The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Lara Bazelon

Episode Date: November 12, 2022

Noam's favorite guest, Lara Bazelon is back. She is the author of A Good Mother, a professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law, where she holds the Barnett chair in Trial Advocacy. She spent seven years as a deputy federal public defender in Los Angeles.

this is live from the table a comedy Comedy Cellar-affiliated podcast coming at you on SiriusXM 99, Raw Dog, and on the Laugh Button Podcast Network. And with me, of course, is Noam Dorman. He's in mid-pizza right now. Noam, how do you do? Noam is the owner of the world-famous Comedy Cellar. That pizza is not from the Comedy Cellar.

It's from next door at ben's pizza i prefer joe's in any case perriel is also with us ashen brand our show's producer there has been some controversy with regard to that title but that's the title that we are going with producer and of course nicole lyons is the woman behind the scenes that makes it all possible. The unsung hero from Binghamton, New York. Nicole Lyons is here working the mixing board. We got Lara Bazelon coming in about 15, 20 minutes. I assume we're going to talk about the election with Lara. That was obviously yesterday was election day as we record.

And we can. It's pretty important, I think, if we're going to, especially for somebody like you, who is a political junkie. As well as a pizza lover. I was so hungry. I'm sorry. Go ahead. Okay. I was chastising Noam on the carbs, but as Perry Al pointed out, sometimes you do need carbs. No, very rarely you'll see Noam eating carbs like that, too.

He usually doesn't. I had a question with regard to the restaurant. The hummus plate, it has carbs with it yeah but you don't you're not you you're usually gonna go for the salad yeah uh but speaking of restaurant no i was discussing this with the wait staff you know one of the waiters or waitresses mentioned that they feel weird sometimes when people call them by name because they forget they're wearing a name tag and it dawned on me that I don't know of any restaurant that I've been to, maybe diners or McDonald's, where the waitstaff wears name tags. And we were wondering why you have made that decision

to have your waitstaff wearing name tag. I know. One thought I had was that it makes it easier for customers to either praise or complain about them so that you can get feedback as to which waiters are doing a good job, which waiters might not be doing a good job. Yeah, I mean, when we when we first implemented it, plenty of other places had name tags on waiters and waitresses. They don't have that anymore. I don't think so. Ariel, do you notice name tags when you go to restaurants?

Typically, a lot of waiters will introduce. Hi, my name is Richard. I'll be your waiter. Yes, I can count think so. Ariel, do you notice name tags when you go to restaurants typically? A lot of times waiters will introduce, hi, my name is Richard, I'll be your waiter. Yes, I can count on that. Yeah, I'm pretty sure they don't. I'm pretty sure sometimes when you get the check, it'll say. Well, I think you answered your own question, which it's easier to pray.

But I don't know that that was known motivation. Because like some customer will complain, oh, who was your waiter? I don't know. And now, you know, even describing somebody can get you in trouble. that was no motivation. Like some customer complained, who was your waiter? I don't know. And now, you know, even describing somebody can get you in trouble. I do.

I, it's possible that waiters get better. He had like a curly hair and, you know, dark, darker complex.

Swarthy. Well, that was a sketch on the Amy Schumer show, which, which she was accused of stealing from some other show, but I think it's a pretty old concept. You know, I don't think anybody stole anything. But

anyhow, did you vote? No, I know you're not a pardon. I did not vote for the love of God. You know what? I just want to tell you that I was just downstairs talking to Dave Attell when he was talking about you were talking about politics and the podcast and everything. And I said, well, he asked me if I vote. And I said, yeah, of course. I said, well, I'm sure, you know, Noam was disappointed that that Zeldin guy didn't win. And

I said, well, I don't know, but it doesn't really matter because he doesn't vote. And Dave was like, what? Noam enjoys the debating. He enjoys discussion. He enjoys the thought process behind politics. But the actual practice of being involved, I guess he feels it doesn't matter. Excuse me.

Doesn't matter living in New York. But it was a close race. I hope I haven't been following it. I hope I didn't screw up. Did anybody lose by one vote? Yeah. The guy you would have voted for probably. Well, I have a whole Zeldin. I have a lot to say about Zeldin. But go ahead. Did anybody lose by one vote? Yeah. The guy you would have voted for probably.

Well, I have a whole Zeldin. I've lost about Zeldin, but but go ahead. I'm just so you didn't vote, but but I was saying to you, you know, it was a relatively close. It was a close election and it was impressed. I don't know. I'm usually his excuses. It doesn't matter. It's New York. Now, obviously, he didn't lose by one vote, but it was impressed upon us that it was very important, fairly close election. So if you were either in the whole whole is it whole whole?

I think it's hotel. Whole whole. Oh, oh. Or or Zeldin camp. Either way, it was I don't know if it's important to vote, but it was it's important. I typically don't vote in midterms, but did you go? I did vote. Would you vote for? I would prefer not to discuss. But let me just say that whoever I voted for, it was because in my heart I felt that they were the best person to represent

Americans and New Yorkers of all race, creeds and colors. OK, so not Zeldin. Well, I'm just saying in my heart, I felt it was the best decision for all New Yorkers and all Americans. Well, why would you say not Zeldin, because I don't think it's a racist. I just don't think that. First of all, he's. Yes, probably.

Number one, he's awful. He's anti-abortion. He's some like proump fucking patriarchal gross. Please don't even get me started. Listen, I don't love Hochul. If that's how you. Hochul. Hochul. Is it Hochul?

Hochul. Yeah. All right. Don't get. You shouldn't be allowed to vote for her. Fuck. I know how to say their name, but you know that he's a racist. I don't know if he's a racist.

It wouldn't surprise me if he were. I wouldn't surprise you if all the Hispanic members of the Los Angeles City Council were racist. That wouldn't surprise you. That's funny. Anyway, I don't love her either, but as I said before,

I also don't want to live in like some like dystopian hellscape. I mean, tell me, is Zeldin, did you like him? I pronounce that dystopian. Or if I were you, maybe I would say dystopian. I thought you said dystopian. Dystopian. Tell me about Zeldin now, because I don't

really know anything about him. Maybe I wanted to have Lara hear about it too. Well, we can wait for Lara if you feel that we should. There's other things we can talk about. For example, it's official apparently. The cellar is expanding. Wait. Yeah, hello?

By the way, my friend Mark Reiner, I'd like to give him a shout out because I went to high school with him. What are you doing, Perry? He dropped by last night and he loves our podcast. And so I thought he might enjoy. Shout out, Mark Reiner. A shout out for you.

Peril just got like a Rorschach test. I wanted to give that to you. While we're pitching new projects. You were invited to a very stupid launch party. Well, don't say when it is. It's not open to the public. Oh, God forbid I say what it is. It might be, you know, throngs.

All right. You just stampede. Stampede or something it is. It might be, you know, throngs. All right. You just need a stampede or something. You might get crushed like, you know. And if you scan that, if you scan. This is a cartoon that Perriell has produced. Little short cartoons involving the comedians and the comedy seller community. I'm in one of the episodes, for example, Dean Edwards, Gary Goleman, numerous others. Why is my name not in the list of people in the show? And Noam is also in one of the

episodes. It's not. No, that's so weird. Let me see. No, I'm not going to let you see. In any case, I was very excited. I'm the Lee. I'm the first fucking thing. Yeah. Well, your name's everywhere else. And Perry is trying to sell it to whoever she can sell it to. Well, your name's everywhere else. And Perry L's trying to sell it to whoever she can sell it to. Well, we're interested in developing season two, which is already recorded. And our first episode, our first episode is Noam.

Right. But I'm not on the stupid thing. Hey, whatever. So I'll add you to it. You know, at first you didn't give a shit. And now look at you. Well, he just wants credit where it's due. He gets a lot of credit. The thing is,

is that, um, it said on the stoop of the comedy seller and it's called stupid and it's heavily inspired by, it's sort of like, um, Mr. Rogers neighborhood of make-believe meets comedians in cars,

getting coffee with a little bit of Dr. Katz and the Larry Sanders show. Can anybody see a preview of this online? After December 5th. Let's talk about it when people can actually look at it. Okay, fine. Well, if anybody works in TV and is interested in season two, you can call me.

After December 5th. Well, you can call me before. Why would they call? No one's calling you because you... Well, I'll send it to them. I had a call already about season two. Did I just hear a phone call? Go ahead. Nicole, you need sound effects. Go ahead. Just to redo the introduction, the Comedy

Cellar is expanding. Comedy Cellar... When you say this, try not to say anything that might trigger any kind of association in Peril's mind. So just take us down a different conversation. Fair enough. The Comedy Cellar currently, if you're a regular here, you know, has four showrooms.

Four? My kid. I remember my kid's fourth birthday. Comedy Cellar, the original in McDougal Street, the Village Underground and two rooms at the Fat Black Pussycat, the lounge and the bar. In any case, there will be a fifth room added and the location will be on West 3rd Street between McDougal and 6th Avenue. Is that correct, Noam? Well, yeah.

