The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Matt Taibbi

Episode Date: July 26, 2019

Matt Taibbi and Myq Kaplan

You're listening to The Comedy Cellar, live from the table on the Riotcast Network, riotcast.com. Good evening, everybody. Welcome to the Comedy Cellar Show here on Sirius XM Channel 99. I'm here. My name is Noam Dwarman. I'm the owner of the Comedy Cellar. I'm here, as always, with my very good friend, Mr. Dan Natterman. Hello, Daniel. How do you do?

And we have Mike Kaplan. Hello. He's become our resident lefty. So whenever we have a topic that we need someone really... Happy to be here to present what I think is a reasonable account. On the authentic far left, alt left, what do you call yourself? I call myself a compassionate person. All right.

He's a standard comedian with multiple television appearances. His one-hour special... What's the name of the company that guy... Oh, it's New Wave, or whatever New Wave is now. I think it was... Comedy Dynamics. Yes, Comedy Dynamics. Yes. They produced it, and it's on Amazon now.

He's on Amazon, and he has a podcast called Broccoli and Ice Cream. Okay, and the guest of honor. Someone I didn't think we were going to be able to get you. First of all, you're one of my mother's heroes. My mother is to the left of Mike Kaplan. Wonderful. Get her in here.

Oh, no, no, no. Matt Taibbi is the author of the New York Times bestseller's Insane Clown President. Not about Trump. Yeah. The Divide, Griftopia, and The Great Derangement. He's a contributing editor

for Rolling Stone and winner of 2008 National Magazine Award for columns and commentary. So my big interest in meeting you was because, though we probably don't agree

on a lot of things, the stuff that you were writing about Russia, I thought was absolutely, stunningly on, and so did he. Before we get to that, we had a big week of mob rule censorship here at the Comedy Cellar, and that might interest you. So, Dan, if you want to run it down, let's just cover it. I will run it down. I want to say, just real briefly, I ran into Ginger from Gilgan's Island at my gym last week.

Tina Louise? Yes, I did, and I recognized her. She has the same mole on her, I guess it's her left cheek it would be. But in any case, I thought that was interesting. I won't divulge the name of the gym to avoid stalkers, but I thought that was an interesting thing. Anyway, yes, this week was a big week at the Comedy Cellar. You don't mind sitting through this a little bit, do you? No, of course not.

I don't know what your schedule is, but it never happens. But this week we had two big things. But Periel, by the way, is not here. You neglected to mention that. Periel is not here. Go ahead. She's in Israel. Nobody cares.

Dina Hashem. We do a show, Matt, I don't know if you're familiar with, this week at the Comedy Cellar. Are you familiar with the show? I've heard of it, yeah. I'm not familiar with it. It's on Comedy Central. I got kids, though. Yeah, you got kids.

It's on Comedy Central, and the comedians go up and they talk about the week's news in joke form. So Dina Hashem, one of our newer comedians that works here, who is, I believe, Arab-American, she did a joke about the murder of rapper XXXTentacion, I think. Tentacion, perhaps? I'm not sure. I don't follow rap, as you know. Not since the Sugarhill Gang was some time ago. One of your faves?

I don't know why. The murder of that rapper was like a year ago, but for some reason it's back in the news, I think. No, just because Dina did a joke about it, that's why. Yeah, but she did a joke for the comedy Cellar Show, which is about weekly news. Oh, I see. So I don't know why she did that joke, but in any case, she did a joke. The joke essentially was saying that, because this rapper was murdered, he had a lot of money on him.

$50,000. So Dina said something to the effect of, that should be a Venmo commercial. Right, right. That was the joke. Makes me think, why don't I have Venmo It's very tragic but on the other hand I thought this would be a great commercial for Venmo Yeah so apparently she got a lot of Very very nasty reactions

On Twitter which is Twitter is kind of That's what happens on Twitter It's kind of a cesspool of hostility And hatred So we got shut down for that kind of, that's what happens on Twitter. It's kind of a cesspool of hostility and hatred. So we got shut down for that. Comedy Central elected with Dina's urging to pull the joke.

Comedy Central, to their credit, as far as I understood it, was going to stand by them. Stand by it. Only a couple hours left to spare, but then the threats became too dangerous and they doxed her mother, I think, and she had to hire security. And at the same week,

we were sponsoring a reparations debate. We do like a half a dozen debates a year. And it had like, I forget who the panelists were, but Coleman Hughes was there. Coleman Hughes. Coleman Hughes spoke

in front of the Congress a couple weeks ago. Amy Wax, from your alma mater, you pen. Amy Wax. And before the recent Amy Wax controversy and some experts, UPenn. Amy Wax and before the recent Amy Wax controversy and

some experts on the other side. But anyway, we started getting threats about that, of disruption. That we shall not have a debate about reparations. Wow. Not even have the debate? Yeah, that we shouldn't have the debate.

And if we did, they were going to come and they were going to disrupt. This was this group called ADAS, African Descendants of Slaves. American Descendants of Slaves. American Descendants of Slaves. And so, it's just the times we live in. We had two nice things that were scheduled and

they get shut down and the self-censorship that is caused by these things can't even be measured, but it's huge. Now, Noam, how disappointed are you? I was very much looking forward to the reparations debate. I thought it was going to be quite interesting. I'm disappointed. Of course I'm disappointed.

But I shut it down because we don't have the expertise. Like people are telling us just hire more security, but we don't have the expertise to handle that kind of thing. And it can take on a life of its own before, you know, somebody gets hurt. And then or, you know, a lot of the security, most security guys are black. And then you can have other people taunting them like, oh, you're doing the slave master's bidding. And it can get very, there's all kinds of oh, you're doing the slave master's bidding. There's all kinds of bad scenarios that I could see coming out of it, all of which could go viral or have somebody get hurt. Either one is horrible.

And I had to remember that this is something we do just for gratification because it's fun and we're interested. But it's not what we do for a living here. And I thought it would be irresponsible to take that kind of risk just to indulge myself in these debates. So we'll do other debates in the future. But I did speak to one of these people. This is interesting. And I talked to you about this one time.

I spoke to one of these... You're referencing a man who hasn't been introduced. I spoke to one of these ADAS, this woman from ADAS. And she came at me very strong in the beginning. One of the first questions, what are you? Are you a Jew? She said to herself that. But I didn't react

and by the end we actually had a pretty nice conversation which ended so nicely. I said, you see this conversation we're having and all the back and forth, that's all I want from the debate. So it was really you know well look there's so much controversy now over I mean I think we

all kind of grew up with the idea that comedy that the role of comedy is to explore these things right and this wasn't gonna be funny yeah okay yeah no even if it's not the role of comedy is not to be funny matt so so what she said to me this one is uh she said to me when she said she said you're i didn't and i got i didn't i didn't want to tell her i was jewish i still it's probably obvious but i don't know why you're asking me that but she says well anyway you wouldn't do a debate about the holocaust would you and and i just kept quiet but the truth is as, and I think I told you, I wanted to do a debate about the Holocaust. I wanted to get some Holocaust deniers,

the best ones, you know, and have it debated. Right. And as you'd want to say, on the one side, I said, well,

how do you know it's six million? How do you know? Like, go through all of it and then, hopefully, humiliate them.

Hopefully, they don't have a case. You know, it's a little bit of a calculated risk. But my thinking being that the best way to take this on, like when somebody says something outrageous like that that I feel is not true, I want a live televised debate for the whole world to watch.

You agree with that? Sure, yeah. I mean, look, the atmosphere is so bad right now. I mean, how bad is it for stand-up comedy? I can only imagine. I mean, in punditry, it's really been bad in the last three or four years. But, you know, comedy, I mean, are you steering away from every subject? Well, Mike hasn't spoken yet, so we'll give Mike the mic.

Thank you, Dan. I mean, I think it's interesting that with the Holocaust, there were reparations paid. So they didn't, they did debate that like pretty soon after it happened. And it's, it's interesting to me that there's a group of descendants of slaves in America who are, according to this situation, like not wanting there to be debate because I mean, Ta-Nehisi Coates' whole, like I just read and listened, listened to today on the way here, the case for reparations, like, to be refreshed about it. We must have been caught in a lot of crosstown traffic, because that's a hell of a long... I was coming from Connecticut. Oh, yeah. Okay.

