The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Megan McArdle

Episode Date: August 30, 2020

Author, journalist (The Economist, The Atlantic, The New York Times) and Washington Post columnist, Megan McArdle. Use the code (COMEDYCELLAR) and Mybookie will double your first deposit at https://bit.ly/MB_COMEDYCELLAR

are on this is live from the table the official podcast of new york's world famous comedy seller coming at you at sirius xm 99 raw dog and on the riot cast podcast network dan natterman here with noam dorman owner of the world famous comedy seller the once and future best club in america now defunct now defunct but go defunct, but go ahead. It's only mostly dead. Periel Ashenbrand is with us. She's our producer and an on-air personality. She didn't start out that way, but it just sort of evolved.

We have... You should give her book credit. And she's also the author of On My Knees and The Only Bush I Trust is my own available where books are sold. And we also have with us Megan McArdle. Yes, she is a columnist at the Washington Post with almost 20 years experience as a journalist and news analyst.

Her work appearing in The Economist, The Atlantic, Newsweek, Bloomberg, Businessweek, The New York Times, The Guardian, and numerous other publications. And her book, The Upside of Down, Why Failing Well is the Key to Success, hasn't worked for me so far, was published in 2014. A recovering, lifelong New Yorker, now living in Washington, D.C. with her husband and bull mastiff. How is the mastiff doing, by the way? He is very well well he's been stuffed into the basement though because uh he is the most social dog i've ever had uh which is odd for bull mastiff they're normally more like mobile sofas and uh he would he would totally try to get on camera if he was if he was allowed upstairs so and i just want to say i think you're my dream guest i'm i there's there's all the

i usually like to have people i disagree with on. So in that sense, you're not the dream guest. But I think that you are the smartest columnist working in America. I actually really believe that. And I don't think I've ever read a column of yours that I disagreed with. And I disagree with everybody all the time and I and quite often I feel smart because you'll you'll say something that echoes something I had been saying that that everybody kind of dismissed me on and then I can send them Megan McArdle's column and it's like aha now they have to take it seriously so um shameless flattery. I am gray red. It's absolutely the truth. I mean, you are at a time, and we'll get into this,

when I feel like virtually every journalist pulls for their agenda at the expense of obvious, what was it, steel manning the other side or whatever that expression, an obvious admission of the other side, the best version of the other person's argument. You just never hear anybody countering the best version of the other person's argument and i would say you you absolutely never do that and i think that's why i admire you so much so having said that heard uh just to back up with no i'm saying i mean he he'll lay it on thick but i've never heard him lay it on quite that thick so i suppose he's sincere oh no it's sure but i mean i i said i i'm friends with the like some

journalists from the atlantic andate and whatever's in it. And I send them your columns all the time. Anyway, so Tyler Cowen, you did say, had the best blog on the net. Well, I'm sure Megan probably agrees with me on that. Oh my God, Tyler, I'm hoping to have lunch with him next week. Like actual in-person lunch, although outside and socially distanced.

I mean, how fantastic is he? He's amazing. He is like the smartest person. My favorite, there are so many awesome Tyler Cowen stories, but my favorite story, I met a graduate student who he had been advising, but not closely. He was just the person who made sure she got her paperwork in on time. And she came to him one day freaking out because her committee had demanded that she add some section to her, I guess, dissertation. And she said, I can't possibly have a weekend to do this. And he said, well, how? And I would have to read all of these books and I can't possibly. And he said, well, how big are the books? And she was like, I don't know what that means.

What are you there? You know, like eight and a half by 11. And he was like, no, on the shelf, how many feet did they take up? And so she sort of indicated with her hands, a distance of about four feet. And he said, okay, go to the library and get me the books. And she brought him all the books and he said, okay, come back on Monday. And on Monday, she came back and four feet of books were there with each of them with like little yellow stickies indicating each spot where the information that she needed was he is just amazing i feel remarkable yeah you feel like if you if you're in a room with him you feel like you are getting smarter just sitting near him it's a like he's really phenomenal and you know him a friend, and I love every time I see him. That's incredible.

No one says that about me. He says he feels he's getting smarter just by being in proximity. Yeah, yeah, something like that. You know that he was New Jersey chess champion at like 15 or something. Not 15-year-old champion, but champion of the whole state. Anyway, so let's get into a few issues so we can get it. Your most recent column was about Trump's performance during COVID. Yeah. And it's a perfect example. You went through, I haven't gotten in front of you, but you went through the obvious arguments to make for Trump,

which are that absence of Trump essentially has not helped a lot of other countries do much better. I don't know if you mentioned all the people who died in nursing homes and, you know, all the various things that you would want to mention if you were trying to actually be fair and zoom in on exactly what he's responsible for and what he's not. Like the ventilators in the end didn't matter, right? So you have this one paragraph, I couldn't face it. And this reverberates to me. He said, but a great Republican president would have worked to overcome those lower level failings.

You also referred to the testing failures, which I don't think you blamed him for. Instead, our Republican president exacerbated the shortcomings at every juncture with denial, indecision, and belligerence. Even his most touted, quote, accomplishment, the travel bans were executed late and ineptly. So you want to tell us about that? Yeah. So, you know, the big thing his supporters say and the big thing that he'll say for himself is I did the travel ban to China. Well, by the time he did the travel ban to

China, the airlines had already shut down the flights to China. So it was, you know, they'd started, it wasn't complete, but it was in the process of, it was already largely complete, and it was in the process of being completed. Because no one wanted to be flying, no one's, literally, I don't know if you remember this, the crews of the airlines were just like, I am not flying there. If you can fly the plane without me, have fun, but I'm not going. And so it was kind of moot by the time he did it. And then he didn't ban travel to Europe for a long time. And so all of, you know, I think what we've learned about this epidemic over and over and over again is that you are only as safe as the least safe person in your travel network, right? In the United States, you are only as safe as the least safe person in your travel network, right?

In the United States, you are only as safe as the least safe place in the United States. And globally, especially back then when no one had had it, no one had anything like herd immunity. I don't think anyone still does have herd immunity, but I think people are closer, like it's at least slower in places like Spain and the United States and New York and the United States in and you know parts of northern Italy it's probably slowed down just because the virus runs into too many dead ends but so it just went straight through to Italy and then ripped through Europe and came here and he eventually reacted to that but it it was, again, by then, it was so obvious that the airlines were having trouble getting crews to fly there. So, you know, actually, and if you remember when he did the European, you know, we're going to ban Zealand, right, you get off a plane, you get off a plane there in March and they had like a horde of people swarm you. They tested your temperature. You were shuttled straight to a hotel where you spent two weeks quarantining. They were

not messing around. The United States not only didn't do any of that, but they couldn't process people at customs fast enough. And so people are standing in line for five hours at O'Hare. Do you remember these pictures of the lines at O'Hare? So people are just standing there infecting each other for hours because they can't get through customs. And that was something that was predictable. And that was something they didn't, you know, they just did the travel ban and they didn't think, okay, then what?

So let me ask you, I'm going to give him even less credit than that and then try to be more fair to him. I give him even less credit because travel ban seems to be his solution for like six other things we've had to face. It's almost like a reflex that might have actually been the right thing in this case, but I can't even credit him any deep thought. It's like the ginseng of Trumpian policy, right? It cures everything that ails you. Travel ban, travel ban. In this case, it was the right thing to do. But on the other hand, this was at the time when people like Fauci and others were downplaying the seriousness of this virus.

So to be fair, I have to say, well, what's he supposed to say? I don't care what that Fauci says. This is serious. And we're going to take all these measures. At some point, I do forgive him a little bit for the fact that he was surrounded by experts who were also telling him this, you know, you don't have much to worry about here. Everyone screwed up through, certainly through March into April. Everyone had a lot of problems, right? And through June, it really wasn't obvious that we were doing any worse than anyone else. But then you get to June and we are doing really worse than other. I mean, remember, you know, again, there's a point early on, certainly in January and February, where everyone's kind of in denial, like they think China is special. And in fairness,

that was actually the experience of SARS. It didn't spread. It got to the Pacific Rim, and then it just kind of stopped there. Canada had some cases, but it wasn't very serious in the United States. It wasn't very serious in most of the world. And people kind of learned from that experience. But by March, every other world leader is taking it seriously. Donald Trump is still insisting it's a flu. It's the cold, blah, blah, blah.

