The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Israeli Politics and American Crime

Episode Date: June 21, 2021

Patrick Sharkey is professor of sociology and public affairs at the PRinceton School of Public and International Affairs. He was formerly chair of sociology at NYU, where he taught for 10 years before joining Princeton. He is founder of americanviolence.org, former scientific director of crime lab new york, and author of the book Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence

this is live from the table the official podcast of new york's world famous comedy cellar coming at you on sirius xm 99 raw dog and on the laugh button podcast network this is dan natterman co-host of live from the table here with noam dorman the well we're i don't know if we're co-hosts or known as a host and i'm the i'm the sidekick but originally it was we were co-host now i've sort of been downgraded. Anyway, Noam is here. We also have Periel. Who downgraded you?

Well, it's sort of, it's not been stated, but I think it's obvious. Telling my wife. Periel Ashenbrand, the producer who's been upgraded from producer to on-air personality. We also have Danny Cohen. He's a regular on the podcast and at the Comedy Cellar. Patrick Sharkey is going to be joining us a little bit later.

It's been an interesting week. I don't know if we want to first just very quickly know, what's the situation? It's May 19th. Wasn't this supposed to be the day that you're open at 100% or with vaccines or something? Something was supposed to happen today yeah something's supposed to happen today was the day we're supposed to allow we're supposed to be allowed to open um for vaccine only shows whatever it is but uh uh it doesn't seem like that's gonna happen because the government didn't get their shit together we nobody's told us how to do that so they haven't they haven't issued any new guidance so we're still at what 33 percent

they're 50 what is it now because who knows they raised the restaurants to 75 i mean if i if i really tried to tell you nobody would believe how you know opaque and and how how badly it administered all this is from the business point of view. We don't even really know what we're supposed to do. What are the actual requirements? It's silly. But anyway, I mean, that's okay because everybody's vaccinated and people who are not vaccinated are going in eyes wide open. So, you know, I don't know. I'm not, I'm not really stressing it anymore.

Is our friend Mustafa still stuck in Israel or was he able to get out? He's the guy that produces the mint comedy show at the Cellar. Yeah, I was just texting. No, he's not back yet. He's still stuck in occupied Palestine. And he's in the north.

So apparently he's not where it's where where uh where it's dangerous the missiles can't get there but he sends me uh really you know horrifying news stories of um you know lynchings of arabs i don't know how many there have been but even one uh it's been more than one but even one is very unsettling to know that you know the religious jewish people are doing such things i mean in every other aspect of the conflict you know i'm i'm team israel but that really bothering me um what are you gonna do you know i asked periel if she wanted but given all the events of this week, I asked Perrielle if she wanted to have on somebody to take the pro-Palestinian side. Lord knows there's no small number of such people in the comedy community,

both the Arabic comedians and non-Arabic comedians, even some Jewish comedians that take that position, but she did not want to do that. Perrielle? She knows I can't be trusted to, why? Oh, because I felt like i i mean i felt like i wanted to be able to have a conversation first without like fighting or like boring without the fighting to the listener and for me it's just boring we need to fight well i mean you know you can fight me. I'm sure we disagree on a

lot of stuff. And we can certainly have that show and that conversation. I think it's an important one to have. But I mean, I wanted to say that, you know, I felt very, you know, disturbed because I've been, I feel like I'm getting fed this narrative that you can't be pro-Palestinian and also think that Israel has a right to exist. And, you know, I got into, I never argue with people on Facebook, but I got into this ridiculous thing. I mean, really nasty with somebody who I've been friends with for like 15 years. I mean, it was really pretty anti-Semitic what he said. And I don't know. What did he say? He said that, I mean, he said exactly that,

that like you can't, that if you were, if you, you know, were pro-Israel or you believe that israel has a right to exist then you can't you know also be pro-palestinian and that anytime anything happens the jews just roll another holocaust video um and that nobody in israel wants peace and i was like you know everybody I fucking know in Israel wants peace and like my entire family is like having like rockets rained down on them non-stop and I feel like extremely empathetic and sympathetic to the Palestinian people and that they, I think what's going on is horrible and that they're, you know, Hamas, they're at the mercy of this, you know, horrendous, you know, terrorist organization and nobody should fucking live like that. But, you know, I don't think it's fair to

turn people who don't think that Israel should be obliterated off the fucking map into like monsters. And I also don't think it's a fair and balanced assessment, frankly. What's not a fair and balanced assessment? To say that you can't believe that Israel has a right to exist without being anti-Palestinian. Well, I, yeah, well, I don't know what you meant by you, you were pro-Palestinian. I mean, I don't know. I don't know. It's getting ridiculous already. I know it's a pretty exhausting norm.

I don't have a lot to say anymore because it's just, it seems like it's never ending. It just doesn't, it's like a same old story. That's why, like, Parallel says she's very sympathetic towards the people. I don't know if I'm as sympathetic towards the Palestinian people after 60 years, after like three generations,

and they're still at it. They're still electing these people who are, I don't know. I feel like the majority of the people want to annihilate Israel. They don't want it. They don't want peace. They want the entire country. They want to get in there. Perry L's way she words it always bothers me because pro-Palestinian is a meaningless thing to say. And the most likely interpretation of that is that you blame Israel for the dynamic in the Middle East and not the Palestinians that you, but anyway, I think that all decent people have to say they are, that they are sad to see any innocent person suffer, you know, and, and the average Palestinian citizen is, is, you know, through an accident of birth has a miserable life and little reason for optimism.

I shouldn't say the average Palestinian, but many Palestinians living in the West Bank, at least, have a miserable life and little reason for optimism. And, yeah, of course, we should all be on their side. I don't want that on their side. Well, where it gets dicier, where it does get dicier is that, you know, for instance, when they elect Hamas as their leader in a democratic, what seemed to be a free democratic election back whenever it was 15 years ago, at that point, there is some nexus between the leadership. It's not like it's just a dictatorship anymore, although it might be now. Although, look, Abbas was about to run for re-election in the West Bank, and it looked like Hamas might win there as well. So you're right, in a certain sense, there is a lot of evidence that would indicate that Hamas is the expression of the will. It is. At least the majority, not all. The majority, the majority.

No, look at the rest of the world. You see people protesting pro-Palestinian. They're in the streets screaming anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist all over the world, all over the world. There over the world. There are so many. If that's how they feel and they're not in Gaza, of course you can assume that the people in Gaza feel the same way. There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions,

protesting across the country, across the world about this problem. So, of course, if they're protesting, you can only imagine how they feel. They probably are all, they are so pro-Hamas in Gaza, and the Palestinians love Hamas, they're pro-Hamas, they're behind Hamas, and they want to destroy Israel. They do not want peace. And I don't care how many people say, you know, they want peace, they only want peace. They do not want peace. And I don't care how many people say, you know, they want peace. They only want peace. They do not. I'm done. It's been 60 years. Sorry. Build your own country. I'm not totally comfortable with the way you're expressing that. Sorry.