And, yeah, it was an hour and a half, and it was, I mean, I hadn't really engaged with it this extensively, and there's, I mean, so many facts, and then so many just, you know, beautifully made points to get to the point where he wants there to be a public debate. That's what he wants is like H.R. 40 to go forward and for there to be like there's no money on the table with this bill. It's just a bill to be passed to explore, be like, hey, check. We check if water is healthy. We check if air is healthy. Like, hey, why don't we see if the worst thing that America ever did, like, is having lasting implications, which it is. And if there is something that we can do about it, and if there's something, if so, what should we do about it? Like, all that he and many other black people these days want.

Like, I'm certainly also, there's no black people in the room, I don't think. And that's also, it's important to listen to what, obviously black people are not a monolith as well, but it's important to listen. Are you black? He's of color. I'm Palestinian. Yeah, so that is not a black person. People of color.

So this is interesting. No one did 23andMe. I think you had some. No, my kids. My wife has some. So I asked her the following question about reparations, because I think this is one of the hardest questions. I said, if you had 12 young black kids in a bad neighborhood, all of whom were suffering the classic difficulties that we attribute to poor black kids,

hassled by the police, crappy schools, having trouble getting a job, you name it. And four of them are descendants of Haitian immigrants from the 40s. And the other eight are descendants of slaves. Are you going to literally tell, okay, you eight over here, here's your check. You four over there, You're on your own.

I think one of the answers. You know what she said? Go ahead. Yes. She said yes. I said, all right. At least I credited her with, this is the woman from,

one of the people who protested the thing. One of the things that I think. That's crazy to me. But the money would be used to build schools and help. No, she wants a check. She's not in charge, and she's not the only person.

We're already building schools. We already spent millions of dollars to try to help that. That's one of the things that could be debated. You're not just debating reparations yea or nay. You're debating in what form, the structure of it, which is also going to have to be discussed

if there are reparations. This is going to have to be discussed anyway. I just found it stunning that she was, like, ready to cut those other black people loose because they didn't have the right DNA. Yeah. It's just, but all right. Look, they could be helped in other ways, but as far as reparations are concerned, she wants just for the American descendants of slaves.

I mean, and Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Case for Reparations actually isn't only making The Case for Reparations of slavery, but it's Jim Crow, which lasted until 1965, and also housing discrimination, which is like a legacy of slavery that still continues to this day with black people 10 years ago getting bilked more disproportionately into subprime mortgages. So let's move on. But, you know, you never answered Matt's question, which was how does all this environment affect stand-up? I think that stand-up thrives under everything. Art thrives under pressure.

I can say whatever I want. Dina can't. She did. She said it. She won't again. I think that's a case. He has some sympathy for this cancel culture thing. And this is why I wanted you here. And as a lot of people I know have had until it happened to them.

I actually disagree with that assessment of me. But please continue. I'm done. So I disagree. Well, so then, for instance, when the guy from Netflix who is discussing... Aziz? No, the guy... There's a lot of guys on Netflix.

I forget his name. He was... I'm going to fill in the blank. He was discussing the N-word in the context of an issue they had about the word retard. And he compared it to the N-wordword but he said the n-word out and nobody in the room had any thought that he was using it

as an insult or that he would ever use it as an insult simply having a conversation about the word and he said the word and he got fired. You're okay with that?

I didn't fire him and I don't know anything about the situation. But your instinct isn't like what the hell? My instinct is that somebody should have a conversation with him about the use of the word. All right. We can go.

I'm not going to concentrate on Mike because I can get Mike anytime and I don't want to talk about Matt. Well, I was going to respond to Mike's question. We don't have to focus on me. We got to the effect of cancel culture, et cetera, on stand-up comedy. Go ahead. Matt apparently hasn't seen my act, but I tend to avoid controversy and always have in my act, so it doesn't affect me directly. I think that, you know, and I've said this before, that there have always been issues you couldn't touch.

Maybe now it's more severe with Twitter and online mobs. If you think about comedy in the past, Richard Pryor, Sam Kinison, Bill Hicks, the whole idea was to go straight for the most forbidden idea that you could possibly get and express it in a way that, you know, express something that people were thinking but were afraid to say. That was kind of the idea back in the day. Now people are afraid to go anywhere near a lot of these topics. I think back in the day, as of now, most comics didn't do that, but some did. I don't think most

comics were ever pursuing those topics. But there were some that did. But there weren't, I don't know what you mean there were always things you couldn't say. There were always things that you couldn't say on network television because you knew you could

ruin your career that way, but that was always regarded as a bad thing. The network television was a bunch of squares who were censoring. But there was never a time when you could go on stage at the comedy cellar and say the wrong thing and your career could somehow be ended or even impacted. Never. You could be booed off stage and you would never do it again.

But, you know, a lot of the best comedians, I think the difference is... You mentioned Sam Kinison. What do you think he said then that he couldn't say today? You couldn't do the joke where, you know, I don't approve of violence against women. I understand it. You know, that whole thing.

You couldn't do that joke now. I mean, there's a million jokes that he did that were really, you know, I mean. Bill Burr does jokes like that now, for sure. Yeah, well, but you know, there is that flip side that Burr doesn't need anybody. He's a self-contained thing and he has his own way. So he doesn't have to get a gig from anybody. Sure. Can I, I'm sorry to cut you off, but can I offer a, there's a comedian I know

in Boston who I love named Mike Dorval. And he has a joke about being, he's a white man. He's married to a Chinese woman. They have a child who is half white, half Chinese. And his joke, uh, he's watching with his kid. He's like, I love Tom and Jerry, sharing Tom and Jerry with my kid. Uh, and there's a scene where one of them gets hit on the head and the eyes of the character get that gets hit turn Asian. And he's like, oh, this is horrible from like decades ago. I don't want my kid seeing this. He's Asian. I don't want him to think that that's what happens.

And so I say to my Chinese wife, I said, can you do you remember when this was OK? And she says no. And so it was clearly OK to make that cartoon at the time. But it didn't mean that the communities that it was about and that were impacted by it were okay with it. And so I think the N-word is similar. You always could say it and hurt a lot of black people's feelings.

No, that's not true. White people were able to say it. Actually, they still are, to tell you the truth. I know a lot of black people. White people were able to say it in a conversation. I could say, I'd even said it up until recently. Like if my door guy got in a fight with somebody, I would say, yeah, this customer came in and called him. And I would say what they called him.

And nobody black ever looked at me like, how could you say what was said? I understand. But there are black people who, if they heard it, wouldn't be happy. Well, yes, there are some of everything, but it was not... I don't believe... I don't believe that was the case. But, go ahead.

The whole point of comedy is there's a fine line between tasteless and funny and tasteless and insightful, right? So, bad comedians will reach for something using difficult material and screw it up, and great comedians will reach for something using, you know, difficult material and screw it up. And great comedians like Richard Pryor will, will use that same material and it'll be funny and insightful and people will come out and, you know, look, but, but Richard Pryor, look, think, think of the stuttering Chinese waiter routine that he did that lasted like

six minutes and was completely and totally offensive. You could never do that material today. Agreed. But when Richard Pryor did it, it was funny, and people walked out of it, and they didn't feel mean-spirited toward one another. But that doesn't mean you can walk around saying the N-word. The whole point was there was a little bit of room to try something, screw it up, and learn from your mistakes. Now, if you screw up and you say something wrong,

the punishment is just more severe. Can I zoom out and add to that? It's also that we also even had more tolerance all around for things that we despise. So like Bob Grant, remember Bob Grant? Yeah, yeah. I mean, Bob Grant was a radio personality, a talk radio and he said the most outrageously disturbing things.

And he was criticized for it. He was called a racist for it. But he kept his show until the very end. David Duke would be a guest on talk shows, on Geraldo. You know, we just, we were able to... And you'd like to return to

David Duke being a talk show? Absolutely. Yes, I would. I agree with Noam on this one. I mean, I want to hear from everybody. I would love to hear Richard Spencer. He was interviewed by Kamau Bell. I was actually going to bring him up. He has a joke about his white friends asking him

when is it okay for us to say the M word and he says, you can say it anytime you want when you're ready to deal with the consequences of saying it. And that's free speech. So, but when Charlottesville was happening, I remember, was it Richard Spencer or the other guy, Jason, one of these white supremacists, I wasn't really familiar with them.

And when it was all going on, I began to Google because I wanted to read and hear. And in real time, this stuff was being taken down off the internet. Like a video that I wanted, all of a sudden the video wasn't available. And I said, what are they doing here? Like these powers that be were going to make sure that I couldn't educate myself on what was being said. And you have sympathy for that? I have sympathy for a lot of people doing a lot of things.

