cares like it doesn't matter if you call it today or tomorrow like that would have like you know the, turned the election around. No, no. Fox audiences is – no, you're right. You're right about that. But it was just interesting that Fox got it right but not for the right reasons.

The audience wouldn't – didn't care why they – Yeah. You know, like wasn't it one of the big TV stations, CBS or ABC, one of them called – accidentally called Florida for Gore in 2000. Do you remember this? And then they had to take it back. And then the people that had said, we're going to give up CBS, probably primarily liberal viewers. So it's something very unhealthy where your audience can't even take this stuff.

I think they called it for gore. Then they called it for Bush. And then they had to take it back more than once, right? That night. I don't remember. I just remember calling it for gore. You might be right. I don't know.

Yeah. But you know, okay. There was Matt Iglesias. You read his sub stack? Oh, yeah. He had a piece today and he said something that really struck me and I'll let Dan ask what it was. He didn't know. He said that he didn't know

that Obama's Justice Department had exonerated the cops in Ferguson, Darren Wilson. He didn't, you know, he'd heard a million times that Michael Brown was murdered and Kamala Harris saying, oh, whatever. And he just he just discovered recently. Now, this is a guy. There's not a more sophisticated consumer of news in the country than Matt Iglesias. But somehow it never got before his eyes that Eric Holder had exonerated Darren Wilson. And that was a pretty powerful illustration to me that something is wrong.

Because this is a very important fact. I mean, this was a rallying cry for riots and all sorts of things that come from. And it's compounded by the things, you know, people think that way more unarmed black people are being killed by the cops than actually are. They think there's so much common belief that's incorrect about these issues. It has tremendous consequences, right? That is a serious thing to fault the media for, no?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's why I say it, I think, three or four times in the piece, race, gender, sexual orientation, they're out to lunch. It's like talking to, you know, Bin Laden about religion or something. I mean, it's really, really bad. Although, you know, even like, you know, they'll eventually get, you know, they'll still, you know, you'll probably find that in the New York Times, you'll probably find that, you know, Darren Wilson was, was exonerated. Yeah, this is just a such a nasty thing, because the man lost, that man ended up losing his job. And it's basically, you know, last I heard he was in hiding, because he can't just go out and like be a public figure anymore, because of what, you know, what the, what the media was

doing. And, you know, I think a lot of these things, and by the way, it's not just the media, I think a lot of these local communities, you know, they do basically, they have these false beliefs or they have these very hostile attitudes toward the police and this narrative gets spun up and the media sort of dragged along with it.

So I don't think it's just all like the media, like invents this stuff, which I think a lot of people do. But yeah, the media, I mean, did a terrible job on the Ferguson stuff. They've done a terrible job on other racially charged police shootings. And yeah, it has real consequences for people's lives and has real consequences for public policy. And you know what? I think that if you don't take the attitude that the media is wrong on every single thing and they're just

hopeless, I think you could be more effective in pushing back against them and saying, be better on the things that you actually are terrible about. A of the you know on the on the trans issue a lot of the people who were pushing back on this stuff were like center-left people who didn't have crazy views on other things but basically said you know look at the data here there's something going on why is that justice justice exactly barry weiss's publication you know people who are sort of you know seen as more you know more moderate and they're saying you know why is there a 10 times you know tenfold increase in the last decade or whatever in this stuff? And so that's more effective than just we hate you and we're going to go to war with you.

Can we digress for a second? Unless you want to say something, Dan? No, digress. This is related to the media and I got to be careful how I talk about it. But it occurred to me and I'm wondering if you agree did you see the video of Tyree Nichols is that the name

the man who was killed by the cops in Philadelphia I saw the video yeah oh that yeah no I did not see I saw part of the video yeah this was horrific I mean kicked this guy in the head. Then apparently, it's not in the video,

apparently the guy texted out the photos to his friends. I mean, and this goes to the media I'm about to say. I think this was much worse, not just worse, much worse than the George Floyd killing. For reasons that the media failed to report to people. Essentially, if you if you watch it's on YouTube, the video of what happened to George Floyd before he was killed or before he died. But everyone would say the cops spent like 20 minutes trying to put George Floyd in a police car. And he was acting crazy and he didn't want to get. He said, I'm claustrophobic.

