The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Immigration and Stealing Jokes

Episode Date: February 13, 2021

Immigration, stealing jokes, Ted Alexandro and Saturday Night Live.  Eric Kaufmann is an author, journalist and Professor of Politics at Birkbeck College, University of London. Alingon Mitra is a stand up comedian whose credits include Conan, Colbert, and Comedy Central.  

Okay, this is Live from the Table, the official podcast of New York's world-famous comedy seller. Coming at you on Sirius XM 99 Raw Dog and on the Laugh Button Podcast Network. Dan Natterman here with Noam Dwarman, the owner of the world-famous comedy seller comedy club. Periel Ashenbrand, our producer. With us today, Alingon Mitra. Alingon, it's been a long time. He is a stand-up comic, a comedy cello regular. He has been a writer on Adam Ruins Everything and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah's made

appearances on Comedy Central and Conan O'Brien, Stephen Colbert, etc. Hello, Alingon. We also have with us another guest all the way from the United Kingdom, Eric Kaufman, professor of politics at Birkbeck College, University of London, and is the author of White Shift, Immigration, Populism, and the Future of White Majorities, and it's probably as controversial as it sounds. He has also written for the New York Times, Times of London, Newsweek, National Review, New Statesman, and other outlets. Eric Kaufman, welcome. Thanks for joining us. It's late over there where you are in London. We appreciate you staying up for us. Great. Well, thanks for having me. And I do apologize for not having a British accent

since I'm Canadian, but that's okay. I've lived here for over 20, 25 years. The English accent is contagious, but apparently you are resistant to it. It's not that easy to pick. I recall Madonna living there for like a month and all the talking, like, you know, he's talking like a queen after just a couple of months. But you resist it.

Yeah. I think the Northern Irish and Scottish ones are easier to acquire. Well, I guess everybody at their own pace. Noam, this is a guest that you you were turned on to by our friend colman hughes who recommended him as a guest eric you know colman right i do indeed yes i've had some some nice uh lunches with him in new york um so yeah he's great i love his work so eric and and elena you, can you give us a quick overview of,

you have some thoughts about why America is coming apart and how it relates to immigration and how it is a hostage to human nature and where it might go. You want to give us a little overview and then, you know, Lingan can tear you apart. Go ahead. Yeah, so I'm a sort of, I'm a political scientist. I work a lot with survey data on public opinion. And one of the things you see in the U.S. case certainly is that views on immigration were absolutely critical for predicting who would support Trump in the Republican primary, as opposed to Cruz or Kasich or others. And then also in terms of Obama voters and non-voters switching over to the Republicans in 2016, that issue of views on immigration was absolutely crucial. And in Europe, we have, you know, if you look at the Brexit vote, you look at the vote for the Sweden Democrats, Marine Le Pen, etc.

Again, immigration is absolutely the key issue for the rise of the populist right. And I think Trump's reflecting that same dynamic. If you look at American public opinion, just white Americans, Democrats and Republicans were only about 10 points apart on views on immigration in 2012. And by 2016, they're 50 points apart. And that pattern we've seen in other countries to a greater or lesser degree. So I think that issue is really key for understanding why we're in the moment we're in. And why are we in the moment that we're in? Well, we're in a actually quite substantial period of ethnodemographic shifting across the West. And depending on how people are wired, and this is 50% heritable, you either see that as stimulating and interesting, or you see it as loss and as disorder.

And it's the people who see it as loss and as disorder who are moving into voting populist right now. And that issue is going to be with us really for the rest of our lives, I would argue that's going to be a major factor. So whenever what's happened now is there was a big increase in immigration, say in Britain and in Europe since about 2014, and that's been reflected in the rise in the number of people saying immigration is one of the most important issues facing my country. And when that rises, the support for the populist right rises. And it's been found in nine out of 10 Western countries in the last, just in a recent paper. So there's a very important link then between this kind of ethnic change, which unsettles people's idea of the country they live in, of their own identities, but it only

unsettles a part of the population who are, for psychological reasons, mainly not that, you know, they tend to see differences, disorder, change as loss. So the big question is how we're going to deal with that part of the population in Western countries. So I have a series of questions and then I don't want to dominate, but one of the things I always find myself thinking is kind of like a first principles of all this. And I'm not clear the answers as is what feelings are we prepared to say are wholesome and acceptable and what feelings were you prepared to say are bigotry and racism so for instance when um black people complain that harlem is becoming gentrified and all of a sudden they find themselves living in a white neighborhood, we kind of say, yeah, I don't blame them for being pissed off, right?

I say, if I was moving here to America from Russia, and I decided to move to a Russian neighborhood, nobody would say, boo, of course you got, I understand you want to move to a Russian neighborhood, but then all of a sudden, if my Russian neighborhood started turning Italian, and I didn't want that, you say, what are you, a bigot? I say, well, it was okay when I moved to the Russian neighborhood started turning Italian and I didn't want that, he said, what are you, a bigot? I said, well, it was okay when I moved to the Russian neighborhood. Now it's not okay that I want to keep it a Russian neighborhood. And I think that we, I don't want to keep talking,

but I think that we haven't really grappled with what sense of wanting to be around people like yourselves do we think is okay? And where does it cross the line into being evil? Yeah. I mean, I think you've got your finger on the key ethical or normative question because, you know, in surveys, it's really- I usually do, by the way, but go ahead. Okay. Yeah, because actually psychologists, they find, you know, that attachment to your in-group and dislike of the out-group are separate dispositions. In most cases, unless there's a direct clash, like being a Republican and a Democrat, yeah, the warmer you feel towards the Democrats, the cooler you feel towards the Republicans, but that's a zero-sum competition. It doesn't work that way for, say, feeling warmer. If you're white and you feel warmer

towards white people, you don't feel cooler towards black people. It's unrelated. And so that's part of this issue. It's like saying, if I'm really attached to my family, do I hate the neighbor's family more? No, actually, there's no relationship there. And so one of the questions is, you know, is it okay for an ethnic group or even a pan-ethnic racial group like white Americans or Hispanic Americans to feel an attachment to their group, and perhaps to want to slow down change to a neighborhood or country, etc. I think it's different when we're talking about stopping change entirely and sealing the borders. You know, that is clearly an exclusive orientation. But if you talk about what's the rate of change, you know,

it tends to be that if you say, I want slower change, you're put into the closed box and there's the open people and the closed people. It's kind of very black and white. And what I'm sort of saying is we've got to move to a place where there's faster and slower, not just open close. And you've got to be tolerant that some people who want things to be a bit slower and you have to be able to find an accommodation point. Why are you drawing a line between slow change and no change? Slow change, you have to be able to find an accommodation point. Why are you drawing a line between slow change and no change? Slow change, you seem to be saying is okay to want slow change, but when we get into no change at all, you say that's not okay. Why that distinction? Well, no change would be sort of associated with a sort of irrational fear of foreigners

and desire for purity and essentialism, you know, so that is sort of, that's where it comes into racism or some kind of xenophobia. Whereas if we're just talking about slower change because of attachment to the way things are, not freezing it in stone, but sort of an attachment and where you're willing to tolerate differences, but you want to be able to govern the pace of increase in that diversity. I think that is a conversation we have to be able to have. I don't think we are able to have it now in many circles where you are immediately tagged as a kind of bigot if you aren't in the open group that more or less doesn't believe in it hold hold hold that uh free speech uh issue for a second that is one of the things i want to get to but a ling on uh you being uh the

only um well i used to be the jews were fitness description but i guess we've been declassified so being the only be the only brown person and non-white person uh this is what what are you thinking while you're hearing him say this stuff well Well, I mean, there's a couple things that I have questions about. One of the things was the idea of being wired to want this or not want this. That I guess I'd have to find out what this data is, because it seems like something that you wouldn't be wired to be something that you would learn. And if it's learnable, then it's something you could change. And then the other thing is when you're talking about being, if you're against it entirely, that's irrational. But if it's slow, that is rational.

I still feel like I'm not sure how one part of it is becomes rational. If you're just like, okay, well I'm okay with it, but you got to go slow versus I'm not okay with it at all. Why is that one now a rational choice? Okay. Eric. Yeah. I mean, really good questions. I mean, I, I think that the, the wiring, okay, so this is, there's a literature in psychology on something called right-wing

authoritarianism. This is a disposition again, as I mentioned, that sees differences disorder in a way. And they've done twin studies that can show you that that essentially in twins that are separated or half related, you can see this relationship. They always do these twin studies where they're separated. How many are there in the world? Significant numbers. Significant numbers. We had Nancy Siegel.

We had Nancy Siegel from NYU. She was involved in the Minnesota twin studies. There's quite a significant number of them. Go ahead. They might use the same twins for every study, you know, just like they use the same committee for every TV show. Go ahead, Eric. Go ahead.

But you can even see, for example, people's view, you know, how messy is your desk? Do you believe in a dress code for a tennis tournament? Things which you wouldn't think of as being related actually are very much related to something like,

do you want more immigration or less immigration? Things you wouldn't believe are actually, so this is tapping into those underlying dimensions of psychology, which are sort of very stable dispositions. So this is not something actually that you can teach out of people.