Do you, how about you have sympathy for Amazon dropping books that are under? No, I don't want that. You don't like that? No, I also think when you say you want to hear from everyone, you can't hear from everyone at once. You have to choose who you're hearing from. And I say, why not start with mostly people who aren't white supremacists? Except

that we have a situation now where we never had before where actually bandwidth is no longer an issue, meaning there used to be a limitation of pages, how many hours on a television. It's unlimited now. There's no reason to limit anything because there's no opportunity cost of it. I mean, our lives

are limited, so I'm choosing... Do you understand my argument? At the time when actually there's no rationale, we couldn't fit it in, there's none of that anymore. There's unlimited everything, and it's free to distribute. Basically, you know, for all intents and purposes, it's free. There's also the distinction, like, you know, in the journalism business between telling people about something

that is happening, right, and then being the person who's actually expressing the bad views. So right now they're, they're not making that distinction. Like if you're, if you're, if you ran a documentary or you shot a documentary about Charlottesville, they will put, they're pulling down footage now, uh, of people who are even critical, uh, of those white supremacists equally as they are pulling down the, the, the footage shot by the white supremacists. That seems misguided for sure. So the problem there is that in the interests of taking down the offensive material, now

audiences are uninformed about what's actually happening in the world, which I think is a problem. I agree with that. Big problem. Okay, Russia, you called it all along. What would you say, and you can go freeform on this to whatever you want, but what would you say was the insight?

When you look at, and you must have this experience, like you're a smart guy, but you know other smart people. Yet IQ does not seem to explain why it was so clear to you and other people, maybe even smarter than you, had no fucking idea.

Thank you so much. I'll take this. How do you account for that? What was your insight? I mean, I think in the journalism business, there were a lot of us who've done this for a long time who recognized early

that there was a lot of groupthink going on with this story. What did he predict about Russia? Because the premise itself... I mean, the early problems with the story were, there were a couple of things. They were asserting all sorts of connections between Russia and Russian interference and the Trump campaign.

Who was asserting? People in the media. And then when the Mueller investigation started, they were consistently promising that this would result in the end of the Trump presidency and there would be lots and lots of reports that said things to the effect of, you know, he has a lot more than we can report

or that he's telling us and that the walls are closing in and Trump is going to be indicted any moment now. And this was a drumbeat that started in the newspapers and was growing on cable news. And there were a whole series of stories that were retracted. In a normal press environment, you'd see stories that would be mistaken. There'd be retractions in both directions.

But all the retractions were in the same direction with the story. They were all in the direction of, you know, sort of showing that there were connections between Trump and Russia that later had to withdraw. And by the way, with Trump, it's not just the Russia story. I mean, it started on day one with the bust of Martin Luther King. Like, every story about Trump that has to be retracted falls in the same direction, including Russia, in my opinion. I mean, I covered Trump from the beginning, and I at first thought he was crazy and unelectable. And then there was a moment, I think, in the campaign after he won the nomination where the press suddenly started to feel guilty for having given him a lot of free coverage. And I even heard this on the campaign trail where a reporter started to say, oh, we have to kind of dig in a little bit more because we were sort of responsible for him winning. And I thought that was a kind of a dangerous moment because, you know, it's kind of not our jobs to, you know, stick our finger in the works there. But if they had been giving him more than he deserved earlier

because he was funny or a character or a caricature, then wanting to back up, it makes sense that they'd want to be lesser than more. They'd want to be like fair and equilibrium establishing. Sure, but you make up for that by evening out the coverage distribution, not by being editorially more negative. I mean, you know what I'm saying? Trump got 23 times as much coverage as Bernie Sanders.

And they were actually kind of similar stories within the primaries. They were both rebellions against their own party. They were both doing pretty well. And he got so much more coverage than Sanders because of the ratings, right? And we all knew it. And then people started feeling guilty about it. So you did a long article. Was it just online?

I don't remember. Yeah. It was a long, great, I must have sent it to 50 people, where you just went through all the stories that had to be retracted. Do you want to give us the top three, like most important? Let's see. There was the one where they CNN came out

with a story that they had proof that Trump had foreknowledge of the WikiLeaks disclosures and then it turned out that they had just misread the dates on some emails. And so they had this poor guy on air on live TV saying, oh, I guess it doesn't mean

as much as we thought. You know, there were a series of stories asserting... I'm trying to think now. There was the... I didn't mean to put you on the spot. No, that's okay. There was the one with the

the Russian weather report. Matt, do you not remember everything you've ever written or read? I'll have to go back and look. No, but he went to a whole... Michael Cohen, the pinging in Prague was one. Oh, yeah, the Prague story. Oh, my God. They got that one wrong like five different times. In fact, even after the Mueller report came out

and said that affirmatively that Cohen had never been in Prague, McClatchy, which did the original report, doubled down and said that their report was correct, that they had found evidence that Cohen's cell phone number had been in Prague, and they refused to retract the story. So that was a consistent theme of this whole period too that they would get things wrong and then just simply not not retract them there was um another one of my member was that they were that that uh Comey was gonna testify that Trump never had

never told him that he wasn't under investigation right yeah yeah that the Comey told Trump that Trump had said that Comey had told him that he wasn't going to be. Yeah, it wasn't a target of the investigation. And there was there was a story that Trump that Comey was going to come out and say that that that wasn't the case. And then they had to retract that. There was another one, the New York Times did a very influential one that said that that the Trump campaign had had repeated contacts with Russian intelligence. This was a story that was sourced in the New York Times that had, and one of the consistent features of them is that there's often more than one source.

The Times cited four current and former U.S. officials. Comey later testified that that story wasn't true. So how does this all happen? Well, so one of the things that happens when you're doing national security stories is that you get a lot of sources who won't be on the record, right? So you're dealing with somebody who either is in Congress and has a security clearance or works in one of the security agencies, or is a lawyer connected with the defendant in one of these stories. And they'll say, oh, here's this thing I heard, but you can't use my name. And sometimes what they'll do is if it's a person, say in the CIA

or the FBI, you'll get a source telling you something. And then they'll say, you can call these three people to get confirmation for this. And so it's really one source, right? Because the story comes from one place and he has has maybe three co-workers or three subordinates. But it'll show up in the story as four people confirm that this is true. So it's not like you're actually cross-confirming it with four people. This is a dirty little secret that people don't understand when they read these stories.

They think it's actually four sources when it's really one. This is one of the issues in the FISA warrant, too, that they were using that he told the newspaper, and then he used the newspaper also to verify. Yeah, that was something that happened in the wmd thing too right because remember if you remember dick cheney uh did this trick where he would tell a reporter something about um wmds being discovered the newspapers were reported and then trump then cheney would go on tv uh like two days later and say see the see, the New York Times says this is true.

And that's kind of happened with the FISA thing. What they did is they referenced stories that they themselves had been the sources of. You know, it's funny you bring that up, because that was actually, was it Scott Ritter? Was that his name? Yeah, the weapons inspector. So there was this weapons inspector, Scott Ritter, who during the first, when the inspections first started,

was very anti-Saddam Hussein. And then in the run-up to the second Gulf War, he began to say Saddam doesn't have any weapons of mass destruction. Right. And everybody descended on him, and they tried to make out that he was getting paid by Saddam. And I believed it all the time, too. And then it turned out he was telling the truth all along, and he was right all along. And it was all character assassination coming from a particular agenda. And I never forgot that.

Like, ever since then, I really go slowly before I jump to a conclusion just because when I hear that people who are very motivated to want the outcome are attacking the character of the person who's standing in their way of that outcome yeah and that happened a lot in this case i mean anybody who had anything to say about this that was that was not towing the party line about russiagate was accused of being you know a useful idiot in cahoots with the russians propagating russian propaganda right there i mean this was even the Washington Post even did a story that cited this group called proper not that was collecting lists of people they felt were too sympathetic to the Russians and they were all these different people on the left and the right in the press and

so people I mean I know a lot of people in the business who were afraid to come out and say well you know this part of the story doesn't make sense to me. I mean, there was a guy in Politico who said, you know, I'm a little bit of a skeptic on this. And he got so much, you know, crap for it that he renounced himself a couple of weeks later. Or the people who would normally be credible like Bob Woodward.