And then what happens is not that Donald Trump gets religion late. It's that the stock market crashes for days. And finally, after the stock market is so far in the toilet that he can see his political career swirling down the drain with it, that is when Donald Trump finally, for about two hours, admits that there's a problem and then immediately starts backtracking because what is he obsessed with? He's obsessed with getting reelected. Right. And he understands that if we shut down the economy that complicates things. Now, first of all, I think that and this is a critique that I've had over and over of Donald Trump is people keep saying, well, you know, he's doing what voters want. He's he's doing what he needs to to get reelected. And sometimes that's true, but often I think it isn't. Often I think he's actually extremely bad at assessing his own

political self-interest. And this is a case where he's fixated on getting the economy reopened, and he's not thinking about, okay, can I reopen the economy in a pandemic? Even if the government does nothing, are people just going to be wondering, or no, they're not. That's not how people act in pandemics, right? And you can see this in New York where people are still unlike Europe right they're so traumatized they're just extremely reluctant to leave their homes even as stuff has started to reopen and so he doesn't think about what I need to do is get the pandemic under control and that if I do that if I rally people, if I can be a unifying figure for once, then actually my chances get way better. I'm like George Bush in 2001, right? I've led us through the national crisis. It's rally around the flag and Donald Trump. He doesn't even

try that strategy. Instead, he dithers, he's divisive. He starts tweeting, liberate Virginia, liberate, right? At no point. Can I stop you there for a second? Do you remember Perry Olin Dan, the one time I really turned on him about this was about exactly what you're just saying now that the president of the United States is out there during the day talking about the lockdowns and then by night undermining the lockdowns with tweets. I'm like, well, that's not acceptable as a leader. If you don't agree with the lockdowns, then don't have the lockdowns.

And if you do agree with the lockdowns, then you got to be behind them. But what kind of president undermines his own policy? And I also agree with you that he's wrong about the economy because the American people were not going to hold him accountable for the economy. I mean, I saw today Ann Applebaum in The Atlantic tweeted, Trump tanked the economy. And that disturbed me because what, like, is there some economy that hasn't been tanked? But I mean, I think the American people would forgive almost any outcome if they just felt he, like like we kind of forgive cuomo even though his record has been terrible i even forgive him yeah he stuffed those patients back into the

nursing home so that was a really stupid thing to do yeah um and i think i i blame him for that but i also think like you know i don't blame him for the early stuff where he i don't even blame de blasio for getting out there and being like everyone everyone go to Chinatown, right? You know, it's hard. It's hard to discard your own past experience, right? Well, I did blame them for that. And I blame them for that in real time because you must have seen Chernobyl, that TV show. So you remember in Chernobyl when they had the Geiger calendars and they were

only reading like, I'm making a 30-Rengen, which is like a chest X-ray. But the reason it was only reading is 30 because the a 30 rangang which is like a chest x-ray but the reason it was only reading is 30 because the guy your count has only went to 30 yeah that was very obviously what quoting tests were in march we only had 30 positives because we only had 30 tests and it seemed to me back then shut down pretend it's a snowstorm shut down get a hold of this thing we can always reopen. I was saying that at the time, that this didn't seem, and they were bending to like, well, what are the kids going to do during the day and all this kind of stuff. So in the meantime, states that had

far fewer cases than we did were shutting down. Mike DeWine, hero, right? The hero governor. He's a Republican in Ohio. Now, of course, they're trying to recall him because he's a hero governor. And London Breed in San Francisco. She was very responsible. So I can't give Cuomo a pass on that. But the nursing home thing, by the way, have you figured out the math at all?

Like if you back out all the nursing home deaths, which are like 40%, how much does that rehabilitate Trump's record here in terms of- I think it's really hard. So like here, okay. There's a few things, like, first of all, did other people screw up?

Yeah, a lot, right? I've been very, I've been quite savage about the public health people who were like, stay in your home, stay in your home, stay in your homes. Oh, anti-racism protest, that's safe or that's fine. And like that, you know, I mean, and even leaving aside whether morally, like you can make an argument for that, it was disastrous.

Yeah. Right, that was the moment at which no one on the right half of the political spectrum was ever gonna listen to a damn thing you said after that. It was a really bad idea. Even if you can like by some advanced calculus say that, and frankly, I think that that wasn't what people were thinking. They were thinking with their kind of emotional political brain, not their epidemiologist brain. And I think that that's a problem and we all do it, right? Like it's a bunch of

Republicans out there thinking with their political brain rather than their like epidemiologist or just kind of basic common sense brain. The number of people who are claiming that masks don't stop transmission, like that's nutty. You know, try spitting with and without a mask and then see which one, see if they block fluid transmission. They do. They totally do. I promise. Right. And it's just, it's crazy that we're having these kinds of debates. But so I absolutely think other people really screwed up. And I think that it's also true that, right, this thing keeps confounding people. You looked at South Korea. South Korea was doing so amazing. And now all of a sudden they've got it in 70 provinces because it spread through a Presbyterian church. At any time, the person who looks worst at any

given time is not necessarily going to be the person who looks worst three months from now. And you really do have to keep that in mind. That said, every other country had this big peak and then they went down to nothing. And then the US just had this big peak and then they went down to nothing, right? And then the U.S. just had this big peak and then we went down and we stopped at about three deaths per million per day. Are we still doing better per capita than, well, Sweden, for example, and a few other places? There are now five developed countries, although one of them, Belgium, it's really hard. They have this really inclusive definition of a COVID death that's not really comparable to anyone else's. And so I sort of just kicked them out and like, I don't know. Can I stop you there right in the middle of that

point? Because I have something I wanted to read out loud that it's going to bear on what you're saying. I picked this up in the Times yesterday. I never noticed this probably because I skim, but it says about France. It says, France is one of a few countries in Europe that includes COVID-19 deaths in retirement or nursing homes in its countrywide daily death tallies, meaning the overall picture of mortality is more accurate, but the data skewed higher in the early weeks of April. But anyway, but the point is that apparently some countries in Europe don't even include the nursing home data. So it's complicated. What that's saying is not that they don't include people from nursing homes who die in hospital, which is where most of them will end up dying. Just that like if someone died in a nursing home and wasn't tested, and that nursing home had a

COVID outbreak, as a lot of them did, do you assume that that was a COVID death or not? Right. Yeah. None of these numbers are precisely comparable, but I think the British numbers are in the, how they calculate them are in the ballpark. we're, you know, the British numbers are in the, how they calculate them are in the ballpark. So Britain, for example, says if you got tested, if you tested positive for COVID and you die within 28 days, then we're counting you as a COVID death, unless we can prove it's not a COVID death, right? If you get hit by a car, we're not going to call you a COVID death, but people who are that sick probably aren't getting hit by cars a lot, you know? So, you know, is there some wiggle room? Yes.

But in general, that number is pretty comparable to ours. None of them is perfect, right? All of these, there's these, there's always great stories about one of my favorites is that the town of Beachy had in London, which is next to these very, in England, next to these very high cliffs. And they had been a famous place for people to go commit suicide. And in one year, they managed to cut their suicide rate in half. And the way that they did that was that they got a new medical examiner. And the new medical examiner had required sort of

proof that someone had been despondent and wanted to kill themselves. Because of course, people also just, they get drunk and they fall off the cliffs cliffs and the previous guy had counted all of those as suicides and the new guy counted only the people who seemed like they were definitely suicides and suicides and there's always some element to that in any statistic that you look at but I think we're pretty comparable and I think it is pretty clear from both cases and deaths that we really are high and elevated and we never got down to that level where people in Europe are pretty much walking around

feeling pretty safe. And I'm seeing this in my own household now because my husband is a movie critic and Tenet, Christopher Nolan's big new movie is coming out. And he wants to go review it and I want him to go review it, but I don't want him to go review it. And it's really you know

this is a really hard decision but he has the same thing is you know we've actually I'm not I'm making this sound like he's just like I'm gonna go do this no we're really torn about this right but he would like to see the movie in the theater we're not sure it's safe and the data we have from Europe seems to suggest that it's safe but the data we have from Europe is in a place that just has a much, much, much lower background incidence of COVID than we do. Because we are now, in terms of that, the worst in the developed world.