And this is a point that Karen Stenner, the psychologist in her book, The Authoritarian Dynamic, which Jonathan Haidt talks about quite a bit. And Jonathan Haidt himself, I mean, preferences for messy dots on a screen versus orderly dots on a screen. And that's very, at a very basic level of disposition. And these things matter because you then start to select environments that tend to reinforce those dispositions. And so you get people sort of becoming quite different. So I would sort of say that I don't think this sort of view that this can be educated out of people is likely to work. And in fact, what Stenner says is if you try and do that, you actually can make things worse. People react. There have been some experiments that can show that people actually have a reactive

effect to that kind of messaging. And actually, there are ways you can message to try and get. So for example, if we're talking about immigration, if you tell people that, well, immigrants are coming in, but things aren't changing very much, your country's not really, they're just being absorbed as they have in the past. Actually, that works very well with this kind of segment of the population. Whereas if you say, we're getting more and more diverse, things are changing, ain't that great? That goes down really badly. So yeah, go ahead. Also, I would say, Alingan on and eric you correct me if i'm out to lunch here but in general humans get used to things in a particular pattern whether it's

really spicy food or i mean i mean it seems weird to say but like there was a time when beethoven's music they couldn't be comprehended by people who listened to it if you woke up tomorrow and found that the entire world was now hasidic jews that that't be comprehended by people who listened to it. If you woke up tomorrow and found that the entire world was now Hasidic Jews, that would be quite disconcerting to you in terms of everything that would have to change. But if gradually over 20 years, more and more Hasidic Jews moved into your life, obviously that would be quite a different outcome that you would get used to it. So at some point, and cultures are quite different, let's not kid ourselves. And I chose Hasid because they're both the most, kind of the most

out there. And also because I'm Jewish, I can kind of get away with bashing them without being called anti-Semitic. But they make a nice example because I wouldn't want to wake up in a Hasidic neighborhood. And I know a Lingam wouldn't have named, by the way, and they wouldn't want me. But if it happened gradually, you would imagine that not only would I get used to it, but also they would also change a little bit as they gradually were introduced and they would start to adapt other things.

And this actually brings me to the next thing I wanted to ask you about is that assuming this is going to happen, aren't we emphasizing the opposite of everything we would put on the drawing board for like, okay, if we're going to make this multi-ethnic nation work, we're going to have to just get rid of this notion that cultural appropriation is a bad idea. And we're going to have to get rid of this idea that the most important thing about is your ethnicity. And we're going to have to go a little, you know, have a thicker skin about people talking about stuff because we are emphasizing everything that would make it

almost impossible to live together. Am I wrong? Yeah, I think I would agree with that. I mean, I think some kind of notion of assimilation. And again, that gets to this idea of sort of celebrating the inclusion and the idea that things aren't changing so fast. You know, you want to actually almost suggest that actually things aren't changing fast. Immigrants are coming in, being absorbed into an existing matrix, even if it's not actually happening quite that quickly. That's the message you probably want to emphasize, not to say we're getting more and more diverse and changing. And isn't that fantastic? I mean, that works with a small number of people, but it's not going to work with another part of the population. And this is partly what's behind the polarizing politics. I mean, if you look across

the West, increasingly, parties are looking more and more similar on class and they're more looking more and more different in terms of culture in terms of cultural attitudes and and that's because of this psychological divide between the people who like difference and change and those who don't so yeah I I agree with you we're kind of going about it the wrong way in many western countries by emphasizing that difference all the time. What are the tangible differences in a society, in a Western society, that becomes less white? What is actually changing that one might react to, other than fear of change? And we can understand fear of change, I suppose, but what's actually changing or what will change

in a society that's 50% brown, say, 50% East Indian, Hispanic and black, how will we be a different country, if at all? Yeah, I mean, part of this also, I haven't talked as much about the second part of the book, which is about melting into that, if the ethnic majority expands its boundaries, like in the US, it went from Protestant to white,

you know, so Jews and Catholics became part of this sort of majority category. But, you know, going forward, you know, Michael Lynn talks about Beijing, so you'll get sort of people who've intermarried into this category becoming part of it. So you might actually get a multicolored majority melting pot emerging, right that's that but that's not going to happen in a serious way until the second part of the century the question is what we do now before that has occurred um yeah i think when you have ethnic difference which is people who have different collective memories different myths of ancestry in terms of which communities they belong to and and possibly different culture,

you're going to get these different identities. And it's well known, there's a study of this globally that shows that where you have more ethnic differences within a country, there are some things that are harder, like where do you build a hospital, whose district you put it in, you know, so there are these collective action problems that are thrown up by rising diversity. And in the U.S. case, you had rising diversity in the early part of the 20th century. Robert Putnam has a book on this. And then you actually had a decline in diversity as you had assimilation. And actually, you had arguably a higher social solidarity. But now we're back to where things were in the early 20th century. So the question is some kind of integration,

not government assimilation, but these things happen organically, privately. That probably needs to happen before some of these tensions start to reduce. Also, we have other problems in this country that, and so I'm a child of immigrants and there was a particular immigrant mentality that I grew up with that is quite different. I would say then the immigrant mentality of immigrants that I know,

like who worked for me, people I love, by the way, I'm not, this is not, I hope it's hard to express it without somebody thinking I'm criticizing it. It just is what it is. So my father came here at a time when, first of all, going from country to country was a tremendous thing, right? And it was no long distance. It was barely any mail.

So when you went somewhere else, that was it. And coming from Russia or Israel and winding up in America, you kissed the ground and you wrapped yourself in the flag and you would never utter a word. America was the savior and you appreciated every minute of it. You didn't care that they sang Christmas carols. You didn't care that there was a national Christmas tree.

You didn't, you know, you... But now we have populations coming here who have grown up on an anti-American diet, with anti-American mentalities, who are also coming in ways that they have no particular obstacles to going right back, or going back and forth, or calling home all the time. So in many ways, it doesn't feel like they would naturally root to this country in the same way. And I speak to immigrants who work for me. They're like, are you going to stay here? I don't know.

I might. I might go back. I might go back for a little while. Would you want your kids to fight in a war here? Oh, no. I'd be out of here if there was a war. And I don't blame them for any of these things, but it's just quite different. And then finally, we've also decided

that it's no longer appropriate for us to demand of the immigrant the intention to assimilate. And I don't know how you feel about that or anybody in the panel feels about that. But again, I'm just saying that's the truth. We used to think it was very appropriate to tell an immigrant from a foreign country, well, you better learn to speak English

and get your shit together. And remember that George Washington is your founding father. And now we don't, we think it's almost bigotry to expect the immigrants to wrap themselves in our culture, in our traditions.

All of this seems like a recipe for a lot of difficulties, really, all I'm saying. Yeah, I think you're right. I mean, I don't think the immigrants coming now are less necessarily that much different in terms of their willingness to assimilate. But I do think the dominant narrative coming from the elite is quite different. It's sort of encouraging difference rather than assimilation into a common entity.

And so, yeah, I think that really is having a negative effect. I mean, I think what's interesting is you have this combination of the ethnic diversification. Layered on top of that, you have this ideology, which is very pro-diversity. And that sort of begins, it's got a long intellectual history, begins kind of in the early 20th century in America, but it really takes off post-1960s, gets into the institutions, the education system, and now is into high politics. Yeah, I think that's really going to be a very challenging recipe when you aren't even, you don't even have a matrix into which you're trying to get the majority. Now, of course, people are allowed to, it's a free country,

if they don't want to assimilate, that's fine. There's no problem there, but you probably need a critical mass to be voluntarily doing that if you want to have a reasonable level of social solidarity. But the other thing I'd point out though, is I think the origin of the polarization

is within the white population more than anything else. It is a kind of intra white battle between kind of the what I call left modernism, which is a sort of cultural left, and then the more traditional patriotic kind of, whereas I'm not sure that the immigrant, you know, the immigrant groups and non white groups are sort of not on the sidelines, but they're not as implicated in this polarizing tendency that's really gripped in the last few decades. Oh, it's definitely the white people. What do you say, Alingan?

I don't know. It's dicey because I feel like once you start pushing that a little bit where you're like, look, we got to figure out a matrix to assimilate in. Then you get to a point where people are saying oh you're not american because you aren't playing baseball or you aren't speaking english and that's where it gets i don't know it starts getting a little prejudicial even if the person's an american citizen you're like well you're not doing american things because you're not eating our food so you're less of us now which i don't i think that there's a nuance there, but I feel like people aren't going to catch that nuance. They're just going to grab it for what they want, which is, I want my country to be the way it is. You're not doing it the way I want it. So you're not us.

Well, you're right, Aling, and it is dicey and it is, and well, this is where I started off asking Eric, it's, we are trying to bring out the best parts of our human nature and find a way to control and contain the worst parts of our nature and these issues activate both these things and in the same people at various times you know and um and i think that's why, in the end, why this idea of moving slowly is wise. The typical recipe is add ingredients and then stir. And we need to stir. There is this more less easy to justify in moral terms, but it's real. And you're afraid to bring things up in this day and age.

But I just want to say, for people who are older, there was a time when there was a wave of immigrants, illegal immigrants, just when Reagan was president. Reagan gave amnesty to all the illegal immigrants at the time. And then people were promised, and now we're going to take this problem seriously, and this is not going to happen again. And a lot of these voters woke up 20, 30 years later and found that, wait a second, everything is drastically changed now. It's five times worse than it was when they promised us it wouldn't happen worse from their point of view,

when they promised us that this would be under control. And now I'm being asked to change my expectations of how I should live and they resent it. And whether it's wrong or it's right, it's perfectly predictable, right? It's perfectly predictable that a human being, we're all the same, black, white, or any color, would resent that. And we have to deal with that resentment in some way better than just saying, you're an asshole, shut up and take it, you know? Eric, what do you say? Well, yeah, I mean, I think there is an issue here around intolerance of people who want to assimilate, for example. That is, you know, it's certainly in academia where I am, the idea that

you would look positively on somebody who wants to assimilate doesn't really exist. It's just not in the high culture. Whereas someone who wants to retain their identity and traditions from another country, that's seen as fantastic. My view is, retain if you want to retain that. I don't think we should look down on that. I don't think the state should be forcing people to assimilate. But what I have a problem with is the sort of reverse that somebody wants to voluntarily assimilate is kind of frowned upon. And so it's that. And similarly, when I think we're looking at... Explain that. I'm not sure what you're referring to. Who's frowned upon for wanting to assimilate?