Bob Woodward, I mean, I had this argument with somebody in his book. He said he found no evidence of collusion. Now, if Bob Woodward had come out and said he found evidence of collusion, it's Bob Woodward. It's a big story. But since he didn't find it, I mean, almost nobody even knows he wrote that in the book, right?

It wasn't in the Washington Post. It only came out in a podcast. Now, Matt. And we really found out who the Garfunkel was in Woodward and Bernstein, right? Because Bernstein was a total jackass. Anyway, go ahead what's becoming clear to me is that journalists are a bunch of incompetence except for a relative few much like comedians good news about comedy is it doesn't really

matter if most comedians aren't very good but if most journalists aren't very good we have a real problem on our hands because you perform an infa a function it doesn't really matter if most comedians aren't very good. But if most journalists aren't very good, we have a real problem on our hands because you perform a function that is absolutely indispensable. So how, then, do we deal with this problem? I don't know. I mean, it's tough. I should preface this by saying I'm not a fan of Donald Trump.

You sure sound like one. You've been defending him for two years. That's what people say to me, and it's so frustrating. But this whole thing has been really depressing to me and to a lot of people in the business because this really got worse about three years ago, and it has a lot to do with the way the business works. If you work for MSNBC and you get up there

and you say something suggesting that the Russiagate story, there's something wrong with it, ratings will go down. People can see in real time what happens with viewers now. So you avoid, they avoid that content. So both Fox and NBC, they essentially just preach to the choir, right? They have their own audiences. They feed the news that they know.

They pick the news they know that those audiences are going to like, and they give it to them. And so the old function of reporters, which was to kind of call balls and strikes and not say what side they were on, that's just gone. It doesn't exist anymore. Although you said something just interesting there, just as an aside. You said they picked the news the viewers were like, which is not the typical rap on Fox. The typical rap on Fox is that they make it up or that they're lying about everything.

Yeah, that's not quite right, I don't think. I mean, look, Fox has some issues. Just it's much easier just to pick the few stories. Yeah, but it's both, right? It's both those things. Right, yeah. But the thing is, you don't have to really make up the news. You can go through every morning and pick the nine or ten stories that you know your audience is going to like, right?

I mean, the classic, Fox took a technique that they got, really, from the tabloids here in New York City, which was to put a lot of crime stories in the front, a lot of mug shots of black suspects they knew that certain kinds of audience, particularly white audiences in the boroughs would get mad about these stories and they test marketed them so they did them over and over again and Fox did that a lot in the early days and you can do the same thing with political content you can just take stories that are you know are going to make people upset um same thing with liberal uh audiences like msnbc

you just pick out the things the most outrageous things that trump says or the most outrageous things that x you know conservative congressman like steve king or something like that put that on the air and you know know, wind people up. So my feeling is, by the way, I just signed an exchange with David Frum. Frum. Did you correct me? Frum. I forgot the pronunciation.

I mean, he doesn't show your politics on most things, but this is a smart intellectual guy. And he was sure about the collusion story, if you follow me. And I said to him, look, if Mueller had evidence that Trump was a Manchurian president, he would have to come out with it immediately. You can't wait two years while Trump pulls out of NATO and turns the world upside down.

And I said, so wouldn't Mueller have to? He says, no, no, Mueller would have to play it by the book. I say, Mueller's going to go two years with a president doing Vladimir Putin's agenda. And David Frum said, yes. And I was like, what the fuck? Yeah, I know. I mean, that was that was the first giveaway. Right.

Because. Invasion of the body snatchers. Yeah, totally. Right. And I thought of that a lot in this last couple of years. Yeah. They would have had to step in before the inauguration, right? Immediately.

Yeah. I mean, they were saying, oh, there were all these stories out there. There was a story that came out before the inauguration that the United States intelligence agencies had told Israel to not share information with the Trump government because Trump was under leverages of pressure. That was the quote, leverages of pressure by the Russians. So essentially they were leaking to news audiences that Trump was compromised by Russian intelligence. No, if they really thought that, they had to stop the inauguration. That's right. They have to. Mueller would have to just come out with his evidence.

Yeah. I mean, it was Brennan at that point. It wasn't Mueller yet. But yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I was, yes. Brennan would have to come out with evidence. Right. Look, it's, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I was, yes, Brennan would have to come out with evidence. Look, it's,

oh yeah, I agree with you. By the way, Noam was giving, I don't know if the, this is still, the offer's still on the table, Noam was giving 20 to 1 odds that Trump would lose. Oh, the election? The election, can we get there in a second? Yeah, I'm, so,

what was I going to say now? We were just talking about, oh, I have a theory about how this all started. Let me start by asking you, what do you think, and you come from a wing of thought which has never much trusted the FBI or the CIA, right? What do you think the Inspector General report, or however the facts come to light light is going to show about how this investigation actually started so i mean i actually spent much of the spring trying to get to the bottom of that myself and you know that's not a world that i've ever really covered a whole lot so i don't have a whole lot of sources in that area but my best guess is that that it's a combination of overzealous surveillance of, because they have all these amazing tools now to spy on everybody.

And the new sort of Pfizer regime, the thing where they're capturing everybody's emails and phone calls, they have these methods they can use to sort of peek into people's communications. They take these, they're called about searches, where they can kind of take a backdoor look into things that people have written. And I think what happened was the CIA or the NSA, that they were kind of snooping around everybody who was even potentially connected to the Russians, and they got in the habit of looking into some of the people surrounding Trump,

and maybe they thought they saw something that wasn't really there. And this flowered into a huge investigation. And I think that's the reason that they're not telling us exactly how it began is because the original surveillance probably was not wholly legitimate, is what I'm guessing.

Yeah, this is my theory. Where I do part very much from the Fox News narrative is that this was some kind of partisan vendetta against Trump. What I think is, I compared it to the ticking time bomb scenario in the torture debate, where sure, it's great, but if there's a nuclear bomb, you do what you have to do. And I think that they saw this Steele dossier, which created a cognitive bias environment. Everything else that came to them, using Russian dressing, to use as a joke, anything, aha, this kind of.

And they panicked. And the laws that they had available to them were not up to the task of protecting the United States from a Russian Manchurian president. Right. So they started bending the rules like you might have to torture somebody in that situation. And before you know it,

you're in that world and it just expands and then you commit to it. And I think that's how they found themselves in that situation. They began to believe it and they were doing what they thought was their patriotic duty in a sense.

I don't think this was kind of like some sort of treason. Yeah, I don't think so either. But I think early on they started doing things like sending informants at people in the Trump campaign. And that might've been something they would just do informally. That it would never come out. That was another thing.

Nobody thought Trump was going to win. So none of this stuff was ever going to come out. Did you think he would win? No. I mean, I thought he would win the nomination. I never thought he would win the general. Did you? No.

No, I didn't think he was going to win. But I do think he's going to win in 2020. Do you want to take that action that Noam offered? This time I would take it, yeah. You think he's going to win in 2020. Do you want to take that action that Noam offered, 20 to 1 odds? This time I would take it, yeah. You think he's going to win? I mean, he's got a better chance. I think it's a real chance.

At 20 to 1 odds, it's a good deal. Yeah, sure. But there's 20 people running against him. Surely they've got to be able to defeat him. My logic for him not winning, although every day since I said it, you look like you have a better shot, is that— I didn't take the bet because I'm a coward, but I do think he's going to win. He won by 70,000 votes in three key states. 70,000 votes, meaning if only 35,001 people had voted the other way, it would have gone the other way. So it doesn't even need to win the 70,000 votes.

And these are places they didn't even campaign. They just wrote it off. After all this, the idea that he hasn't regained or he hasn't lost those 35,000 votes seems to me to be impossible to believe. Well, yeah. But the thing is, Trump was elected. One of the most amazing stats about Trump, his election, was that one out of five of his voters disapproved of him when they voted for him. His approval rating was like 36% when he got elected.

So where he won the election was with the 20% of voters who disliked both him and Hillary Clinton. He won those voters by like a factor of two to one. So the theory in his, on the Republican circles, what I keep hearing is that if he improves his approval rating among Republicans, he'll be starting in a better place than he was last time. So his approval ratings right now is like 45, 44, 45%. So maybe you're right. Can I give you my i might i've touched on

this insight before or this kind of thing but but i i it really applies to trump so my theory is that everybody spins everything even if they're 100 in the right so if i get a complaint that a customer has been waiting 30 minutes for their hummus, I can bet that two things are probably true. They've been waiting too long for their hummus, and it's probably been 15 minutes. You know, and so then my job as the owner, I'm going to make it worse, and then they complained about the lazy black waitress who took a long time serving it.