Because, no, I'm not upset. I'm saying, like, I just don't want it to speak for me because it's not really the way I feel. I but it may be distinction without a tremendous difference. But for instance, I know, you know, numerous Arabic friends I have who really wish that they had accepted a two-state solution, or that, you know, and who speak about, you know, the Palestinian leadership being corrupt and not representing the people. And I mean, it's just a horrible situation. But without getting personal towards the people, which is just hard for me to talk that way, there is certain bottom lines here that are very troubling one bottom line is that what is a country supposed to do when missiles are fired indiscriminately at civilian targets right i i can't comprehend what our friends were criticizing israel AOC, what do they mean by stand with Palestinians now?

It sounds like they're not saying, let's stand with the innocent Palestinian people who are victims of this awful Hamas regime that's sending missiles into Israel. They're not saying that. That would be a pro-Palestinian position, which I could respect. In other words, let's stand with the people who are victims of Hamas on both sides, essentially. They seem to be saying, they seem to be taking the side of Hamas, right?

I mean, they really seem to be taking the side of Hamas. And Hamas is committing war crimes. That's what I'm saying, what I'm saying. And Israel is entitled to defend itself and it's not required to be proportionate.

It is required not to target civilians or whatever it is. And if it turns out that some bombing, that it turns out actually they, I can't believe they actually targeted civilians, but that they were not sufficiently careful, then Israel Israel, you know, will not have clean hands. Not that in any war, any war ever, can I ever imagine that any side has ever had clean hands. But I will say that when America was attacked, like at 9-11, we killed civilians by the score in Afghanistan, of course, not targeting them. And we and we occupied that country and we leveled it. And and and that's what countries do when missiles come in. And I just don't. But let me tell you what's even more troubling.

Now, let my co-host talk. What I think is even more troubling is that Because that's all part of the course We've seen this over and over and over again What's really really troubling In which anybody who listens to the show Or has to put up with me knows I've been saying for years already now But it's all coming true Is that when the Jewish Jewish senator

In the United States of America Maybe whoever lived Chuck Schumer While Israelis are in bomb shelters, is silent. Silent. To the left. Of course he's going to be. He's not moving to the left.

That's not. To the left. He does. He feels that within his party, it would be suicidal or risk suicide. Correct. within his party, it would be suicidal or risk suicide for him to say what I'm sure he believes is that Israel is, you know, what he wrote in 2014, he wrote an article in 2014, there's no moral equivalence between Hamas and Israel. And by the way, to make matters even worse, somebody wrote a,

had a post on Facebook which was criticizing Israel. And all I did, Danny, is I took Schumer's tweet about his own article from 2014 which said, there's no moral equivalence between Hamas and Israel. And I posted that

as my reply to somebody else's comment on Facebook. And I, it got banned as, as, as, uh, um,

offending community standards. You were, you were in jail or you took it off immediately. No, the, the tweet that I'll show you. Hello, Mr.

Mr. Sharkey. You have an option. You can get it. You could take it off immediately and you don't get thrown in jail. Or sometimes they jail you immediately. I don't know what happened. I'll show you.

I'll put it up here. And you can tell me. So here's the graphic. Hold on. Oh, come on. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Okay. I just had it.

What? Wait, wait, what? You're good. Hold on. While you're waiting're waiting Dan you want to introduce Patrick's or someone how are you guys doing tonight how do you do I did there were a couple there were a couple of um here it is here sorry so just just show everybody

so because this is really like like this is really something right so here's the tweet hold on this is this is the I mean I would remind you that hold on this is this is the i mean i would remind you that that on the radio this is you know i'm gonna describe it so this is the this is what facebook did so you can see oh come on i thought it's not me doing this you know how much trouble here it is so it says this is my exact um comment to i wrote, so they wouldn't think it was a recent thing.

And I just put the link. You can see it's just the link. And the link is to Schumer's tweet, which he says, wrote an op-ed today in the New York Post, there's no moral equivalence between Israel and Hamas. That is what I wrote. And it got taken down from Facebook as defined community standards. Well, I don't know. They have algorithms sometimes that are imprecise.

Well, I, I, I contested it and they, and they didn't like, I didn't, I haven't won yet. Algorithms like, like this is, I don't know how they do it, but, but I think sometimes they look for keywords. You know, let's go through the words and imagine what it might be. Israel, Hamas, moral equivalency. There's no word of violence there.

In any case, we have Patrick Sharkey with us, unless you want to continue on this. I mean, in all this talk about wokeness and cancel culture and where is this going to go? It is really troubling that, I mean, it really seems like you're just not supposed to say that kind of stuff

anymore. And Schumer obviously thinks he's not supposed to say it anymore because he's, I mean, you should follow his Twitter feed. Every day is about student debt and this and that. And the one issue, which you know, he cares about and which he's the one issue which you know he cares about and which he's always been associated about, and he's never shut his trap once in his 30 years in the Senate. Anytime there was a war in Israel, the Iran deal, anything that concerned Israel,

this guy's been outspoken. He has not made a single comment while the Jews are in... For many years already. For a bunch of years already. This is a sea change. Hi, Patrick. Okay, tell us why crime is going on, Patrick.

I'm the introduction guy. By the way, I did want to get to, if we have time later, if we don't, we don't, the death of Paul Mooney and also Demi Lovato is now they. Patrick Sharkey. Hi, guys. I didn't sign up

for the Israel-Hamas conversation. All right. We know. We don't want to get you canceled. We won't put you on the spot. Patrick Sharkey, professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, formerly chair of sociology at NYU, fine school, the Bobcats,

where he taught for 10 years before joining Princeton, the Tigers. That's right. That's right. Founder of Americanviolence.org. I lost money in.orgs. They said invest in.coms. I made a mistake. I think that was a... Who wrote that joke? Anyway, former director of Crime Lab New York

and author of the book, Uneasy Peace, The Great Crime Decline, The Renewal of Human Life and the Next War on Violence. Please welcome Patrick Sharkey. Thanks, guys. Thanks for having me here. So, Patrick. I gave you a long intro.

What do we do about Hamas? The only time I get to talk on this show is when I do an intro, so I got to really make, I got to drag it out. You know, in that conversation you were just finishing up about cancel culture or whatnot, you know, we just changed our name from the Woodrow Wilson School to the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, which is a major change. So I have to remind everyone still calls it Woodrow Wilson. So you got that right. That's you usually get that wrong. You get that right. Call it the Van Wick Expressway. Now it's a Jackie Robinson Parkway, right? Was Van Wick a racist?

No, but they just I don't think it was a racist, but they wanted to a Jackie Robinson Parkway, right? Was Van Wicker racist? No, but they just, I don't think it was a racist, but they wanted to honor Jackie Robinson. I got no problem with Jackie Robinson, but I grew up in the Van Wicker era. Yeah, a lot of people are attached to Woodrow Wilson, but this is, I think some of these changes are really important. It was an important change for Princeton, I think.

I think it was a good change. Yeah. Well, Woodrow Wilson was a racist. We know that. I don't know. For instance, we know that much more recently, Roald Dahl, the guy who wrote Willy Wonka and all,

he was quite a racist. I mean, anti-Semite. He said, you know, that he essentially blamed the Jews for Hitler, for Hitler's hate of them. And would I object to, you know, Roald Dahl, blah, blah, blah? No, I wouldn't. It's like, you know, it's history. It's history in its flawedness and its richness and people being judged in their time and place. And, you know, I wish, like, like I I'm a parent and I really want, I really want to talk about crime, but I'm a parent and I have, I have children who are mixed.