Well, the idea of seeing assimilation as a positive thing, for example, it's kind of... I won't say it's a swear word in academia, but it is certainly close to that. No one is talking positively about assimilation. Voluntary, I'm saying. But the other thing, too, is that there's an idea of exclusion, right? So if I say, let's take a phrase like, all accents are American accents, right? If you think about that, it's true. Anybody can be an American citizen and have any accent. So on one level, absolutely all accents are American accents. But on another level, that's a nonsensical phrase.

Clearly there are British accents and French accents and American accents. And that distinction of that part of what makes the US distinctive are these everyday particularities, like the way people speak English. That doesn't mean everyone must speak that way to be considered an equal American. We have to be able to kind of juggle both things at once. We want to retain traditions, but at the same time, be open-minded enough to allow for difference. I think that balance is being lost. It's now all on the different side. If you

mention any of this traditional stuff, then you are seen as anti the difference. No, you can actually be okay with tolerating difference and accepting somebody as equal, but at the same time, want to conserve and preserve certain traditions which make your country distinctive, such as the American accent. Let's say that people didn't assimilate. There was a lot of immigration, there was no assimilation. How would that affect somebody who chose to live within, how would that negatively affect somebody that's an American of, has been here for several generations? Why would they care if there's a neighborhood in which people don't speak English very well and have a weird accent?

And there are such neighborhoods, by the right and how that doesn't affect me directly how would that on a macro level affect people you know uh well it all gets population yeah it all gets back to that sort of distinction between people who like difference and change and those who who dislike them they're actually separate dispositions. The change part and the difference part are separate. They're not exactly the same. So for somebody who tends to prefer order, for example, a more homogenous environment, they would tend to see that, experience it negatively. Someone else might see it as stimulating and interesting. Both exist, and we have to deal with both. But is it possible for some people to live in homogeneous environments? I could certainly move to parts of the United

States that are very homogeneous, and let New York be New York, and let Idaho, which I assume is mostly, I don't know this for sure, but I assume is mostly European ancestry people, let them be them, and we can live in separate, we can live where we want to live. I mean, at what point does the changing culture affect the people in Idaho or affect the people in Montana? Well, it affects it insofar as they may not feel in as much of an identity with the diverse places. So they may see those, those diverse places, as fundamentally different, having fundamentally different interests, and therefore it's harder to have a national, common national identity. Now, I actually think there has to become a tolerance on both sides.

So there has to be an acceptance that there are cosmopolitan places, there are homogenous places. Neither one of them is sinful because it's diverse or cosmopolitan on the one hand or homogeneously white on the other. It doesn't make it a better or worse place. So I think that tolerance has to happen. But we do know, for example, that, you know, worldwide, it is just more difficult to achieve in terms of, say, economic development, more what's called ethnically fractionalized diverse societies tend to have slower economic development, mainly because public goods such as government welfare and garbage collection and hospital provision and policing and all these sorts of things are just more difficult when you have these differences. And politics tends to run more on ethnic lines.

Parties tend to be dominated more by single ethnic groups rather than by, say, liberal and conservative. So there are a whole bunch of reasons why it's just more challenging. But it's incorrect to say such societies are all going to collapse into chaos. No, they're not. I mean, there's a lot of successful, very polyethnic societies like Mauritius, for example, of Switzerland. So it's not, but on the other hand, it's just harder. And it's maybe, in my view, probably better to have kind of this melting pot assimilating

majority, which is not the whole country, and then minorities who maintain their culture, and that's fine. But I think if that melting pot kind of majority shrinks and becomes a smaller share and you've got multiple polls. It's just it's just harder. Politics is more likely to take on an ethnic form. What about this thought? Suppose the those who are against immigration because they believe that immigrants will change the culture and won't assimilate. Suppose they're dead wrong and they're probably at least half wrong. OK, but suppose they're 100% wrong do they still have the right if they do they are they worthy of condemnation have they do they have

the right to be wrong and guide policy in other words if a majority of my fellow Americans don't want immigration whatever the reason they're a majority and I feel like I have to be like okay if you don't want immigration, that's your choice to make. I might disagree with it, but I'm not going to say you're evil and that we're going to overrule your decision. I mean, I don't know if you know where I'm getting what I'm saying. It's like, to what extent does a country have a right to say, for any reason they choose, that they're going to reduce immigration? I feel like I have a right not to invite a lingon to my dinner party because I don't like a lingon. And I don't even have a good reason. I've never been invited to a dinner party.

I don't have dinner parties. My apartment's too small and it's not very nice. But the point is, whatever the reason that a majority of our population wants to reduce immigration, is that their choice? Or should we fight that choice and say, no, you try to force them to think in another way? Well, I think you could, when you say force, I think you could certainly make an argument and say, well, look, do we not owe a debt to people in other parts of the world?

By all means, try and convince. But in a democracy, I do think that the problem has been that there's been an attempt to take this issue off the table by associating it, anyone who wants less, with being a bigot. And what that does is essentially shutting down, narrowing the acceptable space of debate. What you're doing, it's a bit like Soviet Union, I explained, you kind of, you're only going to sell one color of pair of pants. And so if someone wants blue jeans or something different, where are they going to go? They can't go to the main political parties because they're not selling that. And so they're going to go? They can't go to the main political parties because they're

not selling that. And so they're going to go to a black marketeer, which might be a Trump. It might be a Le Pen, somebody who is willing to break the taboo and offer people what they're not getting from the mainstream parties. Now, you don't obviously you don't always want to offer what people aren't getting from the mainstream parties. George Wallace offered segregation. You have to draw lines. But the question is, you have to have a good reason for drawing the lines. And I don't think tarring anybody who wants less immigration with the racism brush was a justifiable, legitimate reason. And so all you did is you created a Trump by not allowing mainstream parties to address it responsibly. And so there are dangers in trying to shut these things,

these conversations down. But are they racist though? Like if I want my country to be white, because I'm white and I'm like, okay, I'm okay with somebody from Russia coming, but I'm not okay with somebody from China coming. Whereas the guy from China may have more similarities to me than the guy from Russia.

It's just how he looks is the way I look. I'm okay with that. Is that not racist? Is that not something we should be saying is a racist policy? Well, I think if you're trying to maintain some kind of a racially homogenous ethnostate, then that is racism because you have this notion of purity and essentialism, which is irrational and dangerous. And then where does that stop? You're going to start purifying in what way, right? So there is definitely a, you know, we want to clearly condemn that. But when I'm talking about slowing down the rate of change. It's a view that says we're going to have immigration and we're going to have intermarriage and interracial marriage and mixing.

So clearly that's not the same thing as saying we want to have some kind of pure race thing. But people tend to collapse both those positions into one. That is, you don't want change, you're not open, you're a bigot. And you're the same as Richard Spencer. Well, we have to be able to be more nuanced than that. We have to be able to say, yeah, there's some people who want slower change, some want faster. We're going to have to meet in the middle.

We can't be so absolute and reactive to the people who want slower change. Can I say something here? Because it's really complicated and it's depressing, actually, because, I mean, as Alingan says, I would say, yeah, that does sound like racism to me. At the same time, my first thought was, but you know, the people who are supposedly pro-immigrant and calling people who are not racist, if you listen to stuff they talk about, they seem even more racist to me.

All I ever hear from that side of the ideological spectrum is anti, is bashing whiteness, bashing white males, all sorts of identity politics. I mean, strongly, strongly identifying everything in the world on the basis of race and then if god forbid a white person like we're creating i mean people should understand i have no affinity towards white people it's only like a few years ago that i mean people forgot the fact that the people, the white nationalists hate Jews first, you know, now they're kind of lumping in. But I'm just saying I have no affinity for them whatsoever. But I feel like if we keep telling them that we view them as white, at some point they're going to say, that's right.

Why are you getting mad at us for saying about ourselves the very same thing you've been telling us every day that we are so it's almost like we're creating a white race we're normalizing every day even in a subtle thing like calling people karens and everything like this we are normalizing all the concepts that we should be trying to root out and destroy if we're going to be a melting a melting pot society multi-ethnic society. Go ahead. And I have something else to add after that. Go ahead. Well, yeah, I think we need to also distinguish between a kind of normal, you know, sense of ethnic identity, you know, or even racial identity.

You can be Puerto Rican and Hispanic. You can be Irish and white. White is kind of the higher level and in fact in the research what we find is people are strongest strongest attachment is to their ethnic ancestral identity but if you are strongly attached to being Irish you are much more strongly attached to being white or if you're much more attached to being Cuban you're more attached to being Hispanic. The one is kind of just an outer layer. And, but the difference is,

do you sort of, in expressing your Hispanicness or your whiteness, are you doing that in opposition to somebody else? Like I'm superior or I hate this other person, or is it simply, no, I'm proud of the traditions that we hold, et cetera. And it's what Jonathan Haidt calls a common humanity version of identity, ast calls a common humanity version of identity

as opposed to a common enemy version of identity. And what's going on now, I think, with the cultural left is they are encouraging minority groups to have a common enemy version of their identity instead of a common humanity version of their identity. The minority groups don't want that pushed on them. They're actually quite content

with being proud of their traditions and they don't want this to be part of this people of color coalition that's going to somehow overthrow some power structure. And so what we're seeing is this is driven mainly by a kind of white cultural left rather than... We got some freezing going on. I think big tech had enough of our coffin. The Atlantic cable is getting too much salt in it. No, that's a very good point you just made. It's true. A lot of this is driven more by the far-left white people than it is by the non-white people themselves.