I mean, everything's not finalized yet, but we went before the community board and everything. That's really exciting, Masato. I think so. I think so, Daniel. So it's 90% to 95%. Yes, I would give that I think so. Daniel. So you're 90 percent to 95 percent. Yes, I would give that

that degree of certainty. Yes. What are you calling it? It's as least as likely as the red wave. OK, what's going to be called things with 90 percent

likelihood sometimes don't pan out. What's it going to be called? Comedy seller. No, come on. At the something. Weren't you going to do the little out we had come on. At the something. Weren't you going to do the little out we had? On the X.

OK. Now, why did you decide on that room? I know there was because there's a McDonald's that that closed down on the corner of 6th and West 3rd. But you that you were thinking of. But that's why I would prefer the McDonald's, actually. But I can't seem to get my hands on it. So that's it.

Is there a chance of a six room at some place in the future in this vicinity? I guess I guess you'll see. I mean, the idea being is that we turn away here at the Comedy Cellar. I'll say we we turn away a certain number of people. And so no one wants to capture those people. And instead of turning them away, I do,

I just want to give more spots to the comedians. Well, but that's not your primary motive. You wouldn't give more spots to the comedians and lose money doing it. You'd, you'd happily give more spots to comedians, but you'd have to be making money. Obviously.

Now the question of course comes up a question I've posed before. What's in it for Dan Natterman? And the answer is it's probably very little. You know, it seems to be there's an ever-expanding number of comedians that work here. Certain, you know, certain favorites. But I suspect

I'll get an extra one performance a week out of this. Don't you think that you're one of the favorites? No, no, I don't think so. I'm I'm I'm steady. I've been here a long time and I get work consistently. And I guess I should be grateful for that. But that's not my nature.

Yeah, he's he's the you know, he's the steady. The mistress always gets more attention. But then where is she a year later? I guess so. Yeah, that that that, you know, perhaps that later? I guess so. Perhaps that could be an analogy that could be made. If I were famous, obviously

I'd get more, clearly. If you're famous, you would leave us. No, the famous people aren't leaving you. There's three degrees. There's the non-famous comics that work here. There's the famous-ish comics. You were famous-ish at one

point. I don't know if you still are. You're still here famous-ish. He is. No, I wouldn't. The famous-ish is like Ronnie Chet. No. He's famous. He's full-on famous? Yes. What about Sam Moreau? Famous-ish. Okay. Famous-ish sounds wrong, but you're right.

The way to really think about it is how many, what size theater could they sell out? That's really what it amounts to. Ronnie Chang, I think, has jumped to a bigger category of theater. I believe he has. And he still, but he still works here is the point. From time to time. Right. Would you be here every night?

What about Chris DeStefano? He apparently has become pretty, pretty famous. Well, and he works here, too, though. I mean, the problem is I don't know who's famous and who's not. I sometimes don't either. But Nicole Lyons probably knows because she's a member of the public. Yes. So how famous is Ronnie Chang and Chris DeStefano?

I don't know. They have different audiences, too, because Ronnie obviously had The Daily Show, which unlocks a whole nother group. And then Chris, his podcasts are like crushing. But I think the general public knows about them, even if they're not in touch with comedy. Yeah, because Chris has his his thing that he does with Sal Volcano. Well, Sal's big. Right.

So but and Chris is filling theater. Sal's a guy I. So, but, and Chris is filling theaters now. Sal's a guy I would have never heard of if I didn't work here. So, for instance, when I brought my daughter down, my 10-year-old daughter with her friend to see the, to the comedy cellar one night, Zarna Garg walks through. And my daughter's friend, Lekha, practically starts crying like she's seen the Beatles or something. She goes, is that Zarna Garg?

I'm like, you know who Zara Garg is? She goes, yeah, I follow her on TikTok. And then I checked out Zara. She's got like a million TikTok followers. So she's famous. I didn't know she was famous. Well, TikTok famous is a real thing. Yes, of course it's a real thing.

But it's also more specific. It's not like household name famous like Chappelle. Oh, well, Chappelle's one of the most famous people in the world. And he still works here, but he doesn't work here. No, he's still on. He's not on the schedule. He's not on the schedule. He'll come by and he'll go on.

He's performing here on his own terms. He's not. Chappelle is saying, I hope I get more spots when he joins. But the point is, there's a level I could be at in which I would get more. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Irregardless. I know that's not a word. I like it anyway.

Irregardless of how hard I'm killing on stage. Yes, irregardless. So that that. There may not ever have my question. First of all, my question is, is. Would you still perform as often as you do because you perform i don't know every not maybe not every night but you're here a lot perform once a night some comics get twice a night during the week and on the weekends i'll usually get two on a friday and two on a

saturday that's a lot isn't it well a lot of comics get three. And I guess some comics get none. Some don't want that many, I suppose. Some get as many as they want. If they say to Esty, Esty, I really would like, you know, four. They probably get it. Have you ever said that? Do you want four? Would you like four spots? Probably, you know, if I'm in town.

And have you ever said that you know, I'm not going to be presumptuous. And I don't think no, I don't think that I mean, ask. I don't think that would go over well if it was a very special occasion, like I was working up for something, then maybe I would ask. But just a general matter, because I want more money. No, I'm not going to ask that. Esty gives me what she gives me, and that's fine. Anyway, no tuning out that I heard a buzz.

Does that mean Lara Bazelon is here? All right. Perfect timing because Noam was tired of that conversation. No, I'm not. Hi, Lara, if you can hear us. No, I'm not tired of that conversation. I was just thinking like

one of the... Hi. Let me just finish this thought today one of the um things i used to like giggle about when the comedians talked about starting a union was like the havoc that it would that it would wreak in terms of their competition in terms of like how many spots they should get how much they should get paid blah blah you know would they would they ask for terms where everybody should get the same number of spots? Nobody should get more. It could be.

It's an every man for themselves business. Well, it's an every man for themselves world. No, but if you're all working on an assembly line, there's a different camaraderie. It's not. Right, right. You're not set off against each other. That's true.

It's a zero-sum game. Zero-um games zero-sum careers sometimes zero-sum parts i mean not not maybe not zero-sum but there's a sum it's not it's not it's not like multipliers like it's not like there's as many parts as needed for as many people as want to do them right which is also really interesting because i feel like comics are the ones who give other comics their biggest opportunities. All right. Okay, Lara Bazelon. We've had her on before.

She's the best guest. She might be the best guest. She's Noam's favorite guest. She is my favorite guest. She's an author, number one, of a novelist. But more than that, she's a professor of law and a director of the criminal. How's your book doing, by the way? The sales off the charts?

I mean, after I went on your podcast, I just went home and went to bed and let the. All right. There's no need for sarcasm. Her book is fantastic. Now, I haven't read many books in the last five years. Novels. I got hooked on this novel. I tried to get Perrielle to read it, but Perrielle's very self-centered.

But her book, I can really wholeheartedly recommend it. It should be a movie. It's just fantastic. What's it called again? A Good Mother. You can argue whether anybody in the book is one.

It's just really good and um there's i wanted to have a show just about her book but because there's things there's like things that happen to the characters in the book that i i'm not gonna ask her but i but i you're reading of like did this happen to larry did somebody like like you know what what's what's autobiographical and what everybody always wants to know whether i really stripped which i never did uh well i would have i wouldn't have thought that you had no but anyway she's a professor of law and director of criminal juvenile justice and racial justice clinical programs at university of san francisco school of law um any any other thing else of note noam that we might mention before we get into the thick of the conversation

in her resume and her resume, something that you feel is just fearless, fearless, fearless, uh, spokesman for, for principle, the, that she believes the same thing. Um, the day after the election is that she believes the day before the election that she's, uh, and you know, uh, know that's why that's why she's my favorite guest because well anyway the book should be a movie and I

don't know with all the balls that she has in the air at the time if she has anybody that could pursue that for her or you know how but that book it's written to be a movie it's written to be producers I'm waiting by the phone. Call me up.

I'll make time for you. Are you able to have connections? Does anybody? I mean. You know, it's one of those things where like your agent has an agent in L.A. And that person sends it out. And then, you know, years go by. And then you die.

And then when you're dead, they make it into a movie, but you're not there for the premiere. What you need is somebody that is a big name in Hollywood that loves the book. Yeah. An actress that wants to play one of the roles. That's right. That's what Bill gets.

I only know one actual movie producer. That's Judd Apatow. And, you know, he does comedies. So like, you know. Yeah, it's not very funny. I mean, it has its funny moments, but they're more like mordant-ly funny, not sort of. Yeah, he wouldn't be the, it's not his bailiwick, as they say, or his wheelhouse. That's a big word.

Is that the right word? Did I use it correctly? Well, you just used the word mordant. You know, do you ever have this experience? Touché. You ever have this experience? Touche. Do you ever have this experience? Because it happens to me with some regularity. If you were to ask me what a particular word meant, just out of the blue, I would struggle to tell you what it meant. But in the right context, that very same word will come to me out of nowhere and I will use it usually correctly.