But I, I, I would love for like one of their teachers to one day assign them instead of telling them, like they cram them down with exactly what to think, ask them to want to think about it. Like, what is it? What do you think you would do if you were born in the old South in the, during the time of slavery? Ask my children, like, do you think you would have known that slavery is wrong? Do you think there's a chance you might've thought it was right? Had slaves yourself? How do we judge people in that way? Do you think it's like, get my kids thinking about these issues rather than feeding them this simplistic notion that everybody born before 1970 was evil.

You know, it's just it's so stupid. And it's just stupid. Anyway, go ahead. But yeah, you don't want to you don't want to be Woodrow Wilson. I'm not not defending Woodrow Wilson. But what is it? 14 points guy. Yeah, the 14 points guy. Yeah. It's the 15th one. We don't talk about the 15th. No, he was he was he was quite a racist. Was he a unique racist to American presidents? I don't know.

He was uniquely racist. Yeah, he was. I mean, he resegregated the federal government. He was distinctly racist. He also did some great things internationally. So it is, you know, was he was distinctly racist um he also did some great things internationally so it is you know all these things are tough in that case i think it was definitely the right call but um you know this this broader point is a challenging one i loved ralph doll he was my favorite author when i was a kid that's a tough one to swallow he was clearly

anti-semitic just to uh briefly before we get to violence, was Woodrow Wilson our most alliterative president? Woodrow Wilson. I'm just, I'm just coming in my head right now and I can't think of another one, but there might well be. Dan. Okay. So,

so I, I, I learned about Patrick Sharkey because I, I was reading The Atlantic, which has an article, by the way, about how the AP was hiding Hamas. But anyway, I was reading The Atlantic, and he was in an interview where- Ronald Reagan. How did I even not hear? Oh, Ronald Reagan. And the headline is, Why America's Great Crime Decline is Over.

It's over. All over, Herbert over. All right, stop that. This is one of the most vexing issues, why crime goes up and crime goes down. I mean, John Haidt, of all people, who's a brilliant intellectual, he once told me that he believed in this theory that lead paint had caused crime to go up,

which I couldn't believe that, but just the notion that somebody as thorough a thinker as he thought it was credible just was another place on this spectrum of intellectually believable notions of why crime goes up and down that reasonable minds can differ about. So where do you come down? Why did crime go up through the 60s, 70s and 80s and 90s? And why did it go down and why is it going back up again? Like Bitcoin.

Yeah. So these are tough questions. I think the best answer that we have is when communities are abandoned, left on their own, resources are extracted. The institutions of a community start to break down. And by that, I mean, of processes, which took place from the 40s through the 70s as central cities lost jobs and poverty became more and more concentrated and political influence went out to the suburbs and resources went out to the suburbs, money went out to the suburbs as well um as all of that happened uh community central city communities became vulnerable to violence so it's a process that happens when a community empties out and becomes abandoned uh it it leaves a community more vulnerable um so i think that's like the simplest explanation for why violence rose from the 60s all the way through the 1990s. And then, you know, a different set of processes took hold in the 90s.

In the 90s, this is the period where both Democrats and Republicans took on crime as their issue and tried to outflank the others. And this is when Clinton ran on adding 100,000 officers to the street and really mass incarceration kicked into another gear. And, you know, police went after data, in the empirical work, is that there was really a mobilization where nonprofits and community organizations mobilized on a large scale. to march against violence, to reclaim parks and playgrounds, to make their community safer, to provide services for addiction and homelessness and mental illness. And so that was a central part of why violence fell as well. All of these things happened at the same place in the 90s. Can I ask you a few questions about that? Yeah, sure.

And I might sound argumentative, but I'm trying to understand this. And I grew up in the 60s and 70s in Manhattan. I mean, we were not allowed to walk above 104th Street. Everybody I know was mugged. But a lot of what you're saying, the first thought is to me is, well, how do you know which is the causation here? Because obviously if crime rates spike, well, yeah, you're going to see the housing projects turn into shit. You're going to see people abandon the parks yeah you're going to see the housing projects

turn into shit you're going to see people abandon the parks you're going to see businesses leave you're going to see poverty increase crime is is is almost certainly uh going to cause all the things which you which you're saying caused the crime and how do you know so how do how do you know which way to come down on that? Or is it like a cycle? Do they cause each other? Definitely, there's some reciprocal effects there. And it's a great question. So what we do is we develop methods that take advantage of natural experiments. So in that last thing I said, where I said, community organizations formed on a large scale and started to reclaim their neighborhoods and that reduced crime. The way that we came to that conclusion is by taking advantage of natural experiments that increase funding for the formation of nonprofits in different cities at different times. And so you're essentially taking advantage of an accident

that led to more of these groups at a particular point in time in a particular place, and then looking at how that accident affected the level of violence. So it's the use of natural experiments to understand which way the causal arrow runs. And so that kind of analysis, all of my work is geared toward identifying causal effects. So all the methods I use are not, you know,

just pointing to what's going on and say, hey, this is causing this. They're taking advantage of shocks in the world and then seeing how they affect a given outcome. Maybe I'm not following you. I can understand how you put money into a non-profit and then that

might impede or deter crime or might help the crime rate, but I don't understand how that's evidence of what caused the crime to go up to begin with. I mean, from what I mean? From what I saw as a little boy was just a, a cultural reality,

which even as a young child, I had trouble understanding just a, a, you know, and, and like, where does the, as, as single mothers increase and increase and increase as the age of mothers decrease and decrease and decrease. And I can remember going to PS 75. I've told the story, which was a pretty mixed. It's a pretty well-known mixed elementary school on 95th, between 95th and 96th on West End Avenue. And I'd say we had 20%, maybe even more minority kids at the time, but they had the same resources, school resources,

the same everything that I did. And yet with, with the exception of some black kids, I was friends with who were like middle-class black kids. Their parents were, you know, professionals, a lawyer, whatever it is, who, who basically, I mean, I, I don don't want to speak badly but this is just the truth who basically hung out with the white kids but the but the the black kids who came from a more hard scrabble part of town i mean they didn't do their work they didn't behave in class it was a tremendous tremendous obvious difference and so for the rest of my life,

when anybody would say, well, the amount of money that's going into the schools, I'm like, yeah, but you know, I actually remember a school where we all got the same amount of money, the same resources. And it was clear to me, I can remember thinking this at nine, 10, 11 years old, that there was something really different about their parents and my parents, because my father would have killed me if he found out the way that these kids were behaving in class. So it's hard for me to accept that there is not something also cultural going on or was going on at that time, maybe exacerbated by dumb government policies, exacerbated by racism, descendants of slavery. I'm not trying to take

a conservative position on the causation here, but I feel like that was going on. So sorry. Yeah. So the, I mean, in your answer, you said the kids from the tougher part of town, you know, had a different mindset or different proclivity to get in trouble. You know, so that's a clear finding here that one of the major differences, even with kids who go to the same schools or are from similar families, is that Black families are from overwhelmingly more disadvantaged neighborhoods. And that's kind of the legacy of our policies that have generated segregation. These are only a few blocks away. They're only a few blocks away.