That's been my experience too. The classic case is this Latinx thing where only 1% or 1.5% of all Latin people wanted to be called Latinx. And yet every liberal white person is on Twitter, will use the phrase Latinx. And it goes to New York Times as if they changed the term for Jews to something that none of us Jews ever wanted. And supposedly they did it out of respect for us. It's kind of wacky. But here's another question. What if this hadn't happened with so much illegal immigration? What if it had happened out of need? Because it's always seemed to me that the people who need the illegal immigration people who'll be most pinched if all the illegal immigrants in the country to disappear are

republicans they're the ones who need somebody to take care of their landscaping follow their kids uh work in their businesses i mean who i mean democrats i if i I put on my cynical hat, they see voters in immigrants, and it also jibes with their kind of tolerant worldview. But if we had not been so porous, you would see the right calling upon the government to allow in more immigrants because we dreadfully need the labor. I mean, we terribly need the labor, right? But because it all poured in illegally, it allowed people to have their cake and eat it too. They can use the labor and still complain about it, which is what they do.

They would never have to be on record demanding it because they needed it, right? Am I missing something there? Well, no, I think you're right that a coalition, a part of the Republican Party, which is particularly agriculturalists, people who own large farms in the Southwest and very rich people did want exactly what you talked about. But I think now the base of conservative parties

like the Republicans has shifted and it's much more about that kind of populist middle class, working class. And a lot of the kind of wealthier voters have moved into the Democrat, not a lot, but many of them have gone into the Democratic parties, particularly the last two elections. You see white wealthy voters shifting into the Democratic Party. So you're right, though, at one time, the parties, the party voters were very similar in their views on immigration for decades. And it's not really until the last, well, 2015, 2016, that you start to see a big gap opening up. But yeah, I wouldn't say it's Republicans, but I'd say it's elite country club, if you like Republicans who benefited. Well, but it's small businesses too i mean i

think that here i've been trying to be understanding to the non-immigrant side but i want to say this we have very little perspective on how much we benefit from immigration in this country i mean as a business owner, I will tell you, I mean, you can literally bring tears to my eyes. The immigrant workers, the labor is so far above the quality of native born. I'm telling you, I mean, like the Mexican employees that I have, you can't even comprehend how good they are. And I mean, I guess to say somebody's good is the same as saying someone else could be bad. So I guess I'm supposed to pretend that, no, that's not the case at all, that they're exactly the same as everybody else. I'm telling you, it's not the case. They are unbelievable. And immigrants in general are truly the backbone of everything. We have an

aging white population that is not going to do this work. I mean, when I was a kid, the cab drivers were white. The guys in the kitchen were white, white people did all the jobs, right? That, that, that doesn't exist anymore. And like I said, we have our cake and eat it too because we indulge our tribal, you know, get our tribal rocks off by complaining about all the illegal immigrants or legal immigrants. But we really, really, we need a, like, it's a wonderful life,

the movie, we need it. And it's a wonderful life moment where there are no longer any immigrants. And all of a sudden we realize, holy shit, I had no idea they were holding us all together all this time. And then you wake up and you're, and you have a different outlook, you know, I don't know how to do that, but really people don't get it yeah well i i mean i think it's something similar here in britain you know that it's a very similar story that you know immigrants work probably better for less money and and therefore no it's not about the less money for the same money or the same money for the same money for more money they're still cheaper i i'm telling you an immigrant making an immigrant making twice the wage is still cheaper than most non-immigrant workers.

Yeah, I mean, I think that's probably right. But the thing in this conversation is that there are economic benefits. I think that's absolutely right. I think it's a mistake to see this as an economic issue primarily. And a lot of the academic research would suggest that when it comes to attitudes to immigration, it's mainly about these cultural psychological things and has very little to do with whether you are rich or poor or unemployed, your views on immigration. So yeah, I suppose what the restrictionists might say is, let's give it a try with lower numbers and see how it goes. And we don't like it. We can go back to higher numbers.

To have that conversation is difficult when there are restrictions on what you can debate, what you can talk about, which policies you can politically campaign on. This is one of the reasons it might be a good idea to have a period of lower numbers for a while. And then people might realize, actually, we've thought about it, and maybe the trade-off, it's worth having more immigration, even if we have faster cultural change, which I might not like. I'm willing to make that trade. The other problem, of course, is that the people who benefit from the immigration tend to be the better off. And it tends to be people who are less well off who don't see those benefits. They see the benefits in terms of lower prices for goods that they would have to pay more for. They don't necessarily appreciate that. But the benefits accrue more to the well off. And we should remind everybody,

it was very short while ago that people like Bernie Sanders were the loudest voices against immigration. He filibustered the immigration bill that George Bush wanted to pass. So, you know, they pretend that this has been always their attitude, but it's not at all. They're very much blowing the wind with what's expedient now. By the way, do you get called a racist for this stuff? Well, there's always a group. I mean, it's only a small group on the sort of left that will tend to wheel that out on many occasions. But I've been really pleasantly surprised, say.

I mean, the center grounds, the mainstream newspapers in the U.S. and Britain have generally been pretty favorable because they can see that, you know, the argument is one about slowing things down, having assimilation. And yeah, I mean, clearly they can see that the populist right was surging from about 2014 through to about just when the COVID pandemic hit. And I think after COVID, it's going to be right back with us. And so I think there is an awareness that there has to be an explanation for why this is happening. We have to come to grips with it somehow. So I think they were willing to listen to some extent. Yeah, I mean, we know, of course, with political correctness and with wokeness, there's always that group of people who are out there trying to paint everything as racist and end the debate and shut it down. So Olenka is not the only one to call you racist?

Not yet. Dan, you had a question. Well, you sort of alluded to it. My question was, is just to calm people down not reason enough to lessen immigration? And this goes back to my previous statement. If a large portion of our country feels that strongly about lessening immigration, whether they're right or wrong about it, is it not valid to compromise with them just to calm things down? Yeah, this is sort of my point is that to find an accommodation, like with economics, some people want more tax and spend, some want less tax and spend. People kind of accept that you kind of have a middle ground and they don't go ballistic when taxes aren't reduced or when they are increased. But Eric, I got to tell you, and Dan's going to roll his eyes because we're always talking about, but really the left has to clean up its act here too. So for instance, you can't go blah, blah, blah about how dare you not want to take is the ultimate contradiction, in my opinion. Take them in. I don't care where they're from. But then once they

get here, we have to treat them as people, period. I don't see how we can be a successful multi-ethnic nation if we are going to bean count how many Asians we have at our universities. I just, I don't see that. If Harvard becomes 80% Indian and Asian, South Asian and East Asian, I think we have to be prepared to say, we're very proud of our country now because actually we believe what we've been saying all this time. We don't care where they're from.

God bless us that Harvard is 80% people of Asian. But if we're going to say, no, we have to keep it at 20%, then who are we kidding? We don't want to be a nation of immigrants. We don't. We just want to sound like we are. And then we want to do everything we can to prevent the successful immigrant populations

from doing too well, right? That doesn't make any sense. Well, yeah. I mean, the ideology really of essentially sacralizing minority groups and demonizing the majority and that tendency of sort of a very negative outlook to majorities and very positive to minorities then colors all of these debates, right? Colors, you know, you want to enforce the border. Oh, it must be white people disliking non-white people.

You want to enforce the border? Oh, it must be white people disliking non-white people. You want to have admissions. It's got to be equity, right? Because we want to have a racial mix that, you know, so I think the problem, you know, this ideology of essentially sacralizing minority groups and essentially demonizing the majority, that's where we've got to. And this thing started a hundred years ago. And I talk about this in the book, you know, really back then it was demonizing, you know, wasps demonizing themselves, right? Saying that, oh, you guys are so boring. You don't like dancing. You want to ban alcohol. That was the beginning of it. And it's slowly developed and become more and more the sensibility of of the elite and yeah we have i think there has to be some reckoning with the excess of this left modernist ideology we have to be able to dial it back or we're only going to be fueling the kind of culture war polarization that we've got now yeah because i'm actually quite an idealist i would i you know i

would like to be i like a diverse america most, I mean, I got tremendous pleasure as a musician at times and as a dude who was trying to date women. And, you know, I can imagine the first time I went to various cultures, learning from various cultures, musically, cuisine-wise, just experiencing it. I think these are all, I think it's all wonderful for America. I'm going to admit here, I'm probably the only one who doesn't know what sacralized means.

Okay. Tell me what it means. I imagine you know what it means. I don't. You can use your context. Make it sacred? Yeah. Yeah, make it sacred.

Okay. So I'd never heard the word, but I guess it's from the context. And then this is my last question, and I know word, but I guess it's different, you know, from the context. And then this is my last question, and I know I always got to go, but maybe, you know, everybody get one last crack at them. Yeah. Where does, where, what is the typical African-American view on immigration here?

Because one often associates the people struggling to be more likely to be resentful of someone else coming in, low skill particularly? Well, I mean, I would say that they are, you know, they're not as restrictionist as whites are, but there's still a significant, you know, I think it might be 30% or 40% wanting lower numbers. What's interesting is that if you look at, you know, of course, Trump got a higher share of Latino and black voters and Asian voters than for the last couple of elections. It's very interesting to see that the views of those groups on immigration are very similar to white Trump voters and their views on political correctness are very similar. And so I

think we've actually got a kind of multiracial coalition on a number of these issues, which is quite interesting. And I think that speaks also to this assimilation process. It is actually occurring, the assimilation process. And part of this increase in Latino and Asian support for the Republicans is reflecting that process. So the cauldron is bubbling. I mean, let's be honest. If it was an entirely white planet, at a time when

low-skilled jobs are leaving the country, at a time when the ability to earn a decent middle-class family-supporting living on the strength of your own back is disappearing, it's perfectly natural then that the country, big pockets of the country would be resistant to millions of competitive low-skilled workers coming in for a dwindling supply of jobs. And that is part of what we're seeing here. As low-skilled opportunities have evaporated. That's at the very time when low-skilled workers are pouring in. And when the elite economists, including the Krugmans out there, can't tell you whether low-skilled immigration is good for people, bad for people, creates jobs, loses jobs, they don't know. The Nobel Prize winners don't know. Then of course, the average

working Joe says, I don't want these fucking immigrants in here. I'm already struggling to hold on to this job at the plant. And I don't know if the plant's going to even be here a year from now. So, you know, it's not all race, right? No, no, it isn't. But most of the, I mean, actually, most of what drives immigration opinion is these kind of cultural and psychological dispositions, regardless of whether you are unemployed or working class. Class doesn't explain much.