He said, well, we'll roll down the windows for you. And then he got in. They let him get out. They didn't manhandle him. But what he kept saying for the entire 20 minutes was, I can't breathe. I'm going to die. I can't breathe. I'm going to die. I can't breathe. I'm going to die. I can't breathe. It says over and over and over such that one can understand, not forgive,

not think it's okay. Not think that this is something that training doesn't need to react to. One can understand how it is that the cops were on this guy while he's screaming, I can't breathe. And they didn't take him seriously because they knew what we didn't know. But very few people know who's watched all this is that he had been saying that all along. He didn't start saying it when they had him under their knee. And at some point, they're like, you know, he just you can imagine he's like they're not even taking him seriously. Now, of course, they were wrong or most probably wrong, although the scientific evidence or whatever,

and there needs to be a new training regime about that. But, you know, every training regime, like every clause in a contract, is like an archaeological dig of some weird thing that's gone wrong in the past. So these things stack up. From now on, everybody knows, just because somebody says they can't breathe all along, if they're on the ground, you still have to treat it. And by the way, also not well-reported was this hold of George Floyd with a knee on his neck.

This was out of a photograph of the Minnesota police training manual. This was something they were taught to do and called a non-lethal hold. Again, that's crazy. This is an outrage. You imagine in the moment, somehow they should have known. I think there was one cop said, you know, maybe you should let him up, whatever it is. But in the totality, it really doesn't seem to me anyway, that Chauvin or any of those cops had the slightest intention of murdering this guy or even roughing him up because they wanted to rough him up. They could have roughed him up when they were trying to put him in the police car.

They actually let him get out to make him more comfortable. As opposed to these cops in Philadelphia, that at least, now maybe there's a backstory to this, which will also look different, but from what we've seen, and it looks- Was it Philly? It was Philly?

I thought it was- Memphis. Oh, Memphis. I'm sorry. Why did I say Philadelphia? Memphis. Yeah. Jesus Christ.

I'm conflating all things. These cops in Memphis, they just murdered this guy. They kick him in the head and kill him. And there's no mitigating circumstances that i've heard or seen i'm sure there's nothing in a training manual that says this is a non-lethal thing to do the only thing that's different is the race and yeah you're right you've already identified that this is the case i I'm sorry, I said Philadelphia. You've already identified that this is something the media can't be trusted on.

But given the consequences of this misreporting, I just think you're a little bit easy on them because this is monumental. Well, I looked into this case a little bit and it's actually very interesting because you say, you know, you wonder, people look and they say, oh, there's no riots after Memphis. So there was riots before. You know, must be the media, you know, didn't play this up like they played up Minneapolis. I actually started looking at, you know, urban riots from like the 1960s to today. And every single one I could find, I looked at 20 or 30 of them, took place during the summer. And so this did not occur during the summer. The George Floyd thing actually did occur during the summer. So I do think actually, yeah, during the pandemic, right? Those were the Floyd was,

yeah, the Floyd was summer and it was the pandemic, right? It was a sort of a double thing. And so I do think like the media, like, okay, if they were burning down Memphis, you know, as a result, the media would have been there. It's just like, sort of like if nothing happens and nothing happens. And a lot of these communities too, like they'd rather get their, you know, their young person from the community, get his head bashed in by a bunch of black guys than a white guy. I mean, the reaction is there too. I get that. But what I'm saying is that the media, clearly they were scared to report or give way to the things that I'm describing. Because I know people get angry at me for describing them. Yeah.

But that's their job. And there's more to it. These are relevant things. You can dig a little more into that case, too. You can look at affirmative action policies and police forces. You know, they've gotten rid of stuff like criminal background checks. They've gotten rid of stuff like psychological testing. Because, look, if races differ in the crime rate, then if we have a criminal background check, it's going to screen out a lot more black people than white people.

These aren't healthy things. They're not even digging into that. You're absolutely right. Do we know why he was pulled over in the first place? I think he was speeding and then he ran off. And so that was – he took off and then they caught him up and started beating him. But he wasn't tussling with – I mean this is – I was sick over this video. And I'm not defending Chauvin either.

I'm just saying like if I had to say who was the murderer, like murder in his heart, like those Memphis guys or that guy who kicked him in the head. Did you hear that they might have had that there might have been a love interest? This was reported. There was just like a throwaway line in New York Times. He tweeted the picture to some girl. So there's speculation that one of the cops and the guy were like dating the same girl or something like that. Oh, well, I didn't hear that. They were saying something about Chauvin.