Yeah. So they're block to block. There's this incredible resource. It's called the opportunity Atlas that Raj Chetty and economists at Harvard has put together that shows. So it's tracking people through, through the tax system and it shows the probability of them ending up in the prison system at a given point in time in the 2010s. And it's really remarkable. Just a few blocks away there, you know, within L.A. or within New York,

there are these dramatically different levels of involvement with the criminal justice system. And it's really like the patterns of investment and disinvestment are that fine grain that it's really block to block and the segregation is really block to block. But to get back to your point, there is some, like, I would not want to rule out behavior and culture as part of these explanations. What really got me into sociology was reading this book that William Julius Wilson wrote called The Truly Disadvantaged that has become this very famous book.

Because what he did is he took all the changes that were happening in the 50s and 60s, like the movement of manufacturing jobs out of structure and the improvements in civil rights, which allowed middle-class and upper-income Black families to leave the traditional ghetto. And he put together all these forces and documented how what they resulted in was a concentration of poverty in the communities left behind and a resulting switch in the political influence of which communities had political influence, which did not, which had resources and which did not, which had kind of the core institutions like churches, schools. Can we stop for a second and focus on that one? Because you just brought something up which i first heard from black friends and i it always never gets spoken about in that much and i think

it's because people are on both sides a little uncomfortable with it but the argument goes you correct me if i'm wrong that with the end of jim crow and with the end of segregation, successful and educated black people moved out of the neighborhoods because they were now finally able to, leaving a dearth of role models and community leaders within these communities and rudderless, essentially, these communities deteriorated.

It was just kind of like law of, ultimate law of unintended consequences of desegregation. And I can see why that people, it's awkward to talk about that, but you put some stock in that theory. Yeah, definitely. I mean, as poverty became more concentrated and that happened because the middle class started to move out on a large scale.

And like that's that's rational. It's not it's not because they didn't want to live in black communities. It's because they didn't want to live in communities that were the objects of long term disinvestment and abandonment. You know, just that you start making money and you can you buy a nicer house, you get to. But it's normal, right? Yeah. And so the, it's, it's not just that they, you know, the role models left, but also that, you know, those churches start to, are now empty on, you know, every weekend, you know, people empty out those, those parks are no longer being maintained. And, and as violence starts to emerge, it does create this cycle where then people retreat from public space and they're less likely to go out. And if they can get out of the neighborhood, they will.

And, you know, I would never want to raise my kid in a violent neighborhood. It's very rational because of the way that we have invested and disinvested in communities. It's very rational for people to want to leave neighborhoods of concentrated poverty and segregated neighborhoods. And so those processes definitely happen. It led to kind of the breakdown of core institutions in central city communities, and then they became vulnerable to violence. And, you know, as you mentioned before, this is reciprocal. So when a community becomes violent, it destroys the community, and it leads business owners to want to leave. It leads teachers to want to leave.

It leads families to want to leave and results in more depopulation, the additional breakdown of kind of the core institutions of community life. And so it is this reciprocal process. Also, there's a concept of critical mass. You know, it's like a good analogy in a lot of things. Like at some point, you have a couple of bad kids. It's not the end of the world, but at some point, magical point, when it gets so bad that then it just, everything just falls apart.

And then it, cause you're raised by your peers as well. Yeah, absolutely. And when all the peers or so many of the peers are up to, or, you know, I don't want to say they're hard hardened criminals but just like you know day-to-day not going to school vandalizing i mean you'd be shocked to know like how ordinary it was for pretty nice kids to mug people back in in the 70s that's one of the things i remember like i remember one of the guys i went to school with, he was all right, you know? He was an all right guy. And then he was mugging people on the way home because he was so young. He didn't even really understand how awful what he was doing was.

It was just something he learned to do. He grew up around it, you know? I joined Little League because the kids were doing it. And my batting average was literally zero. I told my father, don't come to the game. You feel like Manhattan is headed in that direction now that we had a lot of people leaving. And now that sort of the cops are sort of like the police. They're sort of like fading away.

They're not around. They're not really what they were a few years back. You know, economy, stores closing. Do you feel like New York, Manhattan is headed in that direction again? I don't, but I'm worried about it. You know, I think, I think last year, last year wasn't sufficient to be very worried. You know, the level of violence last year was pretty shocking. You know, shootings almost doubled. And so when that happens, and if people make the decision that this is a place that's going downhill, then yeah, some of the changes that we saw will, you know, there will be a possibility that they'll become permanent.

I don't think it's happening right now. You know, I think New York City has as much criticism as the did a pretty awful job last year and really lost a lot of trust. But that said, it is they are really trying to regroup and get back. What people forget is that the NYPD was moving in a direction of lighter touch policing all the way from 2014 through 2019. Like there were tangible steps toward changing the way that they were doing their job. And violence kept falling. You know, violence fell to there were less than 300 murders in 2018. So, you know, as they ended the practice of stop, question, or frisk, violence kept falling. As more and more people came out of the jail system, violence kept falling. So, you know, it's easy to forget the progress that was happening because last year was such a disaster.

But I do think, or at least I'm hopeful, that last year was a bit of an aberration. I have a couple of questions. First of all, you want to say something, Dan? Well, you know, I, I, I actually haven't spoken about this to many people, but I was victim of an assault a week ago. I say assault in the legal sense of the term because nobody hit me, but I was in the subway transferring from the D to the Q or whatever it was. But anyway, there was a long corridor underground and I'm this guy

coming toward me and he's like coming toward me a little close like he's not giving me like like adequate personal space as he's coming toward me and I suppose I maybe I should have walked to the other side but anyway and he puts up his fist and he goes like this and he like fans punching me like punches halfway like a check swing in baseball like like that and then he walked and I cowered like like a coward I cowered and I got like this with my hands in front of my face and then he walked on um so it's very unsettling and you know I mean the worst part of it is I felt emasculated did he because what should I have because i know first of all he wouldn't have

done that to godfrey or duff david off or ben bailey he wouldn't have done he picked the weakest guy that he that he felt comfortable doing it with and i proved him right you know because dove probably would have dove probably would have squared off and punched him in the face but but those interactions destroy a city uh you know like like, I mean, it's kind of, you know, I know you can laugh at it looking back, but when we were in our last years in Manhattan, we moved about two years ago, you know, my son was taking the subway to Queens to soccer practice with his friend on his own, you know, and we felt fine about it. And, and, you know, so when a city starts to turn, when the subway system starts to turn, and we start to say, hey, we're not sending

our kid out to Queens anymore, then the city that changes, then you start to think, oh, maybe we should move out somewhere else, you know, so, so those, those kinds of interactions. And the whole reason I started studying violence is because of the research I was doing that showed, you know, as you were talking about when you were a kid going through this, like incidents of violence reverberate around entire communities. They affect not just, you know, how scared we are walking down the street, but they affect our cognitive functioning. They affect our sleep patterns. And so all of the empirical work I've been doing for the past 10 years has been just showing, and I've been astounded know, it, it really undermines community life. And, and as a city becomes more violent, it, it puts the trajectory of that city at risk is why I've come to think of

violence as the fundamental challenge of cities, because if public spaces are unsafe, then city life just starts to break down. He looked at me, he probably thought landlord. And Doug Davidoff is a landlord. And he wouldn't have done that to Doug Davidoff. All right, go on. So, okay, so in no particular order,

one of the things I thought of when you were talking about the, you know, the ups and downs is like the economy, I'm never quite sure how soon you're supposed to see the results of a change in policy. So like things don't turn on a dime. They stopped stopping frisk as it was pretty clear they should have, especially when we all saw the stats, how they had just done it more and more and more as there were fewer and fewer crimes to find, right? Yeah.