Spain is basically the only other one. And we didn't have to be here. And I think that, so I think there's a lot of these deaths Trump could not have stopped. And there are also failures at other levels and we're having problems that other countries aren't having like that cops keep shooting people and then we keep having big protests that are certainly not helping right in a lot of ways right they're not helping us build a political unity we need to to attack this

they're they're a story and I'm not I don't want to denigrate the protesters. I'm just saying we now, America, unlike everywhere else, has two big stories it's trying to deal with at once. And we're not focusing as much as we would like to on either one of them. And they're both very important. But that said, I still think like a lot of this does go back to Trump and the way he has reacted at every turn, tear gassing the protesters, making it worse, right? Escalating the conflict. And I think that that has, you know, I listened to Melania Trump's speech last night and I just thought, gosh, if only Donald Trump had ever given this speech.

It was so nice. She was trying to be nice to everyone in the country. She was trying to talk about all the things that unify us all. It was beautiful. I hadn't heard his political speech like this for a long time. And it was so sad that it had to come from the first lady and not the president. One more question about COVID. So if you were, if you were president tomorrow and you wanted to salvage this situation and you, you know, and you had to do realistically, what would you do?

Oh, that's really hard, right? I can make up if you make me a dictator, it's a lot easier. Yeah, dictator's fine. I think what I would probably do is say, okay, everyone, here's the deal. We need to get a real handle on this. And so what we're doing is we're locking down for a month. And if you are not like an actual, if you were not feeding someone, if you are not, but you know, one more emergency, like $4 trillion bill, we'll, we'll pay for it later. And like, if you have a business,

I'm just going to pay your bills for the next month. Like all the way up, everyone's bills get, if I shut you down, everyone's bills get paid. And then the second thing is if you come in to the United States, you quarantine for two weeks. No exceptions. This is what we used to do. I mean, there's a hospital in Staten Island that was the quarantine hospital. When ships showed up, sailors went there for two weeks or you had to be offshore for two weeks and just sit there. So everyone quarantines. And if you come here, you know, sorry, that's part of the cost.

We're not going to have business travelers for a while, but everyone who comes in here quarantines for two weeks. Mask testing, I would be really prioritizing that. I would be really prioritizing getting N95 masks. I want N95 masks to be so cheap that they're giving them away as promotions when you go to the movies. So if anyone heard that, do not stop washing your hands. But those are the things I would be doing. I would be trying to knock us down to a level where we could actually control this. And then the last thing I would do, army of contact tracers. And I would have some way to certify that you've gotten tested recently.

Right? I would have some way that, there's a website. And so if you're having people over at your house, hey, just mind popping that test and like get your results up and then, you know, come on over, right? So that I have a test from you today. And like, are there still going to be infections? Yeah, but way down. And if you can get them down to that point,

then you can start contact tracing. Then you can start doing things. There are reasons in the US that all of these things are harder that have to do with not with Donald Trump. But like federalism makes this harder. Our civil rights make it harder. South Korea was using, you know, phone data to track people in a way that the U.S. government can't. I'm very skeptical of contact tracing because of that. I think people are going to lie.

They're going to turn their phones off. They're going to hide. a ton of money to, for example, be like, hey, if you sign up for this app and you keep it on all the time for 28 days, you get a $5 gift card to whatever, right? I would give people reasons. A MAGA hat. Yeah. No, it's $5 or $10 off your cell phone bill, right? As if you have the contact tracing app going all the time. You don't have to, but I think we're going to have to think about that for vaccination, is how are we going to encourage people to get vaccinated? think we're going to have to think about that for vaccination, is how are we going to encourage people to get vaccinated? Because that's going to be the next big hurdle that no one is really talking about. What's the end game at the end of that month that you just talked about,

that month of lockdown and all this? Given that the whole thing started with one person in China, how would we keep it from exploding again if after the end of the month, we're not, the virus will still be with us? Is the end game to eliminate the virus entirely, or is it just to keep it at bay until a vaccine? For me, it's at this point, the end game is at bay until there's a vaccine. I don't think there's any other way. It's too endemic in the global world. The United States does, I mean, Donald Trump is kind of right about this, we've got a long border. And it's endemic in parts of South America and Mexico, which means it's going to keep coming across that border, and we can't interdite that. We can't interdite the Canadian border. It's not nearly as big a

thing. But that said, if we could get it down to the point where we can actually monitor it by contact tracing, we could do most of it, right? Like, you don't need 100%. You need to bring back the economy, right? And I've had these really, because I'm like a mathy if DC cases are under 10 a day and our testing rate is above X and our positivity rate looks like this, I get super comfortable with a lot of activities I'm not comfortable with right now. Right. And that's how we have to think about it. Right. and that's how we have to think about it right if we have if we're New Zealand and we have you know we we have an outbreak and we need to shut down Auckland for three weeks we might get to that point again but if we have to do that once every five months like that's way better than where we are now right where we can go around normally almost all the time and then every five months we have

another month-long shutdown I will take that because the fact is you know we can talk about how we just all need to get the economy back going but I don't know about you like I'm not going to a bar until there's a vaccine I'm just not going to crowd into a large or until I've had it but even then we just Hong Kong just reported the first case of reinfection, and we hope that that's just an outlier. But look, reinfection was never going to be no one ever does it. We don't know how common it is. It was always possible that someone it was going to happen to. It was a mild case. It could be nothing. It could be a big deal. We don't know yet. But I'm not going to a bar until not only I have had a vaccine, either it's a super effective vaccine that's like 95% effective, or it's a 50% effective vaccine

that most of the country has had. I'm just not going to do it, which means we have to like, one way or the other, we have to take care of this. There's a lot of magical thinking all over the place on this stuff. But the magical thinking on the right is if i just pretend it's not a problem it'll be okay and like you can pretend all you want i am not joining you in fantasy land which means you still have a problem and this is something that like this is a broader problem with america right now right is like we're so politically divided but we're also politically divided into two groups of people who have an extended fantasy where they don't have to deal with the other side, where

like the other side just no longer matters their lives. Like you are sharing a country with these people and they matter. They matter because they're people, they matter because they're Americans, but they also matter just because like they can mess up your life which means you got to find a way to get along with them so but so that uh tyler seems to think that places like new york and i think he said london that he thinks we have achieved some sort of that we're not going to spike again that we have some sort of equilibrium of herd herd ish immunity um but we'll we'll we'll see it does seem like that in New York and Sweden and London, the place that we're not spiking, you know. But there's a whole big country out there that's still prone to spiking, right? I think there's that. But I also, I am less confident than Tyler.

And we've talked about this a bit. I don't think, I don't necessarily think he's wrong. I just don't know. They don't know. I think it's more possible than he does that he is wrong. And the reason I think that is a few things. First of all, Europe's been having a heat wave. If anyone has ever spent a summer in Europe, there is to a first approximation, no air conditioning in Northern Europe, which means when there's a heat wave, everyone's outside. So meanwhile, where are we having, right? We're in Florida and Texas and Arizona where there's, it's really hot and everyone has air conditioning and they're inside. And so I think that it may be that as it gets colder and people go back inside, it turns out that actually what we're seeing was

not that they had herd're seeing was not that they had herd immunity. It was that they had kind of had a little bit of herd immunity if they were all outside all the time, which now they're not anymore. I think the second possibility is just that like the lower it goes, the more people who like me are pretty risk averse start like, oh, well, I can do this. This seemed okay, right? And if you think about how people actually do things, we're not good at learning from other people's experiences. What we do is we try something and if we don't die, we think, oh, well, that seems safer than it used to seem. So maybe I'll try it again, right? And then we try

it. And then usually that's actually not a bad strategy, right? Like you look at what other people are doing, you try it yourself. If you don if you don't die okay well that seems pretty safe um it's really bad with a novel threat but nonetheless i think that's how this is actually going to go is people like me we're bored we look at other people having fun no one seems to be dying we go out well the thing is that what we know from the first wave is that it takes like a good couple of months to really see that you've got an epidemic going again, right? And so what you could just get is like a sine curve, right? Where it just like goes up and down and up and down and up and down as those, as people, it seems safe, safe they go out it turns out like the

epidemic it's going again and I think that that's very possible I don't know and I'm just saying like I think that those do I think it's gonna be slower in New York and London yeah because they have to be the virus is just gonna keep running into dead ends but that doesn't necessarily that could just mean it takes longer to get going but you know and is a little easier to control. The nice thing is as you, as you try to control it, but it doesn't mean that you're at herd immunity. And I think that the problem is that most of the people, not Tyler, cause Tyler is a very smart and wise person. Um, but most of the people I see making this argument are functionally like, look, New York and London, which, you know,

New York is basically still pretty locked down. Um, they, New York and London, which, you know, New York is basically still pretty locked down. They seem to have herd immunity, therefore they should open up. It's like, no, actually, maybe they just have herd immunity if no one goes to bars or movies or whatever. And maybe they wouldn't if they opened up again. So yeah, I don't know. All right. So let's move on to, you wrote a column, maybe it's about a year. No, it couldn't be, it couldn't be a full year ago. But anyway, about, about your view of the, the, the issue of structural racism. You want to give us like your little. because like the secret to being a columnist is reduce, reuse, recycle. And, but it's actually, it's really, this is a really near and dear cause to my heart.