With Chauvin, they were saying there was some connection. They worked as security. They used to work together. So there was that. Another one of these cases was... That was a rumor. I don't know. Yeah, another one of these cases was the Kavanaugh case where they really underreported people close to her, close to Blasey Ford, who were like, I don't believe this.

They were pressuring me to change my story, whatever. Nobody knows this stuff. But what we do know is whatever Avenatti – this is bad. And the analogy of death by a thousand cuts or Gulliver being tied down by, this is really a good analogy in life. And each one of these things, it just adds up the slight misreporting or underreporting of all these things. It has created a group of people who are seething and I think see a world which is not accurate, is not really what's going on. They see a world that they think is despicable. No, you're absolutely right. Yeah. And, you know, you mentioned Iglesias Substack. There's one, you know, there's one that came out just today about

depression among liberals. I mean, they're the biggest, I mean, the left is the biggest victims of this sort of catastrophizing ideology. I mean, the depression rates for young liberals are just going through the roof and, you know, they're not really budging much for conservatives. So yeah, they're victimizing themselves with this stuff more than they are anybody else. And you're absolutely right. I mean, I, but I don't want, like, I don't want people to just distrust the media, period. I want people to distrust the media on a few issues and realize there's going to be a bias. And look, even like the bias, it goes to the big level of like, they're going to report things more in favor of Democrats than Republicans. But like, I don't want people to say I distrust them

on everything. I don't want people to say everything they say is a lie. Like every allegation against Trump that's ever been made or any criticism of Fox News or any criticism of the conservative movement, that's all just made up. Like that is – that's not the right path to go on. But no, no, I'm with you. I think this piece got a lot of attention because I'm like criticizing the media is a large extent a lot of what I do. And so people see me making fun of the media time and time and time again and say, they're wrong about this issue. They're wrong about that issue. But then I'm still going to come here and I'm still going to tell you the media is honest and good because you still have to sort of maintain that proper

perspective. What should a consumer of the media, how should they proceed? I mean, you're saying that the media is not good on race and the media is not good on gender but that's your conclusion uh so how would a how would a how would you advise a consumer of the media to proceed and what level of skepticism and and what level of you know of uh cross-checking should be done yeah i mean i think you have to sort of keep your way is there a good part go ahead i'm sorry sure i mean I think you have to sort of keep your common sense about you. I mean, it depends on how sophisticated you are as a news consumer. I mean, like, you know, this is basic reasoning. If they tell you, you know, what the arrest rate is for different races, and they don't tell you what the crime rate, I mean, that should, you know, if you're just a thinking person, that should just pop into your head. Okay, there's something, you know, there's something going on here. A lot of the COVID stuff, I mean, there was massive, you know, state level differences early in the days about, you know, you know, some states had more masking, and some states had more social distancing, and this and that. And then they didn't really have, you know, big outcomes, differential outcomes

in death rates. I mean, that's also something you can look at and think about. So yeah, I mean, there is a, you know, there is a way to be a sophisticated news consumer. You just have to sort of use common sense. And then if something's important enough, like for COVID, for example, I mean, that was important enough and that dominated the policy discussion for a few years. That was important enough that I did my own research. I tell you to do your own research on things that are that important. Other things just use common sense and sort of know where the biases are. Once I know they're biased on police shootings of young black men, I can generalize from that a little bit. OK, when they talk about test gaps, right, different races scored different tests and what causes that, I can say, OK, they're generally hyper emotional and, they're hyper-emotional and they're very PC on race.

Okay, I can sort of be skeptical of everything here. The identity issues, when something becomes an identity issue, you can become a little more skeptical. But yeah, there's no answer here. There's no simple, always trust the media. There's no simple, always don't trust the media. There's many people. I don't know what the percentage is.

There's certainly on Twitter, you would think it's most people don't want to be uh prudent consumers they want to believe what they want to believe and they're happy to consume whoever is telling them what what they want and so i don't know what percentage of that absolutely i mean that's another reason why the media is so you know i'm so impressed with the media because the the demand actually you know for like uh news that is even somewhat nuanced and somewhat truthful, I don't know how large that is. And like, you know, I think they could actually be much worse than they are. But there are, I think, you know, professional standards. And that's why I think like a media establishment that most people trust. And look,

let's be real. Most conservatives, they trust the New York Times on purely factual issues more than they do the conservatives they follow on Twitter. I talk to conservatives all the time, even though cite the New York Times, whatever, you know, it tells them something that they agree with. You know, the New York Times doesn't go and, you know, cite Breitbart for like some, you know, third, you know, for some issue that, you know, even if it agrees with them. And so this is why like a media establishment that's even somewhat fair, that's even, you know, that's even like, you know, arguably trying to tell you the truth. That's why that's so rare throughout history. And that's why there are so few of these institutions. It's just the market demand really isn't there. People are morons and

they just want to be told, you know, what they want to hear. And, you know, to the extent that anyone like deviates from that a little bit, I'm impressed. My expectations for humanity are just very, very low. Okay. You may be right. Judging by Twitter, you are right. But I don't know if there's a silent majority out there that is reasoned and nuanced in thinking. Yeah, you might be right.