But somehow the definition has to get triggered through a completely different pathway. And I know, and as I get older, as I have a little cognitive decline, I notice you get insight into how your brain works sometimes and the things that you confuse. Sometimes I'll confuse a name, but they'll have the same initials as the name I'm trying to remember. So isn't that interesting? The brain stores things in a certain way by initials. I would have never realized that until I started making those kinds of mistakes. There's all kinds of very interesting things about the way memories are recalled.

Anyway, so I heard you on two podcasts in the last month or so. And I want to say, you know, over time, since I've been doing this podcast, more than once, I kind of hooked into somebody early on. Like John Hite was one of our first guests and he was he was not known. Or Greg Lukianoff, the the guy who runs FIRE Foundation for Individual Rights Education. I think they changed the name or changed what the initials mean. But now they're kind of like a new ACLU type group. But these people, you know,

struck me as being compelling. And then over the course of these years, they've actually become very, very prominent voices. And I've noticed, and they've actually become very, very prominent voices. And I've noticed, and they've actually all developed relationships with each other, not through me. And it's just- No, no. No, I don't mean that in ego. I mean, it's not that I facilitated, just independently, whatever I saw in them as just as an audience person or as a person who liked to meet interesting people, they kind of saw in each other.

It's just it's it's very I don't know. There's some it's it's a it's something I'm observing and it's very interesting to me. And you all of a sudden showed up on Glenn Lowry's podcast. And then on Barry Weiss's podcast. And and these are both people. And Camille was, Camille, you know, from the fifth column is somebody. And Moynihan, who's also the fifth column,

he's going with the Israel with me next week. So all these people. Oh my God, you're going to Israel with Michael Moynihan? Yeah. That is going to be quite a trip. So yeah, I've been on the fifth column twice. They call me their favorite lefty, but I'm their only lefty.

So so that's so it all brings me to that question, which is what is it that you what is it about you that you think makes you so many kind of. Libertarian or right wing, maybe some of these people are right wing favorite lefty? Well, it's a short list. There's maybe one other person on it. And if you asked me to break it down, I think it's because you're right. I believe what I believe. Sometimes it's contrarian within my own tribe. And for whatever reason, probably because now I'm just old and ornery, I don't care about saying what I think. And there's some overlap on the Venn diagram, although not a lot, there's enough to have a conversation. But there's also so much where there's not overlap that there's a lot of debate, but in an open minded way, because I have kind of a, I have a thick skin. I mean, I used to be a trial lawyer for a living.

So debating is my profession and I don't easily get offended. And I'm excited to engage with people who disagree with me because that's how I keep my mind sharp. You were talking about, you know, acuity and things may be decaying as we age. And I was relating to all of that. And I think just like doing the crossword puzzle every day, engaging with a libertarian or conservative, maybe not every day, but as a regular person, it's good. Well, what comes through, so I heard you on this Glenn Lowry podcast, and I want you to, hopefully you can just recount one of the stories you told on that show. But this is my feeling about Glenn Lowry, who's done it. You know, he did an event at the Comedy Cellar where he hosted. Yeah, he is a hero of mine because I and he does this weekly thing with John McWhorter or every other week where they talk a lot about

racial issues. And I've said this to him, too. I don't know of anybody who covers any issue with the integrity that he discusses racial issues in the following sense. He presents the other side of every argument that he makes so well. Sometimes I listen with my wife. He'll convince my wife of the quote wrong opinion. He will present the side that he wants to disagree with so powerfully, in such good faith that she'll be like, oh yeah, he's got me convinced. And then he'll stop and they'll say, but this is what I think about it. That is an unbelievable quality of his. I don't know anybody like that. And he has my total admiration for that. And I think maybe that's why he has your admiration because he has a lot of integrity.

No, he does. He's a true intellectual. He's really interested in the best arguments on both sides and then vigorously interrogating them. That's what makes him happy. That's what makes him light up inside. And he does it with race. He does it with gender. He does it with education. He does it with civil rights. He just goes there every single time. Yeah. He's really, he's really- Well, let's go somewhere ourselves. Yeah. So yeah, Dan's- So on the Lowry show, you told, and we should talk about the midterms also. Do you want to talk about the midterms first? Happy to do it. Oh, well, yeah. What's your thoughts on the midterms? Did you click your heels?

I'm imagining you're a little bit disappointed. No, I mean, there was going to be this bloodbath, heads, progressive heads were going to be rolling in the street. It looks like, in fact, unbelievably, the Democrats could hold on to the Senate. Some MAGA folks went down in flames. Some election deniers went down in flames. Some people weren't supposed to win prevailed. And it wasn't particularly close. Like I'm thinking about John Fetterman or Maggie Hassan. So overall, I imagine the libertarian right leaning folks are maybe a bit taken aback. So I was not someone and I never am someone who makes these predictions that are more optimistic or more pessimistic than the polls are. I know the polls are often wrong, but I I feel like the polls are all all we have.

So when the polls showed that there was like a almost a dead heat with the generic ballot, I found it interesting that the Times and many other places seem to already thrown in the towel. And then that made me think that there was going to be this red wave because so many liberals seem to be, you know, complacent about it already. But other than that, I didn't have any reason to think there was going to be this big red wave.

You make a good point. You make a good point. The liberal media had totally thrown in the towel. That's an important point. Yeah. So you feel like, what do they know that I don't know? Like sometimes they'll know the candidate's internal polls. Sometimes they do have information that the rest of us don't have. So having said that, I felt for a long time that the problems with both parties need an electoral rebuke for them to come to their senses. I would prefer that the left got their electoral rebuke first, but I think that this is a healthy rebuke as well because the House will shift most likely

to the Republicans. So the steady stream of legislation that I might think is too much will be stopped. But it's pretty clear that Trump is the problem here. That the places where Trump was popular, reasonable people underperformed him. And as I said to somebody, if we had the precise same election, if you imagine the precise same election, however, Trump had conceded as a gentleman, like a gentleman on November 4th, 2020, but the, everything else was the same. You would imagine there would have been a red wave inflation. Everything is going terribly. So I think it's pretty clear that he is the problem. The election deniers are the problem. The whole craziness is a problem. So I'm totally fine with this result. Actually, I have I'm not upset about it. I think that. Well, that's all there was one thing I want to say about it. It slipped my mind. That's the age. But so so I'm not I'm not I'm not all upset about it. And then I think that the Democrats,

it may not actually work out in their benefit because DeSantis did way over perform and going into 2024, if the Republicans come to their senses first and move to the center first, the Democrats might find themselves back on their heels. But there was an article in national Review that said this is if this finally helps the Republicans. Over get past Trump, it'll be overall a good thing. Oh, I'm a Republican. So I was I know this crime issue, which is your expertise that I want to talk about. I am concerned about the crime issue.

And I think you might remember, but I was very open to the bail reform. I do understand the importance of the idea that people are innocent or proven guilty. And I don't dismiss any of that. However, so you don't know what constitution. Yeah. And it's and it's a very important principle. I mean, we've seen terrible injustices happen because people forget that stuff. But, and that's maybe not even the issue of what we're seeing, but as a business owner, just listening to my employees, there's something going on in New York, which is extremely concerning and seeing these kind of flash mobs and running into stores,

like something. But do the statistics bear out what you're saying? I don't, the statistics are not easily. Statistics are aggregate. And it could be that certain neighborhoods are running amok while crime is dropping elsewhere. I don't know what's going on, but I know for sure that what I'm seeing is not something in my imagination. I don't know how that all, like they'll compare, we're getting off, like they'll compare New York to Oklahoma City or something. I'm like, all right, but I have no idea what the boundaries of Oklahoma City are.

Is that similar to a boundary of some neighborhood in the Bronx? I mean, New York has rich neighborhoods and it's down. I don't know how to aggregate all those statistics, but I know that things are different than they were. And I know that nothing stays the same. So maybe that's just a post-pandemic thing and it'll settle back down. Or maybe we'll look back on this and say, well, why didn't we address it then? It only got worse from there. And I feel like the current crop of Democrats that seem to have a lot of power, not Eric Adams, maybe, but I'm worried about their naivete. So I'm sympathetic to that. However, so I was kind of thinking of maybe going to vote for Zeldin, even though I bet that he would lose because he's not going to, you know,

outlaw abortion in New York. Well, no, you cannot, you can't not going to outlaw abortion. And I would be happy with someone at least pushing the other direction. However, then Paul Pelosi got,

uh, and I was going to vote. I never vote. And then Paul Pelosi got hit over the head with a hammer. And then these disgusting conspiracy theories came out. And then Donald Trump Jr. tweeted this Halloween costume.

And then Tucker Carlson, I saw this clip going around viral. It was hard laughing. I said, I can't vote for these guys. Whatever it was, I was like, you know, I just, I said, it's too disgusting. And I feel like I'm going to dirty myself. And for whatever reason, it sapped from me

the urge to be in any way a part of these people, even if I prefer their policies. And I feel like what I've just described is in some way and not just on that issue, why this Republican wave fizzled out. There are too many people like me who do lean in those directions, who just can't fuck. I don't want to be involved with that. Yeah, you're right. Disgusting. They're fucking disgusting.