And it is that I really believe structural racism exists and is a problem. And conservatives, you know, and I identify as right-leaning, not, you know, most of the right rejects me as a, as a hopeless lefty, but I am, I am definitely on the right. If you peg me on the American spectrum, I'm just kind of the right rejects me as a as a hopeless lefty but i i am i am definitely on the right if you peg me on the american spectrum i'm just kind of center rightish um but so i i think that this is a problem that the conservative the conservatives should take more seriously and i have been saying you know ever since Black Lives Matter started I've said to conservatives like what you should not have done is just like started with Blue Lives Matter or whatever even though I understand some of the the things that that motivated that and I'm very sympathetic to the aims of Black Lives Matter I am extremely you know sympathetic

to the claims that police often abuse the power they have because as a libertarian, which is that cops are afraid of getting shot and then they preemptively shoot people who are not a threat to them. And like, we should figure out how to solve that problem. And they would be like, well, it's that's their job. It's like, you know what, if it was your job, you wouldn't be like, oh, well, I guess I'm just going to get shot then. That's a really stupid thing to say. And I understand why conservatives had some of the reactions they did.

That said, what it boils down to is like, what have we seen with COVID? All of the conservatives who are so indignant about being made to wear masks, about being stopped by police when they're trying to play in the park with their kids, about being in fact treated the way that communities of minorities in America have often been treated by the police. Stopped even though they're not really doing anything wrong because they, you know, and they don't like it and they got really indignant about it. And the thing that I thought, I have always thought conservatives should have been saying is not trying to counteract the message, but to co-opt it and to reframe it as a conservative issue. And what they should have said is, this is America, these are Americans.

We don't treat Americans like that. We don't treat people like that in America because we're better than that. And that is to me the most fundamentally conservative, liberty-loving message that they did not try to offer. And that made me sad. So anyway, I've been trying to convince them,

but the most effective vehicle that I have found to convince them is pointing out that all of the stuff that they complain about, and I agree a lot of, with a lot of, about the liberal bias in the media, about liberal bias in academia, about the way that conservatives are excluded from those institutions and from Hollywood and from the arts and so forth, right? Like what are they fundamentally complaining about? It's structural discrimination and microaggressions. What are they mad about? They're mad that the media just sort of, often inadvertently slights them and doesn't understand who they are and treats them like, and others them. And they're mad about the fact that people like other people

who are like them and they tend to hire those people and hang out with those people. And so if you have an overwhelmingly liberal institution, it gets even more overwhelmingly liberal as they hire other liberals. And therefore, they should totally believe in structural racism because they've seen it operate in their own lives. They should believe in microaggressions because they know it bothers them. And that was the column that I wrote is like, guys, you do believe in this's you don't like it and it's bad so let's figure out how to fight it when it's not happening to you let me add let me i'm sorry then i'll let you know let me add to that because i had some similar thoughts so what i what's bothered me about this is that it's focused on something

which actually isn't the problem which is cops shooting unarmed black men. And we know it's not really the problem. The statistics are not very powerful in making that case. And in my opinion is that when a cop shoots somebody, that's probably, if you could put it on a graph, that's the most good faith reaction a cop is having. When they're shooting someone, they have a lot on the line to do that, as opposed to having a guy in the back of a police car and he comes out all beat up and he's, oh, he was resisting arrest and nobody can say boo about it. And I think that we're pretending it's about the unarmed shooting, but really, I mean, every black guy I know is in a rage from some story that he's had with the cops where he was just an innocent, wholesome guy minding his own business, got pulled over by the cops, you know, probably maybe in good faith, maybe being profiled, gets spoken down to. It's very clear in the interaction that you're under my thumb. You're my bitch.

Don't misbehave. And it happens to you. It happened to me once and it's enraging. It happens to you six or seven times a year. And you know how arrogant these cops treat you. And you fucking hate the cops. And even if you can understand it somewhere, I get it, I know the crime stats,

I know, it doesn't matter, you're still human because it's just such an imposition. So that when a cop does shoot somebody, you react to it in a way because that finally gives you the license to vent all that rage. But the fact is, if the cops had always treated you nicely and you saw somebody get shot like that you're like oh well you know i guess

there might be a tragic mistake he might have had it coming i don't know but i know cops and they're always pretty professional so and then but for conservatives and data people like me i'm like you know what are you feeding me here there's only been 14, you know, there was zero, literally zero black guys shot in New York last year unarmed, you know, so that, and I don't have it in me to get behind something and speak about it when I know it's actually not even the truth. And Black Lives Matter hasn't presented me with the opportunity to get behind them on the day-to-day humiliations that cops are subjecting people which i know that that's true and that and that's where i think you you hit the nail on the head because you tell a conservative put their mask on and all of a

sudden just being told what to do is a really heavy thing for a human but someone who doesn't respect them and someone told what to do respect Respect matters so much, and we forget that. Like, it's really interesting to me, because, you know, Marion Barry, who is the mayor of Washington, D.C., and had all of these, like, he got arrested while he was in office. Hookers and crack.

Hookers and crack, yeah. I mean, he was really, like, he was a theatrical person. And white D.C. couldn't figure out how this dude kept getting reelected. You know what it was? It was his, he respected his people. He made them feel like he respected them and he didn't respect the people who disrespected them. That is so powerful. So I, my, you know, last name, like McArdle, my dad's from Boston. There's a great story from Boston, Mayor Curley, who was the Marion Barry of his era. He's an Irish mayor. He like in the way that Marion Barry just refused to snowplow the kind of the really white and

affluent districts of DC in the eighties. Mayor Curley just systematically disinvested in any of the Protestant areas. He systematically refused to hire anyone who was not a white ethnic, as we used to be called. And this made the Brahmins really angry. And so they got together and they finally came up with this candidate, I think for public works commissioner. And this guy is so wildly overqualified for this job. And they went to him and they said, you have to hire him. He's obviously better than anyone you have. And Curly looked at him and he said, okay, I want you to go back into the records of Boston. I will open them up for you. Before 1881, so the first Irish mayor, Hugh O'Brien, is elected in 1881. And I want you to find me the name of any Irishman who has given

any job above that of patrolman in the city of Boston before 1881. If you can find me the name of one, I will appoint this guy. Well, he didn't appoint that guy because they couldn't find the name of one. And if people, and what the Protestants, what the Brahmins never understood was that, yes, Curley was in many ways bad for Boston. I'm not really defending exactly what he did. But if you don't understand that Marion Barry, Marion Barry came out of the fact that D.C. was literally run by segregationists, like literally the worst segregationists in the Senate were overseeing D.C. And their number one priority was keeping black people down. And similarly, if you don't understand that Curly came out of what you did, respect

matters. And like that, I mean, I agree with you, right? The shootings of unarmed people are low. They're not large in number, either blacks or whites. That's not fundamentally, but they are, they're so much more vivid when we see them. They're a vivid and visceral example of something that really does happen, which is the ongoing continual disrespect disproportionately of minorities and especially blacks in this country. And it is related to poverty and it is related to crime rates which are themselves somewhat partly related to poverty and then there's a whole stew of legacy of of slavery that is still ringing through the centuries um but that's absolutely what that is about and we have to do better on that we have to figure out a way that policing is not so

disrespectful because that is fundamentally i think you you're right, where the roots of this are. Well, we actually have to go to a commercial break. Go ahead, do it. Perfect. Do it. Do it. Perfect. Yeah. MyBookie. MyBookie is an online betting site and winning season returns at MyBookie. Winning season means doubling your first deposit. Winning season means survivors, super contests, and squares. At my bookie, winning season means hitting all your parlays and props with your feet up, watching your team trounce their rivals.