We've got a couple more minutes. Do you have any take on Elon Musk's tenure at Twitter? Do you think he's – people are freaking out. Go ahead. Yeah, I mean I was – I don't know. I don't know. I think that everyone – it's easy to say free speech and we can look at the mistakes that Twitter made and obviously was biased before the Elon era. like it's easy to say, you know, free speech and we can look at, you know, the mistakes that,

you know, Twitter made and obviously was biased before the Elon era. But so much of Twitter is just nasty and ugly. And look, everyone agrees that there has to be some censorship. So we're just talking about degrees, right? You post a swastika to Twitter right now. I think, you know, Kanye West was, you know, was taken off of Twitter for that. So Elon agrees there has to be censorship. Everyone agrees. And all we're disagreeing about is, you know, where the lines are. You know, so since Musk took over, I mean, I'm interested in sort of this is a business story, the fact that he could just cut all these, you know, people and, you know, the site doesn't collapse. And, you know, besides that, it hasn't really changed all that much. I think sort of nastier right wing people have

become more emboldened and like nasty left-wing people are probably a little bit less emboldened. You must be following the nasty right-wing people. I haven't noticed it in my life. I think they follow me. I mean, they follow me and they reply to me. So I think that's what I'm finding.

But besides that, the change hasn't been too drastic. First of all, I agree. I mean, I don't think I would, if I had gone to sleep a year ago and woken up today, but I noticed Twitter was drastically different, my Twitter feed, I don't think I would notice any difference at all. But I do find it interesting that, so Twitter has something like 7,000 employees,

and let's say they cut 5,000. I'll say they're down to 2,000 now. And the media is outraged that he cut 5,000 people. But what a normal person would be outraged that he cut 5,000 people. But what a normal person would be outraged by is why do they have these 5,000 extra people working when it works just as well?

Like as a businessman, I'm like, the person who should be explaining themselves is the previous management that had 5,000 more people than they needed. Why does the media have an opinion

on a guy's business decisions anyway because it's musk right i mean if it was if it was uh somebody cleaning up you know yeah i mean imagine you know what could what can the media do though because it's it you know it was it had all these engineers coming to them right this is like the wmd stuff and some of this other foreign policy stuff they had had the engineers come to them and say, look, you know, he cut, you know, 60% of the workforce. This thing is going to collapse, you know, above, you know, whatever, this site's going to go away. And they're not technical people. They don't know the, you know, inner workings of Twitter. And so like, what's the comments? Okay, they cut 50%. You know, were they really, you know, did they have three times as many employees necessarily? That doesn't

sound plausible. Okay, all these engineering people tell me it's going to collapse. Okay, I would have believed it at the maybe. I mean, I don't know. So the fact that the media reported it, I don't think it's the fault of the media. It's still fascinating as a business story. I think that it changes your sort of opinion of a lot of these Silicon Valley companies and what they're doing. I went on record on this podcast when it happened saying that I remember saying it's a MySQL database. It doesn't need thousands of people to run it. And if, when it goes down, it doesn't need thousands of people to fix it. It's a computer program and you know, it scales and it doesn't scale by having more people shoveling coal.

It's not it's not, you know, the number of it's not the way that's not the way computers work. And I was sure it wasn't going to. And if it does go down for a couple of hours, I mean, Amazon goes everything goes down for a couple of hours. That's not even necessarily an indication that is related to his cutting of hours. That's not even necessarily an indication that it's related to his cutting of employees. He's done some obviously ham-fisted moves where he suspended some journalists that looked an awful lot like he was

suspending them because they didn't like what they were saying about him and stuff like that. But he seems to have gotten it under control. By the way, I mentioned Scott Adams before and I still feel stupid about saying Philadelphia. There must have been some story I read today or yesterday about cops in Philadelphia. Did you know that Scott Adams, who I don't like what he said at all, and I don't think he should have lost his comic strip because I don't think that way. I don't think the instinct to fire people for things that they say, opinions on other matters, I don't think that's a healthy instinct for a society. Pat Buchanan used to say anti-Semitic things,

and I never thought he should get fired. But anyway, did you know that he is bipolar? Nope, I don't think I knew that. Yeah, I heard him on his... I've listened, I've checked my YouTube history. I listened to like an hour of Scott Adams over the last year. And in one of those hours, and I still have the link, I could send it to you. He talks about this recent that he is having a manic period and he's bipolar.