So hopefully this will be their wake up call. I don't know if you want to respond. Lara has anything to say about that. I don't know. I want to respond. Lara has anything to say about that. I don't know. I mean, I think I think you put your finger on something. It is interesting. You know, I hadn't thought about the attack on Paul Pelosi as maybe being the deciding factor for some people who are wavering just because they've been so successful in vilifying Nancy Pelosi that I imagine that most swing voters wouldn't really care. But you are right that the MAGA reaction to it was so awful that maybe it really did disgust people in a way that made it hard

to pull the lever, at least for certain candidates. I mean, I do think it's a really interesting point about, as Mitch McConnell calls it, candidate quality. And there were certainly some really questionable choices. Why Mehmet Oz, who lives in New Jersey and calls vegetables crudités and doesn't know that the Steelers had a buy? Why Herschel Walker, who has paid for his girlfriend to get an abortion'm going to be your worst goddamn nightmare and talking about election denying. So at every turn where there was a chance to have kind of a more reasonable sort of pre-Trump conservative in the mold of, say, Marco Rubio, they seem to have allowed Trump to anoint the person. And when that happened, it tended to not work out. And maybe that is a cautionary tale for them. Maybe this is the beginning of what he did with Disney. But he's proven himself. If you can imagine him as a black box, as a machine that has to administrate a government of Florida. He's done an able job of it.

He even turned out, and I was on the other side of these issues, as everybody on this podcast knows, even on COVID, the things that I disagreed with him on, it turns out he may have been right now. He may have been reckless and lucky to get some of them right, because based on what we knew at the time, I didn't come to those conclusions. But it's hard to hold people accountable for lucky, correct decisions. So, but for instance, in this last hurricane, you know, the, the guy is not Trump. He's not, he's not an empty suit. And, um, so I think, I think he might run away with it. Um, so yeah, so that, you know, I don't know if you saw this Tucker Carlson thing where he had this, this black guy on with him and the black guy was making fun of Nancy Pelosi's

cans. I mean, and Tucker is just laughing. Like you have to watch it. You hearing it wouldn't do it justice. Just laughing. So what is with these people? The man got hit over the head with the camera. Let's say for the sake of argument, let's just say for the sake of argument that he was a gay man in the closet and they told a lie. It's a ridiculous coincidence that the guy also has a huge political manifesto. Right. But let stranger things have happened let's just say that there was one lie to this story which was the way the guy didn't break in somehow for some reason paul velozzi let the guy in and he wants to keep that part of his life private how does that even change anything it doesn't it no it really like like what like what do they accomplish in

terms of now saying, ah, the man got hit over the head with a hammer. An 82 year old man has is having surgery. What sickness is this anyway? But the other flip side, go ahead. You want to say something? They look like like you wanted to say, oh, I was I was waiting for Perrielle. Did you want to jump in for a sec? No, no, no. Don't worry about Perrielle. Thank you, Dan. We're still sexist. I mean, the other thing that's truly disgusting about it is that David DePapp hit Paul Pelosi over the head in front of the San Francisco police officers who were called on 9-1-1. I mean, as conspiracy theories go, this was so easily debunkable. It's one of the few crimes that happened in the presence of the police who were called there in a documented 911 emergency call made by the victim. It doesn't get

any more obvious that it was a crime having nothing to do with these really noxious conspiracy theories than that. And yes, Tucker Carlson laughing maniacally about an 82 year old man having to have surgery because his skull was fractured by a hammer is at what age at what age do would you would you not mention the age of the man as a aggravating factor you know that's a really good question like at 45 is it not as bad i think i'm just wondering at what age people say oh my an 82 year old i'm just wondering if i got hit in the head if he would say a 53 year old no they, they wouldn't. Failed comedian. Well, maybe I would feel really bad for you. And I would send you a bouquet of, well, at least carnation.

I just don't want to be at the age where my age is mentioned as an aggravating factor and in the soul. It also starts. It also starts again as you get younger, like a nine month old baby. So I'm past that. Well, I mean, I mean, the age would be where you're especially susceptible to dropping dead from an injury that most people

would tolerate. If you punch an 82-year-old man in the face, it's just a different act than punching a 40-year-old man because anything could happen to him, right? My question is, if I got assaulted, would my age come up as a whore, as like, can you believe what they did to this? No. That is

53. All right. I think it has to do too with just the inability to fight back that you're just. Well, I have that component. By the looks of it. Anyway, so but there's something and this will bring us back to the other thing.

On the other hand, with the Trump people and I struggle with this. so help me God, I struggle with this. With the Trump people, I find them, for some of the reasons I've already mentioned, absolutely detestable. And that visceral reaction is real and decent people. And it's easy to say, well, that's all the reason I need to vote against these people. But then we'll hear in the news something about, and Lyra can speak on this, some Title IX abuse, where as a result of the other side, who are very, very classy and always speak nicely and would never give a reason to turn away from them,

they will be responsible for a policy which is just unbelievably abhorrent and it becomes a kind of a philosophical question like how do I react to that one as I should without all the visceral cues to make me hateful? How do I just imagine that situation? I don't even get to see the guy crying or realizing what's happened to him. I just read about it in the paper and say, yeah, but at least they're not laughing at Nancy Pelosi. So I'll vote for those guys

and try to mentally sweep that all under the rug. This is a dilemma I deal with on certain policies of the left that really, really disturbed me. But I know in a certain analytical way- But you didn't vote anyway. I didn't vote anyway, but I'm saying, in a certain analytical way, it's hard to weigh it and then you have to also add to that the cost of inaction the people who die in crimes that maybe wouldn't die in crimes as opposed to so anyway so

that's the kind of thing i struggle i i think that you want to i and i struggle with the same thing by the way but but i think that we're the minority. I think most people are you know, they don't they don't put this much thought into who they're going to vote. Well, Lara actually made a face, which I read as a brother. So let her let her answer that. Well, I think let's take the chase of Eugene recall in San Francisco. I think that proves what point that some people who consider themselves left, they weren't willing to keep a progressive DA because they felt unsafe. And that speaks to what you're saying, which is that he wasn't voted

out because this city has a ton of Republicans. We have like one Republican. He was voted out because people felt unsafe, got really angry. Millions of dollars were poured into recalling him. There were some very forceful people speaking out for the recall, but those people were mostly Democrats, right? So it can reach a pitch where people aren't sort of willing to go with the most progressive wing. I think that's one example. But then on the other hand, on the other hand, you have these really stark choices. And when you have these MAGA candidates and they're talking about rape, raped teenagers carrying pregnancies to term, for example, you know, a 10 year old considering it a blessing to be raped by her uncle. Sorry about the dog. You think about some of the other policies that they have around abolishing Social Security and Medicare, I mean, or just not believing in the results of the election.

And it's just sort of a bridge too far. So I feel like it's this weighing where you think, like, how uncomfortable am I with some of the most left policies of the left versus am I willing to really cross over and join this other team, which has a lot of monsters on it. And I think, you know, in these big races with huge stakes, we saw at least this time that with the really fringe people, there just weren't the margins to go there. I don't think. So I agree with you, but I would just add, and this is where I first contacted you, the story alone of Kamala Harris and her quest to make sure that a guy on death row wouldn't be able to take a DNA test to absolve himself puts her at least in the category of the people that we're talking about, if not in an even worse

category. And because she doesn't have a, a, what we might consider moral argument that she believes in to warrant what she's doing. So you can really play this game, you know, anyway, and there's no obvious answers to me, but this, so now can you, but you did say at the end of the day, if you were forced to vote, you would have gone Hoko. I don't know if you said that, but I thought you implied that. No. Yes. No, no, no.

So I really want to get to this amazing Title IX story that Lara told, but I'll tell you about Zeldin. So I bet somebody that Zeldin would not win. Somebody really believed he would win. And then through one of these additional weird coincidences in my life, I have a lot of them. I met Zeldin and, um, recently about two months ago. Okay. I didn't talk about it on the air. And, um, and I took the stock of him and I guess I can speak.

I was, and I found him to be well, well-intentioned. I questioned him very aggressively on this election denying thing. And why are you, why are you, you know, not just, and it seemed to me, um, he was extremely cagey about it. And it was only, it was only so hard. I I'd already, I think crossed the line of how appropriate it was for me to question it. I was running for governor, but I really, I was pretty strong. And I felt like it's he probably does think that there's a chance that the election was not legit. And but also he was probably afraid to get on Trump's wrong side. As far as his actual beliefs on abortion,

I have no idea. All these guys in my whole life, they've said like, I have, I have no idea. All these guys in my whole life, they've said like, I mean, it was a perfectly acceptable yet totally illogical position of every democratic Catholic governor was I'm personally opposed to abortion. I obey my church's teachings on it, but I would never question a woman's right to choose, you know, this kind of thing. So I chalked it off to and I don't think Trump is actually pro-life either. These Jesse Jackson used to be pro-life on the issue of abortion.