So now I got a racist customer lying, but I still have to remember, but wait, but the customer is actually right here, and if I don't see that they're right, I'm not going to have a business. I still need to react. This, to me, I'll confess, is how I see Trump. Trump is the lousy racist customer lying, exaggerating about the hummus. But I do have sympathy for many of the issues he talks about. I do have sympathy for controlling the border.

I do have sympathy for business being overregulated. I do have sympathy for knocking down PC culture. I do have sympathy for the white working class who's been shafted by NAFTA, who used to be Pat Buchanan, another person who was allowed to speak in the old days. So, and I try not to let the things, I'm as offended

as the next guy about all the things that anybody would be offended about a guy like Trump. Nevertheless, I'm closer to his direction on these issues than most of the Democrats, except for maybe Biden and maybe Mayor Pete, who I may be projecting on him because I want him to be what I want him to be,

that he's kind of reasonable. But this is where you probably support Sanders, right? Yeah, I mean, I like him, but I don't know. So that's where I would disagree. And in what I'm describing could explain why he would have really harsh disapprovals, but people would still vote for him. It's like, you know, nevertheless, I kind of do. I can't see him ordering hummus he voted the he ordered the taco bowl remember when he tweeted out the taco bowl oh sure when i am speaking to

people that i regard as very very reasonable yeah people saying that they have not ruled out voting for trump which means they're going to vote for him in my experience that means they're going to vote for him i think well i don't means they're going to vote for him. I think, well, I don't know. Well, maybe. But the point is, if reasonable people are thinking that, then there's reason to believe that, which I wasn't hearing, by the way, in 2016. Right. There's reason to believe it's going in his direction. Things are going in his direction.

Yeah. From my limited anecdotal chatter with people. I feel like that's interesting. Reasonable people. Reasonable is like a subjective thing. And it's also how informed are the people? I feel like that's one of the problems is like none of us has all the information. source, then even reasonable people will then start to have, you know, ongoing unreasonable beliefs based on just sort of confirmation bias of their own cheerleaders.

By the way, this PC issue is huge. I mean, I'm pretty well to do. I have friends who are way more well to do. I don't really care if they raise my taxes or lower my taxes. I prefer to pay less taxes. But the idea that I can't say whatever I want to say, that I have to look over my shoulder, that there's a whole movement out there

that might not even respect the idea of a First Amendment and what that trajectory might mean, that really, really matters to me. And if Trump is the imperfect guy carrying that message, it's a tough choice, you know, when you hear what's coming out of the mouths of some people on the— I don't want to say left because I don't want to insult you because I know you— Whatever you want to call that new movement. I'll disagree with that assessment. Like, you can say whatever you want, and there are people who can say whatever they want in response.

Dude, I lived through this whole Louis CK thing. Sure. My kids were threatened. I don't want that. Right. But it was, I had, this was not coming from the right. And you have, you have to experience it to understand it. All I did was let the guy go on stage and tell jokes.

That's all I did. I mean, I've, in the recent Dina Hashem thing, I, I posted some things in support of her and people, uh, came on my, my page and responded to, you know, my posts.

And I got into a lot of back and forth with very unreasonable people who are pro threatening life, threatening rape. And I'm, I'm opposed to that. And I don't think that that is, there are people who believe all kinds of things who are threatening and I don't want that. Okay. Okay. You may not be representative of it, but we know this is a real thing.

There's too many examples of people who have been ruined. And you certainly do understand, because you've talked to other comedians, what I said is the more damaging thing is that people are shutting up. People are afraid to talk. I mean, you know better than I do, but I've met many journalists. I met one journalist who says, you know, I was going to write a Me Too thing. I had a really good take on this guy for The Atlantic. And he says, I said to myself, what am I doing? I have a career to worry about. Why would I take the risk? And he wasn't some right-wing nut. He's a liberal guy. Just like Jane Meyer, she just wrote

this thing about Al Franken. and i guess she's one of those few people who has such strong street cred that she could dare to write such a thing to rehabilitate al franken also democratic party politicians are backing this rehabilitation they are franken yeah i wish he'd run again yeah do you think he might i don't know i don't think so he just wants his life back i think i guess I guess I would say like, I mean, Aziz is somebody who, you know, there were had horrible things, you know,

sort of portrayed as he's going to be canceled. He's not going to have a job and he is, you know, he's has a Netflix special. He's talking about it. First of all, Aziz did. I don't want to say Aziz did.

Basically, I think I don't know how to put it. See, I'm afraid to talk. He did nothing. He had a date where he couldn't read the nonverbal signals of a woman who gave him two episodes of oral sex. And then he brought her, put her in an attack.

I mean, there's no physical coercion, whatever it was. And he had basically two years of his life taken from him. He didn't know which way it was going to go. He was scared. You've seen his reaches. I mean, do you know what it's like to go through that? Like, even if it turns out okay in the end. I know a little bit.

People kill themselves in that kind of thing. If Louis C.K. had killed himself, nobody would have been shocked. Yeah. All those people say, oh, he's got plenty of money. Nobody would have been surprised if he hung himself to go through that. I would say that, by the way, about any comic book. For two years, Aziz couldn't walk into a restaurant without worrying that somebody would come scream at him or pour water on him or a milkshake or whoever knows what the thing is. Nobody should have to live that way.

I agree. Yeah. So, yeah, it's really serious. And I went through it. And, you know, the guy who threatened my kids, he didn't even hide his name. Like, my theory is that we're all horrible people. We're all nasty and mean, whatever. It's all within us in human nature.

Distributes on some kind of curve, but it's all within us. And as soon as you're given license, like this is actually what good people do. This is a righteous thing. The fucking vitriol and nastiness and sadism and bullying that comes out of people is really something to behold. Cause it's like, I'm on the right side of this. It's free reign.

Let me just call that club owner and threaten his kids. And then I'll go high fiving my friends. Like, look how good I am. Now, Noam, I agree with you that the culture is sick in that respect. And a good percentage of them always mention my race.

Somehow being a white male is part of this, which is also ridiculous. So, okay, assuming, and I agree with you that the culture is sick, that the spirit of free speech is not flourishing in America, how would voting for Trump or electing Trump help the situation, or is it just sending a message? I don't know. Any thoughts on that? I don't think it would help a lot of things. I don't see Trump as, you know, a leader,

a bastion of free speech. I don't think that even if you know, a leader, a bastion of free speech. I don't think that even if you think that he wants to say whatever he wants and then there are people who are like free speech. We need to be able to say whatever I want. I think it is also an important question to think about. We can say whatever we want. What do we want to say and why? Like, again, let me express my sympathy for like that's illegal to threaten your kids. I don't know if you...

Not really the sympathy. And I think that's not what a good person does. There's no sides of good person and bad person. A good person doesn't treat people like that. So to answer Dan's question, I think there's two tracks to it. One is actually the long-term legal consequences of these things. So there's Supreme Court justices, there's legislation, what you can't get,

there's painting over murals in San Francisco, these kind of things that maybe there'll be an attack on the Jefferson Memorial, this kind of thing. So to have a president who doesn't go for that stuff can actually have an impact on legal manifestations of this. And then the other side is it kind of makes us all feel better to know that this is all a little bit of an illusion, that Twitter really isn't reality. Like in public, everybody toes the line, but then they go and vote for Trump.

So maybe we don't have to be so worried about this. Maybe people are more reasonable with give them credit for. And maybe that gives us a little license. I don't know. I'm riffing, but, you know, I could totally see. There's another place where where the Twitter Twitter thing has kind of impacted the world. And it's also, it's made reporters afraid just to report things that have nothing to do with any controversial topics. Like, just to take an example, when I first started covering Trump

and I was with a whole bunch of journalists, he, you know, some of his speech was, you know, inflammatory. You could call it racist. But there are other parts of the speech where he would say things like, look, Jeb Bush's campaign chairman is a head of a major pharmaceutical company. He's not going to lower your pharmaceutical prices. And the crowd would be full of vets. And he would say, I think our Mideast wars are a bad deal. They're a strain on communities that have a lot of military people in it.