But I don't want to call it, it's not racism. It is, and this is the point, it's about attachment to rather than hatred and fear of much more. It's much more that attachment to the country you knew growing up. And I just think it's a misnomer to call out racism. It is a form of cultural attachment, perhaps parochialism, but I do think the left is gonna have to develop more of a tolerance for that kind of person,

that that is a valid way to be. And by the way, I just wanna say, there is a well-known sociologist who has a phrase, there are no cosmopolitans without locals so the countries you like to visit the the authentic cultures you like to to see in other countries are only there because somebody has invested in them and wants to preserve them in a way and so it's kind of inconsistent to sort of say ethnicity is great. Keeping your traditions is great if you are exotic and a minority, but keeping your traditions is awful if you are white and a majority. I mean, it's just not a consistent. Yeah. Ask the French, ask the French. They'll get, they'll, they'll tell

you. Alingan. What I listen, I, I'm always, first of all, he went to Harvard, Alingan. He's a Santa comedian, but he went to Harvard. So he's quite bright. I failed. And he didn't fail. And I never quite know where he is on these things. But before Eric leaves, I'm going to turn it over to you to get everything else that you're thinking about finished. And then we're going to let Eric go if he wants to go. Go ahead, Elingon.

Okay. Yeah, no, I've got, I guess, like two questions. One is I think that you have a very nuanced take on it and this idea of like okay it's it's just it's not we don't like those people we just like this thing we want to continue having this thing and it's not about us hating these other things but i don't i don't know if this is true for the majority of the country, the majority of the Trump people who are coming out to those rallies and cheering when he's saying like the China flu, right? Like or whatever kind of dog whistling he was doing at that point. Now, maybe they're not representative of the country, but we are seeing that.

And that's something I wonder about. And the other thing I wonder about is when we say slow it down in actual terms what does that mean like right now maybe we're more open than we were before and there was a time when you couldn't marry a black person or you couldn't go to school with people who weren't also you know black would we have at that point said oh slow it down because white people are uncomfortable with black people coming onto the bus the way they are now, you know, like, at what point are we like, okay, we're bowing too much to these? Excellent question. And people did say

slow it down. Then what's your what's your answer? Okay, well, yeah, just on the on the Trump, you know, the people in the rallies are obviously true believers. And yeah, I think you're probably right that some of them would have these negative outlooks. But certainly in the survey data that if you look at white Trump voters, their warmth towards Latinos, African-Americans, they're reasonably warm. Actually, it's not they're not particularly cool. And white Trump voters are accurate because we yeah. Yeah. These are these are this is like the gold standard, I mean, the American National Election Study. I mean, you can look at a lot of the social scientific surveys, but the one I'm talking about is the ANES, the main U.S. politics survey.

It measures warmth towards out-group, and that's really not correlated towards, you know, white Trump voters who are attached to being white are not anti-Black or anti-Hispanic more than whites who were not attached to being white. So I actually think that is, people have less to fear than they imagine, that the average white Trump voter is not that anti-minority. The other thing in terms of the looking ahead, you know, it's worth looking back on the U.S. historical experience when Jews and Italians and others, I mean, it really took the Southern and Eastern Europeans, you know, three, four generations for the ethnic neighborhoods to break up, the intermarriage between Catholic, Protestant, and Jew to happen. It took 70, 80 years. And I think we'd be kidding ourselves if we don't think it's going to take 70 or 80 years for the current waves to be similarly assimilated. And therefore, but it took an immigration pause for that to occur.

And part of the argument is that we may need a slower period in order for this melting to occur. Eric, can I take a stab at Alingan's question? So the slow it down is very interesting because, for instance, we made a deal with the devil of slavery under the argument of slow it down is very interesting because, for instance, we made a deal with the devil of slavery under the argument of slow it down. And, you know, we decided to, we had enough of this, or much of the country decided to have enough of this during the civil rights movement. And many people then were arguing, slow it down. But the strife, which was real, which we had to endure as a nation, we decided at that point, morally, it didn't matter because the price to pay and not doing it was too high.

So slow it down shouldn't be considered ridiculous because, yes, there are real difficulties and costs to not slowing things down. However, there's, you have to look at the other side of the moral equation. What's different here is that we don't have any particular obligation here to allow X number of people to come into the country. We're not, we don't have the other side of, well, we have no right to let black people sit on the back of the bus, use different water fountains and go to different schools. We can say, slow it down and say, we haven't done anything to anybody. Nobody, you

know, we don't, we're not obligated to just open up United States of America. So I think that the slow it down, I think your question is excellent. And I think that maybe I'm, maybe I'm just finding a clever way around it, but I think that the other side of that equation is different here because we are not actively engaged in an absolutely immoral practice, which we're looking for an excuse to perpetuate by saying, slow it down. We're just saying, let's just go back to levels that we had 20 years ago of immigration, you know, and if that works out, we can pick up the pace again. That would be my answer. Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting point you make about, because there's a question of discrimination. Is discrimination always not permissible? And of course, in fact, we recognize that people are allowed to form associations that they want to form. So they can move to areas they want to move into, they can make friends with whoever they want to make friends with, join clubs they want to join. And this is part of what nations are. They can decide who to admit, how fast to change. The relationship with the rest

of the world is more like the relationship of a club or association to the rest of society. People are allowed to discriminate, make choices. The difference with civil rights is you're not allowed to discriminate. If somebody, you know, you can't let a black person buy something from your bakery. That's not allowed because you're offering a public service and you're not treating people equally within your own society. It's a very different thing from whether you allow in more or fewer immigrants vis-a-vis the rest of

the world which is an associational problem and not the same issue of discrimination as blacks sitting in the back of the bus. So the problems of a different category and they shouldn't be collapsed into the same logic. I know it's not necessarily the subtlest point but it's... All right so I guess we're at an hour you only agreed to stay with us for half an hour I hope the reason you stayed was because you thought the conversation was not stupid

and I guess that's it right Perrielle we're at an hour we are at an hour yeah we did want to talk a bit about first of all we haven't spoken to Alingon in a while. We want to talk about the Ted Alexander thing, right? And about the Ted Alexander thing. So, Eric, we're going to open the door in case you'd like to leave.

I'm very happy if you want to stay, but we're going to talk about comedy shit now, which you might find interesting. But if you're tired, you won't insult us. But if you feel like you're up, then hang out and join in if you're interested. Go ahead, Dan. Go ahead, Dan. First of all, are you aware of the Ted Alexandro issue, controversy, conflict, whatever you want to call it? I know you are because I've sent you articles on it. I don't know what's going on.

Well, Ted Alexandro has accused saturday night live of stealing his joke ted alexandro had a joke about um he's older now and he um he's not turned on by set a dirty talk so much as by talking about real estate and him and his wife it text i mean i'm not getting it perfectly correct but more or less that the uh the idea of the joke is that they talk about zillow ads that they see in Zillow. Ooh, a three bedroom. Hey, you're a naughty girl. You know, that kind of thing.

They're talking about real estate ads on Zillow that are exciting to them. So Saturday Night Live had a sketch and Ted had done that on his special that he put on YouTube maybe a year ago, whenever it was. He's been doing that joke for a while. Anyway, SNL had a whole sketch this Saturday about couples in their late 30s, or people in their late 30s talking dirty about Zillow, basically about getting off on beautiful homes that they see on Zillow. And you can, I assume it's up on that, that,

that sketch is up on YouTube. But anyway, Ted Alexandro has declared rather unambiguously that Saturday Night Live stole the joke from him. He's asked for a million dollars in compensation. I don't know if he's being serious or tongue in cheek. He said, I'll give you 24 hours to vend on me a million dollars. And he does have a petition on change.com or change.org or

whatever that was. I don't know if he put that up, though. Did somebody else put that up? I don't know if he put it up or somebody else put it up. I'll find it. Go ahead. He's gotten a lot of press also. Vice.com and TMZ.com have talked about it. So that's basically all there is to say about that. So if anybody wants to jump in, I mean, I have my own thoughts.

Hey, what's your thoughts, Dan? Well, since I brought the topic up, let's hear, and we haven't heard from Alingan. Yeah, come on. Go ahead, Alingan. What are your thoughts off the top of your head about this? So what does Ted want exactly? Well, he asked for a million dollars now i think he was being tongue-in-cheek but he wants the world to know that snl stole his joke oh so he actually

thinks the writers knew of the joke and then he's adamant material yes he's pretty uh unambiguous in that um and this is this is the um you got 536 signatures That sounds like a decent number of signatures They're going up as we talk 539 It says on February 6th An innocent man was robbed in front of millions of viewers Across the nation And

Comedian and national treasure Ted Alexander Shared his unique content one fateful night In the infamous comedy cellar I don't know why it's infamous People use that word incorrectly they might be the audience erupted with laughter as mr alexander shared his sexualized tale of zillow exchanges with his significant other and uh you can watch the snl sketch but it is it is similar you know and it is zillow um i don't know if we bored eric but he just walked. Maybe he's wearing some tea. I mean, listen, it's a big topic.