I think if you start really pretending that these people believe what they say they believe in very few times, would you actually be right? I like the good old days where George H.W. Bush could say that he was pro-life and his wife, Barbara Bush, could say that she was pro-choice out in the open in front of the American people and we could live with that. Those days are gone. So an abortion, I don't know. But I found him to be mild and not inspiring, but understood that small businesses were got the shit under the stick in a lot of these laws and generally leaned in the way that I would want somebody to lean. If only that's somebody who has veto power. And by the way, I was comfortable,

pretty comfortable with Andrew Cuomo as well. I would vote for Andrew Cuomo today, despite all the horrible things that he did. And despite the fact that I thought he was responsible for those people, you know, we talked about dying in the nursing homes, but he was like a sensible, moderate Democrat. I don't think Zeldin would have had an impact in terms of the system, much to the right of what Cuomo's impact would have been. So for that reason, I would have voted preferred Zeldin winning, but I won a lot of money. What do you think about Kathy Hockel?

I won real money. How much did you win? I'm just kidding. I won thousands. What do you think about Kathy Hockel? It's hard to get a read on her. She's I mean, she's she you know, I'm a little I'm a little I don't know if Lara feels this way. I'm a little a little bit of a resume snob. I look at her education and her degrees and stuff like that.

And I suppose that she could only be, you know, so talented. But that's as I said, that's being a snob. That's not always true. She's not a compelling politician. Cuomo won by 22 points. Hochul won by five points against a pro-life candidate who is an election denier. That is in its own way is a wake up call to liberals. Like terrifying, isn't it?

Like what? What if maybe if if Zeldin was just adamantly against Dobbs, that might have been enough. Maybe if he called Trump out, that might have been enough. The idea that a Democrat is within a Republican is within striking distance in New York. That's what I'm saying. Like on the flip side, this will happen to the Democrats and they'll have to say, oh, shit, we need to wake up as well. Being within five points to the smartest Democrats that will wake them up. But I don't know if that'll be enough for the party.

Anyway, Title nine. Can you can you give us the short thing? I won't put you through the long description on that you did on Lowry show. If you don't want to, you don't have to. But this is coming back. But could you please explain everything? Lowry will do it all in ways that are that raw dog listeners can understand. But so Title IX is a federal statute.

It prohibits discrimination, quote, on the basis of sex, end quote. And since the 90s, the Supreme Court has interpreted that to mean that colleges and universities are responsible for adjudicating sexual harassment and sexual assault allegations on campus under Title IX, because the idea is that if you're being sexually harassed or you've been sexually assaulted, it's going to interfere with your right to equally access your education. So ever since then, schools have struggled with this role where they become quasi-tribunals with these really, really high stakes allegations. And under the Obama administration, they shifted sharply toward a process that, in my opinion, doesn't really have very much process to it, meaning that

basically someone can make an allegation, they appoint, the school appoints one person, some kind of a bureaucrat to investigate. They can do a pretty terrible investigation and then conclude all by themselves by a 51 to 49 percent margin that you committed the assault and then decide how you should be punished, which is usually expelled. So that started happening with a lot of regularity after Obama issued what's called a dear colleague letter, basically authorizing and even encouraging these kinds of practices. And then when Trump came in, Betsy DeVos rescinded that guidance, and instead they passed regulations. So they're federal laws that do away with that system. And in my opinion, make it more fair, because now there has to be a hearing. So there has to be

a third party who's weighing the evidence. And do get the right to cross-examine the witnesses against you, things like that. So in a nutshell, that's the last 30 years of Title IX. And you had a particular case that you were involved in, which was pretty horrifying. I'm a very reluctant Title IX participant. This is not my area of expertise. This is civil litigation. I am not a civil litigator. I only took this case really because my students shamed me into it. And just as a shameless plug, you talked about Greg Lukianoff. They invited me to give the keynote at the FIRE conference in July in Philadelphia, and I told the story there.

So for your listeners who want the 20-minute version, you can check that out on YouTube. But essentially, there was a kid at a school in way upstate in California. He's Black. He was there on a full scholarship, first in his family, I think, to even graduate from high school. And he had two Tinder dates with a white student. And according to her, in the first Tinder date, he raped her. And then three days later, she wanted to match up with him again. And he agreed. And she came over and they had consensual

sex. So that was her story. And the school did what I said. They had one investigator do an investigation that was laughable. I mean, my kids could have done a better job and my kids are in and the school did what I said. They had one investigator do an investigation that was laughable. I mean, my kids could have done a better job and my kids are in elementary school. It was just ridiculous. It was a word document. Right, we want to underline they are bright kids, Ella.

That's true. They're geniuses, but even still. I mean, this was word documents with kind of stream of consciousness from both people and then her saying, I believe her. And then the school expelled him based on that. And there was all this evidence that really called her aversion of events into doubt. And the investigator had no interest in were the day that they reconciled. So basically she gets back together with her boyfriend and he says, who have you been with? And she says, I've been with this guy, but actually he raped me. So there were reasons to be

concerned, but the investigator felt that none of that was relevant. Anyway, by the time my students and I got involved, he'd already been ordered expelled and we were in the appeals process. So we had to appeal internally through the school and it was sent back down for them to, for her. Does it have to be a state school for any of this to apply? Oh no, it applies to state. It applies to any school that gets federal funding and that's all of them. So this was a California state, and I should say half a million students in California attend CSUs. So it applies to all of them, or did at the time. Now it doesn't. But it also applies to UCs and private schools equally, because everybody depends on federal dollars to survive. So while this was happening,

the case took this really unusual twist, where we had come back down and the investigator was supposed to fix some errors, including like she hadn't let my client see the rebuttal statement that the accuser had made, a bunch of other things. Anyways, in the meantime, the accuser had gone to the courts because she wanted my client to be permanently restrained civilly from ever coming within a certain number of yards of her. And her claim was that he was doing all of these things to harass her after she made these allegations. And based on that, we were entitled to go to trial. So we went to trial on that in court. So there's this parallel proceeding where we got to go to court. And we got to go to court, we got to

really litigate it, which meant that I cross-examined her for two days. And there was no evidence that he had harassed her or contacted her in any way since she had accused him. In fact, there had been a retaliation campaign by other students where they had posted his picture and then word rapist all over campus. So he was afraid for his life and had been hiding in his house. So that evidence came out. Some other evidence came out and the judge ruled for my client. He said, there's no reason to issue this order. He's not posing a danger. He said, you're provoking him. And then in cross, all the evidence about the boyfriend came out, which I just told you. So I thought this is great because we have a chance to do this again since the school remanded back. So I gave the whole transcript to the investigator.

And I said, you need to consider this. This is new evidence. And she said, no, I don't. And she ruled against him again. And so once again, he was ordered expelled and we went up on appeals. This is like the saga. We're now in year two. And in the meantime, Trump gets elected and they roll back these guidelines.

And the California Court of Appeals looks at this system that I just described for a different person, but it's a cross-racial allegation and it's got some similar features, single investigator making all the decisions, one person who's like the detective, the prosecutor, the judge, the jury, and the executioner. And the court says, this is not constitutional. So in the middle of year two, the school's entire process fell apart and they had to start all over again with us. So at that point, we went to the bargaining table, which I can't discuss the settlement other than to say, my client left that school having been found responsible of nothing. So he left.

And can I make one observation? One of the, and it's related to this, one of the, so, so that story is just horrible and make no mistake. This man would, for the rest of his life,

he was thrown out of school as a rapist. Yes. And you can never, ever go to school again. It's very important for people to understand. Hold on. Sorry. No, no, no. So, but anyway, so one of the things we're grappling with, I think as a, as a world is that there's no half-life anymore, no decay anymore to the immediacy of any information. So if this happened to this guy in 1950, yeah, but then the memory would fade. And, you know, the newspaper, it's every for the next for the rest of his life and for his great grandchildren's lives.

You put his name into Google. Rapist will be the top return. So and I don't know if we fully, like I said, grappled with how that changes things, things which may have seemed less severe in terms of consequences are much more severe now simply because they will never just decay on their own. This guy would be a rapist the rest of his living days. So that's the kind of thing you think about that policy. Then who to vote for is not so easy to me. And, you know, and liberals like Bill Clinton, very classy guy, the Bill Clinton during the 92 campaign. He flew to Arkansas to execute a brain damaged man because he wanted to make sure everybody knew he wasn't afraid to do it. Right. So depending on what your priors are, partisanship wise. It's not that hard to create monsters on every side.

The problem with the Republican monsters are their particular type of brutish. What's the what's the word for like, you know, just vulgar. There's a vulgarity in that particular profile of the Republican, which really isn't the equivalent. I have to admit on the put it this way. The Democrats should thank their lucky stars that they lost all the working class votes because it's a little bit more of a working class thing. And so long as the Republicans remain the party of the white working class, they're going to be the party of a lot more vulgar expression of certain things, because that's just the way the world is. Right. So I find these issues very, very hard. Can I ask? So this was years ago, you said, because you said what Trump got elected

during when this all was happening. So the case started in 2018. So where is this guy? What's what? What's the situation with this individual now? Is he? So it's over. We settled it and he left the school as a student in good standing. He was never found responsible. But is he back in some other school? I'm not at liberty to discuss these other matters with you other than to say he is not

a Title IX sex offender. And if he were, he could never go to school again. What happens though? They found him guilty. They expelled him. Does then the DA take this up and say, let's proceed and prosecute him?