So if you go to write the story about why Trump has appeal, you would list all the things. You would say, look, there are some clear areas where he's appealing to people's racial frustrations. But then he's also saying some true things about pharmaceutical companies and their influence in politics. Or, you know, many military are don't work and people suffer because of it but the reporters who did that got blasted by other people in the press for for pointing out the fact that trump's even said a few true things right whereas i thought that was a crucial part of the story that it's the same thing as your you know as your customer who says that the hummus is 30 minutes late.

It's actually 15 minutes, but it is late, right? So you have to actually point that out. I mean, you can't leave out pieces of reality. And what Trump voters see is they see the press leaving this stuff out. And that convinces them that the press is full of it, that they're full of shit, that they're going to lie about him, right?

And that makes them disbelieve everything that we say about him. And that's a huge problem. Would you agree with this observation about Trump? He's, I mean, it's been pretty much empirically proven that he's told more lies than any president ever, right? Yes. However, he's probably told fewer lies about what he actually wanted to do than any president has.

The things that we didn't, we didn't credit him for the sincerity of his core, the things that he ran on, like very early on, they got some transcripts of him on the phone with the president of Mexico. And he's like, no, no,

you need to build that wall. I promised everybody that Mexico would build it. Like we never thought he would really tell the president of Mexico to build the wall. And same thing with, with Australia and some, some refugees that were coming in

like everything and almost the immigrant ban I mean the Muslim immigrant ban he said he was going to do it he did it

he tried it right so he's not so it's a it's a complex kind of liar it's a liar kind of the

salesman liar but he's not the the the person that I the sociopath that I thought he was in a sense that I thought that he would just do it, that he hadn't, he didn't really believe in anything, but he seems to actually believe these things. Yeah. I think he's also, I mean, he's, he's open about who he is, you know, or what he is, right? I mean, he lies in a word and in fact, but nobody could be mistaken about what Donald Trump is. When he gets up on the stage, he's not pretending. I mean, he may a little bit pretend to be the man of the people, but it's different from a traditional politician who gets up there and says, oh, I've bailed hay. I'm just like a farmer, just like you. Everybody knows that's bullshit, right? Trump gets up there and says, I'm a billionaire. You know, I hang out with models.

But that's not even necessarily true. we can't even see his tax returns okay well but he but he's he might not be a billionaire okay but he's he's rich anyway right i mean you know yeah his father did give him a hundred million dollars yeah look he's rich the point the point is that he's at least he's at least talking about what his actual lifestyle is. And voters see that and they say, this person is more genuine than the stuff suits who come in here every four years. And on both sides of the aisle. And that doesn't mean that he's telling the truth, that he has good policies, that he's a good person. It just means that traditional politics seems fake to people. And this has appeal.

There's something else about Trump. Go ahead. In a hundred years, are we going to look at this? Are people going to? seems fake to people and and this this has appeal there's something else about trump good in 100 years are we gonna look at this are people gonna well we won't be here probably but uh absent a medical breakthrough but are people gonna look at at this as a as as the as the moment everything changed in american politics i mean it's it feels like it right doesn't it is there any going back now to to politics as usual i think so i so. I think Trump is a singular singular event. But I will tell you this. The second that there is like a palatable Jeb Bush type Republican candidate, I fear with what's going on in like the intersectional community, you're going to see a huge white flight to the Republican party in a way that

Trump is keeping at bay right now in a horrible way where the two party system will actually be virtually people of color and, and, and, and their cheers and, and, and white people, where you can look at somebody walking down the street and pretty much decide who they're going to vote for unless they desist from this open season on saying it's wrong to generalize about anybody by their race, unless it's white people, we can say whatever we want. This bashing, how many voters are you going to get if you're going to use their race as a synonym for awfulness. I mean,

it's crazy. It Trump, Trump right now, you know, with the thing to send her back thing, I think even people, people are saying they don't want to vote that there's, that there's,

you see a lot of the sort of influential sort of centrist, uh, like commentators saying, I don't, I don't want to support either. Like Thomas Friedman, David Brooks, they're kind of all saying neither side appeals to me now.

And that's interesting. What happens when it's John Kasich? Right, exactly. Have you talked on the show already about the idea of him saying, go back to your country as like, that's racist.

Or are you, do you not think that is so he's the guest? No, I'm, I'm curious about what do I think? I think that, um, I think that to credit Trump,

first of all, I mean, I'm just saying this, the expression, forget about Trump, the expression, go back to your country. I'm not a mind reader and I don't know whether it was racist.

I know that when I was a kid, basically synonymous saying America, love it or leave it. If you don't like it, leave it was aimed at young white people. I know that go back to your country. Yeah, I know. I know that when I have I have a very close friend of mine. I don't even want Andy knows him. My friend knows him and Andy knows him. My friend knows him. And he's Dominican. I mean, we're good

friends. He comes to my house. We've gone on trips together. We're good friends. And he hates this country. He hates this country. And one day we're having a conversation and he's just saying the most outrageous, dishonest, untrue things about America. I said, Jesus Christ, if you don't fucking like it,

why don't you go back? And that wasn't because of his color. He could have been any color. He could have been Israeli. It didn't matter to me what color he was. I responded viscerally, rightly or wrongly, to what offended me. If I were to apply a but-for test, like with Josh Gibson, why wasn't he in the majors?

Well, he wasn't in the majors because he was black. Didn't matter, good hitter, bad hitter. Didn't matter that they knew they could win the World Series with him. That's racist. I can be sure of that. Is Trump reacting to the politics of these people or their color? Or both. Or both.

I don't know. But I tend to think it's first and foremost the politics because Trump is the type of guy who picks up whatever is around and bashes you with it. If you were in a prison camp, he'll bash you for the fact you got caught. If you're disabled, he'll make fun of you if you're disabled. If you're fat, you're a fat pig. If you're Carly Fiorina, it's a horrible face. It doesn't matter to him. Whatever is not attached to the ground, he'll

pick up and hit you over the head with it. But he hasn't said to Bernie Sanders, go back to where you came from. He hasn't said to any... No, on the contrary, he says nothing but nice things about Bernie Sanders. And that may be, but Bernie, but these four, you know, bashing him, bashing him. They said, and Bernie isn't. So my answer is, no, not in the same way.

My answer is, I don't know, but it was a reprehensible thing to say for sure. For sure. Is it a reasonable question in a case where somebody is. Especially because one of the people is black, which I don't even think I would not surprise me if he didn't even know who Ayanna Pressley was. But it's so absurd because if you're going to measure American is by time in the country, as it were, nobody's more American than most black Americans. Is it is it ever reasonable to say to somebody, look, I mean, I've been hanging out. I noticed you. You hate America. Everything it stands for. say to somebody, look, I mean, I've been hanging out, I noticed you hate America, everything it stands for,

its history, its culture, its people. Did you ever think maybe you might be happy somewhere else? Is that never a reasonable question? Trump himself ran his whole first campaign on Make America Great Again, implying

America's not good. So why didn't he just leave? Can I tell you what I think is more interesting than you tell me? Sure. What I do think, what I do think was terrible is that the Chiron, I always get the word Chiron. Yeah.

We're referring to Trump's racist tweets, which to me implies that this is, you know, the wall is blue and the tweets are racist and no reasonable person could differ. There's no subtlety to it. And I just find it conspicuous, virtue signaling, forgive that phrase,

language. For instance, Sarah Jung had tweets, which are on their face racist enough that you have to try to explain why they're not. They would never, nor should they, describe the Miss Sarah Jung's racist tweets on the Chiron. Ilhan Omar talks about Jews and dual loyalty and whatever it is that, you know, a lot of people thought was that.