Comedians steal, right? It happens. I'd have to look at the sketches, but if they're close enough and Ted has some strong feeling that they took it from him, I mean, you're not supposed to steal. That's a golden... No one's arguing that. Right. mean you're not supposed to steal that's a golden that that's no one's arguing that right that you're not supposed to steal yeah i mean i think that's pretty clear um the question is is is it fair for him to say and look i i did a joke does he know the writers like why would he say it like where's his accusation coming from he feels the jokes are

similar enough number one and number two that come that snl writers probably do go to the cellar i mean like we know snl writers and you know and people that are on snl that are at the cellar so it's certainly possible or that they saw him on youtube so motive opportunity motive and opportunity so so he's pretty categoric is that a word yeah in terms of his accusation. He doesn't seem to be allowing for the possibility, at least in terms of what he's saying on Twitter, he doesn't seem to be allowing for the possibility

that it was a case of parallel thinking. So you haven't seen both sketches, but I don't know if you have any. Well, comedians, parallel thinking happens, right? Well, look, I had a joke that I did on America's Got Talent where I said, like, it's so easy to get a girl pregnant, to create a human being, but very, very difficult to put together a TV stand from Ikea.

And when I wrote that joke, I knew that it wasn't the greatest joke or very rich. I said to myself, somebody thought of this joke before, but, you know, I need to, I need to do corporate work and I need to do politically correct jokes that won't offend anybody. So you didn't steal it. I certainly did not. But, but somebody said on Twitter, Oh, I, that was a good joke you did about being an easy to make a kid. I liked it better when Tommy Johnigan did it. Well, I,

I don't think I've ever even seen Tommy Johnigan on stage. I've met him. I certainly didn't steal it from him, but I felt particularly violated by that accusation. And I think it's very dangerous to throw out these kinds of accusations, just like it's dangerous to accuse somebody of anything and get a mob behind you.

Now, SNL can certainly defend themselves, but just like it's dangerous to accuse somebody of sexual impropriety without rock-solid evidence and get a mob, a Twitter mob to rise up behind you, I think this is dangerous too. And I'm very hesitant. And by the way, I have a joke about how Prevacid, I saw a commercial, a doctor says,

ask your doctor about Prevacid. And my joke was, well, shouldn't your doctor know about Prevacid? How's that my job, ask your doctor about Prevacid. And my joke was, well, shouldn't your doctor know about Prevacid? How's that my job to ask my doctor about Prevacid? Now, I did that joke 10 years ago, at least 10 years. I'm embarrassed to say because it's so old and I still do it.

But apparently on a recent special, Ellen DeGeneres had a very similar joke. And I never said she stole it. I said, we do a similar joke. We're looking into. Maybe she took it. Maybe she didn didn't i would have never said never dreamed of saying she stole it give me money now maybe this is different well and if it's different why is it different and i hesitate to say any of this because it's a comic you know comics rally around other comics and i feel like I should rally behind Ted

but I feel it's dishonest to do so because I feel like it's very, very possible SNL took the joke. Absolutely. Dan, Dan, Dan, let me ask you this. It's possible that they didn't. Dan, let me ask you this. First of all, I want to say

Michael Che, head writer at SNL and I would be fucking, I find it absolutely impossible, absolutely impossible to believe that Michael Che would knowingly do something like that. And I know that Ted actually, I happen to know Ted actually agrees that this was beyond the scope

of what anybody could see somebody like Michael Che doing. Now then the question is, from Ted's point of view though, he says, well, there's a number of people in that writer's room. And what are the odds that none of these people saw this joke that I do? And it's a particularly unique joke, right? About Zillow. Well, Zillow is a unique aspect. Yes, Zillow is a unique aspect. Which is not as ubiquitous as jokes about getting girls pregnant.

You know what I mean? But I will say that I've heard a lot of jokes in my comedy career about getting turned on by things that are not sexual, especially as one gets older. But then we've seen lots of other smoking gun looking cases of things being stolen. I don't want to go into them. I don't want to say them out loud because I don't know the merits of any of them, but suffice it to say, there are many skits out there.

On SNL. SNL and other shows, which resemble various people's standup jokes, you know, and have been accused of stealing. And there's no doubt that some of them were stolen. And there's also no doubt that some of them were not stolen and were parallel thinking. So in any particular instance, how do you know?

You don't know. Ted doesn't know. He said as much that he doesn't know. He just suspects it. Okay, so what's the proper course of action? I feel like we are pretty precious about our material and we think that everybody has heard all our jokes but i i literally posted jokes online uh where people who are my friends are like oh that was a great joke i i'm glad you posted it i've never heard

it before and i did it like on conan years ago like they're, then they're my friends. So I, I think sometimes we think everybody's heard our jokes and knows them, but I, we're not. Do you think their point? I think that his joke about Zillow is so specific that, that the, the burden of proof is on SNL to prove their innocence.

I'd have to, I'd have to see like where they took it. If it, if there's a lot of parallelism but if it's just zillow i could see that coming out of just like a couple looking at zillow stuff and getting excited and then somebody thinking oh i'm gonna heighten this and do a sketch i don't think that that is unreasonable for somebody to independently come out and think i'm sure but if ted the way he's talking dirty and the things

they're they're doing is very similar to what's going on there then i could get a little bit more behind it but just the idea of a zillow sexual joke uh well no what's a proper course of action for ted i mean it is possible that ted was he can't he prove that. He can't prove it, but is there a course of action he should follow to get some kind of redress? I would tend to think that Ted is getting the redress that he wants out of this already, which is he's getting a lot of attention. A lot of people are seeing his joke now

and comparing it to an SNL joke. Everybody's talking about him. This is all very good. And I don't mean this in a cynical way. I mean, this is better for him probably than the $300 they would have paid him for the Zillow joke, right?

It's a big thing in the comedy community. I think Ted is one of the finest and most original comics out there. I'm a big fan of him. And I hope this helps him get to a wider audience.

I mean, it's just one joke. How much money, what do you make from that? Well, what is your... Let me play the clip. What does your spider sense tell you in terms of whether there was theft? Or do you have any?

I have no idea whatsoever. Can we see? Can we see? He posted it on Twitter. Can we see that, Noam? Yeah, you want me to play the clip? Yeah, go ahead. Please do, please.

He posted on Twitter the back-to-back comparison. Sex, one another. Okay, cool. Ariel's really good with tech stuff, so those will just take a second. You know what? I haven't said a word this whole show, and I don't need to start getting shit now.

Do you have to leave at 6.30 by the way? We'll be done by then. I would like you to see this clip and weigh in. Go ahead Perry. And roll. Noah maybe you can put this up for us. What am I looking for? I think he did it on Twitter is where he did it. Yeah,

but we can't. It's too. I'm trying to make it so I could make it full screen. Oh, that's going to be challenging. Okay, I got it. I got it. Okay, let Noam handle it. Hold on. Let me just share my screen.

I'll do it. Oh, wait. I'm sorry, Perrielle don't get mad, but you have to say share audio before you do it. Okay. I did it. No, I didn't, that's it. Okay, can you see it? I can see it. Okay, I'm gonna play it.

She and I do not sext one another, no judgment if you do, We just don't sext. What we do is we send one another properties on Zillow or Trulia. That's like our dirty talk. Are you bored? Looking for something to spice up your life? Oh, yeah. Three bedrooms, two bathrooms.

You are a bad girl. The guest house has its own little kitchen. 800,000? You are nasty. Who likes a big backyard? Who likes a big backyard? She and I do not. Okay, so that's about it, right?

Is there any more to it than that? Well, that's all he posted. Well, that's all he posted, so let's assume, I think there's a legal principle that assumes that, there's some legal principle that you just,

you go with whatever is there. Anyway, we'll assume that's all there is and we'll base it on that. And let's go around the room. Periel, what are your impressions it's dicey would you like to lose ted as a friend go ahead what are your impressions

no i mean i mean it's dicey i think that if if it wasn't stolen it's i mean it's, it's very, it's very questionable. I mean, that's like a very specific joke. Um, and I don't, I, I, it's, um, I, I think I'm, you know, I err on the side that that somebody probably heard Ted's joke before they got involved in contributing to that skit. Okay, one vote for Stoll and a Lingon. One vote for Stoll and a Lingon. You say what? I don't think it's... I wouldn't convict on that.

That's not enough for me. I think I agree. I mean, what's not enough for me. I think, I agree. I mean, what's that? Would you give them a fine? That's a conviction. You can't give them a fine. It's a civil, it's a civil, it's a civil ponderance of the evidence

versus a reasonable doubt here. I also think it's, when you slice up comedy like that and put it back to back, you could do that with a lot of bits and it starts feeling like, oh, that's something that definitely matches what just happened

just because of the visual of it. And again, I think I agree with Noam. I think Ted is very inventive, very skilled comedian. I admire his work a lot. I don't know if what I'm seeing there is enough for me to say that this is something that was clearly stolen.

It's clearly not enough to say that it's clearly stolen in my opinion. What do you say, Dan? Well, what would you give it a percentage? A percentage of what? Well, I'm not knowing if he would give it a percentage. Like what is the percent chance that it was stolen? Now let's, before I answer that, how much credit do you give to this thing that people say, well, he, it was,

he'd heard it, but doesn't realize that he heard it. It was just, you know, that's what I said. I think that happens a lot. Does it really though? That sounds like a, I don't, yeah, I do. I mean, there are times when I was, I would start singing a song and then, and it's like playing in the background. I didn't even realize it was playing in the background. I think it happens a lot now, especially because comics have to churn out material so much faster. Back when you had the same set and you'd do it for years, it wasn't as common. But now when you're trying to create material every day,

yeah, I think some of that stuff just kind of sometimes is in the ether. Do you think a comedian could rationalize themselves? Well, yeah, that's kind of sometimes in the ear. Do you think a comedian could rationalize themselves? Well, yeah, that's kind of his premise, but there's not a single line, and this is a skit, not a single line directly borrowed. The only thing that's borrowed is the fact that it's kind of sexy to talk about Zillow,

so I can do it. So it's okay if I do it. I would not accept that justification. I mean, in other words, I think if it was, if it was. But it is a justification people are capable of making for themselves. It certainly is, yes. But I would not accept that justification. No.