And this has not been mentioned at all in any of the coverage of Scott Adams. He obviously did something weird. Not only did he say this very careless stuff, but he said it on the basis of a poll question, which was absurd on his face. Is it okay to be white? Like, what does that even mean? Like, how can you extrapolate any attitudes

about African-Americans based on the answer to a question that they obviously didn't know what the question meant? And it was only something like 22% or 25% of African-Americans said it's not okay. The other 25% said they didn't know. And you'd probably say they didn't know because they didn't know what the hell the question meant. So all of it does kind of add up to Scott Adams was in some way having a manic episode. And his reaction is also weird.

I'm only, only because this is a big story. And it seems to me that the mental illness could very likely be an important part of it. And nobody has mentioned it. And I will send you the link if you're interested in it. You know, he talks on the air about being in a manic state like two weeks ago. Yeah.

I mean, didn't Roseanne say something similar after she had all these tweets about – I forget even what. She was criticizing Valerie Jarrett. Roseanne said she had taken out a van or something. Isn't that what it was? Yeah. She said she was under the influence of some sort of – She had a lot of excuses. Tranquilizer that left her.

She also said that she didn't know Valerie. That's how you know racism is sort of an unforgivable sin, right? Most things you do, like if you're going out on the streets, most of the time you have sort of a mental illness defense in court and most other things. You know, if someone like just has a breakdown at work or something. Yeah, but not racism or sexism or homophobia. These are like the sort of sins that are sort of on a different level. And so I don't think you could even pull out the mental illness card. I mean it's just sort of a high level. I mean Mel Gibson, I think people kind of – until he did other shit.

Actually, Kanye lost stuff too. Kanye lost a lot, yeah. Roseanne, by the way, I know people who know her who are persuaded that she actually didn't know that Valerie Jarrett was a black woman. I don't know if that's true or not, but I just – I don't want to be like Fox News and not tell you something that I know. What was exactly the Venge Valley Jarrett thing? I'm trying to remember what the story was. What did she say about it? I don't want to say it out loud. Oh, she compared her to a certain

kind of animal. Okay, and she didn't know she was black, which is, yeah, which is believable. I mean, look at Valley Jared. She's not clearly, I mean, of African descent. It's believable, but whatever. But anyway, but the thing is that presuming that she did know,

this is a third rail. I mean, Howard Cosell was fired for for referring to a black. He was like there was a black football player. He said, look at that monkey run. And and he got fired for it. And then they unearthed footage of him saying the same thing about white runners. Like it was it was not. And of course, Howard Cosell, on top of that, was known to be a tremendous champion of civil rights and was friends of Muhammad Ali. There was a lot of – Are you being truculent, Muhammad? There was a lot of reason to – if you're trying to be reasonable to think that Howard Cosell was not meaning to say that.

But yet that was – Do you remember when John McCain – Speaking of the monkey thing, do you remember when John McCain said Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was a monkey? And then people were like, oh, Arabs and Middle Easterners are – you're calling a Middle Easterner a monkey? Do you remember this? And some people like yelled at him and I was like, I never heard this before in my life. Yeah, that they were – this is a slur. Yeah, it's very insulting to black people.

It's like, OK, people have used that to refer to black people in the past. But, like, whenever for the rest of your life you refer to monkeys or monkey around, you know, we have to think that there's an association with black people. There was a Hispanic woman who worked in the Democratic Party. I don't remember what exactly her position was. But she, like, came outside of her house. Some black kids were playing in a tree. And she said, stop jumping around like a bunch of monkeys or something like that. I mean, it's an expression people say, right? People talk about monkeys, people talk about apes. And the idea that like this is going to be taboo forever, like whatever a black person's around. I mean, it really is sort of a disturbing implication, right?