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So that's my bookie for those sports betting enthusiasts. You needn't go to Vegas. You can go to my bookie. You qualify this as systemic racism. When a cop harasses a black guy, how is that not just racism? Why do we qualify that with the term systemic racism? How do we, when a cop harasses a black guy, how is that not just racism? Why do we qualify that with the term systemic racism? Well, because he might like, look, the cop might just be a jerk who harasses everyone. Or he might, he might think this is how good policing works, right? Or like, but the fact is, like, he might actually treat everyone the

same. But the difference is that like, the neighborhoods with the highest crime are the ones that get the most policing. And what are the neighborhoods with the highest crime? They're the neighborhoods that are disproportionately poor and minority. And so even if that particular cop is not in any way profiling anyone based on their race, it's just where is he? He is somewhere, he's on a drug corner. Who is on the drug corner? Well, whites tend to sell drugs inside. Blacks tend to sell drugs outside. And it's easier to detect people who are selling drugs outside, right? Like all of that stuff.

And again, that is a legacy of income. And where do people live? And, you know, so there's like this whole thing. So that even if the cop is not personally racist, which is possible, right? Often the people who do this which is possible, right? Often the people who do this are themselves minorities, right? It's that the whole system, these things have propagated for so long and they are structurally embedded so that if you are black, it doesn't matter whether the cop himself is personally racist. It is that all of this other stuff is happening outside of the

relationship between the two of you. And that is the system. Well, I'll give you the argument for systemic, Dan. I've said this on the podcast before where, you know, I had been very early on against stop and frisk once I saw these crazy stats that came out of that lawsuit, just like ridiculous numbers. But then Bloomberg recently, you know, when he started, when the election campaign started, he acknowledged that, yeah, yes, these black kids are getting arrested for marijuana. But you know, that's what we need to do to keep the guns off the street, essentially admitting that, yeah, we're arresting these guys or, you know, I don't know if they actually get arrested or just whatever falls short of being arrested for a crime that we actually don't care about

and we know it's a bullshit crime, but we're putting them in this traumatic experience with the police because we're trying to get to something else. And I said, what could be a better example of a systemic racism than that? That simply because you're black, you're gonna get harassed for an offense, marijuana,

which actually the government doesn't even care about. It's just a pretext. It's just a way to get to you, like pulling you over for not wearing your seatbelt or whatever it is. You're broken talent. Broken talent. And now, to be fair, it is true. And I just saw a stat yesterday somewhere with the new spike in shootings, how many black people are dying. It really is true. And I just saw a stat yesterday somewhere with the new spike in shootings, how many black people are dying. It really is true that in the end, it is black lives that are being saved by these methods that we find problematic. And that's a tough philosophical issue, I have to admit, for me. If all this rage ends up saving thousands of black lives either either

option is difficult to to accept and i also think to be fair that if we had an army of a force of robocops you would still have tremendous resentment of the robocops because of the crime rates dictate certain behaviors which which are going to put people under a scrutiny and being called in and questioned or whatever it is in a way that i mean in new york the stats are i think i read 98.6 percent of shootings in new york city are non-white so this is a i mean 98.6% is like zero, right? I mean, zero, basically a cop, you have cops there who've never seen a white guy with a gun in their whole career. Who wasn't another cop. Yeah, who wasn't another cop. So this is very, very, very tough.

But I think I really, I really agree with you. And I really admire that you said, and I always felt this way, is that you need to understand, you can say all that's true, but if you can't understand that from the point of view of a law-abiding black guy, to go through this is just unacceptable. You can't ask that of a human being. You especially have to take it seriously. If he just hears us taking it seriously,

that matters to him. I agree with that, but I also think there are better ways to do policing, right? I think like, it's not, not easy. It's not going to happen overnight, right? We're talking about a serious, I mean, partly like, and some of the things I think are really unpopular, like, I think we should hire more cops. And I think we should pay them more so that we get better cops. I mean, it's actually like in New York, the cops are paid decently well, but there are lots of places where these guys are getting paid $30,000 a year. Right. And like, and maybe they can work their way up sometime,

someday to make $50,000 a year, but maybe not. And you know, you should pay, you should pay for quality quality you should make it now in exchange you should make it easier to fire them and hold them accountable but we should be paying our cops more we need more we are actually under policed relative to but we don't need more police like sitting in cars we need police going out in the community i love this richard rosenfeld who's a criminologist uh at missouri has this great thing. He says, I want these guys, not all of them, because not all of them could do it well, but I want them to be recruiting people

who have good interpersonal skills and who are going out into the community and saying, just here's my business card. I'm not investigating everything. I'm just trying to find out what's going on in the community and what can I do to help, right? Like we should be doing that. We need to take cops out of cars.

That might actually mean sacrificing some return in 911 response times, but we need to put them on the street, embedded in the community and have them be part, instead of being this alien force that drops in when there's a 911 call, they need to be out there every day watching the streets, being there, helping people, helping people. People should feel like the cops are the guy you go and

you're like, I'm having a problem. We should also remember though, like there is dysfunction in poor communities. There are people who commit crimes. There are people who commit crimes in rich communities, right? Bernie Madoff did not rip off all of those people just because he was deprived and he had a hard life, right? There are people who will do bad things and we're going to need some policing, but there's also a whole different way of thinking about enforcement and punishment and not trying to be so three strikes, you go to prison for 20 years. How do we do felon reintegration? This is so important. And I love all of these stories. There was one at the RNC last night of the guy who's

like, I went to prison. I had a come Jesus moment, literally in this guy's case. And now I have a new life helping felons reintegrate. And I think that's amazing. But I would love to hear that story where he's just like and now i have a new life as a tax accountant right and there it's always like i'm doing something helping felons reintegrate and i want like we need a world in which you can be a felon and pay your debt to society and have done something wrong well that's what's going on norway right the prison system in norway is exactly everything you have just described and the recidivism rate is super low and it's proved to be incredibly successful we need a whole different

and like again I go back to like this is America these are Americans like we are the land of fresh starts we are like everyone who's here is here because their relatives screwed up at home and stuff was not going well and they got on a boat to get away unless they're Native Americans or African Americans but everyone else like something went wrong and your people came here and started over so so if it wasn't coming from your mouth I would I might almost you know say oh this is so idealistic. But because I know you're very grounded, I have to really take it seriously. I just want to say that, first of all, I don't know anything about police throughout the United States of America. And I would never want to vouch

for any police in any police force anywhere. So when I'm really talking about police, I'm kind of just talking about my universe of New York City and whatever it is. And I just don't know anything about what goes on. I have a skepticism that people who enjoy kicking the shit out of people are attracted to become policemen. And I think that's a difficult problem. I also think that violent crime, like the stuff that really terrifies us on the streets, the people that mugged my father and mugged my mother and these kinds of things. I don't know that they're going to be that affected by the kind of things that you're talking. However, I do believe that trial and error is worth 30 iq points and even if it helps a little bit uh you know a 15 improvement however you want to measure that should is quite important it's 15 fewer people who are you know terrorized by the cops so and and and maybe we don't know where the

critical mass is of how much of this has to go on before people can't fucking take it anymore. It doesn't have to be zero. It needs to be beaten down a little bit. Well, let me also say that actually I think like there's a flip side. That was like the nice side where I'm like everything, sweetness and light, whatever. The other side is like we should be like we should actually have the apparatus to apprehend more criminals. Right. have the apparatus to apprehend more criminals, right? We should actually be able to catch people early, not punish them as harshly as we do, but definitely punish them, right? Like just amping

up the harshness is way less effective than like you will definitely get caught. And so what we should also be looking to is you will definitely get caught and then maybe you're only under house arrest, but like house arrest really sucks if you have to go do it every time you mug someone. And so maybe I will pick up a different career. Like, so I think there's a bunch of things and it's not just be nicer to people. It's also, we should make, it's what the late, like Mark Kleiman said, we should make punishment swift, certain, and fair. And then you can have lighter punishments that are actually more effective and cheaper, by the way, much less expensive to administer. It's like win, win, win all the way around.