To me, if the person that wrote that skit had seen Ted do it, then I would convict, I would say it is a violation and Ted should be remunerated or something i wouldn't i don't think it's different enough if if the if the writer of the sketch saw ted do it i mean i told the story i told the story before and i i told the parallel the other day so one time i wish i could remember the joke my memory's so terrible but one time i i came upstairs uh from might even from i came from around the corner from the underground and I came to the comedian table

and something was going on in the news and Chris Rock was at the table and I made a joke about whatever was going on in the news. It had to do with Obama or something, I don't remember. And everybody at the table got silent. It was weird and they looked at me and they said, Chris just said the same thing. And I said, genius.

You know, like I was, but the point was I had never heard him say he just said that incident happened that day i hadn't been anywhere near the room but i did kind of come up with the same joke that chris rock had come up with so these things do definitely happen you know that where people come up with the same joke even something you know that's not uh a tried and true premise you know or subject so you're ready to give it a percentage given having said all that? I would say that the uniqueness of the Zillow, the sexy Zillow uniqueness

is above the average level of concordance. So I would have to go close to a 48%. I'm going to give it 48% stolen. Wow. Stolen or in the ether, because it is quite a unique premise. You know, you're still saying the preponderance of the evidence is that they did not steal it. Yeah, I think that you have to have something more than that to say that you believe somebody stole something because the presumption has to be that you didn't. I would give it about, would you give it,

I would give it about 50-50 that they stole it. The reason I give it 50 is because A, Zillow is a specific, by the way, I'd never heard of Zillow until, but I guess it's pretty common. So I don't know how common Zillow is, but I guess it's common enough that SNL put it out there. And also because Ted is in the New York scene and SNL, the writers do come to the cellar. And so that's the reason I would give it 50%.

The reason I would say 50% that it wasn't stolen is because, again, I say I've heard over the years this theme of being people, you know, I, for example, I've heard women talk about, Oh, you know, to be good phone sex for women is, you know, talking dirty to a woman would be like where a guy says, Oh, I'm going to, I'm going to come meet your parents. Oh, Oh my God, you're turning me on. Oh, I'm going to, I'm going to call you the next day. You know, that kind of thing. The idea of being turned on by things that aren't sexual and that being the joke, but I'm going to tell you what else kind of a tried and true lincoln am i right i mean that's sort of a yeah yeah i do that joke

all the time no i'm serious have you heard jokes no no absolutely that it is a premise of yeah sexual stuff that things that aren't sexual but that turn you on yeah yeah so not that you can't do it because you know a lot of shit shit I do, similar things have been done. But that leads me to believe that SNL might not have stolen it, so I give SNL 50% for that. Now, so it's 50-50. I'm going to tell you what SNL should do. They should actually steal Louis C.K.'s bit,

where he brought Dane Cook on his show, and they had it out about the fact that Dane Cook was stealing Louis' material. Remember that, on the Louis show? And Louis wrote it into the script, where Louis and Dane actually had it out about the fact that Dane was stealing his material. It would be very gracious, and could be funny if SNL would find a way to bring Ted on the show and address this issue in a funny way, which would make it up to Ted in that way, would make themselves look good. It was very winning when Louis did that, I thought. I think they should do something nice for Ted. Even if they didn't steal it from Ted. For God's sakes, Ted's been around as long as I have.

Give the man something. Lord knows he deserves a bone. I certainly do. We're not talking about me right now. We're talking about Ted. And as opposed to you, Ted is quite beloved, I think. No, he really is. I mean, Ted is just a gentleman.

He's nice. He's simpatico. You know, everybody likes Ted. Also, Ted has defended comedians in the past he's taken us up at and we're grateful to him for it that's why i say i was very tentative i didn't want to i feel like i owe it to ted to say absolutely they stole it give the man his money but i didn't want to be dishonest that's not how i feel i feel it's a 50 50 chance and i also even said that ted even said it nobody I don't know what he said.

Yeah, he put up a video today that was like eight minutes long that he said, this is my press conference. It was actually really funny. Okay, so what did he say? He said he's not sure that it was stolen. He thinks it is, but it might not have been. He was not arrogant about it. He left the door wide open to the fact

that it might not have been stolen. I thought he handled it very well. It's on Instagram. I'm not going to play that now. But you go to Ted Alexander's Instagram, it's up there. Okay, so then I guess Ted and I are on the same page in that respect. But I agree 100% that SNL should give a man a writing job.

I mean, assuming he wants one. Not everybody wants to sit in a writer's room for 15 hours a day. I know... He said he didn't.'t he said i don't want to be on that shitty show i think that was a direct quote what he said was you know his politics are such that like his work is up for free on youtube and he's very happy to do that and he's glad that um people can see i don't know if he called it art, but you know, hit that for free. And he hopes that more people will see his special this way.

That will be, he will get that out of this, you know. I mean, he's a, he's brilliant. So, you know, and I think I do, I agree with Noah on the way that i think he's handled this um has been really smart and funny and um there's something really charming about it also well maybe i should have been more aggressive with the helen ellen degeneres but uh she's not as high profile as snl all right you've had writing jobs i mean they don't sound fun to me, but, uh, they can be, but, uh, I, I do, I could see, I could see something like this just being in the ether and seeping into somebody's brain and, and turning into a sketch.

But if they were actively doing it of like, Oh, this is a, this is a funny idea. Let me see if I can build it out. Then. Yeah, that's a, SNL is a pressure cooker. They're under a lot of pressure to come up with a lot of questions. It's certainly possible. It is certainly possible.

I mean, I don't rule it out. I stand with my 50-50 assessment. I know lots of cases of things that have been stolen. I was in Vegas. I saw somebody pull out a Greg Rogel joke, his whole letter to Santa Claus thing. I mean, word for word, the guy stole it from Roman. That's unbelievable.

Although when I was in my 20s and I moved to LA and I was trying to get a writing, comedy writing jobs on TV shows, we would submit these like scripts on spec and I categorically had verbatim things stolen from those. So, you know. I could show you the scripts. I mean, they were really specific shit that like you then saw on television shows all the action all the action is all the action is in our heads right now all right the whole thing do you have to go right now i do yeah i

gotta go too you have to go too okay i thought maybe we could do a little bit more because we okay i'll do a little bit more because we need stuff for Sirius because I think that conversation with Eric may not be suitable for Sirius. Thank you guys so much. Thank you, Alingan. Alingan, what have you been doing all this time? Just meditating.

Just meditating. That's about it. Say where we can find you. I'm on Instagram at alinganmetra.com and yeah, if anybody wants to see all my sketches, feel free.

All right, bye guys. I would say to SNL, I mean, you can have my whole act for a million. Ted's asking for a million. I will give the whole,

lock, stock, and barrel. I'll give SNL everything for a cool million. That's it. What else do you want to talk about today, Daniel? They can have my sketches. They can have my book. I'll give SNL everything for a cool million. That's what I want to talk about today, Daniel.

And they can have my sketches. They can have my book. Oh, yeah. How come I didn't get to read your book? A, you didn't ask to read it. And I don't send it to people unless they didn't ask. Well, Bernie, I sent it to him because Bernie read Perry L's book and I figured, well, if he reads Perry L's book.

Bernie got Dan's book? What the fuck? I corrected it. You didn't ask to read it, number one. i'm i i don't think you want to ask i i don't think you'll read it that's and it'll be awkward because how long is it it's about 90 000 words so i don't know how many pages that is well you read his book before you read my book i'm gonna be really pissed. And secondly, you, historically, you underappreciated my work. I feel as though if you don't like it, the risk is too high you won't like it.

In other words, if you like it, great. Wonderful. I mean, we all feel great. And I feel self-esteem. And, you know, that's wonderful. But if you don't like it, it's going to be awkward. You don't want me to read it. Just say it.

Don't put it on me. You don't want me to read it. The risk is too high. And I don't think you'll read it anyway. You don't read it. I'll read it. You haven't read mine. I never promised to read yours. I've been sitting there for fucking years at this point, collecting dust. I read, I've read bits and pieces of yours. Oh, bits and pieces of yours. Oh, bits and pieces? Ariel, I'm more interested in Dan's book. No, if you email me a request.

I just got to say it. If you email me a request, I'll send it. You have to email me a request, and you have to promise to read it within a month under penalty of me harassing you. Oh, it feels so good to tell the truth. You know, I was going to say this before. It's a deal, Dan. It's a deal.

You're turning more and more into Larry David. Well, and by the way, Dan, if you send me a PDF, I can email the PDF. You know, for those of you who have Kindles, you may not know this, you can send a PDF to your Kindle via email, and then you can read a PDF on your Kindle. Is there a scenario here in which I'm not supposed to be offended or take this personally?

Nope. I don't see how that would be. Listen, you wrote a memoir about your life, and I've heard a lot of the stories. I wrote two memoirs, actually. I've heard a lot of the stories. I wrote two memoirs actually, two. And I'm definitely not going to read both of them. And I did read a lot of them and it was pretty good, but then Bernie read it and Bernie told me all about it and whatever it is. But Dan has written a novel to my understanding,

a novel that has plots and characters. This is a higher level of accomplishment here, Perriella. Oh, really? That's really fucking interesting. Is that right? Well, yes. Okay. You don't think of writing a novel as a higher level of difficulty than a memoir? I could write a memoir. I can never write a novel.