She went to the police but they declined to file charges. Wow. You said on the Lowry podcast that, you know, it's very hard for you to go against your tribe. It is. And that's why you're here. We had Jason Furman on The Economist a few weeks ago, and I had kind of congratulated him on being one of the only people who was not afraid to predict inflation when Biden had the whatever, whichever plan it was, that was one point something trillion dollars

that now is, you know, accepted to have caused some some portion of the inflation, not not all of it, obviously. And he kind of said, yeah, but if I had to do over do over again, I would have spoken a lot more loudly about it. And then I said, well, what, but how come so few economists even knew this? You know, you, you think of economy as a, as a science yet nobody, but you and Larry Summers said this. And he said, well, actually, basically all the academic economists I know felt this way. They were just afraid to say so. By the way, speaking of inflation, any chance of the comedian Sal, never mind. So, so, so what, what you're referring to all these, this kind of, and I, and I regard

this as a, as again, a problem, more of the left than the right, this pressure to self censor. I mean, to the extent that it could have led to an additional 3% inflation, it's quite consequential, right? But that doesn't get your goat up like making fun of Paul Pelosi's hammer attack. So, again, I just keep coming back all different ways. I think deciding who to vote for is hard. And I think...

But how many people put the kind of... Well, you don't vote anyway, but how many people think about it that deeply i don't know and more people more people than you might give credit don't you think that most people just have like three issues like their top issues that they give a shit about and that's how they vote i don't know and the other thing what about lara baslin how much how much uh angst i assume you voted yesterday. How much how much of thought process did you put into it? Or were you or was were you decided and there was no issue? I am a voting dork. I sit there with my ballot.

I go through every race. I read about the candidates, the school board candidates, the tax assessor. I read about everybody. I read about their positions. I take it really seriously. That said, I have never voted for a Republican in my entire life. And I cannot imagine a universe where I would. I cannot imagine. New York mayoral race, 1992. You wouldn't vote for, not the current Giuliani. I mean, I don't mean Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde, you know, or whichever one of them, but you wouldn't vote for that Giuliani? No. Okay. I don't think there,

I just don't think I could ever, I'm trying to imagine a Republican, but I can't conjure one up. I try to be very careful because in my state there's Democrats for me to choose between, right? Because it's so blue here and we have ranked choice voting. So I've got to be really thoughtful. And maybe if I lived in a purple state, I'd have a harder time, but God, I wouldn't. You wouldn't. I'm sorry to hear you say that. I'll bet you are. Although I will say this, people used to split tickets, but parties used to also have less, less cleavage. They would have more, they would have bipartisan, uh, bills. So you could hope that if you split the ticket for a moderate Democrat, that he might vote for moderate bills that even the Republicans might pass. So I guess what I'm saying is that everything

is so highly partisan now and people almost never, except for Joe Manchin, maybe, um, break party ranks. It becomes illogical to split tickets because you're whoever you vote for. They're going to vote 100 percent for that party's thing, which is why actually I think it was perfectly reasonable to vote for Fetterman. I was another thing that bothered me about Fox News was this kind of the way they spoke about Fetterman. And also, I didn't understand the argument. Yeah, you can't have a governor like Fetterman because a governor needs to do things. You can't have a guy like Fetterman handling I mean, you can't have all the senators like that, assuming the worst of Fetterman's. And I don't know, maybe he's actually perfectly lucid, right? But assuming the worst. But he's certainly capable of voting yes for the policies that the Democrats want to vote for. And if you believe in those policies, why would you vote for the Republican?

Just because Fetterman may have some decline. I never understood that argument. I'd vote for, I'd vote for a guy like Fetterman who agreed with me. If, and, and you vote for a well-trained seal, if they could flip that, put their flipper on, on, on the yes or the no. Yeah. If they're going to vote for what I think is important that they'll, I'd vote for him. Yeah. Ted Kennedy did the job drunk for years. Nobody knew the difference. I always say that. But this is why senators in general, Obama, I was thinking about Obama. Obama may have actually gotten more practical experience from being a community organizer than he did from being a senator in terms of, because he was good at his job. But generally, senators don't have the kind of experience that I would consider

has anything to do with being president. I just want to say that I'm so happy to have had Laura on because any little tiny bit of doubt that you might have poisoned me with about not voting for Hochul has totally dissipated from listening to her. So thank you for that. So let's let's get to crime. Let's get to crime. So my opinion on crime and a lot of issues, and it's more and more and more since I thought of this, I think about every issue this way, which is that everybody on both sides of issues is usually correct. What it really comes down to is how they are prioritizing things. The people who were for racial profiling, I think, at least until it really went over, jumped the shark, were correct that it lowered crime. And the people who were against racial profiling prioritized the the unacceptability of the humiliations and the various and worse that it was leading to for innocent black people.

Similarly, with I think a lot of the issues that Laura can tell us about, there are real trade-offs here between how much crime we'll accept and how much kind of abuse or injustice we're going to accept to people who commit the crimes or are just accused of the crimes. And the analogy I sometimes give is, I can stop 10, 20,000 deaths a year on the highway by lowering the speed limit to 30 miles an hour. Well, how dare you put economics in front of lives? Well, we do put economics in front of lives, right?

So, and I think that is an analogy for a lot of arguments. So having said that, I want, Larry, and this can be free form to tell us your general, as one of the experts in this subject, general observations on this crime issue and what you would like people to know. And then somewhere in there, I would like you to tell me if you were mayor of Philadelphia, let's say, what you would do that you think would make a dent in the crime rate. So go ahead. Well, first of all, I love the idea of being the mayor of Philadelphia because I was born and raised there and my family is still there. So I would get to boss them around and tell them what to do. So let's stick with that hypothetical.

But before I get to being mayor, just a couple of top line points. One is that you're right. Crime is disaggregated. It's experienced by certain communities at a very, very high impact. And then others, it's just much more diffuse. It's really hard to make generalizations about it. People talk about crime as if it's kind of this monolithic issue. And they like to talk about federal statistics. Most crime, of course, is not federal. It's local. And a lot of this turns on what's happening in your very particular community. So we can just kind of start by disaggregating it and talking about many, many, many small criminal justice systems, not one overarching system. I think the other thing that's really important to remember is that when we look at most crime, it's prosecuted by district attorneys and prosecutors, and most of them are elected. So look at what happened this race. In this race, the progressive prosecutor movement in some ways was on the

line. We had this recall that I just talked to you about in San Francisco of RDA. The DA in LA barely escaped, barely escaped getting recalled. And the prognostications were progressive prosecutors are going to lose because people are feeling unsafe, because crime is rising, et cetera. And also because of the way the media covers it, because we don't hear about the success stories for every a hundred people who get out and go live productive lives. No one's writing about them. We write about the one guy who got a break and went out and mowed down two innocent women in an intersection. So for all those reasons, you would think progressive prosecutors would have been the big losers, but they weren't.

They won major races. They won in Hennepin County, which is Minneapolis. They won in Polk County, Iowa, which is the biggest county in Iowa. Two of them were buff challengers in Texas. Another one won a middle district in Texas. So they're winning continually. So why is that? Why, given everything that you just described, are they able to prevail? And the answer is the communities that are most impacted, those are the ones that are turning out to vote for them. When you look at Philadelphia, for example, Larry Krasner elected in 2017. Crime went up. People were talking about how Philadelphia was a hellscape. Kim Fox elected in Cook County, Chicago. People talk about Chicago as the violence hellscape of the nation. You would think that both of them would have been defeated by massive margins. In fact, Larry Krasner trounced his challenger last year and Kim Fox won too. And that is because when you look at these communities, they have been to the tough on crime movie. And they know that when you take their son or their daughter or their husband or their

cousin away and take them upstate and they get beaten up and they get sick and they get emotionally and physically abused and sexually assaulted. They come back seven, 10, 14 years later, and they're in much worse shape. And in the meantime, the family unit has fallen apart. So nobody really wants that who has experienced it directly. And that's something I think that a lot of people miss in the messaging. So then you look at, for example, a place like Pennsylvania, where Mehmet Oz hammered John Fetterman because he had the audacity, I guess, to give people with criminal convictions who had shown that they had been rehabilitated a second chance, oh my God, how dare he? And that didn't really work. On the other hand, we do have a history of that messaging

working, right? It worked in the 50s, the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, the 90s. And as you say, some of the most effective tough on crime messengers were Democrats, including 80s, the 90s. And as you say, some of the most effective tough on crime messengers were Democrats, including Bill Clinton, who passed some of the harshest sentencing and criminal, I don't want to call them reform, criminal justice laws, and we're still living with the consequences of them. So I feel like we're in this weird rewriting the playbook where the tough on crime people are trying to snatch back the narrative. And the storyline going into this election was they had overwhelmingly done that. Lee Zeldin was going to win because of crime in New York. Miminoff was going to win because crime in Pennsylvania. And that didn't happen. But we don't know to the extent that

Trump might have been the different, like as we talked about before, they might very well have won if not for these horrible Republican. Fair. It's not a single issue. It's certainly not a single issue. But I think with Lee Zeldin, it was it was almost very much one. And you're right. She won by not as much as she should have in a blue state. Absolutely true. But he didn't he didn't win in the end. And he was hammering that. So we get to me being mayor, which is my favorite part of this question. And you know what? The mayor actually has a lot of control over crime, I think. I think more than the DA does in the sense that the criminal justice system has

just become this dumping ground for people who are homeless, for people who are mentally ill, for people who we just don't want to deal with. We just want them to go to jail so we don't have to look at them anymore, which is not addressing root causes. So the massive spread of homeless encampments, for example, in California, places on the East Coast, that's really, to my mind, the mayor's job. You need to pass laws, build housing. You need to fund your public health service. You need to give people mental health services. You need to give them substance abuse treatment. That's not the prosecutor's job. They're not sort of this Swiss army knife of solutions.