There's not a lot of policies that are like that. Okay, we're almost out of time. She wants to have a lightning round. Okay. Go ahead, Dan. You have to leave. You have any last questions? I just wanted to talk about Kenosha because it's basically this news item going on right now. Do you think that there's any possible scenario in which this was a justified shooting? And when Biden said, basically, we're grieving, and Kamala also said something similar, basically, in my mind, saying that, that yes this was an unjustified shooting. Was that prudent on their part or should they have said let's wait for the facts?

We have all the facts we need. In general I think it's better to say let's wait for the facts. Do I think it's possible? Look my understanding and I am by no means an expert is that unlike George Floyd, where I interviewed one guy who works with a lot of cops and was himself a cop. And he said, this is one of the few shooting where one of the few of these events where I just I can't think of any possible justification and have spoken to no cop who can come up with any possible justification for what happened there with Kenosha my understanding is that what people who are by no means like cop apologists think is that it's possible that the he was like going into his car and it's possible that the cop thought that he was reaching for a gun and that possibly part of that is that there's this training video that all the cops see it's an actual traffic stop that happened this guy stops a guy and tells him to you know come out of the car with his hands up and he doesn't he comes out with an ar-47 and you see from the dash cam him shooting the cop and so

cops are kind of trained to be extremely scared and like quick on the trigger in those circumstances. And you can see why, but it's a kind of availability bias, right? Is most of the time, if you don't just shoot that guy, he won't come out with an AK, an AR-15. And the one time that he does, right, the one time that it did, it was on camera and it's shown to all the cops to tell them. So we have to think about how are we training cops? How are we telling them what is the most likely outcome here? We are, we, and so I think that it's possible that the cop did think that way, but if, if he did, that sort of speaks to how are we training police to sort of treat every person

as a potential threat rather than kind of erring a little bit more on the side of don't shoot people. And I think that this goes back to what I said is like, we're going to have to pay them more to take those kinds of risks because $35,000 a year is a lot, is not very much to pay someone to ask them to take the risk of getting shot at a traffic stop. But as you also said, I don't care if you pay the guy half a million a year, if he's in that situation and he thinks he's going to get shot, you know, he's going to pull the trigger. I think there's, I mean, but it goes back to what we talked about with COVID, right? Like people are already taking more risks and they do that because if you take risks and nothing happens, you think, okay, well, I learned a little bit. I can, I'm going to, I'm more willing to take

that risk in the future. And the problem is that like news kind of short circuits that video short circuits that and you see this with kids right you see this with people are okay so i grew up in new york i have to leave let me say there's a third rail here, and I must be honest and say, you have two seconds, Dan, or no? Oh, he's got to go. Yeah. That, you know, you see a guy who's, I mean, this is all we know about. I think the answer is they, Biden was, it was a big risk to go all in because a fact could come out tomorrow, and that really makes him look foolish.

We do know that the cop was yelling, put down the knife. So already we know that the cop was at least in the frame of mind where he thought this guy was threatened. And then, you know, there's this, I know we all agree or most people agree, maybe Candace almost doesn't agree,

that it doesn't matter whether you're a good person or a bad person, everybody should be treated equally humanely. Yes. So, but when I see somebody tussling with the cops and in that tussle and the cop's trying to stop him and the cop's worried and he doesn't listen and he runs for the car and he opens the door and then maybe the cop does something he didn't have to do but he shoots him

i i am not cut out to judge that cop in the same way i am cut out to judge a cop who has a guy who is handcuffed on the ground and is obviously no threat whatsoever and then does something or shoots with that horrible was really a murder shot. This guy in the back was running away, whatever it is. If you give a hundred situations like that with the best training, a certain percentage of cops are going to react in that fight or flight situation and shoot. And I have trouble judging them. I have trouble saying they're bad people. Now, we don't know all the facts. Maybe the cop really was a bad guy, but there's enough

facts there that indicate that this was not just some cops looking to shoot somebody or being sadistic. Something was going on there. They called for something. I read that they already had his, now maybe this creates a bias in their part. They already had his record in their minds of assault or whatever charge he had previously. And they're trying to stop him.

And they say, put down the gun. And he's going into the car for something, right? And then something happens. And again, we're so far away from the friends of mine who are being humiliated by the cops and what happens i get sucked into this kind of trying to be fair to what this cop was going through and then people say you don't care about the way the cops treat black people and i'm like no i really really do but I also feel this urge to be fair to a guy who's risking his life and he's trying to deal with a guy who is putting him in fear in some

way you know it doesn't have to just do what the cop asked just stop right look I think everyone could use more empathy right I mean I also think I am I'm struck by two things, which is that I don't know what it's like to be a cop and be that afraid, but I also don't know what it's like to be a young black man who is subject to terrifying stops where he knows if anything goes wrong, he could die multiple times a year.

I don't know either of those things. And so, but I will say this is like- He believes that even if it's not true. Right, right. It might not be true, but he feels that way, right? And so I would say this is like, I look at something like Vietnam. This is a little bit, just sort of a bit digressive, but I think about something like that. And I think about, it is really true, right? There were villagers who would give you up to the Viet Cong and you were in danger from them. And maybe the safest thing is just to shoot

all the villagers. And we told troops they can't do that, even if it would make them safer, right? We gave them rules of engagement as we should have, by the way, I'm not saying I did the wrong thing there. That was right. And so what I'm asking, how did we, how did we achieve that? Right? How did we achieve that in World War II? How did we achieve that? Where, yeah, often like there were people who are collaborators, they'll give you up to the Nazis. How do you, so how do you do it is you install a professional ethos that this is just part of who we are, that I have a code of honor to live up to, that is even that I risk death so that I don't accidentally allow, kill a civilian, right? And I think that creating that

culture is really difficult for a number of reasons, right? It's harder than it is in the military, in part because like the civilians aren't necessarily breaking the law, and often they're dealing with people who are already doing something they feel is wrong, and that engages a different set of moral intuitions. But we need to ask them to take more risks. But we have to, first of all, respectfully acknowledge that that's what we're asking, rather than denigrating them as a bunch of knee-jerk fascists who, right, you don't get anywhere by starting with disrespect, to go back to what we were saying earlier. So respect them and say, we are asking you to take more risks. Okay, how do we make that possible? Partly it's the professional code that takes pride in taking those risks. Partly it is,

we pay you more. We offer you other benefits. We make sure that, you know, your wife and kids or your husband and kids or whoever are taken care of, we give you great disability insurance. We honor you, right? Like we need more of that then, which is why I say if you, sorry. No, I'm sorry. I saw you. I didn't want to interrupt you. Go ahead. I had a question. Please finish. No, I was finishing anyway. It's like, I think that we have to talk about how to do that, but it goes, we should think about spending more on our police departments and being in some ways less adversarial.

This is a problem we all have, including the police. It's not just us versus them it's all it's everyone having this same problem everyone is going to need to fix it so assuming that all of that is totally reasonable i have a really hard time wrapping my head around i think this is like the third high profile case in the past year or couple of an unarmed black person being shot in front of their children? These are terrible. Yeah, there's I mean, there's clearly I mean, I think there's look there are there training problems. Yes. Are there bad cops who are hard to get rid of? Yes. idea why there's someone bursting through their door because they're a law-abiding citizen, assumes that it's like a home invasion, tries to shoot the cops because they were just asleep, and then stuff goes terribly wrong, right? And that's not that the cops did anything. It was the system that decided to do a no-knock raid and then handed them the wrong address,

right? So all of those things are true. All of them need addressing. We have an enormous amount of work to do with our criminal justice system. Your analogy with Vietnam is well taken. I've been spending the whole time just like rolling it over my mind. if you could somehow have the villager who they believe has a weapon who is walking towards whatever it was which would lead to the deaths of the soldiers and was not listening and presumably spoke the same language was defying willfully or with some sort of intention defying the soldiers i believe even the soldiers rule of engagement would um uh even the soldier's rule of engagement would permit the soldier to take it. Yeah, but I also think, right, it is this very complicated, and this goes back to respect. It's this very complicated thing of, like, if a community feels systematically disrespected,

then it becomes a badge of honor within that community. And, like, look, we were all young. It was a badge of honor in my extremely respected upper middle class private school community in New York to be defiant. That's how young people are. And it is a badge of honor, especially among people who, for whatever reason, I'm not defending criminality. What I'm saying is very complicated and that just we will what we it would just be better for all of us if we could figure out how to get the cops to err on the side of not shooting people they're afraid of yeah this give it a little more time yeah this particular scenario it may not be the best example of that you know we're trying to

we're trying to put this square peg of whatever just happened into this round hole of the point we're trying to make. And this may not be the best example of the point that you're trying to make. And I agree with the point you're trying to make. But we'll see. Let the facts come out. If my son were a cop,

I'd have trouble telling him, wait till you see the gun first. I'd say, listen, if you if, well, whatever. You know, you can just imagine. I mean, trouble telling him, wait till you see the gun first. I'd say, listen, if you, well, whatever. You know, you can just imagine. I mean, at some point, you don't want to tell the cop that they have to risk their own life to the point of waiting to see the gun. At some point, the suspect does have agency in how the interaction winds up. And that may be tragic, but he does.