Well, why don't you go ahead and write one before you sit there talking about what you can do and can't do? I'm not saying that. There's a difference between writing a commercial jingle and a symphony, okay? Dan has written a symphony. Well, but it's not necessarily a good symphony.

Whatever, you still wrote a symphony. I't say this it's not a memoir but it does use aspects of my life in fact there's a character named brian rezac in the novel and he is based on a man named noam dorman oh shit is this why i'm not allowed to read it no he's he's he's actually presented quite favorably in the know okay okay so yeah now i really want to read it you don't have me in your book perry l i want to tell you something a memoir in order to be published by a major major publishing house of which both of mine were um is really a novel that's been you know thinly veiled because in order for it to get through legal you really have to change it so much that it is a form of fiction so i don, I mean, we're not talking about fucking Dostoevsky here. So no, this claim of yours.

Hold on, start over, I tuned out for a minute. What were you saying? Shut up, I'm serious. No, this claim that a novel is like so much more difficult to write than a memoir. No, I don't think that that's true. Here's the truth. A good memoir is harder to write than a bad novel.

I would imagine. But I'm just saying the truth. A good memoir is harder to write than a bad novel. I would imagine. But I'm just saying the following. I do want to read your book. It's hard to get me to read anything. It's the truth. No, it's not. You read tomes. You sit there all day long. All you do is read. I'm reading Confederacy of Dunces now. But I have read more of your book than you might realize. And Dan's, but Dan's Dan, I'm fascinated that Dan was able to write a novel, writing a novel to me, just coming up with the plot, the problem, the resolution of that. That's, that to me is a very interesting to me. And I'm quite curious to see dan how dan's talent

dan is supremely talented well we don't know that we're talking about though but i it's curious to me that you don't think you need to do that when you're writing a memoir i i don't i don't i could be what do i know about memoirs? I don't think. Apparently nothing. I mean, you have to be a good storyteller. I'm going to give you that. One can write a memoir and say, and I walked into the room and I sat down on the couch. Or one could say, one could use figurative and floral language, you know. That's not, no. I mean, you have to tell a story.

It's a story. And, you know, everything's fiction. Like, it's not- You're right. You're right. You're right. Sorry, can you say that again? My mic cut out.

I'm what? Your mic exploded. You are right in that sense. You are right. As far as I'm concerned, we could end the show now. But, no. Noam is partially conceding defeat partially partially he's just trying to um placate you he he does remember that i'm trying to help you um bring this baby into the world i

mean listen there's a lot of there's a lot of women who spend a lot of time whoring around who couldn't write a good memoir about it. Let's be honest. Just because you spent 10 years as a slut doesn't mean you have the talent to write a good memoir. Perrielle happened to be able to do both. But Dan. It's a good sense to do so. But, you know.

Her husband hasn't read it either. would say this and i i said it already i'd say a good memoir is harder to write than a bad novel a memoir and a novel of equal standing i would say you got to give it to the novel yeah yeah yeah that would be my that would be my inkling you know whatever it is memoirs don't get the respect that novels get that's for sure maybe maybe they should but they don't from from what from from what do you like you know you know ulysses uh shakespeare i mean these people wrote wrote um works of fiction that they didn't write who's the most famous memoirist erica zhang is that a memoir fear of flying, I think that was a novel, but it was, I mean, it might have been memoir-esque. A lot of novels, they call it Building Stroman,

is a novel based on that. Mine has been referred to as a Building Stroman, actually. So there you fucking have it. I don't know. And then what's the difference between an autobiography and a memoir? Well, I think an autobiography is much closer to what you're talking about, frankly. I mean, this has nothing to do with me. I know my books are awesome. But I think that a memoir is much closer to fiction or a novel than an autobiography is. I mean, an autobiography, you're just like telling facts. Um, I think an autobiography is more like, you know, starts off when you, when you were born. I mean, it's, it's, it tends to be more chronological. It tends to be, um, just more, here's what happened. A memoir is more filtered through experience. A memoir also, I think, is more growth. There's more, you're telling a story that has-

There's a narrative arc. Narrative arc, yeah. So you take part of your life that has a narrative arc and you tell that rather than just saying, I was born in a log cabin in 1808. So for you people at home, Periel has two of them. One is called The Only Bush I Trust Is My Own,

and the other is called On My Knees. It's true. Now, they're available wherever fine books are sold. Which is nowhere anymore. Well, they're available where everything else is available, where your kitchen table and everything else is available, where your kitchen table and your TV are available, Amazon.

That's right. And to clarify one thing, my husband did read the first one because I told him I wouldn't marry him if he didn't. And the second one came out, we were already married, and he has not read that one. And he's given me every excuse under the sun as to why not. You know, Amazon kind of reminds me of this immigration thing because everybody hates Amazon, right? They hate Amazon.

I want to get rid of Amazon. Yet we all love the benefit of Amazon, right? Like we all just curl up and are comforted by everything we get from Amazon. And that's kind of like immigrants. Everybody's bashing immigrants and they love immigrants. Anyway. There's an analogy to be made. I don't bash Amazon, but I mean, it is, look,

it's obviously when a small businessman goes out of business because he can't compete with Amazon, it's sad when somebody loses their dream, you know? And it makes the world a bit less flavorful when you don't have local shops yeah so so you know a lot less flavorful i would say sword obviously yeah but we we made our decision as a people decision as a society well i mean i i think that part i don't know if we've made our decision as a society i think it's really difficult to compete with we made our decision in the sense that we we like the shops to exist but we're not gonna go shopping we're not gonna go there yeah we like they look

pretty in the window no no no that's listen no I've heard you say this so many times about how when your father started or opened the Olive Tree or the Comedy Cellar, he was a taxi cab driver. That's before, yeah, before the comedy, yeah, but go ahead. And he managed to save up money and work as an immigrant and open this establishment. And you said, that's unthinkable today. Right, but you think of Amazon putting people out of business, bookstores and stuff like,

even big bookstores like Barnes and Noble. It's not just the little shops that are- Sure, but isn't it also nearly impossible to open something up with that kind of competition in terms of pricing and shipping? Yeah, but I think that you're, I think you're mixing, to some extent mixing up two phenomena. I think that, yes, there are, there are big, there are big barriers to entry to opening anything,

but I think that the actual demand side, the demand side of buying books and such, or almost anything that you could just, that is a generic item. In other words, every store sells the exact same item, and you can just have it delivered to your home. People just have no interest, as opposed to restaurants, where there's huge demand to go to restaurants, but because of all these issues that we've discussed in the past,

only big corporations or more and more big corporations have a tremendous example, a tremendous advantage over the little guy in terms of running a restaurant. But the Amazon has not, the number of people who still want to go eat in restaurants is still a robust and healthy number out there. So it's not quite the same.

There's no more demand to buy books in bookstores. I don't want to go buy a book in a bookstore. Maybe Christmas time, it's nice to shop. I love going into bookstores. But to that point, it's like, I don't want to wait 10 days for shipping.

You don't, it's overnight. It's not overnight as well. No, but I'm saying- You can get Kindle and you could have it within two seconds. I don't want Kindle. I like books. But no, no, no. I'm saying that I do like shopping

in independent bookstores very much. But if I order something online, I'm agreeing that like I'm torn because I don't want to wait 10 days for a book to get here when I can order it in two for free. That's right. So it's complicated. Things change.

I've no doubt that people were driving in cars at one point saying, you know, this is very convenient, but I miss the open air and the horse and the sound of the trotting. And it's like, yeah, there is. I'm kidding, but it's real. There is a loss when you move to a new reality. And some of that loss is real. But on the whole,

we've made our decision that the convenience is more important to us than the charm of being able to shop yeah there's even there was even a loss i think when we moved from only being able to see a tv show when it was airing to being able to see any show that you've ever wanted to see ever i do think there's and and music too because like i told you we were driving that one time and a song came on the radio i said you know it's a lot better when it comes on the radio than when you just say, let's listen to this song. I think it is.

I think. You compared it to masturbating. I don't know if I compared it to masturbating. Yeah. You said it's the same thing as getting a handjob or masturbating yourself. For some reason it's better when someone else does it. That's what you said.

Maybe that was my joke then. But the point is you always, I mean, I'm just agreeing with Noah. You always lose something when a new technology comes along you know and the an airplane's not quite as charming as the train in certain ways i guess sleeper cars were very charming you know so i mean i don't want to beat a dead horse and i didn't feel like chiming in while you guys were talking to Professor Kaufman. But I don't understand what the issue is here. Like people have decided that they don't want immigrants to come in and they want to keep America like white.

Like I don't get like what culture are we pushing up against here? What's the fucking problem? Let's not get sucked back into it. Just suffice it to say that we had an election where we elected this guy named Donald Trump

and he ran on an anti-immigration platform and he won. So there's an issue out there. I'll send you some articles and then you can catch up. I think Perrielle's question This is a good time to recommend Perrielle's memoir. I'm sure it's quite challenging.

Perrielle, I think, wants to, her question is, her issue is, why do people feel that way? And she doesn't think it's logical or rational. I have to go. Thank you or rational. I have to go. Thank you, Dan. I have to go. So podcast at comedycellar.com

for comments, questions, suggestions. Find Perrielle's book. We got an email from someone. I have to read it to my invite from someone who had a comment on this younger. Oh yeah, that was really good. Yeah, maybe I have to read it, but maybe we should invite her on the show or something.

Okay, I have to go. Bye. See you next time. Yeah, maybe we, I have to read it, but maybe we should invite her on the show or something. Okay, I have to go. Bye. See you next time. Bye, everybody.