They would never describe her as an anti-Semite. I guess I think that what the president says is a bigger deal than the Chiron. No, the question is, no, the question is like, they shut down the conversation by presenting it in such a way that a lot of people think there's some, there might be some nuance to whether these are racist or not, but they know not to talk about it because CNN has told us that even a, no reasonable person can have a different opinion here. That offends me. I don't need to be told what to think. Just tell me what he said. I mean, I think Trump also, I mean, he has that carnival barker side of him, that WWE side of him, that regardless of what the politics are, he understands that race is like the most powerful marketing technique in this country that it's it it's a Guaranteed that if you if you kind of flirt with the line of what isn't isn't acceptable that that instantly will be Everywhere on the news and he did this over and over and over again in 2016 when he was trying to get more attention And I just think that's part of his personality is to kind of search out

the very limit of what you can get away with at that moment and then go a little bit over the line and then kind of sort of fight people uh in the moment of controversy if america's race obsessed as you just implied can a reasonable person argue that and noam has made this point that we're not ready for more diversity i I don't know. I mean, I think this country did pretty well or has done over the years. I mean, look, we've got a long way to go. He's not doing my point justice. The point that I made was that I don't see how we can say that we have a responsibility to non-Americans,

I don't mean that in a harsh way, to bring them in open, basically open. We have to bring anybody in here, but once they get here, we don't want more than 20% Asians at Harvard. That's what I said. Say, if we're not ready to say, okay, once you're here and you're an American, you're an American. And if you score well and you go to Harvard, we don't, we don't care what your DNA is. And I'll go a step further and say that maybe there, because there's no limiting principle to that, but I will acknowledge that if you want to just take the situation of black Americans and say that their experience here is so unique that we are going to carve out something for them in colleges, fine. But you explain to me why you're

going to separate whites and Asians or anybody else. Like, like if we, if we're not, cause if we're not ready to treat everybody as Americans, then we're not ready to tell, open up the borders and bring it in from wherever they come from. And that, that's what I said. So, so at the point where I, I saw the country saying, listen, it doesn't matter where you're from. Once you're here, you're just a human. Then I say, yeah, who cares where you come from? But I'm not the one who cares where they come from. Actually, it's the same people who want them to come in, who care very much where they come from. Ironically, as soon as they are Americans with rights,

that's been my point. Is that a crazy point? Yeah, I don't know. That's a little above my pay grade. Can I say a thing that I also think about the Chiron that you didn't get, you weren't, they were,

if you, if they're telling you what to think, you didn't think it, you know, they said what they presented and you're smug. You know, they were so self-satisfied when they typed in racist tweets. It's interesting that with Trump,

you're like, I can't know what's inside him, but you can know what's inside these guys. No. Oh yes. Yes. I guess I, I do., yes, yes. I do. I have that talent.

I'll channel Trump in another way. We'll probably wrap it up. But I had this thought. So, you know, people are always outraged that Trump doesn't respect the law. And I was really trying to search my soul as to why it doesn't bother me. And I think I realized why, and I think this is accurate. No businessman respects the law. To a businessman, the law is a bunch of well-intentioned rules

that were placed there for good reason, the unintended consequences of which we have to figure out a way to get around so that we can stay in business and manage it. And this is the way business and manage it. And this is the way businessmen are programmed. And anybody who runs a business is nodding. But the importance of this is the following. I don't think Trump ever wants to break the law.

He wants his attorneys to keep him on the right side of the law. He's not a criminal in the sense of a criminal who embraces, I'm going to be lawless. He's a guy who doesn't respect the law, but the last thing he wants to do is get in trouble with the law. And when you see him that way, a lot of these stories become less believable. Like, do you think he really said, yeah, I want you to pay off Stormy Daniels.

I don't care if it's a campaign violation. No. He says, I want to pay off Stormy Daniels. You tell me how to do it. I guess. And the other example

was firing McGahn. McGahn? He told, no, firing Mueller. He told McGahn, I want you to fire Mueller. And McGahn says, I'll see what I can do.

Yeah. He didn't tell him it might be a legal problem, Mr. President. He says, well, I see Alan Dershowitz on TV every night telling me, the unitary executive, Mr. President, that would be illegal, and he said, do it anyway, that's a criminal. And I don't think Trump is that kind of guy. I mean, I would counter that you can look back in his history and you can find that he's come up with a couple of, more than a few scams in his past that are scams. Like the Trump University. I do know the details because that's one that offends me more than almost any of them. But I don't really know if he just licensed the name in that one or if he was involved in the scam. Well, the whole idea of that was that he was licensing the name and that they were making promises about access to Trump or personalized instruction that just weren't coming off. And he had to either know about it or he had the responsibility to know about it one one of the other is that a crime well the court certainly

found that it was against civil civil yeah i mean i i mean that's it was against the law but not a i don't know i don't know i think they probably could have made a case there if they had wanted to you know so i think there's a there's more than a few of those in his past where if if prosecutors have been more aggressive, they probably could have done something. All right, I'll accept that. And also, he is a little reckless, whatever it is. But I do think that most people don't understand.

I think there is something to what I'm saying about a businessman's view of the law. And so what I would say to that is, I don't think that makes for the best president. No, it doesn't. Because if the country is his company, he is certainly not thinking about every employee. He's not the first president to have a disrespect for the law. He's been much more open about it than many of them. I mean, you agree much of what is about Trump is just that he's so vulgar as to say and do these things out

in the open. Sure. Yeah. And I think you're, I think you're right that a lot of small, but you know, if you own a restaurant in the city, you're completely fed up with all the different things you have to do for the city and the inspectors and all that stuff. I'll give you an example.

So I was told by my employment practices attorney that a manager cannot sleep, no, a manager cannot, that's another one, a manager cannot pick up a waitressing shift. I'm not even going to the

rationale why unless you pay the manager hourly and not by a salary and call them a shift supervisor in which case they can pick up a waitressing shift right so this is the kind of nonsense so again there's i say there's there is some legit logic to the reason they pass this law but the unintended consequence i have to get around. And I could give you 50 examples like this of, of, of the, you know, stretching my elbow like this way, just to, to stay in compliance with law. And Trump understands this too. And you just, you get a disrespect for the law, at least when it comes to the law of commerce and stuff like that. So we disagree. We agree. We agree that he has a disrespect for the law.

We agree. But I, but I think that's actually a good point though, because you know, when, like when I, when I cover elections, what I find is that a lot of people who,

you know, are in red States who vote, who vote for vote Republican, a lot of them are small, are people in business who, you know, they don't come from the professional class, right?

They're not lawyers, doctors. And so their experience of America and laws and everything is completely different from somebody who like works in a university or has an artistic job or something like that. So there is something to the idea that Trump is appealing to something different. Oh, and add to that,

I just love Bernie Sanders' latest labor problem, but add to that that the Democrats, Bernie Sanders' latest labor problem, but add to that, that the Democrats, I don't want to generalize, but just the feeling that you get as a businessman is that we're the enemy. We're the bad guys. I employ a hundred people, have countless families that have been supported through the decisions and the navigation that I've done, but we're somehow the bad guy and we're always taking advantage and we always have more money. But if you're a movie star and you make millions,

somehow you're just wonderful. You never employed anybody, you know, you just go and, and you get tired of being bashed by people who don't know a fucking thing about what they're talking about. They don't understand what it means to put everything on the line and take risks and run a business,

meet a payroll. I mean, they have no idea. No idea. I have always said that I have great respect for Noam. Not for me. Listen, I'm talking about me. I'm talking about the small guys, like the Korean deli owners. Well, him too, but I don't know them.

I just, all I know, Noam, is Noam has a tendency to underestimate his income? That's none of my business anyway. So I have no right to ask. I'm curious. I'm a curious guy, but that's not my business. But if Noam were making $100 million a year, which he's not, obviously, but I would say, great. I'd probably ask for more money, but I would also at the same time say,

yeah, it's his business. And, and, you know, and, and, and great. I buy, I buy jokes low and sell them high. That's my, that's my business. And if you're making a hundred million dollars a year, I think you should be on board with reparations. I'm not against reparations. I, I, I, I'm not, I'm not against the, of all the, the policies like that, that I have problems with, reparations is one. I mean, many years ago, even before it was hot, I would say, well, there's a certain logic to this. You would have gotten the reparations and that wealth disappeared and it would have been passed down in some way.

It's not a crazy idea. Oh, yeah. obstacles and then also start to think, well, how do you distinguish between all these government programs, which have clearly been aimed at this problem and from writing people a check. And then also what if they get the check and then white people say, okay, we're even Steven now we're done now we're done here. I have, you know, there's good reason. I have a legal question with regard to reparations that probably nobody here can answer. But after how many, like if they discovered,

somebody was digging and discovered a treasure, and it was established that that treasure belonged to my great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather or something like that. You're shit out of luck. Legally, can I get it? No. Or is there a certain number of generations where it's like, okay, that's it, but it's geats to the state or whatever.