That's also true. And I don't know in this situation. I really don't. So I don't know. You have a few more minutes? Sure. So this is my question to you. Are we led by empty suits?

I mean, everywhere. Is there a single truly talented leader on our horizon in any party that you think could run my restaurant successfully, let alone the United States of America? Oh, gosh, no. I mean, surely there must be. I'm trying to think. I think there is actually someone in Congress who has led, who has run a restaurant, but I'm trying, I can't remember. I mean, just anything. Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Kamala Harris. I mean, come on now. You took apart Elizabeth Warren.

You didn't get nearly enough credit for that. I mean, you exposed her as a fraud years ago. I think that, I mean, Donald Trump, right, is supposed to be good at running things. He's not good at running businesses either, right? He had one. What he's good at is pretending to be good at running businesses and then getting people to put him on TV to pretend.

I assumed he had more actual skills than he did. So I, funnily enough, in the supreme irony of my life as a libertarian columnist, my father was a lobbyist for the heavy construction industry in New York. So I always had some Donald Trump stories, which I sadly cannot repeat in public

because I can't verify any of them. But they gave me a sense that Donald Trump was not really that good at business. And I think you see like the way he cheated people, right? All of these stories of like, you know, ordering 10 pianos and then being like, I'll pay you 75% because that's all you'd get if you sued me after your lawyer's fees. That's so weird and short-sighted. It's not, it is disgusting. Don't get me wrong. It is completely disgusting, right? It's just morally, I don't even know how you look at yourself in the mirror, right? But even apart from that, if you're just, if you're a sociopath, it's not even good sociopathy, right? Because no

one will ever do business with you again. If you act like that. But they did. He didn't though. He pulled it off, you know, he pulled it off. But the banks didn't want to do business with him again either because he tried to do it with them, right? And it's like. I just remember, I'm going to say, but when you were talking before about the respect and the story about the mayors and whatever it is, I was thinking, well, this is exactly why Trump got elected. Like my enemy's enemy is my friend. Yeah. Trump's voters know that the Democrats and liberals just look down their nose at them and, and they they'll try to pretend they're voting for Trump for some policy reason or something. But in the end he he treats them with respect he treats them with

respect and every time i mean it's it's amazing to watch like all of the people all of the kind of urban coastal people like myself who think that like what the real way to be in the resistance and fight trump and like help electorally defeat him is to be as contemptuous of him as possible. It's like every time you do that, the people who vote for him see your contempt as contempt for them. And like, and I, so I admit I give into it sometimes. I try not to. It's, I really don't like Donald Trump. I don't think it's any secret. But I try always to distinguish between him and his voters. It's like, I really don't respect Donald Trump very much, but I respect his voters. I think they're mistaken,

but I think everyone makes mistakes. And so I try to like say, look, I think you are gravely mistaken about him, but I think that like, I'm trying to persuade you because I think you're an intelligent person who can be persuaded of your error. And most people don't even go that far, right? It's just all the way down the line, everyone who votes for him is just, you know,

room temperature IQ racist. And I don't think that's correct, I think just as a factual matter. But I also think that that's not a very good electoral strategy. And ultimately, if we want to get Donald Trump out, as I do, then the way you do that is by treating his voters with respect and making it, there's a great, one of my friends who has six kids once told me, like, a rule that he learned early and that has just been invaluable is don't make it hard to be good. And he says like, your kid does something bad and they kind of come back a half hour later. And what you really want to do is make them pay a little bit more after they've had their time out or whatever. And he's like, nope, if you're being good, I have to, even though I still have a little mad left. And don't make it hard for people to leave Donald Trump, make it easy, make it attractive. And no one really wants to do that because they've got their own mad to work out. It's related to the concept a lot of cultures have of saving face.

Yes. You allow somebody to not have to admit, you're right, I'm a stinking racist. And now, you know, like- Yeah. Don't say anything. Okay, you know. Yeah.

So real quick, the meritocracy, Asians getting into the Ivy League, white fragility, quotas, where are you in all these things? You don't look great like that. White Fragility is a self-help book, right? And I think like most self-help books, the kind of purpose of the whole thing is to not actually do anything. It's to feel like you're doing something while just sitting around and reading a book, right?

And I think that is the great thing that she discovered. You can never finish her program because it's not actually designed to go anywhere. It's just designed, like you just sit there and you navel gaze for a while and then you don't have to actually do anything. You don't have to worry about the fact that your kids go to a segregated school and you live in a segregated neighborhood and there's no actual minorities in the higher ranks of your company because you had her come in and like you felt bad for an hour um so i think it's i i think it's a scam but i think that it it's kind of a scam on yourself as much as any anything else and that like actual real work on racism is about integration and about like actually changing structural things and that's really hard because

it's going to be involved actually making personal sacrifices um on asians i think it's obviously like obviously just wrong right i don't i don't even i don't even you don't fight racism by excluding asia and the worst part about it is is that i think there's actually this argument about what they're doing there is a way i, I wrote a column on this, where you can say, look, ultimately, elite institutions have to include all of the important segments of society, by which I mean, like, if we don't have any left-handed, red-headed oboists, the one in the country will feel bad, but that's not a salient distinction in America. And so we don't have to make sure that they're fully represented at Harvard.

We do have to make sure that groups that are salient identity groups are represented among the elite, just to hold society together. And that means that we can't have Asians so overrepresented that other groups become wildly underrepresented. And that also means that if other groups are, for whatever reason, not getting the test scores that would, I think that there are arguments for affirmative action in that way that work. But the way that it then got implemented, the problem is that no one made that argument. And instead there was this like elaborate, it's all about diversity rationale. There's a reason for that. It goes back to a Supreme Court case.

But what we ended up doing, right, is basically not only discriminating against Asians wildly, but also telling them that we weren't discrimin't discriminating it was just because they were all really boring right and and like this is adding insult to injury i think the discrimination was bad enough but to actually pretend that you're not discriminating because they do they just do too damn well on all of the the criteria and instead pretend that like it's because they're just not interesting people who no one wants around that was horrible how could you how could you say that with a straight face it was really just it was one of the most appalling things i could ever seen i think it actually is racism and i think it does come down to the fact

that they look different because i have trouble believing that if Germans were kicking ass on scores and whatever it Hughes, I do think people who can present the proper case for special dispensation, who will largely be minorities and people growing up poor and without opportunity, whatever, it's perfectly fair to look at their context when you evaluate how they've done. But I don't think, like my son is here, but I have mixed race kids. If my kids got affirmative action, I'd be ashamed. John McWhorter said exactly the same. So I mean, I'm not necessarily selling this.