They have a hammer and that's it. And bringing down a hammer on a mentally ill, addicted homeless person is just not going to work. So I wanted to know where where you you know, how do you balance civil liberties and crime, you know, like frisking, like, you know, stop and frisk, for example, did reduce crime. And yet there were innocent people that got there, got frisked and were harassed by the police. I think that stop and frisk was an unmitigated disaster and also not constitutional, which isn't my opinion. That's the federal judge's opinion, it swept up tens of thousands of people who were completely innocent. It disrupted their lives. Sometimes they got beaten up, they got harassed. It was completely not worth it. And what's so interesting about stop and frisk is the stats between Black people and white people in terms of who's carrying contraband. White people are more likely to be carrying contraband than Black people. And yet,

statistically speaking, they're far less likely to be stopped. I just feel like even most conservatives are going to concede that stop on frisk was a massive failure. I would say now I the first time we got wind of the statistics on stop and frisk were when that was that lawsuit that I think eventually led to whatever decision that founded on constitutional. And it I don't remember at all what the statistics were, but I remember there was a graph. It started out with Giuliani, and it was X number of stops and frisks, and the murder rate came plunging down. And by the time Bloomberg took over, he just kept upping it and upping it and upping it. And the law of diminishing returns had totally kicked in.

It was a slight decrease maybe. And I said, what are you doing already? And then, so at that point, I think I was already on the podcast and I said, well, this is, this is crazy. You know? And I had many friends who had horrible stories about the cops. I had a friend who was beaten up by the cops. So, you know, I'm not the typical sheltered person on this stuff. So I had a lot of misgivings about it. But anyway, so what was oh, and then Bloomberg was quoted somewhere flippantly saying that, yeah, I know we we pulled over a lot.

We arrested a lot of black kids with marijuana. But, you know, that's the price that we pay, meaning like I know we pulled over a lot. We arrested a lot of black kids with marijuana, but that's the price that we pay, meaning I know it was a bullshit charge. We didn't really care about the marijuana, but it was a good way to get these kids in. Hopefully that made them stop carrying guns or whatever he said. And I'm like, Jesus Christ,

you are a frigging out of touch elitist. These kids get arrested. Who knows what happens to them when they get... It was heartless to me. But again, but I know if I if I put sodium pentothal into Michael Bloomberg's veins, he would say, do you know how many lives I saved? That's what he would say. He wasn't he wouldn't you wouldn't find racism in him or I don't care about black people. You would just find a totally different prioritization of this outcome. I would say that I saw an editorial in the Wall Street Journal that had some statistic. There's more assaults since on subways.

There haven't been this many assaults on subways since like 1997 or something. So I went and I did the research and I actually found the stats and whatever it was to see what they were talking about. And it was true on that one statistic. They were they were correct. However, the total number of subway crime back in 1997 was like five times as much. They tried to pretend that it was the same situation as it was in the 90s. But it wasn't. And I would argue that if we were at this point today, halfway between where we are now

and where we actually were in the 90s, the things that you've mentioned probably would melt away. I think if those communities were living the kind of crime and violence that they were back in the late 90s, now, I think enough of them would peel away. They'd say, no, no, we need tough measures. And that's as it should be, right? In a way. I mean, since there is no

clear answer here, the community is going to have to make that decision. How much, like my wife, I don't know if you know, my wife is Puerto Rican and she grew up very, very poor in Bushwick and Brooklyn. Many, many people in her family were in jail. So when she speaks about this issue, depending on which side of the

bed she woke up on, you wouldn't know who you're talking because one time she'll be so angry about victims of crime. And then another time she'd be so angry about the way someone in her family was treated by the police or by the way, her uncle would come out of prison years later and just totally a broken person. So they're both true. And I don't know if anybody knows where those lines can be drawn at some point, even Laura Bazelon would, if she had to leave her apartment or her home, if crime were bad enough, you'd be like, fuck this. We need to get these people off the street. You know, there,

there is a limit you disagree disagree with everything I just said? The thing that I disagree with is that there's no clear answer. I would push back and say, I think there is the beginning of an answer. So getting back to your wife and her family's experience, there's this program in Brooklyn and it's run cooperatively by the district attorney there and a nonprofit called Common Justice. And what it does is it looks at offenses committed by mostly young Black men ages 18 to 25. They're all violent. So shootings, stabbings, maimings, beatings. And what they do with these cases is they go to the victims and they say, okay, there's two options for you. We've arrested this person. They can go through the victims and they say, okay, there's two options for you. We've arrested this

person. They can go through the traditional system and the overwhelming likelihood is that they'll plead guilty and they'll get a prison sentence. Or you can do this other program through common justice, which is this restorative justice alternative where they're going to be surveilled all the time. They're going to have constant check-ins with a probation officer. They're going to have to get a job and vocational training. They're going to have constant check-ins with a probation officer. They're going to have to get a job and vocational training. They're going to have this charge hanging over their head. They're also going to have to sit down with you and tell you what happened and why it's not going to happen again and come up with measures by which you personally and we will hold them accountable. And 90% of the time, the victims choose restorative justice when

they're offered that alternative. They interviewed one of the mothers. I think she had a 14-year-old kid who was just beaten within an inch of his life by a 21-year-old. And she said something like, I didn't pick this alternative because I'm a merciful person. When I saw what had happened to my son, I wanted the person who did this to be burned alive. And then I wanted him to be drowned in the river. And then I wanted the person who did this to be burned alive. And then I wanted him to be drowned in the river. And then I wanted him to be drowned in a river of fire. But I know what's going to happen, which is six or seven or eight years from now, he's going to come home and I'm going to go to the corner store and he's going to be there. And he's going to be worse.

And I don't want that. So I'm going to try this other thing. And common justice has been around for over a decade. and the recidivism rate is less than 10%. I'm not saying it's the panacea, but I am saying you can see why if you pour enough resources into something like that, and you can convince people that it's not a bunch of hippies dancing in a circle, but instead a very punitive, stringent set of measures that are really designed to make sure the person doesn't do it again and gives the victim real validation of their harm, people will choose that. Yeah, that's a tough one. It's funny, we say, well, only recidivism rate of 10% and you say okay well what does that mean for the 10%

you know what the regular recidivism rate is it's like 40 50 60% like you can't compare it to the almighty you've got to compare it to the alternative well I was taking it as 10% of these 10% would still be in prison if not for this program, would not be out

on the street able to do it again. Well, what I'm saying is if you look at the people that we send to prison, look, most people go to prison, they're coming out at some point. So you look at those people, they go to prison, they do some serious time and then they come out. How often are they reoffending? They're reoffending off the charts. And then you look at the people who go through the common justice program and they're reoffending less than 10% of the time. I mean, I personally would take those odds. I'm not against the common.

I don't even know anything about it. And why would I be against it? I'm not. I'm not suggesting you're against it. I'm just saying that, you know, people are trying different approaches because the tough on crime policies, we know that they don't keep us safe. And as you said, it's the law of diminishing returns that, and criminologists have broken this down in ways that I'm not smart enough to explain, but you get to a certain point

where there's basically a million people you're locking up who you don't need to, and nobody's better off for it. And we don't look at sort of the other costs. Like you're thinking, okay, well, this person is incapacitated. I'm thinking, well, what if they didn't do it? What if they don't need to be there more than two or three years? What's happening to their family in the meantime? What could have happened if they had had X, Y, or Z other thing? And they could have gone on to parent their kid who's now in the juvenile justice system, et cetera. Absolutely. So two quick questions before we go ahead and realize how late it was. This incident in Buffalo

where the woman was beaten up for seven minutes and went on Facebook in New York. Do you know about this? No. Oh, well, this is the media bias, but right before the election, there was a case in Buffalo. You'll have to Google it.