A certain number of years even, right? I mean, there's no one answer, but I don't see any idea that you could get something after that kind of time. I don't think. They probably stole it from somebody anyway. It could be. But I just wonder,

if we start with a supposition that, okay, these slaves were owed money, they never got it. So their descendants have to get it. Illegally speaking, is there a point at which the law... But it doesn't need to be legal no it doesn't it doesn't morally morally is a different question that morally is a different

question i was just wondering what legally it would if what well the law is the thing that's been getting in the way all this time the law has been continually racist and discriminating against black people i'm telling you i i'm not against you. And I'm not against it either. I'm just curious what legally one is entitled to after a certain number of generations. I'm sure we have to wrap it up. You know, he did write an article about moon landing conspiracy theories. Oh, I didn't know that. It's on the sheet that you didn't read. I didn't read his article on the sheet.

Go ahead. I don't know. No, it's like, why do people still believe that we didn't go to the moon? I mean, I think a lot of it has to do with they just don't believe the press as much anymore. And they don't believe government officials. I mean, NASA doesn't have the record of lying that other people in government do. But I definitely get that more than I had ever gotten it before in the last, like, five years. You think there's more moon landing conspiracy theories now than there were in the 70s?

More conspiracy theories, right? Like, when you travel around the country people just do not believe what they read in the news and you can hear from more people now like more people have a platform and a voice and so there's different niche like thoughts being pervaded more than there ever were yeah and it's getting farther and farther from it so there's fewer and fewer people with direct experience but do you guys know uh Conover, the Adam Ruins Everything? He did a good thing about the moon landing and about how impractical it would have been to fake it. Yeah.

Well, no, I mean, but people don't have to really think that far. It's easier to go to the moon than to fake it, yeah. Do you believe Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction? Lied? Lied? Lied? I mean, the administration for sure lied. You know, I mean, I think it's hard to say because he could have been briefed and told, you know, that X, Y, and Z exist. They could have told him that the yellow cake thing, that he was actively actively seeking uranium and they could have told him that this

meant a certain thing, but, but for sure, for sure, his administration was, was massaging the facts to miss a reporter. Everybody spins, right?

Like I said, but the reason I think it's similar to the Mueller argument, I said, well, if you're going to have a whole conspiracy to go invade a country on this lie, and you know, it's a lie uh you're gonna find weapons like like if you're that cynical you're gonna have that many people

you're gonna bring some plutonium whatever and you're gonna sprinkle it and you're gonna say we found the weapons like you don't go in there knowing that you know we're just gonna be found out right that doesn't make any sense to me i mean the the the british did this commission a couple years ago they were they studied this problem, and so they released all these emails and communications between us and the British in the lead-up to the war. And I think the main thing is our original reason for going had nothing to do with WMDs. We just believed that we had the right to sort of invade countries that were no longer in compliance. We wanted to reform the middle. We had these highfalutin notions about reforming the Middle East, right?

Yeah, exactly. But we needed an excuse to go in. So they cooked up this whole thing about violation of the UN inspections regime dating back to the 90s. And in order to be in violation, they had to have WMDs. So it was sort of a cause and effect thing. I think that's how it happened. It's all very human, and it plays out in a million different situations.

I've been in, I can't think of it offhand, but I've been in these situations where I want to do something. And the real reason I want to do it is, and you know, there's two sides to it and somebody might disagree or whatever it is. And the lesser reason might be very, very clean.

I say, look, there's nothing you can say. I have it right here. He promised like firing an employee, let's say. So maybe the real reason I want to fire the employee

is because they're terrible. But you need to go buy the books with some other thing. But how do I prove it so he might, you stole, no, I didn't steal whatever.

So I have this, so I have a technicality of some kind, but they actually did this and it's fireable. So that's what I point to. He has weapons of mass destruction.

That wasn't really what I was, this was all about, but it was the, the, and there's a logic to that, you know, the last thing,

just to get it on that point. So from that point, from that perspective, it's, you can, you understand Bush. The, the thing that's inexcusable is the reporters who,

who bought it. You know what I'm saying? Like it, it's his job to find an excuse if he wants to go to war in Iraq, but it's certainly not our job to buy it. Like, I think that's the problem. It's also his job to not do that, I think. I agree, but it's different.

You know what I'm saying? 9-11 had a tremendous effect on everybody's psychology. We didn't even realize it at the time. I mean, so that it became that we were like the police officers who are like, there's been a murder and we got to punish somebody for it, which I think is also bad when police officers do that.

I was totally opposed to the war. I know you were. You and Janine Garofalo. I had this thought about the World Trade Center. It always bugged me. It was called the Freedom Tower. It's always seemed to me that the obvious thing to do, I mean, the obvious thing to do was to build two towers

just like they were with an extra story to fuck you. But apparently, one of the things they were worried about is that no one will ever want to stay in these offices again after what happened. Oh, is that the reason? That was one of the things going around at the time. Also, one tower is better, fuck you. It was so impossible,

even within a few years of 9-11, to imagine there would come a time where we're not worried about this anymore. It was beyond our ability to... There's a comedian, just real quick, Jaffer Khan, he's great. He used to teach like social studies or uh to like you know younger kids who were not born when 9-11 happened so for them it's just like another boring thing that they have to they're like uh

we get it mr khan it was sad you have to sit through these ceremonies on tv with little kids but i'm surprised people want to work in the Freedom Tower, especially on the higher floors. I would be, I mean, if you gave me a free apartment on the top of the thing, I guess I would take it. But you're old. That's the thing. A lot of these people weren't there. No, but what I'm saying is I think we're still afraid. Nah, I don't think.

You're still afraid. You're still afraid, yeah. So last thing. So that's it. I wanted to just end kind of where we started with this, the problem with journalism. I think, and I think you'd think the same thing that because of the,

like used to be a newspaper and newspaper would have to lead with some kind of flashy stories, but then the meat of the newspaper was the newspaper was not being sold by all the stuff inside. Now, every story is basically sold a la carte. Right. And so every story has to be clickbait.

Right. Nobody's buying the Washington Post anymore. You're clicking. And just like every car salesman, no matter how much integrity he thinks he's going to have when he goes into that line of work, ends up becoming a liar. I feel that's the pressure on reporters. Yeah, I did that really integrous story and nobody read it. I gotta be flashier.

That's totally... I spent like 10 years doing those 6,000 and 7,000 word stories about financial corruption and credit default swaps. Influential stories that you did. Yeah, but I mean, not everybody reads that stuff. It's investigative journalism, but you, influential stories that you did. Yeah. But I mean, you know, not everybody reads that stuff, you know, it's, it's investigative journalism, but you can't do that because people,

you will not get the clicks now for that, for that stuff. So you got to do something faster and more grabby, you know, in the headline. And so everybody's under that pressure. And, um, is there any solution to that? I have no, I mean, I don't know. It's cause you have to make the money, right? So where's the funding going to come from if you don't, if you don't do it the way we have, we have it structured. Have you heard about the, is it the correspondent? Do you know this? It's like a, I think it started in Europe somewhere and it's now, it's sort of like citizen journalist, like it's a crowd-sourced, you know, money, money-wise like to get so that there's no,

you know, no ads, no, the same concern. I think it's called The Correspondent, and so... That's a good idea. Yeah. I mean, it's gonna have to be something like that, because, like, if you do it the way we're doing it, it's just all gonna be, like, Kardashians and, like, racist crap, and you know what I'm saying? Like, it's

just devolved into a nightmare. We gotta wrap it up. We already kept you here longer than I think we promised we would keep you. I hope you had a good time. I did. Thank you so much. I used to come to this place a lot when I was younger.

Will you start coming back? Absolutely, yeah. That would be awesome. Come hang out. Do you live in New York? Jersey City. Oh, that'd be fantastic. I'm right up.

All right. Matt Taibbi, thank you very much. You have a Twitter handle you want to share with us? At mtaibbi.com. Or at mtaibbi. That All right. Matt Taibbi, thank you very much. You have a Twitter handle you want to share with us? At mtaibbi.com or at mtaibbi. That's right. Mike Kaplan is M-Y-Q-K-A-P-L-A-N.

Didn't you go back to M-I-K-E or you've been... On Facebook, my name is Michael. My name's Mike. You can spell it however you want,

but M-Y-Q Kaplan will get you all of my social media. Well, you know where to find me. It's at Dan Natterman. And also, please email us at podcast... Podcast at ComedyCellar.com

ComedyCellar.com with comments, suggestions... Questions. Questions, ways we can make the podcast better, what you like about the podcast and what you don't. This has been one of my favorite podcasts ever. I really appreciate you coming.

Oh, thank you. It was really fun. Thank you, Zach. Good night, everybody.