So they stopped that. And then crime continues to decline. You say, you see? I say, well, wait a second. You know, just because they stopped it doesn't mean that there wasn't already a trend. And then it turns the bend and it's like, well, maybe it actually takes a while before people get a sense that there's a new risk of getting caught now. And there's, like I said, there's more. And I saw, oh, my God, he's carrying a gun.

And look at that. He didn't get caught. It's getting a little more safe here. Let me spread my wings a little bit. And then it builds on itself. And then maybe three years later, then that's when you really see the result of having discontinued stop and frisk. This is not an argument to continue stop and frisk. This is an argument. It's like it's not so easy to read the data because you don't know when the results, what they're tied to. Am I correct? Yeah.

Yeah. I think that's not crazy that, you know, the one counter is, you know, this was such a dramatic change in policing tactics where you went from 700,000 stops and those are just the ones that they reported, you know, 700,000 to, you know, I think they're 13,000 or so reported, you know, they basically ended that practice, which was the dominant practice of the NYPD under Bloomberg. So, you know, it was a dramatic enough this ended in 2013, 2014 and went basically down to zero and crime kept falling for several years after. So, you know, I think your point is right that like this stuff is much more complex than than any summary that just looks at the trend and stop and frisk and says, see, we, you know, we didn't need to do this. It has no effect on violence. We don't know that with certainty.

But it does seem like enough of a change sustained over a long enough period, you know, that at least the initial fears when Ray Kelly, the former police chief, said that the city is going to explode if you end this practice. He was clearly wrong. Bloomberg was clearly wrong. And I think we can say that safely. Yeah, they underestimate the fact that norms develop, habits develop. People get used to living crime without committing crime and crime free. They get used to that. And they don't just, it's not like the thing, checking the stats. Oh, the cops are stopped. Let's go right back to it.

It's they, people develop habits, cultures develop that way. And it doesn't turn them on a dime. And so, you know, it's just, it's always been hard for me to believe everybody's so extreme on these issues, right? Even say stop and frisk doesn't work or stop and frisk was everything. When I'm, I tend to believe it did work. It's, it's logical to me that you talk about William Julius Wilson, James Q Wilson, you know, the broken windows theory. It all made sense to me.

You pick people up for smaller crimes and they leave their guns at home and they try to keep their noses clean and some of them go to jail. And yeah, of course that's going to decrease crime. You know, it, I think, I think both sides, there's a sweet spot there. I think both sides are correct. It's overdone, but it's, it's absurd. Just people, you would, some crime experts would have you believe none of this has to do with cops.

Like you can control the crime rate. You don't defund the police, right? What is defund the police other than like a mass delusion that the cops are not responsible for keeping a cork in crime, but they have to be. Yeah, one of the findings that, you know, is I get a lot of flack for saying out loud, but it's one of the strongest findings in criminology is that more police on the street leads to less crime. You know, and we have more policing is going to reduce violence, or at

least going to have some impact on violence. But the other side of the equation is, what is the harm generated from that, you know, and so there's been great work, there's, there's a scholar named Abigail Sewell, and another guy named Desmond Ang, who have done this really impressive work on the harm that's done by aggressive policing, stop and frisk, but also the harm from police shootings and the tangible effect that that has on young people's lives, how they're doing in school, their mental health. And it's real. You know, those those effects are real. The effects of mass incarceration are only now beginning to be understood because now it's that next generation who have had a parent incarcerated that we're seeing the impact on those kids. You know, so it's, I think you have to be honest.

You have to be intellectually honest about the evidence that suggests that some things that we're uncomfortable with, like policing are actually reducing violence, but then you also have to have to hear people when they say, well, you know, the anger that it's generating, the resentment, the estrangement from the city, and then the tangible harm on young people in particular, that's also very real. So, you know, when I look at these, I kind of try to take in all this evidence, look at it as honestly as possible,

and then think about what models might be possible to reduce violence without some of the harm that's been generated by violent policing, by mass incarceration and intensive surveillance. Go ahead, Dan. Yeah, Patrick, should I carry a firearm? I wouldn't. I don't. That's going to make you a lot more, you know, likely to die. Now, firearms, you know, I think the best evidence tells us that

firearms increase the probability of suicide substantially. And there's less evidence, you know, the evidence is not quite as strong as that on firearms and murder, but there's pretty strong correlation there that, you know, places with more firearms have more murders. Police are more likely to get shot. Police are more likely to shoot people. So, you know, if folks are carrying around guns, everybody is less safe. and of course race is such a difficult layer on this because even in my opinion even stop and frisk

if I could imagine an all white community and all white cops that thought that stop and frisk helped I think they would accept it even knowing all the downsides of it i i think it is the the it's it's the the racial aspect which makes it intolerable to us and and i don't not and and rightfully so but it's like in my neighborhood if they're like it was i live in Westchester.

I think the people say, well, yeah, you look good. Let them ask those kids what they're doing out there at night and let them frisk those kids. We don't need kids walking around with weapons around this neighborhood. You know, like we'd all accept that.

It's quite different when it's the white cop coming in there and to the black kid. It's just different. And we need to accept that human reality. Anyway, because, you know, Bloomberg, I fought Bloomberg. I think in his mind, he felt,

and I think he, with some justification, he said, listen, yeah, I know, but I'm saving lives. I'm saving black lives. Don't they see I'm saving black lives and what's more important than saving a life. And in one sense, we all agree, well, there's nothing more important than saving a life, but actually that's not really true. Is it actually, uh,

having a community that doesn't feel humiliated is, um, very, very important. It might even be worth losing some lives if you actually examine what the Democratic consensus, you know, they might not say that out loud, but their behavior and their voting and the things they ask for will indicate that, yeah, you know, we'd rather,

I know we're going to lose some lives, but we can't live like this. The idea of white cops pulling our kids over, we just can't live that way. So, you know, you agree with that? It's very difficult stuff. It is really difficult. And I think the important part that you mentioned at the end is incorporating harm into the equation.

You know, what, like, and, you know, we can't completely quantify just the feeling of not being a full citizen or the feeling of being humiliated. But we can quantify things like the effect of being stopped on kids' performance in school. You know, and that's where some of the research is actually really helpful. I think of it as very helpful because it incorporates harm into the equation and makes you can think about, you know, not just what the impacts are on violence, but also what the impacts are on young people. And, you know, the other thing I'd say is that there are, okay, so the most, you know, the typical example of a police officer stopping a kid is probably a respectful interaction or not a horrible interaction. The worst cases are difficult to even listen to. There was this one article in The Nation of a Kid Who Recorded a Stop, and it was just the audio. His name was Alvin. He was

in Harlem. You can still watch the video. It's called Stopped and Frisked for Being a Fucking Mutt, something like that. And if you listen to that audio, the anger that you feel if you have kids, you know, if I could just imagine my kid being treated that way for walking down the street and just being, yeah, just being abused in the way that that child was. Like, it's just tough to fathom. And so if that ever happened, I would be as angry as anyone is, you know, around policing and stop question for us.