I'm saying, I think this is a valid argument that we should have. But wait, so let's say you're gonna take 12%. I'm gonna stipulate. Okay, so let's take 12% of the spots and give them to minorities. But the other 78, 88% of the country, to me, should be treated indistinguishably. So if Harvard ended up being 12% black and 80% Asian, I would think that we had come very close

to our ideals as a nation. I could be very proud of my country and say, look, we don't care. Who cares if they're Asians? They're Americans. And if the Jewish people are not getting in anymore, study harder, Jews. I mean, you're going to ask me to look at you as jews rather

than just people who are not in that group who have been treated badly by the american government for generations so deserve a helping hand just because you look different than the asians i have to worry about you being underrepresented i don't buy that and i think it's it creates a zero-sum atmosphere that just pits people against each other it can't help but do that and i think it's it creates a zero-sum atmosphere that just pits people against each other it can't help but do that well i mean like part of the problem i i have a broader critique which is that i think that and i say this is like i went to a private school the entire purpose of which was to get me into an ivy league college which it did and then like um so i i say this as a beneficiary of the system

and someone who was extremely invested in it during the relevant period of my life. But I think we spend way too much time fixating on getting kids into elite colleges. And like, I think that there are fewer and fewer ways into a good and interesting life that don't run through an elite school. And I think that's a drastic mistake on the part of society. I think it's bad for these kids who spend their childhoods increasingly like little, you know, like Chinese Olympic gymnasts, right? They start at five and they're off to the races and now it's just this intensive training um to get for the for the college olympiad um and i think it makes people narrow right like in a way that that they didn't used to be nearly as narrow i i like so i worked in a in a i did uh it consulting before i went to business school in the nineties.

And like one of our best guys was, had been a porter at a bank. He was a night porter at one of the banks where my company was doing work, was, was putting in some systems and they hired him just to run cable. And then he worked his way up and ended up as one of the, this guy, not even actually sure he ever finished high school, definitely didn't go to college. And he was great. And like that in IT in the 90s, that was not that weird a story. And now it's a really weird story. And that is a tragedy.

We need more ways for people, more entry points into the system instead of just this one competitive process. I think it's wrecking childhood and it's actually kind of wrecking America by making us conformist. And we're selecting for people who are really good at obeying at a really good age, at a really young age. And I think that's a mistake. Yeah. And unfortunately that may dovetail with, you know, a lot of the Asian ethics and culture, right? I don't look, I don't, no, I'm not, I'm not saying like, I don't want to make it so that the Ivy League

isn't a good way to get. I just want to make it so that there's more ways to get interesting and cool jobs and get more different kinds of people. And like, I recognize that I've benefited from having an Ivy League degree. And I liked going to Penn. But I went to Penn Law school by the way oh really

okay so you you know the you know the rat race right and like I think it's cool but you're you then ended up doing something that's not just going into white shoe law and you've had an interesting life in a way that fewer and fewer kids like they're just I just feel like when we were growing up there was more of a variety of different ways to have a good, good life. And now there's just like three ways to have a good life. And that's not, it's not healthy. It's just really, and, and also that like everyone looks the same, you know, like they, they could be super diverse nominally and they're all from the same kind of upper middle class household, because that's the kind of household that knows how to get you into that kind of college yeah and like

it's just it's just not good so i think we like the broader problem is that affirmative action matters so much because we have done bad things and i think this goes back to like hr departments really i think hr just i think human resources is destroying america, we're gonna let you go. I mean, maybe sometimes we'll impose upon you to come on again, because I want to get into cancel culture with you. I want to know if the minimum wage is a good idea. I want to know what you think about Andrew Sullivan being fired. I want to know why you think I tell you this one little like I have this theory that that while the left decries the fact that chain stores are taking over everything, they're the ones driving the mom and pops

out of every business because you can't possibly run a business if you're a mom and pop anymore. I want to hear this theory. This is the- Well, I mean, just that, you know, when I was growing up, my father was in the business too. This is my son, Manny. He's the least mixed race looking of the kids. My wife is Indian and Puerto Rican, and he came out kind of Caucasian looking. And by the way, that's another thing I want to talk about. The kids come home with these questions about their white dad that they're learning in school. My daughter came home first grade, daddy, you're white, right? It's the first time she ever even conceived of the fact that there was racism. Do you do bad

things? Are you mean to people, daddy? Yes. So my father, I grew up in the restaurant business with my father and he spent really very little time on what I would call compliance. He just ran his business. I mean, he had an accountant and a bookkeeper, but it was easy and he had fun and he did what he wanted to do, you know. And now I am so weighed down all day, every day in avoiding landmines, compliance, regulations, getting, I mean, it's, and I wonder like, and I grew up in this business. How could any like immigrant family even hope to accomplish this?

And then they also have to compete against the economies of scale that these other chains have that because everything's so expensive, they can economize on their legal fees, on their insurance, on their insurance, on their inventory, and all these kinds of things. How does a coffee shop compete against Starbucks? And on top of that, the cost to entry. So my father was a cab driver

prior to the time that he opened the restaurant. Really? Yeah. So in the 1960s, you could drive a cab and open a restaurant. You can't even fantasize about opening a restaurant, making a jump from cab driver to restaurant now. And that's because of a lot of well-intentioned laws and regulations and whatever it is. So it all adds up to, like, it's perfectly obvious to me why everything is a chain. Only chains can make it, you know? But, all right, you're the best.

Perrielle, you have to start reading her columns now that you realize that someone who's center-right is not a monster. Perrielle is very... I think that what really resonated was when Megan said that all of the conservatives, you know, say that she's way too left wing for them. So I don't know if you can really claim her.

I think all the lefties also hate me because like, they think that I'm a fascist. So you have to you have to hear her. You have to hear when she gets going in the other direction. Like, I bet you could talk for days and would agree with me on like media bias and like the crazy stuff that's going on and we did a whole episode about you know all the stories of kamala harris keeping innocent people in jail you're aware of all those stories oh yeah oh yeah and the way they're like oh never happens never happened you know so you hate trump and i'm clearly with you on that. You can't for the truth, Perrie.

Yeah, that's what she said. And so do you think that, because Noam and I talk about this a lot, or I should say I get yelled at a lot. Can Biden and Harris see us into a better future? Or are they just as morally bankrupt and horrible as everything else uh so i think trump is the worst president in the last hundred years i love you see we could just um i i i said last year i will vote for anyone any of the above, but please nominate someone that won't

make me want to claw my eyes out. I think that Joe Biden is like an old fashioned kind of politician in a lot of ways, right? He is less divisive than his successors. That's not how he thinks. He grew up in a different kind of senate he's um i think kind of the question though for me because i'm really afraid of some of the stuff that that the people farther to his left will do to what extent is he actually in charge and to what extent does he feel like for political reasons or for other reasons because every president is to some extent hostile hostage to their staff. Does he feel like he has to give them enough stuff? I think I might be really upset with like everything that happens in his administration. And I still think that would be way better than

Donald Trump because I mean, pandemic for no other reason than like what Donald Trump has shown us is that sometimes it actually matters who's in charge. Well, okay. So I know you have to go, but so just so you know where I was coming from, four years ago, my argument, I didn't believe virtually any of the bad things about Trump being a Nazi, being a this, being a that. But what I always did say was that, but if a time comes when we need a president who's up to the job, we're not going to have one. And we almost got through four years without it. I imagine like George H.W. Bush, like could Donald Trump have handled the Kuwait? Of course not, right? Yeah. And so now in that situation, however, I will say,

I don't know which timeline, I mean, you're playing the odds, but the future is going to live under the policies and the Supreme Court justices and all of the things that the next president does. And if they get rid of the filibuster and they pass their wish list of woke left quota, I mean, who knows? The sky's the limit. And if Kamala Harris takes over on January 19th, you know, and I don't know what, we may be wrong. We may say, you know what, this is actually worse. We're suffering for the next 30 years from this other timeline where Trump had an expiration date. And, you know, just, but the thing is that the other side is not likely to carelessly get us into a horrible war, you know, where millions of people die. But boy, you know, it's kind of unfair to the future in a certain way that they're going to have to suffer from the fact that Trump was such an asshole that we just held our nose and voted for a bunch of people who have intentions, which we really don't agree with. And we think are long term very very bad. Really bad. It's a rock and a hard place if there ever was one, in my opinion. And on that note, I do have to go now. I want to say, do I have to cut out the part where I identified Manny as the whiter,

one of the dwarven kids in this day and age? I don't know. It's a risk. I saw your face. I mean, it's the way we, they talk about it, you know? So yeah, I just cut out that little snippet. I've got to go because I've got another call coming in that I've got to do. But thank you. This is great.

Will you do it again someday? Okay, bye. Hello? Oh, sorry. Yes. You can email us at podcast at comedy seller.com and follow us on instagram at live from the table good night everybody