That we're just going to always have this association no matter what. Noam disagrees. Go ahead, Noah. I know what you're saying, but there are certain things which professional people are supposed to know not to say. But now, I mean, I have some mixed feelings, but if somebody were to intentionally make that comparison, I would think it was quite fair in a broadcast world. I think it's bad. Unquestionably, it's bad.

But do you jump to the conclusion that if they say monkey and there's a black person around, that they mean it in a racial way? Should we be jumping to the conclusion that if they say monkey and there's, you know, a black person around that, that's, they mean it in a racial way. Like, should we be jumping to that conclusion? No. And you know, what's interesting on these matters, and this happened with the Joe Rogan thing, because Joe Rogan made a joke like that. In my like private poll, I found that black people I know were less bothered by that. Yeah, whatever, you know. But of course, they have the,

I don't want to use the word right, but they have the confidence to be able to do that. White, well-meaning people who are not black, who want to be, you know, properly concerned about these things, will not have the confidence to say, I think you should let this one go. So they will err on the side of not letting it go.

And that is a noble instinct. But there's a sweet spot to it. So like when Mike Peska got fired for just speculating that he thought that it was okay that the guy repeated the end, I think that's where it's gone off the rails, but there are certain things which, you know,

which shouldn't be said. I agree. They shouldn't be said. I admit, we got to go. I, I, I had made it,

I had made a similar point and I think it's even more the case when young children wanted to dress up as black Panther or as, as Michael Jordan. And it's, it's not even debatable that the kids are only doing this, white kids, because they love these black guys and they want to look like them. And essentially what you're saying is that we're going to be prisoners to the past forever, even to the point of allowing the actual outcome of a racially healthy society to occur. So in a racially healthy society, we would expect that little white kids could dress

up as their black heroes and that would be fine. That's you would think that's the world we want to see in our lifetimes. And are we going to actually stand in the way of that, stand athwart of that, as they say, and prevent that because of things that happened in the past that people don't even know about? Like, the only reason they know about it is because people are reminding them of it. So we're literally forever going to be prisoners to the past.

I think that's what you're saying. And that sentiment, I agree. At some point, we should allow ourselves to become a racially healthy society. And there is an agenda by some people who don't want that to happen because that's their currency in a way. But having said all that, that comparison is very ugly to me, and I would not want to open the stops on that one. The idea of my Puerto Rican son being able to dress up as Black Panther, I would think that time has come for that. Okay, so Blackface saying monkey is – that's interesting.

Yeah, because it's ugly. It's ugly and it's just ugly. And it's not – and you're not giving up a lot by. Should we remove all analogies having to do with monkeys from our language just just in case? No, but just certain things like I was critical of Joe Rogan for what he said about the Jews. When you're going to talk about something that, you know, has baggage to it. You you speak more carefully. Now, again, I there's a big part of it says, yeah, but if you know that somebody says something by accident,

you know they didn't mean it, you should let it go. And I agree with that, too. But I don't want to give everybody a green light and say, you know, we've come to the point in America where it's perfectly fine to use that comparison. I think people will use it mischievously, and I think it would be impossible to know when it's on the up and up and when it's not. And, you know, manners happen organically within a society. And sometimes it's not the end of the world. I don't know.

You know, I'm talking, as I say, one thing I think of the counter argument. So I don't know. But there's a little bit a lot of ugly people who've said things like that. Okay, so ready to wrap? Yeah, we got to wrap it up. Is it chilly in here or is it me? I'm wearing a sweater, so I don't know. Nicole?

I feel good. Maybe it's just me. Where are you located, Richard? Are you in New York? I'm in Los Angeles, but it's about 40 degrees and been raining for about a week here. So it's cold for us. Oddly enough, L.A. is like the same temperature as us, I think, these days. Do you get to New York at all? Very, very rarely. Sometimes when my book comes out, I'm probably going to be on the East Coast, probably doing a bunch of shows and other stuff. But usually not.

You should stop it. You're kind of fearless, I can tell you. You're not afraid of this issue at all. Have you read my sub stack or Twitter? I mean, that's pretty much, you know, that's like sort of my thing. Yeah, who gives a shit? Are you from New York? You sound like you're from New York. No, I'm from Chicago.

I'm from the southwest suburbs of Chicago. So a little bit of a... Anyway, thank you, Richard Ananya, for joining us. I hope you found this to be an intelligent conversation. This was fun. I really enjoyed it. Thanks a lot. Thank you, Nicole, as always, for being our behind-the-scenes wizard. And we'll see you next time. Bye-bye.