It's difficult to listen to. I agree with you totally. And Megan McArdle made a good point one time. She said these conservatives, you know, they can't they can't seem to get this get understand it. But boy, do they understand it when somebody asks them to put on a mask like that? Then they then all of a sudden they're furious at this police state. Right. But they have no sympathy for, you know, young black kids being pulled over. And yet and yet there's a part of me that says, you know, it takes a tough man to make a tender chicken. And and that, you know, a mayor. Might have to keep order and stuff like he.

I don't know. It's very difficult for a mayor to figure out the right spot because there is something also to the idea that, well, people don't realize but you know we just can't let people like look what's happening in chicago like we can't we can't have that even if it meant whatever whatever it meant in new york we just can't have that right let me give an example just you'll enjoy it of mayor bloomberg and how oblivious he was um this is what he said in it was audio tapes. He says, so one of the unintended consequences is people say, oh my God, you're arresting kids for marijuana that are all minorities. Yes, that's true. Why? Because we put all the cops in minority neighborhoods. Why do we do it? Because that's where all the crime is. So essentially saying yeah we all these black kids for a crime that we actually don't give a shit about having marijuana and we traumatize them and we might even change the

trajectory of their lives and arrest them and all all this shit that they go through but you know we got to do it with no literally oblivious to what he's saying. I like Mayor Bloomberg, but Jesus Christ, if that's not an example of what they call systemic racism, I don't know what is. You know, it's a great point. So I did a study way back with a student named Joanna LeCoe where we looked at exactly this question. We looked at stop, question, frisk data. And the idea was to take Bloomberg at his word and say, OK, he's saying that this is happening because of a crime. You know, and so what we did is we looked at what happens after a homicide in neighborhoods across the city. So, you know, it was the idea was to say, OK, this is a major crime. We know police activity is going to ramp up after a homicide.

So what happens in different kind of communities? And what we found is that so black neighborhoods always had more way more stops. We know that after a homicide, the spike in police stops that occurred after a homicide was about twice as high in black neighborhoods as it was in any other neighborhood with any other racial and ethnic composition. And so the conclusion, we call it life in a crime scene, because the conclusion was essentially when there is this traumatic event, you know, someone gets shot, someone gets killed in your neighborhood. If you're black and you live in New York City, all of a sudden you're walking through a crime scene and you are a suspect, whether, you know, no matter who you are in that community, you are a suspect. So you're not being given, you know, counseling. You're not being, you know, getting extra attention to figure out if you're doing okay after this major shock, you're now much more likely to be stopped on the street. And so it's just a different

understanding of how the police interact with different communities. And that study made it so clear that the city just operates differently in different areas, in different neighborhoods. And we all knew that. But when I saw those spikes, I kind of thought, okay, this is ridiculous. This is a colony within the city, to use the term that Chris Hayes used in his book. It's very real. It's very real in New York. Last question that I have, unless somebody else has one. So one of the things I'm trying to understand, I probably should have looked it up, maybe some data on it, but is crime that's ticking up, is it the same as it used to be?

Or my common sense tells me that it's going to be more black on black or race on race crime than it was for the following reason. Nobody carries cash anymore and so the the main fear that i used to have walking the street was that somebody would assume and everybody you know would assume i had a lot of money everybody assumed the the gas station had money that the taxi had money the fact is nobody carries more than 15 20 now20 now. And so that's got to affect the temptation to commit that kind of crime is that crime. I don't think it can come back the way it used to be. So when I see you, they hear all this violent crime is ticking up.

That sounds more to me like within a neighborhood, people who know each other, not for money. Yeah. So last year, overall crime didn't rise in New York. Gun crime skyrocketed, but other forms of property crime, even sexual assault didn't rise. It was limited to gun violence. So your instinct is right there, at least as applied to last year. And it's kind of a mystery. You know, I think we're gathering a lot of data to try to figure out exactly what happened last year and testing a lot of hypotheses. But if anybody tells you they know exactly what happened last year,

you know, they're speculating. They're lying or they're speculating because it's going to take a good amount of time and research to get better answers as to what happened. But your instinct is right in the sense that it was all gun violence. It was all shootings. There was no increase. In fact, overall crime dropped, I think, slightly in New York. But shootings, both non-fatal and fatal shootings, skyrocketed. Why is there so much violence in Chicago? Chicago is in really tough shape. I mean, I did a 60-year analysis of murder in Chicago just a couple of weeks ago to try to figure out or just get some handle.

And I didn't get a great handle except to say that. I got an answer but you're not going to like it what is it i didn't catch it there's pizza it's everybody up all right dad so go ahead i haven't tested that um so uh well i mean the short version is it's it is a um a change that's almost entirely restricted to very low income segregated neighborhoods um the murder rate is almost as high as it's been in the past 60 years in Chicago. And, you know, so Chicago actually had a huge crime drop from the 1990s all the way through 2014 or so, where the murder rate dropped in half. But then since that point, it may have been a little bit before 2014, but since that

point, violence has really skyrocketed. And so violence doesn't have near close to the highest murder rate in the country. Just just to be clear, St. Louis and a bunch of other cities have much higher rates of violence. Chicago just has the most murders that, you know, the raw number, the absolute number they have the most in the country. But the real worrisome part is that their their level of violence is back up to a point where it's almost as high as it's ever been. And, you know, this is what happens when residents, local organizations, police and the city government have zero trust for each other. And, you know, it works in multiple ways. The police step back from their role in getting actively involved with incidents. Residents step back and stop cooperating, stop talking with police, stop calling for the police to come when as a legitimate institution, that then leads to a

pattern where you can have a surge of violence. And I think that's a big part of what happened in lots of cities last year, you know, New York being one of them. You also have no bail reform law that was passed, and people could just knock you out. And as long as they don't hurt you, they'll be fine. They just don't go to jail. They don't get arrested. So there's been a lot of violence on, on the subways. People just, if they don't like something about you or whatever reason, they can just go up to you and just knock you out.

A fist right in your face. They keep walking. And that's the end of that. There's been a lot of that. Yeah. I like the idea of bail reform laws actually i always did it but you know not for violence not for violence though i mean bail reform is really important i think but not for if you're like stabbing people look it's a it's a it's a kind of a fiction but we you know we try as much as we can to assume that just because you're arrested, you're not guilty. And putting somebody in jail, and it can be for a long period of time when they can't meet bail or whatever it is and what happens to them in jail. And you can't see it outside, at least I can't see it outside of the horrors that happen to people in jail. So all of that, if we could not lock people up or you know without bail or

you know that would be better but all that to say that that's principle but everything has to bend in if reality just shows you it just it's not workable and if you know you're gonna have crime skyrocketing without bail laws and i guess we have to you know that i guess i'm in favor of bail but oh can we uh is it possible to say a word yes yes comedy podcast about Paul Mooney who died well let me just say Mr. Sharky by the way there was a movie about crime

with Burt Reynolds called Sharky's Machine Sharky's Machine yeah no relation no relation you're welcome to say but you're an awesome guest we should have him on again next time we talk about crime he really wants to come to the cellar. Are you in New York City still? I thought you said you left New York.