I'll send it to you because I'm afraid if I recount it, I'm going to end up saying something that's not quite correct, and I don't want to do that. I'll send it to you. Cause I'm afraid if I recount it, I'm going to end up saying something that's not quite correct. And I don't, I don't want to do that. There was a case essentially of a, of a guy who beat the hell out of his wife.

The beating was on Facebook. He didn't, he got arrested, but then allowed to, to leave maybe on the, for one of the bail reform laws and then came back and killed her. And, you know, I would like to know anybody's answer to that. Can these laws be improved? Yeah, it's these is these are so these are such

tricky stories and there's always going to be one. Right. You just told me a Willie Horton story, which is we had a program that was geared toward leniency and look what happened. And the truth of the matter is that the risk of dec was geared toward leniency and look what happened. And the truth of the matter is that the risk of decarceration is never going to be zero. These stories are never going to magically vanish. And you have to ask yourself, like you said, what's the risk of over-incarceration? Because we are attaching a cost-benefit analysis to this, even though we don't want to talk about it that way. As you were saying, talking about, for example, highway fatalities and speed limits.

And so what I would say to you is when you look at the famous Willie Horton story from the 1980s, I think we're all old enough to remember that one, which was used by H.W. Bush against Michael Dukakis to say, look at what he did as governor of Massachusetts. There was a furlough program. This guy, Willie Horton, got a furlough and he went out and he raped a woman and he killed her husband. That's true. It's also true that 99% of the people in that program completed it successfully. But we only remember Willie Horton. Yeah.

But if you're the victim of violent crime, boy, it's really something. I know. And I completely, you know, it's interesting. It reminds me of, it reminds me of the stranger danger stuff where, I mean, there's so many stories that come to mind, you know, Adam Walsh or Eton Patzer, you know that those stories of these stranger abductions and child murders, you know that they're statistically so, so, so unlikely that intellectually. I know that. I understand what the statistics are. And yet, once I had small children, all I could think about was the possibility of something like that happening to them and how I don't even have the words to describe what could they walk to school by themselves, the neighborhood public school that was four blocks away? And my answer was always no. And I talked to my ex-husband about it.

And I said, I know it's not rational. And I know I should just let them walk to school. But I just can't. Because I think, what if they're that statistic? And he said, it's completely irrational. And yet, I understand. Like, what if it was us? That would be the end of our lives.

And so it's very, very hard to discount these stories. By the way, I don't know if you're religious or not. I assume kind of that you're not. My father was vehemently not religious, did not believe in God in the slightest. Even on his deathbed, he didn't buckle. And he sold you the watch? Yeah, but he sold me the watch, yeah.

But yet he wouldn't, he didn't buckle. And he sold you the watch. But he told me the watch. Yeah. But, uh, but yet he wouldn't say something. He had trouble say something that might, you know, God might punish you. Do you ever have like any of these superstitions that because of what you do, you do, huh? Yeah. But this is less of a superstition than just a wildly irrational fear, but it's based on these stories, right? You just don't want to be that 0.05% thinking to yourself, why did I let them walk to school? I could have just, you know what I mean? And it's always that story. And I just, I know the truth and yet my emotion overrides my intellect. The last question is, this is, I don't know, did you ever read the

email that I sent you given with, had all the studies that bore on the Derek Chauvin trial? I think I remember this. This was like two years ago. Yeah. All the studies that show this excited delirium and this asphyxiation stuff was on very flimsy science. So I sent it to a lot of people. Nobody would answer me because it was. And finally, but I did. I did run into an MSNBC legal analyst who never answered me. I said, you know, you must you must think I'm an idiot.

I send you the stuff and you don't even answer me. I'm sure it's because I'm I'm just out to lunch on this stuff. And he says, no, you're just out to lunch on this stuff. And he says, no, I'm, you're not out to lunch on that stuff. And that's all he would say to me, meaning what, which I took to mean was nobody is going to dare at during that moment in history say, yeah, I think you're right. This, this case against Derek Chauvin may not be, may not hold together, but. Well, when you challenged me on that, I had a pretty forceful rebuttal and I haven't moved off of my position. And I will say now I have the full force of the jury behind me. Right.

So I'm feeling better about my position, but I'm glad you got validation elsewhere. So what I would like is someday when you do come into the comedy cellar. Yeah. Because after Zoom is amazing. I do feel like I've met you, but I have never met you actually. Before you come, you let me know and I will send you that email again. So you could just review it a little bit and then we can have like three or four drinks.

So we're not speaking very carefully and we can discuss the whole thing for fun because for fun. I love that. That's Noam's idea. It is fun to discuss these things because that that case is really fascinating to me. It's really fascinating to me why there were certain arguments that were just not made. And I do believe there's some insight into that. If you read that recent Eric Wemple piece where he talked about why he was afraid to even defend James Bennett at the Times and the same reason that Furman said he was afraid to say anything about inflation. I think that has something to do with the way the whole Derek Chauvin case went down

without a single person raising any argument that he might have that would be something to grapple with in terms of the cause of death in that case. I don't give a shit that Derek Chauvin, if he did it, let him fry. But, you know. Well, speaking of drunken conversations, I hope you have a wonderful time in Israel

with Michael Moynihan, who is very happy to drink a lot and talk a lot. And I'm sure you two will have a fantastic time. Who you would not vote for, probably, if he was running for office. Moynihan, what party would he even run for? He would be running as some random third party so far down the ballot,

I wouldn't be able to find his name. Lara, if you ever do come to the Comedy Cellar, everything on the menu, half off. Excellent. I am going to come to New York. I'm excited. I will let you know when and I will come by and hopefully you'll have me back. Oh, I hope so. We'll have you in person. Finally. Yeah. I know Zoom can be mirrored sometimes, but is there somebody on your left on your left there that you keep looking at? No. Oh, I sometimes keep looking over to make sure that my dog hasn't like run through the fence in the backyard.

No, it's just me though. Just me and my loud barking dog. Oh, I thought you're looking at your, somebody saying get a load of him. Can you believe it? No, there's nobody in here. No, if I'm just, I'm rolling my eyes. I'm rolling them at my dog.

He and I are exchanging eye rolls. Like, oh my God, can you believe we're on this podcast? Yeah. Well, he, he, he is your dog is a staunch conservative is perhaps. And he does. You know, he likes to push back. He gives me the business. Thank you, Lara Bazelon. I would say this, Lara. All right. Well, maybe not. If if no matter how disgusting election denying, you name it, he was or she were. You would not vote for the other person if the other person you knew was going to be the vote to end legal abortion. In the end, the policies still matter more. That's my final point. And you'd be right.

And I think a lot of Republicans are feeling strongly about certain issues. In the end, that's how they rationalize it. In the end. Yeah, he's horrible, but I just can't tolerate this. There are few issues which compare to abortion in terms of the bright line. Like you might feel strongly about taxation, but it's not the end. It shouldn't be the end of the world. But abortion on both sides, people feel like this is, you know, there is no compromising. Well, the ultimate litmus test of your argument is what's happening in Georgia. And we'll see what happens in the runoff because the Herschel Walker race really comes down to exactly what you just said. I think Walker will lose. I didn't, this is not my original argument, but because Kemp is very popular, there was, he had significant coattails, which probably

inflated Walker. Although I think there was also a third-party candidate. How could Walker win? This guy, how could he win? How could he have gotten this close? It's unreal. Also, to people who really care about this stuff, it doesn't matter anymore whether they take the Senate because they have the House.

So it's another reason that a Republican might not care so much. If the Republicans didn't take the house and you say, oh shit, we got to make sure the Democrats don't have undivided government for the next two years, then people might go out and vote for Walker with more verve.

But I think now that the house is taken care of, so legislation is thwarted, again, from the point of view of the people who are thinking this way, that's another reason not even to bother to go vote for Walker. That's my opinion. From your lips to adjust God's ear. Oh,

okay. Well, thank you, Lara. You know, once again, podcast at comedy seller.com. What'd you think of this episode?

It was, it started off talking about name tags and waiters and the new comedy cellar room on West Third Street. It ended up in some deep discussions about about criminology and and voting. People actually don't typically write in. So I'm going to have to ask Nicole. Nicole, your thoughts. It was a good one. It was a long one. Lots of topics. But what about the stuff, the the Bazelon stuff? How did that interest you? What parts of it interested you? I need to, like, go back and reference all of them.

I mean, it was it was pretty great. I had a great time back here. This is the old monotone lines. She you can so impressive, isn't she? Every I have been hot. Every answer is like it's written out in advance and she will even five minutes later. Remember something I said is that you have to your point that you made five minutes ago. That's incredible to me.

Okay. She should be on TV. Um, she's very sharp. Well, you know, um, I don't know whether or not she's camera ready,

but, um, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I guess why not? Um, podcast at comedy seller..com who do we have next week perry isle um we have it's a comedy episode next week because noam's in israel i mean i can't

tell you what i did to get this guy that noam wanted i don't remember who it is right now but then and i sent like 400 emails all right so no So no, I'm on Friday. Bon Voyage. And we'll see you next time. Thank you. Bye bye.