I'm in Princeton, but I was in, I was begging for tickets last weekend and I was told I couldn't go anywhere near the club. Is that true? You knew you were coming on the show. Why didn't you call Marielle? I did.

She said I couldn't get in. No way. You have to come on the show first. Are you crazy? I told show. Why didn't you call Marielle? I did. She said I couldn't get in. No way. You have to come on the show first. Are you crazy? I told him to come. She was great. She was great. We had already,

I emailed late and then I, and we had already decided we were going to do something else. But I love going in there. Anytime I'm going in, yeah. Actually, I have some really interesting people coming

down i don't want to say their names on the air but some people who write for the atlantic uh some friends of mine are coming down this friday night um if you're around on friday night you you'd really uh have a uh enjoy the conversation look at how quick he was to assume that i actually told you that you couldn't come i No, I said- How scandalous. I said that can't be true is what I said. No, you got furious. I saw- Well, Patrick, if you're a comedy-

Go ahead, Dan. If you're a comedy fan, are you familiar with the work of Mr. Paul Mooney at all? He's somebody, by the way- I saw him all day today, yeah. And by the way, Dan, I saw you at the Cellar years ago. Did you? Well, I'm even better.

But Paul Mooney, did he saw you at the cellar years ago. Did you? Well, I'm even better. But Paul Mooney, did he ever work at the cellar? No, I never saw him there, but maybe he was there once or twice. I don't think so. He might maybe once or twice years ago, but no, I don't. He was 79, which I had no idea was that old. Anyway, Harriet Houston, you had some stuff to say about him. I feel like Paul Mooney was, you know, like a Richard Pryor type level genius. And he was so brilliant and so scathing and so political. And I think that um you know everybody who is you know even tangentially associated with comedy i think recognizes that but i think he never really made it to like

you know that level of um startup yeah not fame because i think he did he did make it to that level of fame but to be like um no he didn't make that level of fame he's I think he did make it to that level of fame. But to be like... No, he didn't make it to that level of fame. He didn't make it to that level of fame. He should have, because he was, I mean, amongst anyone who knows anything about... Right, but that's show business. There are a lot of greats that just don't make it to startups. And he was great.

He was amazing at what he did. He was really special. It's a big, big love. I guess he just never... Why didn't he work the cellar? Was he not New York-based? I don't think he lived in New York, no. I used to see him a lot

in New York. I would run into him at Starbucks. I saw him a few times. I caught up with him a few times. He was always around. I guess he just never stopped. I guess he just never stopped by. I guess he just never stopped by for whatever reason. I mean, his work is incredible.

Yeah. I mean, I don't have much to say. I'm not proud to say, but I don't know much about comedy outside of the comedy cellar. It's true. Does anybody have any thoughts about Demi Lato is now a they she is a they her pronouns are they and them so what does that mean she's trans or she just changed her pronouns i believe but let me just look this up she's non-binary i believe demi lovato says we were

talking about crime we can get away with that, but don't get this wrong, Dan. The CNN headline says... I mean, you know, it's not politically correct to... I have to say, I kind of laughed when I read the headline. It says Demi Lovato says they are

non-binary. Yeah. That's what... I mean, that's what it is. I have to admit, I could not help but let out a chuckle when I read that headline. Why is that funny?

I've been funny. No, but Lovato says they are non-binary. No, don't, don't, don't,

Sharky's here. Leave him alone. You're telling me that's not funny? Demi Lovato says he can't, he's got, he's got a career

to worry about. He can't get targeted by your dumb. No, I'm here to tell you that's not funny? Demi Lovato says he can't. He's got a career to worry about. He can't get targeted by your dumb... No, you're going to tell me that's not funny? You guys started with Palestine and Israel and ended with Demi Lovato. This is not my wheelhouse. Dan, this is my opinion. I think I speak for everybody, but Danny called...

All due respect, but funny is funny Yeah I mean obviously there's something Funny about seeing Like for anybody who Didn't grow up with this These sentences Are kind of funny because they seem

So unnatural because They Is a plural word It's used in so Many different situations because they is a plural word. It's used in so many different situations as singular, number one. Number two... Not in that situation. You guys just cannot...

But I understand the language changes. I'm just saying. It's also funny because CNN is just immediately in lockstep with the language. Or people have been feeling like this forever, and now they have the language that actually matches how they feel. That's fine. Yeah, but, okay, first of all, go ahead, Dan.

That's fine, but it's still funny to me when I read that headline. But why is it funny? All right. Listen, I will use... Danny Cohen, what do you say? You're in the LGBT community. Yeah, you know, I don't know. I think it's just, it's pretty

complicated. And, you know, I'm grateful that I don't have to deal with any of that. Look, like this, let's take a good example. This Latin X. So you read Latin X everywhere.

Everybody's CNN type and certainly any paper that Patrick Sharkey would ever turn anywhere has to say Latin X, right? But we know from polls that it's something like 2% of actually Latino people want to use this word. So it's this elitist imposition, right? I don't know if non-binary people, like there's nothing offensive about saying she's non-binary, meaning referring to the sex of somebody and saying non-binary, which refers to the, what they identify as. So like you could, you could have kept it, but I'm not, I'm not, I'm not beef with it. I'll say whatever I was supposed to say. I want to be respectful. God forbid. I, you know, I don't

want to not planting a flag or, you know, you can't fight city hall, but I'm just not sure with the trans people I know as you, and you know, some of them, they're way more easygoing about these words than you would think they would be based on how the headlines seem to say they're so important. That's all I'm saying. So I will grant you that. And I know that you have several trans friends, and I have heard them say that.

But I think that also they are of an older generation, and they didn't have access to that language number one yeah what i'm saying is this parallel when you refer to a baby born as he you're not making any assumption about what he will grow up to be in terms of his identified you're referring to his his biological gender so to me saying he is non-binary or she is non-binary is not, you know, it doesn't, it's not, it doesn't contradict logic to me. Well, to you, it doesn't, but to somebody who's non-binary, they have spent their entire lives in many cases feeling that those words are not accurate to how they feel as a human being.

And so that language is very important to that. All right. That's fine. You understand that Noam and I are old enough to remember when trans America was a bank. Now, I will tell you this. There is this feeling like, you know, how people always say, I'm, I need to make a change of, a change of move to another city or change my job. That's going to bring me happiness, right?

And then they do it and they realize actually they feel the same as everybody. If they could just change the words, that's going to make the, if I could just change my gender. And, and, but somebody transgender said to me the other night, she said, you know, one of the disappointments that she had was that she thought that when she finally did change, that all the aspects of sadness and depression, she was happy that she was now transitioned, that her basic personality levels of happiness, depression, you know, all these things remained exactly the same. Of course. Yeah. Well, you say, of course. So I would never think it would change. That's stuff that's that's stuff that you have to take care of. That doesn't change because you change your word.

The state of mind is in your brain. It's not on the beach in Miami. Right. But it is just interesting that we might all just have a certain baseline of what type of, you know, how much happiness we normally feel, how depressed you are, all these things. And then we will attach whatever bad feelings we have to whatever we can point to which seems to be bad. Using the wrong words. I feel it. And then we,

lo and behold, realize, well, okay, it's good that we're saying they, but is it really going to make people that much happier? I suspect it won't, but I am all for the respect. I am actually all for the respect.

Just, you know, just kicking it around. That's all. I'm all for the respect. I say they, even in private, I. I just, you know, just kicking it around. That's all. I'm all for respect. I say they, even in private, I will refer, as you know, to somebody by the, if I don't misspeak, I will refer to somebody as the pronouns I know that they would like me to refer them by. Because respect is more about what you do, actually, when somebody's not looking than when they are looking. If you really respect somebody, you do it on their they're back right so i try to do that no i'm do you know anybody in your personal life that is a they yes i i do i do too i do i don't know any days i don't know anybody i know a few

days i mean people you know people who like i really adore and are really special people. And we're not days when I met them. So I think it's like, you know, things change and other things become available. You know, people used to not have the option to live like that. Like you couldn't actually be yourself. That's a different matter altogether. No, but I think it's part of it you know i know people who i've known since they were kids who you know grew up and became they and

you know had top surgery and are non-binary and you know kids who are in their 20s other languages i would mention other languages have gendered they uh i don't know how they deal with that like you know no other culture besides our supposedly horrible bigoted racist sexist transphobic western culture has ever even attempted to try to change its language to accommodate these types of things you know it's one of the it's kind of one of the things that bothers me is that the more the more we the more we drill down and double the the resolution of our microscope and and clean up new things that we never even knew existed and do the right thing the more we seem to be down on ourselves and think that we're so horrible as opposed to being quite proud of ourselves as a culture you know we're I mean we have a lot to be down on ourselves and think that we're so horrible as opposed to being quite proud of ourselves as a culture. You know, we're, I mean,

we have a lot to be proud of, you know, anyway, we're not so evil. Patrick Sharkey staying out of politeness or because he's interested. He can't don't, don't do he's listen. Do you know, do you know how cynically somebody could use anything he said? They could take out of context. That's true. But it's also the you know these are these are tough issues and i i do think like you know even for our students we get a list of names which are their registered names but we have to go through this process first to make sure that we refer to people by the names that they want to be referred to rather than just the, and, and so, you know, I, I do think it's important because, you know, the, like,

you want it to be about the student and, and what makes that person feel like a full person in the school setting or in the class or wherever they might be. As opposed to about me, you know, like I don't give a shit, you know, like it, I just, I just want to make that student more comfortable. It doesn't matter. It's not a burden at all for me to change the pronouns that I use, even if it, you know, it takes some work to try and figure out what the right word is. And Latinx is a great example of that where I think you're right.

That's like this very progressive, elitist idea, and almost no one likes it. But it's become common in academic writing to write Latinx. And you can get in trouble. Yeah. Can I approach this from a different, I know we got to go, but it's really interesting. So this,

I want to just get the quote right. So this occurred to me yesterday, I was having an argument about Israel with a guy. And we're talking about 1948. And it's someone I, this is, I said, you know,

but that's, that's 1948. Like, you know, this, you know, moving up. And he said,

well, to, to, to many people, it feels like just yesterday. And, like, you know, this, you know, moving up. And he said, well, to, to, to many people, it feels like just yesterday. And, um, I said to him that, well, you know, anything can feel like just yesterday if they're, if the mind makes it so, so like the Tuskegee experiment feels like just yesterday to black people didn't want to take the vaccine, even though it was in the 1930s. 1619, slavery is, people are learning to feel like that was just

yesterday. And much of this is simply, I got the quote because it's a famous Shakespeare quote, nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. It's like, you know, like Coleman Hughes, our friend, said something that I never forgot. He says, you know, people are more concerned about slavery in the 1700s than they are about slavery going on today in Africa. You know, they literally will be more furious, more emotional about a story that happened 300 years ago, then they will react to a story that what's going on in Mauritania now. So much of this is just the ability to download a programming that includes how you're supposed to react, how offended you should be, how you should feel about it. And then you spit that out. And if you're taught that using the wrong pronoun is quite offensive,

you will react viscerally, truthfully, very, very offended. And, you know, this is a impediment to human pride. This is what we talk about, like blackface, for instance. Blackface was just yesterday. So you have a situation now where you have young kids who love a black hero and they want to dress up as their black hero for Halloween. But because we're literally imprisoned by the just yesterday of the past, we can't allow ourselves to become what would certainly be a healthy culture, which is allowing children of all colors to idolize heroes of all colors and dress up like them as Halloween, right? But it's just yesterday. Blackface minstrel shows

were just yesterday. So this is just, I hope I'm not coming across the wrong way. It's interesting to me. It's a psychological thing that deserves, I think, some pushback sometimes. Like, okay, just because you feel it and just because it happened you know it doesn't it doesn't have to be your truth that's kind of like what other your truth it doesn't have to be the end of the end of the lived experience that's yeah and and and so I won't I'm not saying about the they I'm just it made me think of that like anything that happened in history can literally cause somebody of history this is a good segue speaking of history i'm looking at patrick sharky's wicca pd page it says he was born circa 1977 what are you julius caesar

i don't know who put that page together Yes I was actually born Exactly in 1977 All right Well I don't expect it But I don't necessarily Know how And by the way I did not mean to say

The Holocaust was not Just yesterday Danny Of course it was Just yesterday Danny Never forget All right I guess that's it It's a long show

I think it was A pretty good show actually Had a little bit of everything A little bit of something for everybody. Thank you guys for having me on. It was fun. Thank you. Do you want to come down Friday night?

What do you think about an email? Yeah, let me figure out what we're doing. Okay. Thank you, though. That'd be great. What did you say, Perrielle? I'd like you to meet my friend Coleman because he writes a lot about crime and stuff like that. Coleman Hughes.

And I think he would, I think be very happy to meet you. Thank you. Thank you. I mean, I, every time I go there, you know, even my friends who are not into comedy, I always tell them, you know, go in the cellar and, and I guarantee you you you'll have a uh just an incredible time it's just a different place you guys you guys yeah you do something there that's different i'll be there by the way let me just look at the schedule if i may very briefly to see what you might be in for should you come to my show on friday night uh hold on a second my show on friday night one second please hold listen okay so the 5 15 show that's too early you don't want to come to

that that's too early but the uh hmm the 6 p.m show it's also early but it's eagle ed ed Ed Watson, Judy Gold, Dan Adler, and Jackie Faber. Look, besides me, it's kind of a... We're early, Dan. If Patrick comes down later, we'll just put you on for another spot. I'm looking at these lineups. I got to tell you, Noam, without me on the show, I'm not too impressed. I'm kidding.

All right. I just connected you two on email, Patrick and Noam. So you can- Podcast at ComedySeller.com for questions, comments, suggestions. And also, by the way, I sent Dara, you know, you asked, you hired Gilbert Garfield to do a cameo for you. And I asked Dara if he had any idea who you were. And she said, probably not.

Nice. That's probably who we were and she said probably not. Nice. That's kind of who we suspect. She wrote me back. All right. I got to go. But no, it was great. It was actually better than you didn't know who I was.

It made it funnier. Maybe you shouldn't do it so last minute. All right. Everybody, podcastatcomedysally.com. Bye-bye. Bye.

Bye. Bye. Bye, Patrick. Thank you.